Perverted Values

This story about the Utah theater that violated its contract by yanking Brokeback Mountain contains this interesting twist:

The Megaplex 17 at Jordan Commons in the Salt Lake City suburb of Sandy decided to pull director Ang Lee’s cowboy love story at the last minute on Thursday night, despite having agreed to play the picture. The theater is owned by Larry H. Miller, who also owns the Utah Jazz, a National Basketball Association team.

“It’s the most despicable practice that any exhibitor can do,” Focus’ head of distribution, Jack Foley, told Box Office Mojo. “It was a flagrant dismissal of a commitment, and without even a phone call. So I’m not in business with him anymore. It’s a breach of contract. It’s unethical. We can sue him.”

Calls to the Megaplex 17 resulted in “no comments” in regards to why Brokeback Mountain was yanked. “You’re not going to get any comment from us on that,” said Dale Harvey, General Manager for Megaplex Theatres.

As of Sunday, Megaplex Theatres’ Web site had Transamerica, a comedy-drama about a transsexual parent, listed for Jan. 20 in their “Coming Soon” section, but the movie has since vanished from their schedule.

[…]

The Megaplex 17 is showing Hostel as well. Though No. 1 nationwide, the sex-and-gore saturated horror picture ranked fourth at the theater with $10,700.

Ah yes–the perverse values of so many Medvedites. A tasteful movie about two gay sheepherders–without any explicit gay sex–is beyond the pale, as is a film about a transgendered person. A film with no aesthetic merit about men and women being explicitly tortured to death for the audience’s pleasure–let those tickets sell! As Dwight McDonald noted in his review of Psycho (reprinted in On Movies), this utterly perverse ordering of values is not a new phenomenon:

I’m against censorship on principle, but this killing in the shower makes me wonder. And not because of the nudity. I favor more nudity in films; also more eroticism and sensuality. It is the sadism that bothers me. Our censors have the opposite view. They see nothing wrong in showing with intimate, suggestive detail a helpless woman being stabbed to death, but had Mr. Hitchcock ventured to show one of Janet Leigh’s nipples, that would have been a serious offense against morals and decency.

I’m against all censorship, but if we’re talking about the values of youth or whatever it seems rather obvious that slasher pics are a rather more serious problem then seeing a woman’s breasts or two men kissing. That our nation’s self-appointed guardians of morality can work themselves into a lather about Brokeback Mountain but seem to skip the think-pieces about Hostel tells you most of what you need to know about them.

I also note that–despite claims by various hacks that producing this movie was an irrational action that proves that Hollywood is “out of touch”–that Lee’s film has now earned $32M against a $14M production budget…without having gone into wide release yet. Roll over Glenn Reynolds and tell Mickey Kaus the news…