Regardless, the fake announcement provoked intense reactions online, with some people wishing it were real and others disgusted at the very idea of it. I’m vehemently in that second group. In fact, excited reactions to this fake news are reminding me once again that some supposedly progressive people would welcome the return of the Hays Code if it meant they didn’t have to be uncomfy while watching a movie with their parents.
It’s not a viewpoint that I have much sympathy for. If watching sex scenes with your parents makes you uncomfortable, put literally 30 seconds of research into the thing you want to watch before you throw it up on the living room TV. Or, even less than 30 seconds, given that Netflix pops a rating at the top of the screen and tells you specifically why it was rated that way every time you start a movie or TV episode. In the year of our Lord 2024, there is no reason that you need to be surprised by sex scenes if that’s something you’re worried about. It’s your problem to sort that out, not the writer’s, director’s, or actors'.
And this gets to the heart of the issue. When you watch something, you have to meet the creators halfway. They made the movie or TV episode, they put in the actual work. You don’t get to demand they make it different for you. And the world would be a significantly worse and less interesting place if we could make all the art we engage with conform to our preferences.
Though there are other massive issues with the use of generative AI — especially its foundation of plagiarism and industry-decimating potential — one of its uglier secondary effects is how it encourages the idea that the art you encounter should be able to completely fulfill your most minute desires. WhenJoe Russo talked about using AI to make your own movie about going on a date with Marilyn Monroe, this was what he was dreaming about: a world where art primarily exists to satisfy your most obvious desires, rather than as a means of self-expression for the creator with the capacity to surprise an audience through the idiosyncratic expression of that artist’s thoughts, beliefs, and feelings.
When a movie or TV series contains a sex scene, it may be because of crass outside demands from the studio, sure. But in the age ofDisney’s cultural dominance throughStar Wars, theMCU, and its live-action remakes, that’s rarer than ever before. Instead, a sex scene may exist because the artist wants to say or explore something about sexuality. Turning a knob that edits out all sex and nudity may seem straightforward, like bleeping out words in the radio version of a song. But it isn’t always that simple. A film likePoor Thingswhich is, fundamentally, an exploration of what it means to be human using sex as a catalyst for that journey, could not exist without its sex and nudity. Sex scenes aren’t optional ornamentation, they’re intrinsic to its themes and story.
It’s for that reason that the idea of a feature that could simply remove the R-rated elements of a work is so offensive. The way that art is served to us has increasingly been left to algorithms to determine, but we should never allow the content of the art itself to be twisted in the same way.
