Naked Warnings, Naked Violence

I just watched two programs my machine recorded last night. They give a excellent examples of what's screwed up with our society, and broadcast television in particular.

The first was "House, M.D." (about a brilliant but misanthropic doctor and his protegés). This week's episode had an advisory before the show started, warning viewers that the opening scene depicted sexual activity. Not really. Just two attractive and seemingly-healthy 20-year-olds rolling around in bed, and one of them pants a bit right before he passes out. He turns out to be the patient with this week's zebra.* It was hardly eye-opening; I've seen far more nudity at a public swimming pool. We do also get teased with seeing him totally nude in a later scene, but with artfully obscuring translucent glass doors and camera angles that leave plenty to the imagination.

The second show was the first episode of "Blind Justice" (about a police officer who can't see, of course). This show has an advisory similar to the one that its time-slot predecessor "NYPD Blue" had, warning us that it contains partial nudity. Again, not really. What it contains is a few shots of a dead prostitute, wearing the sort of clothing that street hookers wear. I thought the fact that she was dead was more disturbing than the fact that she was showing so much leg.

See, my point isn't to rant about how squeamish the networks are about nudity and my disappointment at not really getting any. My point is to contrast it with what we weren't warned about.

As it routinely does, "House" this week treated the viewers to some nifty CGI shots inside the patient's body, watching his heart beat, a kidney shutting down, his cells dividing, etc. To say nothing of the more traditional avert-your-eyes surgical scene (as also seen on certain other hospital dramas), the kind that tends to make me lightheaded and sometimes nauseous.

And what really takes the cake is "Blind Justice", which in the minute or two following the warning about partial nudity, showed an armored gunman dramtically shooting down several police officers, then the hero fires off a few more rounds and finally misses the guy's kevlar and hits him in the head, only to catch a bullet in the face, which will of course blind him.

Not a single damn warning about that.

Not that this is anything new. "NYPD Blue" always had similar warnings about "adult language" and "partial nudity". They had their permitted quota of naughty words and their carefully edited shots of nearly every character except Gay John in the buff. But they never warned anyone that we were probably about to see a corpse on the street, and maybe an exchange of gunfire before the closing sex scene.

Now, I have mixed feelings about these warnings and ratings in general. The MPAA rating system has certainly screwed up the way Hollywood makes movies, to be sure. But if the warnings are going to exist, shouldn't they make a little more sense? I don't need or care about warnings about nudity, even if it actually involves real nudity. But if they're going to hold my hand, why not tell me that "the following drama contains some graphic biological situations and explicit medical language" or (more plausibly) "the following drama contains graphic gun-fights and realistic depictions of violence". Because - call me nuts, call me a liberal, or even a European - I think violence is just a little more dangerous, traumatic, and offensive than nudity or sex.

*I don't watch "House" faithfully, so maybe they've already address this with the necessary irony, but the whole theme of the show - in which the doc leads his students in diagnosing improbable but deadly illnesses - violates a principle of diagnostic medicine: When you hear hoofbeats, think "horse", not "zebra". The point being that the cause is usually something mundane, not something exotic and exciting. # 2005-03-09 06:13 PM | TrackBack