The disintegration of a culture can be mapped by examining the sequence of previously shameful desires and acts that have been gradually liberated from the restraints of traditional morality. The process is viral, originating among small, often anonymous cells of intellectual, political and cultural elites who see their role precisely as the transvaluation of existing morals. Eventually, the virus moves aggressively into the bloodstream of society at-large, where the effect is cumulative, with each successive wave of legitimized perversion weakening the resistance of society until its cultural DNA has been thoroughly corrupted.

In our time, we have seen contraception, divorce, abortion, premarital sex, and homosexuality lose practically all of the moral proscriptions that once attached to them. In recent years, prohibitions against pedophilia - now recast euphemistically as “intergenerational sex” - incest and polyamory have also come under attack. To claim, as some do, that there is no antecedent connection between the legitimization of, say, contraception and abortion or homosexuality and pedophilia is to deny a plainly observable process of cause and effect. In fact, such willful ignorance - such insanity, really - is itself a symptom of the very social virus it denies.

One incubator of the disintegrative virus is the tony, politically correct film festival, at which the beautiful, rich and powerful gather to explore the outer reaches of proscribed behavior. At last year’s Toronto Film Festival, for instance, the top award was given to a work of political pornography in which the assassination of George W. Bush was longingly portrayed. Now word comes that Robert Redford’s oh-so-groovy Sundance Film Festival will screen “Zoo,” a sympathetic documentary of men who have sex with Arabian horses.

The Sundance Festival’s official reviewer of “Zoo” calls the film “visual poetry,” and declares that “the cinematic language invented for the film permits us to examine where we draw the line, how much perversity we can tolerate in others. In a broader sense, ‘Zoo’ is really about thresholds. What can we stand to know, and, more importantly, what can we stand to accept?”

In quotes attributed to Robinson Devor, the director of “Zoo,” one can identify two of the coefficient agents that empower the virus and enable it to move from the rarified air of Park City, Utah, into the heart of American culture: the appeal to artistic license and the implication that everything dark and shameful ought to be demystified.

“A lot of people looked at me as if I was an exploitative person, dredging up something for profit, and that bothered me. I was certainly asked many times, often with a wrinkled brow, ‘Why are you making this film?’ It was something I did resent; I thought artists had the opportunity to explore anything …

” …it happens, so it’s part of who we are.”

Yes, how dare anyone question the prerogatives of the “artist,” that modern Prometheus, who with only the purest intentions appropriates the divine fire of right and wrong, good and evil? Bestiality happens, says Devor, and presumably that means it should therefore be exempted from moral scrutiny and eventually even celebrated as but one more “orientation” toward which human beings tend. In that spirit - the viral spirit - we await the daring Devor’s films on subjects as liberating as necrophilia, zoosadism, biastophilia, vorarephilia, coprophilia, emetophilia, nepiophilia. All these, like bestiality, “happen,” after all. And anyway, who are we to judge?

(Mark Gordon)

This entry was posted on Monday, January 22nd, 2007 at 2:48 pm and is filed under Culture, Social Pathologies, Sexuality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.