Our mission at SAW is to foster conversations about this thing we all love (or love to hate): film/TV. Many of our features are designed with you in mind. Your opinions, to be more to the point. You have ’em. We want to hear ’em.
Question of the Day (QOTD) is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a film/TV-related question that we put to you, the reader. The comments section below is like the feedback box at work; except, in this example, we actually read what you write and care about what you have to say.
The majority of the time movies are just like a warm blanket and cup of hot chocolate on a cold winters night. They comfort us. They make us feel all warm and fuzzy as we smile while breathing them in. They can inspire and brighten our day or even our outlook on life once we finish watching them. However, once in a while a movie can come along and wreck that cozy little movie existence with something that shocks us and makes us extremely uncomfortable. It can simply be the content of the film, the graphic imagery, and/or uncomfortable scenes. Even for some of the strongest stomachs, there is usually a line that once it is crossed, you can be turned off to a movie.
So the question I ask today is: Has a movie ever made you so uncomfortable that you couldn’t finish watching it?
I am a horror guy through and through and have watched some pretty hard to watch movies with gore and uncomfortable scenes. There have not been too many that have made turn the movie off and none where I have walked out of the theater because of how uncomfortable they are. Usually, if I turn a movie off it is because of how awful the movie is quality-wise but that isn’t what we are talking about here.
The one movie that stands out as the movie I was not able to finish because it made me so uncomfortable is Irreversible. I don’t like rape in films. I understand the use of it as a plot device when the film calls for it but to me, there is a line where it goes from a plot device into the uncomfortable and gratuitous territory. And, Gasper Noe passed that line at about the 30-second mark of an 8-minute rape scene. I actually had to read about how long the scene was because I didn’t finish it. I can handle a young girl being beheaded by a telephone pole, a guys Achilles being cut by a scalpel, innards being consumed among other gnarly images but rape is the most cringey and uncomfortable thing that can happen for me in a movie. I have never felt the need to understand Noe’s reasoning behind the scene and honestly I don’t care. Nothing will make me want to watch that scene or finish that movie.
There are other movies that I have turned off for similar reasons and even ones I will never watch because of what I have read about their use of rape. I know I’m not missing anything. I’d like to hear about movies that have made you so uncomfortable that you have turned them off. Again this isn’t movies that are so bad you couldn’t finish them or the company you were with that made you turn the film off. Movies with content or subject matter so disturbing you had to just stop.
So what about you, folks? Has a movie ever made you so uncomfortable that you couldn’t finish watching it?
I’ll see you in the trenches.
