It’s great having Mark Morford back and mad as hell — Where’s My (Bleeping) Sex?
Because what the world really needs now is more uptight little companies from Utah that will help us all block out the random messy naked blood n’ guts of the world.
Companies that will, without anyone asking them to, protect us from media evildoers and exposed flesh and scary exploding things and that part in “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” wherein the universe is blessed, for the briefest of moments, with the joy of Kate Winslet’s radiant nipples.
This is what is happening. This is the happy godlike agenda of Utah’s ClearPlay, a twee and shrill little corporation that has taken it upon itself to sit around the cube farm all day and watch countless Hollywood flicks and zap out any and all icky violent suggestive material in, say, “Lost In Translation.” For your protection. How kind.
ClearPlay has, thank the Lord Almighty, developed a method that automatically bleeps out and/or completely skips over words, scenes and entire sections of Hollywood films it has deemed offensive or inappropriate, and displays the rest in sanitized, defanged, nipple-free form, so you won’t ever find yourself having to explain to your precious wide-eyed heavily Ritalined 8-year-old just exactly what part of Penelope Cruz Tom Cruise is sucking in that one part of “Vanilla Sky.” I mean, praise Jesus.
ClearPlay is a content-filtering company. It relieves all twitchy God-fearing Americans of the horrible and brain-draining duty of actually taking a modicum of responsibility for what they see and hear and for what they allow their children to see and hear, and replaces it all with a type of hapless willful ignorance, mislabeled as “choice.”
All you have to do is buy ClearPlay’s cheapass scene-deleting DVD player from Wal-Mart (of course), set the level of filtering you want from 1 to 16 (1 being, presumably, “Sex is icky” and 16 being, I suppose, “Lobotomize me now”), pop in a ClearPlay-approved DVD from your local video store and, voil?! — your movie experience is pure and holy and now shows only happy bunnies and nummy butterflies and people kissing sweetly without tongue or moan or bulge. And, lo, the world is a better place.
What a fabulous idea. Dammit, if only more companies would get into the act of protecting us from the crap put out by other, more heartless companies. And then if only someone would launch a company to protect us from the crap put out by the company that is ostensibly protecting us from crap put out by the first company. Why, you’d never have to think for yourself ever again. What a wonderful world.
I volunteer. I am hereby starting a new company called SpankThis that will not only de-ClearPlay all Mormon-sanitized DVDs but will also, in fact, actively enhance the scary icky sexy parts and will actually saturate them in hi-res surround-sound 3-D Technicolor and display them on infinite loop on a 40-foot mobile screen, which I will then drive very slowly through the parking lots of all Wal-Marts of America whilst blaring old Black Sabbath and new Rufus Wainwright. IPO forthcoming.
Mark Morford continues and gets even madder.