After reading an article in Roger Ebert’s new collection of film criticism, Awake in the Dark, I was again reminded of an episode from the latest season of Wonder Showzen. The episode was entirely about Clarence, an extremely annoying puppet that asks average Joes their thoughts on various subjects, asking people what they thought about current television. Most people when asked what they thought was wrong with modern television would say the same thing: That they thought that television was too violent. Quite a few, ironically, would themselves get quite violent with Clarence for filming them for a television show.

You hear this all too often. People think that there is too much sex and violence in television. Ebert writes an essay on how people think that there is too much sex and violence in film. And yet, as Ebert also points out, people go to those movies with more sex and violence in droves. People want to censor others, but not themselves. This is OK for me, but others shouldn’t be able to see it. No one will go to see a G rated film, with the rare exception of a Disney cartoon. Even then, more and more you see kids’ movies pushed up to a PG or PG-13 rating in order to pull in a larger crowd. We don’t want sex and violence on our television, and yet for years the top rated show on television has been CSI, which gleefully advertises its Sin City status while giving us more details about sexual and violent crime than we ever knew previously.

I’m still constantly amazed at how widespread Unrated versions of films have become on DVD. The MPAA has become a rather arbitrary ratings establishment, cutting seemingly random things out of films so that they can say that they have done their job. People want to see this unrated films, but theater chains won’t play them, so we have to wait for the movie to come out on DVD to see what we really wanted to in the first place: The whole movie. The Unrated phenomena has become so profitable that the studios have re-released films with seemingly arbitrary additions to the film just to make an extra buck. Half of the time I have trouble figuring out where they added the new footage.

Finally, I was really shocked to learn the other week in a WalMart that they carry Unrated versions of gory horror films like Wolf Creek, Saw and Hostel, and yet they still refuse to carry a CD with a Parental Advisory sticker on it. I’m sorry, what? Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want them to take away the Unrated DVDs. But still, you can buy a movie where a serial killer brutally tortures and murders teenage girls, or better yet, you can buy a video game where YOU can brutally kill someone over and over again, but you still can’t buy a CD with the F-word on it? Explain to me, where does that make any sense?

People say unanimously that they don’t want this stuff in their homes, and yet they keep buying it. The porn industry, for example, is one of the most profitable enterprises in the country. And yet almost no one will admit to having any of it. Who, exactly, is it that is buying billions of dollars of the stuff then?

Me, I’ll freely admit that I love sex and violence in films. The more of it in there the more likely I am to pick that film up. The only thing that these lists of controversial films accomplish is to give me ideas on what to see next, as I guess they do a lot of others. They just won’t admit it like I do.