(Reader warning: Don’t read this if you’re easily offended. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!)
Anybody who has all or most of the pay-cable “premier” movie channels knows that there’s a competition going on between HBO and Showtime over their original series programming. Anyone who has watched them knows what I’m talking about. That’s right, I mean the doggy-style rape-off competition. First, Showtime graced us with the lovely sight of someone getting raped by Anne Boleyn’s brother in The Tudors. Then, just when you thought you had finally erased that image from your mind, last week on The Borgias, in the episode “Lucrezia’s Wedding”, they lovingly displayed yet another violent wedding-night doggy-style rape sequence. Thanks, guys. A fade to black would do quite well enough for me, thank you. I get the point. (I know that you want us to understand that this was a brutal time, and that this is what some women really went through, but it really reminds me more of a stand-up comedian’s set-up, “Ready your brain-mouth for my mind-penis!”*, when I think about what you’re trying to do to us viewers.)
HBO must have heard about this latest example, though, and not to be outdone, they had in the first installment of their original series, Game of Thrones, a veritable series of such episodes. First they had a wedding sequence where we’re treated to a dance number I could only accurately describe as a topless doggy-style wedding rapey-dance, where a number of women are serially violated by numerous, um, gentlemen, which then is followed by a scene of the doggy-style raping of the newlywed bride by her hunky meat-head husband. Nice. So, if my cliché-o-meter is operating properly, this will mean that she’ll bond with him later, and then he’ll get revenge for her, or something like that. Am I on track so far? (I haven’t read the books, but I’ve seen a lot of bad movies.)
But sorry, HBO, for all the offensive rapeyness of Game of Thrones, you don’t do it as offensively explicitly as Showtime, lovingly documenting every ounce of humiliation and detail of carnality, misery and exploitation. You guys are just amateurs compared to Showtime! Just give it up and admit that your rape scenes are just second-rate copies of something that’s way more objectionable.
This all reminds me of a comedy sketch from the show The Kids in the Hall, where David Foley’s character loves watching ass-rape scenes like the one in Deliverance over and over again, and when someone tries to insinuate that he likes butt-sex, he just says that it’s “incidental” to the scene, and he only likes it because it’s “breathing life into great writing.” This whole rape-exhibition game on these “premium” channels strikes me the same way. I guess I have to ask: is this the dramatic equivalent of rap and heavy metal videos? Perhaps after being conditioned by this stuff for so long, most of us simply lose focus if there aren’t enough ass-rape scenes to keep us occupied. Is that it?
Anyway: So HBO, if you guys want to win the pay-cable rape-off competition, you’re going to have to seriously ramp it up a bit. Now don’t get me wrong here: I don’t want you to do it. (I don’t like seeing this stuff at all!) But it’s pretty clear that somebody does, or else you wouldn’t be doing it. And you want to win, right?
* Yes! That’s right! It’s the brilliant comic Eugene Merman who said that!
