"Challenged" or Beaten Up?

Many years ago I was interested in humor writing and trawled pop-culture musings for idiocies to puncture. One subject was based on the New Yorker's description of Duke Ellington eating a pork chop in public that resulted in the destruction of a questioner's entire concept of Western civilization. Another was focused around a Hollywood producer's insistence that Alexander the Great was the rock star of his era.

But Flavorwire reminded me of a piece in my local newsweekly about the film Irreversible. That film, you might recall, was a French feature told in reverse and featuring a nine-and-a-half minute brutal rape scene that was filmed in one take. My local film critic asked us if we were capable of watching a challenging film about adult themes, as if he were Robert Conrad with a battery on his shoulder.

The "adult" theme of the film is that "time destroys everything," which I suppose can't be shown in any way other than an extended rape scene.

As I said before, we're living in a spiritually empty time. Even the audiences who consider themselves intellectual and artistically astute are dragging themselves to be brutalized and desensitized in the name of art. Here's FW's Kenneth Partridge summarizing the adult and challenging themes of that new trend, the NSFW music video:

If Oasis were shooting “Live Forever” tomorrow, he could stay in his flat, get pissed, and let some upstart filmmaker make something like Eagulls’ “Nerve Endings,” a time-lapse look at a human brain decomposing.
...
The Lips’ “Boys in the Wood” video is Deliverance for a generation reared on Jackass and Breaking Bad. It’s a backwoods nightmare filled with crack pipes, vicious beatings, and graphic rape. After three minutes in this sick and depraved world, the face-peeing scene hardly makes you flinch.
...
And then there’s Polica’s grisly “Tiff” — exquisite torture porn but torture porn all the same. It looks fantastic — more David Fincher than James Wan — and it’s utterly unforgettable, but couldn’t directors Nabil and Mike Piscitelli have found a less obvious way to “show a portrait of a woman as her own worst enemy,” as singer Channy Leaneagh describes the video?

Wow, I'm feeling more grown up just thinking about it!

If you're looking for signs of Western degradation, I think the best examples aren't necessarily the biggest names in whatever creative field one is examining. It's in the mob just below the top tier, the wanna-bes and the almost-theres. Pop-star tributes, navel-gazing martyrdom and "exquisite" brutality are the hallmarks of our age.