Icky Icky Gross Gross Movie

I did this week’s readings before watching the film Human Roast Pork Buns (which I’m just going to refer
to as HRPB), and while reading them was cautious about siding with those saying arguing for more
censorship in films. My reasoning was that, while it is definitely appropriate to restrict minors from seeing
some things, banning content from being presented for everyone can manipulate which thoughts are
presented and which are suppressed, like Orwell’s Newspeak. HOWEVER! I don’t think I think that
anymore after watching this movie.          

Ick. This movie grossed me out. I cannot imagine who would watch movies like this for the fun of it. Or
make them.This movie was awful. AWFUL. We talked during the zoom discussion for quite a while about
this movie versus Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which quite a few people, myself included, found funny.
I don’t find them similar at all, and feel the need to explain why, lest someone think I found HRPB funny.
Which I Most Certainly Did Not. First of all, while TCM was new for its time, the slasher genre has been
parodied to death and we are now set up to find these tropes funny. Second, the  aesthetic techniques
that glamorize violence that were talked about in the article were used heavily in TCM, and while that
may desensitize audiences to ultraviolence, it also puts a level of distance between real murders and tv
gore. Like, come on, the blood in TCM looked like ketchup. The girl screamed for ages while the camera
just zoomed into her piErCinG gReEn EyEs. Nothing about this movie makes me feel like I am watching
footage of a real death here. But HRPB was nothing like that. For one, I have never seen a movie like
this before, so no other media has prepped my reaction. But what really disturbed me was how real it felt,
for me as well as the actors, especially the young ones. 

I watched this with Camille and we paused the film to talk halfway through the scene when Wong murders
the family. We both noted that, while the scene was traumatic to watch for many reasons-- how long the
take was, the static camera and little aestheticization of the violence, the graphic detail, the added verbal
abuse while he kills them all-- we cannot imagine that it would not have been even more traumatic to be a
child actor in that scene. The four little girls left to be picked off one by one look very young, too young to
not internalize what they are seeing as their ‘mother’ is groped, threatened to be raped, and stabbed to
show their ‘father’ how useless they all are, who is then murdered too. Their acting in the beginning of the
scene (before the slaying starts) is how quite a bit of kiddo actors look like-- really sincere but also not
super believable. However they are sobbing and their faces show genuine terror later on, which was an
emotion that they weren't able to capture when they were just acting. I cannot imagine the lifelong trauma
and twisted perception of the world one may have from being a part of a film like this at such a formative
age.  Not only do audiences have something to gain from not being exposed to heinous content such as
this, young actors should also be protected from what could have possibly been abusive directing and
being asked by adults whom they trusted to do things that no child should be asked to do.