So what options are filmmakers wishing to shock their audience left with? It might help to allow an anarchic sensibility to reign. It’s easy to think of the kinds of films that might genuinely upset a national audience, and productively: films in which preconceptions are challenged, complacency is disrupted, or the status quo is upturned. The reason Peter’s Penis Tricks is so disturbing isn’t that it features graphic genital abuse and mutilation, a kind of logical extreme to the same horror filmmaking conventions we see in practice now (and it’s not hard to imagine that being the outcome of the torture porn genre a few years out). Rather, what shocks us is the pleasure experienced by the person doing it: Somebody made this film and did this to himself because, as is obvious on screen, he enjoys doing it. We’re not exactly accustomed to that. It upsets us. The graphic imagery, in other words, is not transgressive alone -- it needs to mean something, too.
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