Cultural Glimpse

The Egyptian-made movie, “Beauty of the Soul” was just banned in Egypt for scenes deemed sexually provocative. The film, starring a famous Lebanese singer Haifa Wehbe, was said to have been inspired by Monica Bellucci’s 2000 hit “Malena.”

In an interview yesterday, the director of the film asked those who helped in the decision to ban the film if they had ever seen it. Their response was “No, but we saw the ad.”

“If you are going to ban a movie, couldn’t you have at least watched it first?” he asked in frustration.

“Do I have to smoke a cigarette in order to know whether or not it’s bad for you?” answered one of the officials.

As I watched the debate, a movie called Wrong Turn came to mind. One day I was flipping the channels when I came across four gruesome men killing and slicing people in ways too disgusting to comprehend. Using hammers and lawnmowers and butcher knives and axes, they pierced peoples’ ears, slit their mouths, jabbed their eyes, cut off their heads and held it up like a trophy.

None of the gory scenes in Wrong Turn were edited – oh, except the nipples of a dead woman. As her corpse hung naked upside down while one of the killers butchered her neck like one would a lamb, so he could detach her head, her nipples were hazed.

Ironically, breasts are a natural thing that almost everyone sees in real life every day. God made them for a great purpose. They feed and nourish babies. Violence and killing are the exact opposite of what breasts represent, yet breasts are seen as the “enemy” to society’s eyes and violence as the “norm”?

Conrad Hilton was right. In his biography, he talked about how he had tried to ban or lesson violence from TV shows but realized he was not going to see it happen in his lifetime. Well, evidently, not in any lifetimes anytime soon, since horror and violent films keep escalating. Wrong Turn, for instance, is releasing its 6th sequel this year and for the Arabic news channels’ coverage gets bloodier and bloodier.