The times they are a changin'...i guess...

In all three of the film noirs we watched, Chinatown seemed to push the most boundaries in terms of what is socially acceptable. This makes perfect sense to me because as we all know, the moral codes of society as a whole have generally decreased in the last 50 years. Now this isn't to say that everyone that lives in todays world is a giant sleaze-bag that deserves to have their mouths, eyes and brains cleaned out with a bar of soap. It simply means that it's becoming harder and harder to offend people. Things like rape and incest would never have been seen in a movie out of the late 30s, such as Out of the Past. However we could see in Kiss Me Deadly that things were already starting to slide. This movie talked more about sex and women and even introduced the idea of torture and, well, setting people on fire. This decrease in moral codes has become very evident with the release of movies like Hostel and Saw (1 2 3 4...however many there are now. I don't know. I will never watch them...they're gross.) All of this begs the question, where does it go from here? If it's gotten to the point where an audience can watch a movie like Hostel and walk away saying "dude that was soooo tight, lets go watch it again," what's next? ~PSH