Realistic

From Seenoevil

The Home Office propose that an essential element of the offence will be whether the image is "realistic" or not.

This cannot be an objective test. An image that may appear to be unrealistic B movie style gore to one viewer will be convincing to another. Is the violence in Quentin Tarantino's "Resevoir Dogs" realistic to you or not? The proposed law will have the result that people are imprisoned for their differing perceptions of realistic film making or photography.

That the degree to which an image appears to be realistic depends upon the sophistication of the viewer is aptly illustrated by these different commentaries on what appears to be the same film. The film is called "Snuff". The final scene featured the hand of a member of the film crew being sawn off.

According to Planet Papers "Of course, it's an obvious fake. The gore effects are bargain basement, even by 1976 standards...But a short time later, a funny thing happened. Law enforcement officials claimed to have trustworthy sources who knew of an actual snuff film. Unfortunately, part of the rumor was that the movie had been made in Argentina. In retrospect, it's obvious that the film was Snuff, and the "trustworthy sources" were actually the rumors that Shackleton [the director] himself had started". According to x-magazine.com when Allen Shackleton premiered Snuff! in 1976 he hired some women to stand in front of the theater and rant at customers." Pickets sell tickets,” said Shackleton. He needn’t have bothered. Women from a feminist organization calling itself Women Against Violence Against Women, brought out their own troops in force.

Then contrast this commentary by Julie Bindel writing in support of the proposed extreme pornography laws in the Guardian on 1.9.06. She refers to having watched apparantly the same film in the company of special effects experts whose opinions "proved" that the events shown on screen were real not fabricated. She says "By that time it was only the feminists left in the room, the others having run out to cry, or be sick. We knew what we would be seeing, because we had heard about it from activists in the US who were fighting the same battles".

While it is understandable, if regrettable, that such subjective percpetions of reality colour political debate, it is not a proper basis on which to formulate the criminal law.