Heads Are Gonna Roll

by anna at 07:48 PM on June 24, 2004

So I call the cable company. They sell me on digital cable, saying we'll have a plethora of channels and a kick-ass picture to boot. Needless to say it's been a huge letdown. There's dozens of channels that just play genres of music I hate. There's movies-on-demand channels stocked with movies that were never in demand. There's a channel devoted solely to reruns of The Nanny. There's a channel that features old game shows with contestants and emcees sporting these hideously mismatched 70s suits. It's painful to watch.

What with free Showtime (actually there's ten Showtimes, all equally as worthless,) I figured we'd see some skin. Again, a no-go. Oh sure, I've caught a fleeting glimpse of some bared butts but it's usually a guy's and if I want that there's the NYPD Blue Rerun Channel.

Now as I've mentioned that sort of thing doesn't fly in my household. Allow me to clarify. My wife isn't so prudish that she objects to nudity or sex scenes per se. It's only when she considers it gratuitous or overly perverted that she objects. For instance, Michael Douglas and Glenn Close knocking boots in Fatal Attraction was fine while Halle Berry getting it on with Billy Bob Thornton in Monster's Ball was not.

Which brings me to the only diamond I've found in the vast cable rough. I caught the season debut of Nip Tuck on F/X Tuesday night. It rocks. These two up-and-coming plastic surgeons share a practice. One is highly skilled while the other is just mediocre. One is happily married while the other would fuck anything that moved. In the episode I saw he banged his partner's mother in law on the eve of her much-needed facelift. I presume he pushed her crinkled mug into the pillow.

I say presume because we were spared footage of their tryst. The same cannot be said of his interview of a new nanny. My wife and I are sitting there sipping our wine when out of the blue, there is so-so surgeon standing there with his pants around his ankles. Around his neck are the legs of this Marissa Toume ethnic-looking chick. They're going at it like mammals on The Discovery Channel. She passed the audition with flying colors.

His ex-partner and mother of their toddler is less than amused to find a used condom. She holds it up in his face as gingerly as you might a rag soaked in HIV germs. This whole time I am kind of half-watching lest my wife think I'm into it. Just then the pair pops up again, going at it. The kid starts crying and they disengage. She wants to soak his pacifier in cough syrup so they can get back to business. He is having none of it and throws her ass out. She makes some wiseass remark about how most nannies don't deep-throat dad on the first date. And she's got a point.

I'm sitting there waiting for my wife to complain but she doesn't. See, the display was necessary to Character Development. You needed to see how they coupled. You needed to know that it occured in a way that in terms of being degradingly impersonal is right up there with bent over a car hood in a rest stop crawling with vermin. Plus the show itself is so engrossing that you can hardly look away. Engrossing in the way watching a suicidal jumper on a bridge is engrossing.

Porn in general doesn't do much for me. I can watch it with the same oddly clinical detachment usually reserved for those Girls Gone Wild videos you see late at night with the tits blurred out. Like, how could she possibly fit that thing in there?

But there is a form of porn I find highly disturbing: The spate of decapitations broadcast almost daily on the web and Arab TV. I never saw the Nick Berg video but Chris's harrowing account of the last eleven minutes of his life was plenty for me. I did see the three stills of Paul Johnson before and after his head was removed. Above the link it read, "Do not click unless you are over eighteen years old." Just as if it were sexual smut.

For whatever reason Al Jazeera chose not to air the actual beheading of that Korean translator. Perhaps a rare lapse into moral responsibility. But sooner or later that toxic footage will seep onto the net and you can rest assured it wil be the most sought-after that week. The human race has lost its collective mind and I blame the net. That and those media outlets that aid and abet humanity's bestial enemies by airing their filthy propaganda. Leveling Al Jazeera would be a step in the right direction.

Imagine if he was your kin and you had to decide whether to look or not to look.