Culture Wars

In an article called "Members Only" in the Salt Lake Weekly, Scott Renshaw calls Sundance 2005 "The Year of the Penis."  He says the male organ was either visible in the festival's films, as in, say, 9 Songs and the "insightful documentary Inside Deep Throat and some others, or suggested in scenes concerning fellatio and masturbation, as in Pretty Persuasion and Thumbsucker and some others.    

And then there was Crispin Glover's What Is It?, which featured not only manual stimulation of a handicapped man (by a naked woman in an animal mask, no less), but oral sex involving someone with Down syndrome, salted snails, a minstrel in blackface, the most racist song I have ever heard and Shirley Temple juxtaposed with swastikas. This wasn't just pushing the envelope; this was shoving the entire freaking Postal Service off the rim of the Grand Canyon.