The Essential Malady

As I’ve mentioned before, I have become increasingly conscious of just how inappropriate much media is. This usually happens when I re-watch something I saw when I was young and notice a lot of things I thankfully didn’t notice as a child. Two good recent examples are Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Back to the Future. The former I found shockingly crude and completely inappropriate for children but that is exactly who it was marketed to. The latter wasn’t necessarily marketed to children but it is generally considered a family film and includes coarse (and blasphemous) language as well as sexual innuendo. The interactions between Marty and his teenage mother in particular should be considered more disturbing than they generally are.

There is an increasing collective consciousness of just how degenerate the world has become. This is often mistaken for the immediate present as if all this has only suddenly happened. Some people act as if sodomy and especially transvestitism only began getting heavily promoted a decade ago. In reality, it has been in front of us for a long time as I noted with the 1990s comedy Mrs. Doubtfire. The absurd comic premise covers the darker intentions of the filmmakers — and they absolutely knew what they were doing. Even then, there were far more obvious films such as The Crying Game (which I’ve not seen and never will), and Boys Don’t Cry which were far more explicit in their intentions.

The subject of this post is The Full Monty a British film from 1997 which is many degrees worse than the examples I’ve already mentioned. So much so that it is amazing to me now that adults of the time so easily overlooked all this. I did see this film multiple times when I was a teenager but even if I hadn’t, it was advertised on prime time television and the premise was not hard to guess for the casual viewer.  

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