Rialto 5:15

In contemporary cinema, creative freedom is no longer radical but the baseline standard. What was once a struggle for artistic expression, waged against censors, moral crusaders, and religious authorities has largely receded. Today, filmmakers are free to depict virtually anything and for what few boundaries remain, even fewer consequences follow their violation. Something has shifted in the process and the result is not progress but one of creative fatigue.

The most conspicuously provocative screen works of recent years; Saltburn, Blonde, Infinity Pool, and HBO’s series The Idol are explicit, stylised, and visually uninhibited. Yet despite their surface extremity, they rarely feel dangerous or even shocking. Their provocations are often aestheticised rather than earned as a creative climax, and the emotional core of these narratives remains conspicuously absent. What lingers is a hollow spectacle: images designed to shock without cause or consequence, and intensity choreographed without substance. This phenomenon prompts a more pressing and rarely addressed question: what becomes of cinema, and by extension, visual culture, when nothing is forbidden?

Contrary to the assumption that creative freedom would unleash cinema’s full potential, the erosion of censorship appears to have triggered a subtler form of decline. The disappearance of prohibitive boundaries has not expanded cinema’s symbolic power; it has diluted it. When there is no constraint, there is no need for negotiation, metaphor, or transformation. Repression, as Freud suggested, does not merely suppress, it generates. It forces material into the symbolic realm, where it may be sublimated, disguised, and ultimately made meaningful. The absence of repression forecloses this possibility. In its place, contemporary film and television present a kind of visual drive, compulsive, repetitive, and affectively flat. What we are left with is a culture of frictionless expression, where the loss of boundary has led not to transgression, but to aesthetic inertia.

What Censorship Once Enabled

Censorship once operated as a kind of unconscious law. Its rules were often puritanical, political, or absurd, yet they created structure. These constraints did not simply restrict filmmakers; they compelled them to invent new ways of showing that which could not be shown. Directors were required to imply, to suggest, to symbolise. Artistic meaning emerged from the tension between what could be shown and what had to remain hidden.

Take Psycho (1960) as an example. The infamous shower scene is iconic precisely because of what it conceals. Through rapid cuts and careful framing, the camera avoids nudity and withholds graphic violence. The terror resides in implication. Similarly, in The Night of the Hunter (1955), biblical shadows and unresolved dread evoke more menace than any literal depiction could achieve.

Cinema once operated with this instinct. It translated taboo into subtext. In the present, that process is often bypassed entirely and what was once implied is now delivered in full, and in the transition from suggestion to exposure, much of the meaning is lost.

The Algorithmic Censor

Although traditional censorship has largely disappeared, it would be a mistake to assume cinema is now unrestricted. The conditions shaping contemporary film are no longer imposed by central authorities, state mandates, or religious watchdogs. Instead, control has become ambient and systemic. It operates through algorithms, funding models, platform metrics, and marketing logic. The result is not overt prohibition, but anticipatory self-regulation. Filmmakers are not told what they cannot show. They are conditioned to understand what will not perform, what will not be greenlit and what will quietly disappear into digital oblivion.

This form of control is more efficient than traditional censorship because it demands no confrontation. A director does not need to battle with a board of censors. Instead, they must navigate testing data, viewer drop-off graphs, genre tags, and risk-averse funders. The algorithm rewards familiarity, emotional clarity, and short-form impact. What it discourages is ambiguity, contradiction, and unresolved tension: the very qualities that once defined ambitious cinema.

What emerges from this system is not a cinema of repression, but a cinema of smoothness. Content is shaped for optimisation rather than confrontation. Scenes are calibrated for platform-specific thresholds and characters are built to signal identity rather than wrestle with it. Narrative becomes predictable, not because of formal constraints, but because of behavioural modelling and subsequently the story, and entire cinematic experience, is flattened by design.

The Audience and the Crisis of Reception

The transformation of censorship into algorithmic conditioning would not function without the audience. Today’s viewer is not merely passive but structurally integrated into the system that shapes what cinema becomes. Data is extracted from every decision: what is paused, what is skipped, what is rewatched, what goes viral. These preferences do not remain private. They are looped back into the creative process through testing, commissioning, and funding decisions and the result is not only a change in what gets made, but a shift in what is even considered viable.

This process affects more than production. It reshapes narrative expectations. Films are increasingly structured to provide recognisable emotional beats, clear moral alignments, and digestible aesthetics; consider Disney’s approach of recent years and the recent backlash and fatigue as an example. The viewer is encouraged to identify rather than interpret, to feel seen rather than unsettled, to consume rather than confront. Even works that appear provocative are often calibrated to produce minimal resistance. The reward is engagement, not transformation.

Psychoanalytically, this dynamic reflects a culture governed less by desire than by jouissance. Lacan described jouissance as a form of excessive enjoyment, one that goes beyond pleasure and often becomes self-destructive. In the current cinematic climate, audiences are invited to indulge in repetition, spectacle, and overexposure. They are aware of the emptiness but enjoy it anyway. The viewer knows a film like Saltburn is hollow, that Blonde is exploitative, that The Idol is shallow. This awareness does not inhibit enjoyment; it becomes part of it.

This structure of disavowal, “I know this is meaningless, but I’m watching it anyway”, ensures that cinema no longer needs to offer symbolic density. The gesture of watching is enough. Content has replaced narrative, recognition has replaced insight and performance has replaced meaning.

The Machinery of Compulsion

Psychoanalysis helps illuminate not only what has been lost in cinema, but what has replaced it. Jacques Lacan also distinguished between desire and drive, a distinction that becomes especially relevant when considering how films are structured today. Desire depends on absence. It creates space for tension, delay, and imagination. Drive, by contrast, seeks no resolution. It circulates endlessly around the object, repeating itself without transformation.

This is the logic that governs many recent films. Narrative is subordinated to repetition. Images accumulate rather than evolve and sex, violence, and grief appear not as turning points in a story, but as cycles of compulsion. These moments do not escalate or resolve; they simply return. Meaning is not built but deferred indefinitely.

In this context, cinema no longer seduces the audience. It does not withhold, disrupt, or invite reflection. Instead, it delivers. Its structure mirrors the architecture of the scroll: continuous, flattening, without climax or catharsis. Pleasure becomes mechanical, and the image becomes inert. Nothing is left to interpret because nothing has been shaped by conflict.

This is not the death of provocation. It is provocation emptied of consequence. Repetition replaces ambiguity and the spectacle of drive substitutes for the movement of desire. Within this system, the erotic collapses into disclosure, not tension. What remains is a surface that shows everything and reveals very little.

Case Study: The Devils and The Idol

Consider The Devils (1971) alongside The Idol (2023). Both works foreground religious iconography, sexual spectacle, and the question of moral authority. On the surface, they appear to belong to the same lineage of transgressive art. In reality, they represent opposite poles of cultural function.

Ken Russell’s The Devils was made under conditions of active censorship. It was heavily edited, banned in several countries, and remains partially suppressed in the United Kingdom. Yet the film pulses with symbolic energy. Every act of blasphemy confronts something real, ecclesiastical power, political hysteria, the repression of female desire. Its imagery is not only shocking but structured. The violation of religious order gives shape to its meaning. It is dangerous because it is in dialogue with a belief system it seeks to expose.

The Idol, by contrast, operates in the absence of such structures. There is no discernible institution being challenged. The sexuality is staged but not anchored to any coherent morality. Its provocations are unmoored. There is no system to offend, no law to break, no boundary to transgress. The series gestures toward disruption but has nothing substantial to disrupt. It simulates transgression in a culture that no longer recognises what transgression might entail.

The distinction lies not in degree but in direction. The Devils pushes against something. The Idol floats through nothing. One film enacts confrontation. The other performs the emptiness of the digital age.

The Death of Transgression

Cinema once drew its power from its ability to disturb. Not through explicit content alone, but by rupturing the symbolic order. It threatened institutions, unsettled moral codes, and revealed the cultural unconscious through symbolism and the rupture of repression. Its provocation held weight because it confronted structures that were still intact.

Today, fewer such structures remain. Religion, nationhood, and the nuclear family, once the pillars of symbolic authority, have either eroded or been absorbed by commerce. As a result, many films no longer engage the symbolic directly. Instead of confronting power, they mimic rebellion. They borrow the aesthetics of transgression while avoiding its consequences.

Not every film has surrendered to this flattening. The Zone of Interest (2023) achieves horror through omission, forcing the viewer to feel what remains unseen. Aftersun (2022) buries its emotional rupture beneath restraint. Titane (2021) disrupts expectations not through vulgarity, but through its refusal to resolve. These films remind us that cinematic power does not depend on what is shown, but on what is shaped and what is withheld.

Reclaiming Limits

Censorship once imposed external boundaries. These restrictions shaped form and content, not by design, but by necessity. Constraint forced invention. The forbidden gave rise to suggestion and tension became a formal device. Eroticism emerged from what could not be named.

That world no longer exists. Nothing is forbidden and anything can be shown. Yet this permissiveness has not led to expressive freedom. It has produced a cinema without pressure and subsequently cinema without risk.

This is not an argument for the return of censorship. It is an argument for structure. For self-imposed limits and for creative frameworks that generate friction, delay, and symbolic density. Without structure, desire collapses into drive and without drive being shaped, cinema collapses into content.

The most radical gesture a filmmaker can make today is not to show more, but to withhold. To resist the scroll. To restore meaning by choosing what must remain unseen.

Only then can cinema recover its edge and not by scandal, but by structure.

References

Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and simulation (S. F. Glaser, Trans.). University of Michigan Press.

Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalist realism: Is there no alternative? Zero Books.

Freud, S. (1957). The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 14, 1914–1916) (J. Strachey, Trans.). Hogarth Press.

Lacan, J. (2006). Écrits: The first complete edition in English (B. Fink, Trans.). W. W. Norton & Company.

Russell, K. (Director). (1971). The Devils [Film]. Warner Bros.

Sontag, S. (1966). Against interpretation and other essays. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Films and Series

Arnold, J. (Director). (2023). The Zone of Interest [Film]. A24.

Dominik, A. (Director). (2022). Blonde [Film]. Netflix.

Fennell, E. (Director). (2023). Saltburn [Film]. Amazon Studios.

Glass, R. (Director). (2019). Saint Maud [Film]. A24.

Glazer, J. (Director). (2023). The Zone of Interest [Film]. A24.

Korine, H. (Director). (2023). Aggro Dr1ft [Film]. A24.

Loussier, P. (Director). (2021). Titane [Film]. Neon.

Moshfegh, O., & Fennell, S. (Creators). (2023). The Idol [TV series]. HBO.

Wells, C. (Director). (2022). Aftersun [Film]. A24.