It was a sacrilegious scrubbing.
Last week, actor Matthew Modine made a horrifying discovery on Amazon Prime. The platform seemingly had altered the iconic poster for Stanley Kubrick’s 1987 war movie, “Full Metal Jacket,” starring Modine and Vincent D’Onofrio.
The phrase “Born to Kill,” scribbled on a camo Marine helmet, was suddenly gone.
The digital clean-up crew did however, keep the helmet’s peace sign; some delicate soul, it appeared, thought the words were too inflammatory to remain.
“Who decided to remove ‘BORN TO KILL?’” Modine, 65 wrote on X, adding, “Not only did they alter a piece of iconic art by [designer] Philip Castle, but they completely misunderstood the point of it being there.
“[My character] Pvt. Joker wears the helmet with ‘BORN TO KILL’ and the peace button as a statement about ‘the duality of man,’” Modine said.
There is a pivotal scene in the movie when a colonel asks Modine’s young recruit character why he wrote “Born to kill” and wore a peace sign button. “What’s that supposed to be, some kind of sick joke?”
Modine’s character explains that the combination refers to “The duality of man. The Jungian thing, sir,” referring to psychiatrist Carl Jung.
Heaven forbid we take a moment to employ critical thinking skills and curiosity, and probe beneath the surface to understand the words’ intent.
There’s nuance and conflict in that poster — which is also a concept central to the movie.
Naturally, the altered poster led to backlash. Deadline reported that Warner Bros. asked Amazon to restore the image to its original form, which the streamer seemingly has.
But it’s just another example of a nannylike overreach into our treasured works of art.
Last year, author Roald Dahl’s most popular works were altered for today’s bizarre sensibilities — removing the word “fat,” “ugly” and “crazy.” The words “mother and father” were replaced by the gender neutral “parents.” (Backlash led the publisher to agree to offer both versions).
Are we that precious? Our corporate overlords seem to think so.
AMC Networks slapped a trigger warning on “Goodfellas,” saying the movie contains “language and/or cultural stereotypes that are inconsistent with today’s standards of inclusion and tolerance and may offend some viewers.” And Disney added a scolding caution to classics, like “Peter Pan” and “Aladdin,” that they could contain harmful stereotypes that were “wrong then and are wrong now.”
Yet we’re living in a moment of cultural schizophrenia and can’t decide what’s truly taboo. There’s an arbitrary, censorious attitude applied to language and art; simultaneously, we’ve opened the floodgates to an anything-goes mentality.
Think of Amazon’s current offerings. The movie “Saltburn” leaves no raunchy act behind, while “The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard” exists because a girl murdered her mother. Netflix’s “Dahmer” was a pop culture obsession.
Without gruesome true crime, networks would go belly up.
Beyond the streaming giants, the internet is a portal that offers all sorts of porn and violence — and enforcing any reasonable age limitations seems positively quixotic. Currently, one of the country’s most viral stories is about a random Southern chick, now known as the “Hawk Tuah Girl,” who reportedly might land a talent-agency deal after using onomatopoeia to boast of her oral sex skills.
If you made it through that sentence without losing your marbles, congratulations.
Take a scroll through X and users acting as news aggregators share breaking stories by inserting asterisks within words like rape, murder and suicide out of deference for our snowflake sensitivities.
We can’t see the words spelled out, but we can watch the attached videos which are nasty, violent and raunchy. Thanks to the ubiquity of cameras, there’s no shortage of footage featuring street fights, murders and assaults.
Yet there’s pearl-clutching over a movie poster containing words that, when looked at in their totality, have a completely different meaning.
I’m no Pollyanna. But the surefire way to offend someone like me is to alter existing art, bowdlerize literature and tamper with important cultural touchstones.
