I've head this movie defended because it's supposedly raising awareness about sexual exploitation of children by depicting it. The thing is, none of those Hollywood awareness-raising sessions ever seems to improve the situation they claim they're examining, not exploiting. https://twitter.com/drawandstrike/status/1304096233414328321

This defense also assumes a huge lack of imagination on the part of the audience. "You can't really understand the exploitation of minors until you see it dramatized on film!" Yes, we can. Not everything has to be shown explicitly. Not everything should be.

I suspect the entertainment industry thinks its audience is filled with numb clods who can't feel anything unless they're blasted in the face with explicit imagery because Hollywood is filled with people like that. They're all jaded as hell, so they assume we are, too.

That's probably one of the reasons we get so many sequels, prequels, side-quels, remakes, etc. The film industry ran out of imagination and assumes nobody in the audience has any, either. They produced less real art once the restraints on them were lifted.

At the peak of the film industry, with insanely huge budgets, limitless visual effects technology, and virtually zero editorial standards, what did we get? Remakes, franchises, comic books, sequels. They could show us anything, but they couldn't think of anything new to show us.

If you really feel the need to dramatize something objectionable, you don't have to make a perfect example of it. You could trust your audience to imagine, to infer, to understand what happens after the camera looks away.

You don't have to make kiddie porn to make the audience feel uneasy about kiddie porn. That's just grasping for excuses to create salacious material and desensitize our common culture to precisely the thing you're claiming you want to raise awareness of.

A great deal of vandalism has been perpetrated against our society by people who claimed they were just trying to warn us about vandals. A little more restraint and faith in our imaginations would go a long way toward improving the quality of our art. /end