I just recently saw
Quills, the fictional recreation of the Marquis De Sade's final days in an insane asylum. Certainly not for the squeamish, it's a movie that questions right and wrong, art and its influence. The tagline says, "There are no bad words... only bad deeds."
My mother, whenever forced to listen to whatever noise I and my sister are interested in at the moment, inevitably says something like, "I understand why people say that music can make you kill yourself." And in her melodramatic way, she's echoing the sentiment of too many people hell-bent on the idea that life imitates, and blindly follows the ideals of, art.
In the movie, the Marquis passes a story verbally to other inmates through holes in the asylum's cell walls. At the story's mention of a fire, one of the inmates, an arsonist, excitedly sets fire to his bed as a brute halfwit reenacts some of the tale's sexual brutality upon a laundry maid.
But the point I think the film tries to make is that every man's actions lie in his own hands. The men committing the atrocities, spurred on by the Marquis De Sade's art, are criminally insane - lunatics barely in charge of their own daily routine. To blame the art for their inability to distinguish right from wrong would be just as absurd as the men themselves.
Definitely a movie worth checking out for those who have the constitution for raunch and the violent enforcement of morality. There's more to think about here than you might expect.
