Arts What’s Wrong With This Poster?
As a Card-Carrying Prude™ and a Prematurely Old Man®, I dutifully shudder every time I pass one of those nasty-ass posters for Comeback or Comebucket or Deep Gash or whatever you libidinous bastards call your foul-named dance nights. But I don’t think there’s anything even slightly eye-popping about this:
Some business owners do. From Jennifer of the Akropolis company, who hired Jeff at Keep Posted to peddle the posters:
Things were especially tough on the Eastside, which Jeff said didn’t especially surprise or worry him because our biggest target area would be Belltown and Capitol Hill. He thought these areas would be more open to the poster, but then he started having difficulty in Belltownif I recall correctly, nearly 50% of places he went to refused to post it.
Fine, the Eastsiders don’t like it, the Belltowners don’t like itbut Capitol Hill?
Then Capitol Hill didn’t go as well as he expected… He called asking for us to grant permission for them to slice the image off the poster and then reposition it (with tape, I guess) so the male figure is pictured but the female is mostly eliminated. We did not grant that permission and don’t intend to.
What’s wrong with you people? Oedipus is a motherfucking classic and like most classics, motherfucking or otherwise, it’s got an enormous, unflinching scope: murder, incest, rape, plague, tyrants, you know, the good stuff. The poster is a pretty tame depiction of the play’s most famous themeare you lily-livered prudes really saying that you cannot endorse a motherfucking classic? Has a lifetime of FCC regulation dulled your taste for classics, in which mothers get fucked?
Either way, may your all your mothers-in-law be named Jocasta.
"The poster is a pretty tame depiction of the play’s most famous theme..."
My take on it is that that's part of the problem - it's kind of a boring photograph visually and just not a very well designed poster either... I probably would choose not to hang it for that reason. Not because of what it depicts.