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In his landmark text Film as a Subversive Art, Amos Vogel argued that movies had the unique power to normalize taboo subject matter. They did this in two significant ways: one, by transforming “untouchable” ideas into controllable sounds and images; and two, by forcing them into the public sphere as represented by the movie theater. Vogel championed many explicitly confrontational filmmakers, particularly in the avant-garde, yet he also voiced admiration for certain films by Charlie Chaplin and Luis Buñuel, which wielded this subversive power more benignly. One enjoyed these movies without thinking of them as provocations, laughing at things like murder and heresy as if they were simple pratfalls.
At the same time, I’m skeptical that a movie as inept as We’re the Millers is truly concerned with our culture’s evolution. The references to sodomy feel little different than the clips of popular viral videos that open the movie—both suggest that the filmmakers are flailing at cultural currency and aiming for the easy laughter of recognition. It’s true that anal sex is all over the Internet, though I’m not sure if that’s especially funny. Hardly enlightened, much straight pornography associates sodomy with sexual degradation—a subject that We’re the Millers feels unhealthily preoccupied with. Perhaps the filmmakers regard sodomy merely as the degrading practice du jour; if so, they’re just advancing the same old puritanical disgust with sex under the guise of libertinism. (By contrast, the final scene of The To Do List is genuinely progressive in that the heroine has anal sex consensually and appears to enjoy it.)
