In the comment thread for my post about Inside, Bruce Baugh writes:

I’ve thought for a while that the distance metaphors like “too far” don’t really serve. In my head there’s a taxonomy that builds on the image of pushes and shocks emerging from the zero point that is the movie, heading out in all directions. Things that could be measured, notionally, include the direction of the push, its speed, and its relentlessness – the difference between a single bottle being lobbed in the direction of someone’s head and a bulldozer blade crushing everything that might resist it.

Each of us in the audience rests behind a set of barriers that surrounds the movie point. In some places are barriers are close up to the point and flimsy, so that not much gets through – like you, I’m that way with cruelty to animals, and also with certain specific kinds of head and face deformities. (Which is why one part of the excellent Vanilla Sky was so grueling for me, and why I just can’t go see The Dark Knight at all.) In other places, our barriers are far back and well supported, so that we aren’t overwhelmed even by a lot of whatever it is.

I think Bruce is probably right about the utility of “too far.” It’s tough to argue that killing a cat is “further” than, I dunno, hanging a girl on a meathook while you dismember her boyfriend with a chainsaw, just to name the first example that comes to mind. (Although I’d imagine the cat was dispatched in a far more visually explicit fashion than either of those unfortunates from Texas Chain Saw ultimately were.)

Regarding Bruce’s notion of different barriers for different things, I’ve thought about that before in terms of phobic reactions, which to me are very different things than one’s usual gradated responses to various scary or disturbing or unpleasant things in horror movies. For example, my wife is emetophobic, so vomiting, gagging, dry-heaving, and certain kinds of throat-trauma, choking, or coughing just plain hit the panic switch in her brain. It’s not a question of the imagery being one level too extreme or too frightening for her to take, being just powerful enough to break through a given barrier–there is no barrier.

I am the same way, not quite as bad but getting worse even as she gets better with her phobia, about skin growths and growth-like structures, and to the extent that their bodies and multiplicity can evoke growths, bugs. Again, it’s not like there’s a level at which I can handle it that can be surpassed–I go from zero to curling up and shaking in a second. If it hits that anti-sweet spot for me, panic! Based on what Bruce is saying, I think that’s what’s going on for him with facial deformities, though I could be wrong.

On the other hand, I think there’s something different about animal cruelty, which you and I and my wife are all very sensitive about. My wife also has a real problem with people soiling themselves with fear. I’ve thought about this hard and I’m pretty sure that there’s something different going on here than there is with my phobia. It feels more thoughtful, more considered, more fleshed out a reaction to the stimulus than the reflex response of a phobia, you know? Like I said, I really do think there are contexts in which I’d be able to accept animal cruelty in film, because it’s happened with me before, though I would always find it very, very troubling. But there’s no context in which I’d be able to handle my phobia–if it’s triggered, it’s triggered. That to me says that there’s something different at play, even if my reaction when the animal-cruelty barrier is violated can be just as extreme and binary.

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