While the case studies examined in the preceding chapters have varied widely in the details of their respective national contexts, aesthetic issues, censorial challenges, market accessibility, political sensitivities, and critical appreciation, some overall significant cultural and historical patterns can be gleaned from examining them together. To do so is, naturally, to risk wading into the territory of top-down critical analysis, in which theories have been offered and examples have been selectively cherry-picked to support pre-determined theses. It is not my aim or intention to extrapolate an overly generalized monolithic definition of the complex relationships between cinematic innovation and social control from these few select examples, as doing so would risk engaging in a dramatic oversimplification of the various intersections between discourses of sex, violence, censorship, free expression, artistic experimentation, commercial distribution, and economic systems identified and engaged within them. However, in the interest of synthesizing a set of complicated processes for the purposes of shedding light on the cultural functions and histories of postmillennial cinematic transgression and the moral, legal, ethical, economic, and aesthetic questions that surround it, some measure of consolidation is perhaps useful.

If there is one concept that can potentially clarify the focus of the cross-national, trans-historical, multi-system comparison that this study comprises, it is perhaps most succinctly symbolized in the umbrella term classification. Throughout the preceding chapters, this notion has been employed, interrogated, and analyzed in several different ways. Yet its expansive reach as a concept is characterized chiefly by a remarkably consistent symbolic meaning and implication.

It is perhaps no surprise that classification has come to replace censorship as an essential tool in the lexicon of both critical and governmental discourses. Its versatility in this study alone suggests its importance as a cipher of cultural meaning. Classification can be many things in many different contexts. It is the mandated goal of contemporary review boards, whether governmental or industry initiated. It is the process by which “art” comes to be accredited as such. It is the primary toolkit of the cinema critic, commercial or academic. It is a conceit by which films are successfully marketed. It is a means of social control through labeling of deviance of subject matter, of approach, of cinematic gesture.