The cumulative controversial impact of Fat Girl, Ken Park, and Irréversible on international arthouse circuits became a flashpoint for the intensified scrutiny of classification policies, to much the same degree as Britain had experienced in 1971 with the near simultaneous release of Ken Russell's The Devils (which included masturbating nuns and the “rape” of a Christ Statue), Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs (with its uncomfortable masculinity and sexual violence), and Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (showcasing extremes of anti-social behavior). While these were considerably more mainstream films in terms of studio support, director prestige, and projected audience size, their shared use of confrontational sexual violence, and especially the rapid succession of their appearances onscreen, had the inadvertent effect of making it increasingly difficult to negotiate for censorship on a case-by-case basis. Like the New French Extremity films, these New Hollywood productions collectively announced a shoddiness of pre-established standards of acceptability and a push to reconsider the role of cinematic art as a vital means of confronting the human experience—ugliness and violence notably included.

While The Devils was seen as a significant problem—portions of the brilliant but remarkably incendiary religious imagery remain tangled in various legal quagmires to this day—the BBFC certified Straw Dogs and A Clockwork Orange with X ratings, signaling for some commentators an inevitable demise of narrative film censorship. As Evening Standard critic Alexander Walker famously declared in his review of Straw Dogs, “What the censor has permitted onscreen … makes one wonder whether he has any further useful role to play in the cinema industry … For if this goes, anything goes” (qtd. in Simkin “Straw” 45). Irréversible, which shares many narrative and stylistic elements with Straw Dogs, represents a symbolic fulfilment of Walker's prediction.

As it pertained to Straw Dogs in 1971, the notion of an “anything goes” approach to the regulation of sex and violence in narrative cinema was little more than an abstract and wholly hypothetical construction. Filmmakers were left to read between the lines, as it were, to find whatever vague guidelines the BBFC decision might have hypothetically “drawn.”