The bloodlust of modern man

If you haven’t already, you should check out this post by T. aka Ricky Raw, in which he skewers the recent “poverty porn” flick Precious. This passage struck me in particular:

I watched it in a predominately black theatre, and many of the scenes the audience was laughing or cheering at were disturbingly inappropriate, and much of that seemed deliberate based on how over-the-top the subject matter was presented.

Has anyone else noticed this trend of people laughing or cheering at movie scenes that are supposed to make the viewer feel uncomfortable? Two years ago, I saw Black Snake Moan, a film in the same exploitative vein as Precious, only focused on poor rural whites as opposed to poor blacks. During one pivotal scene in which the main character, played by Christina Ricci, physically assaults her mother with a shovel, some asshole two rows behind me was hollering hysterically through the whole thing. It was just one jerkoff, though, so I forgot about it at the time.

It happened again when I saw Watchmen, where a good third of the audience was driven to hysterics and cheering during the scene in which the Comedian attempts to rape the Silk Spectre. The film was already making me nauseous (the only movie that had ever done that to me), and watching the audience cheering on rape, violence, and brutality almost made me walk out out of sheer anger and disgust. I frankly wanted to take every single one of those faux-macho, hairy-palmed comic book geekazoids out in the backyard and beat the shit out of them, given them the beating their fathers should have given them. I managed to sit through the rest of Watchmen without starting any fights, but the dark, nihilistic gestalt of the film combined with the sick audience reaction put me in a deep depression. I spent the rest of that night in a dejected mood, drinking bourbon and watching Nostalgia Critic videos.

Has anyone else seen this phenomenon and been similarly repulsed?