A number of things that have dominated the news recently - most notably the tragic events at Virginia Tech and the death yesterday of former
MPAA honcho
Jack Valenti - got me thinking about censorship and the perceived effect of films on viewers.
If we are to believe the news media,
Park Chan-wook's
Oldboy is (at least partly) to blame for the VT killings, a claim that not only reeks of sensationalism but, as
Dave Kehr said, is "faintly racist." Sky News has said that Cho Seung-Hui
"repeatedly watched [Oldboy] in the days leading up to the massacre", something which in turn reminded me of an incident in my native Scotland back in 2002.
After killing his life-long friend, Thomas McKendrick, Allan Menzies pleaded diminished responsability - despite admitting that he
"drank his blood and ate a bit of his head ...and I buried him up the woods." The excuse Menzies gave was that he had watched the film
Queen of the Damned (based on
Anne Rice's vampire novel) over 100 times and that Akasha, a character from the film played by the late
Aaliyah, had told him that McKendrick and another friend were planning to kill him, and that if he murdered someone he
"would be made immortal in the next life - a vampire, basically."Pointing the finger at films like
Queen of the Damned and
Oldboy may make for a good story, and "explain" to some people the root of certain horrific events, but ultimately it only distracts from the fact that anything can trigger the psychotic actions of severely disturbed people.
Queen of the Damned, for example, had a 15 rating in the U.K., and no one voiced the opinion that it was legitimately to blame for Menzies' deeds. And any attempt by censors to try and anticipate the effect of similar Hollywood vampire moives on the insane would be ridiculous.
But when it comes to sane minds, censors are second-guessing and "protecting" audiences - with unfortunate results.
Shane Meadows' latest film,
This Is England, is released in Britain today. However, because it is about skinheads and deals with racism, the film has been given an 18 rating by
British Board of Film Classification, the U.K.'s equivalant of the MPAA, on the basis of its "realistic violence and racist language."
As Meadows wrote in
The Guardian earlier this week,
"This means that the film is now unavailable to the audience it will benefit the most. It's like I've somehow overachieved. By having one piece of violence and one piece of really acute verbal violence I've managed to get an 18 certificate, whereas someone else can slay thousands of people in a single film and that's OK. To be honest I don't understand it because, yes, the film is affecting but I think it's something that someone of 15 can cope with. It's not like it's a film about the 80s that has no value; it's incredibly relevant politically. It's as much about Iraq as it is about the Falklands. It's as much as about England in 2007 as it is about England in 1983."
Meadows' words on the double standards of censorship bodies echo the sentiments of
Kirby Dick's brilliant study of the MPAA,
This Film Is Not Yet Rated, which is pretty much essential viewing for anybody interested in film. Jack Valenti's death is a reminder that his legacy, namely the system he created at the MPAA, has always favored studio films while, as Dick's
potted history of the MPAA's "quirky" decisions reveals, indie filmmakers have been the ones disadvantaged by the censors' double standards. And no doubt will continue to be.
# posted by Nick Dawson @ 4/27/2007 11:25:00 AM
Comments (1)
Anybody remember after the original Superman came out in '78 that some kid jumped off his roof thinking he could fly?...
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posted by @ 4/28/2007 1:23 AM
