SYMPATHY FOR THE CENSOR

It’s the worst job in the world: censor. You get blamed for doing too much and stifling freedom of expression, or for doing too little and corrupting children. You watch hundreds of movies for a living, burning out the part of your brain that once found movie going pleasurable. Your career is a dirty little secret because it’s practically an insult: censor. As far as bad jobs go, this is the end of the line.

No one really plans on becoming a movie censor. Maggie (not her real name) left Malaysia to attend graduate school in the U.K. She returned to Malaysia to become a university professor but unable to find work she wound up at one of Malaysia’s few private television companies, sitting in a windowless room and watching movies. She’s not the official in-house censor, but her job is to make sure that Muslims in these films are not shown doing “haram” things: drinking, smoking, or encountering pork products. She has generated hundreds of pages of notes that read: “Scene in which the Koran is discussed in relation to belief in the supernatural needs to be further looked into.” When she started she was promised some training, but a year later none has materialized. It’s just her and a VCR locked away in a tiny office.

This is an entirely voluntary project by her television network, which wants to preemptively remove anything that might upset government agencies. This kind of self-imposed sensitivity is crucial in Muslim-majority, multi-ethnic Malaysia, but, at times, it can seem a bit over-zealous. If a movie shows a Muslim girl walking into a restaurant with roast pork hanging in the window the scene is cut in order to avoid offending Muslims.

This caution is understandable when one realizes that the network takes their cues from the draconian Malaysian censor board, Lembaga Penapis Filem Malaysia, which is responsible for all decisions regarding theatrically released films. The board has decided that if Muslims don’t like pork, then they would really go bananas if confronted with pork that sings and dances: “Babe” was banned, as was “My Life as McDull” a popular, Chinese musical cartoon about a singing piglet. Muslims were not allowed to buy tickets to see “The Passion of the Christ” in a concession the government made to Muslim clerics who claimed that the film not only violated the tenets of Islam by visually depicting a holy figure but that Muslims, inspired by the film, might convert to Christianity. This was a step forward given that Malaysia had outright banned Jim Carrey’s “Bruce Almighty” for the same reasons. To avoid offending Buddhists, the Hong Kong movie “Running on Karma” had its title changed to “Mr. Fit.”

But while some of these decisions make sense, no one can figure out the motivation behind changing the title of the Hong Kong horror film, “Ab-Normal Beauty”, to “Normal Beauty.” “Zoolander” with its plot hinging on an attempt to assassinate the Malaysian Prime Minister was understandably banned, but “Schindler’s List” was banned because it was viewed as “propaganda with the purpose of asking for sympathy, as well as to tarnish the other [German] race." It was eventually allowed through after being heavily cut. The critically acclaimed Malaysian movie “Sepet” about an interracial romance between a Chinese boy and a Malay girl received eight cuts, including a scene of the two lovers sitting on a motorcycle together. And then there are the rules that just make life harder. Pity the poor editor who made the cuts to “Lord of the Rings”. The censor says an arrow can be shown in flight, but not striking a body part, something that happens approximately five billion times in Peter Jackson’s trilogy.

The more rules there are, the harder the job of the censor, but while Malaysia seems to operate on the principal of “when in doubt, cut it out” the truly tormented censors live in the UK and Canada. In the United Kingdom, the British Board of Film Classification must review and issue a classification certificate for every movie and video that sees daylight, and offending material is snipped. The BBFC gets it from both sides: papers like “The Guardian” criticized them for refusing to give classification certificates to movies like Sam Peckinpah’s “Straw Dogs” (for its video release) while at practically the same time there was a “name and shame” campaign run by the Daily Mail which published the identities of the examiners who granted certificates to “filth” like David Cronenberg’s “Crash”.

But what the BBFC spends much of its time watching is porn. Every single porn film must be classified and Robin Duvall, the BBFC Director from 1999 – 2004, says that while the BBFC offices are already “Dickensian…demoralized…and a little bit paranoid” he feels that regulating porn is the “least attractive and most exhausting task of an examiner.” Psychological counseling services are provided for those who have a hard time with it.

Jan Chambers is one of the bodies found trapped beneath the porn avalanche. She quit the BBFC after six months of writing up reports that read in part: “"Woman strips on bed and masturbates. At two minutes man comes in. At six minutes double penetration of anus and vagina.” Usually the report would end with, "All sexual activity consensual and fine within current BBFC guidelines." In the beginning, Chambers considered herself a liberal, pro-sex kind of gal. After six months of classifying porn she just considered herself exhausted.

What the examiners cut out of porn films are scenes of degradation, rape, bestiality and water sports. The definition of water sports is a fluid area, which has led to trouble with the female ejaculation brigade. The BBFC considers female ejaculation urination, but many feminists say it’s a legitimate female response to sexual stimulation. The two groups clashed over a 2001 video, “British Cum Queens” but the BBFC carried the day, claiming that female ejaculation did not exist.

The “is it pee or isn’t it?” question has also led to one of the most gripping exchanges within Canada’s Ontario Film Review Board.

“Can we go back,” says a 60 year old woman. “Was that urination?”
“I’m sorry, what was the problem,” asks a gentleman with a gray moustache.
“Urination,” she repeats. “See, it’s coming down her leg.”
“I think it’s just lubrication seeping down,” says a guy in a vest.
“I don’t think it’s urine,” says moustache. “Unless you disagree.”
“No,” the woman responds, “I guess I’m okay.”

Probably the most hated censorship organization in North America, the Ontario Film Review Board has publicly put its foot in it more than once. In 1999 it ordered cuts in Toronto documentarian, Ron Mann’s, 1999 film “Grass”. The charge was cruelty to animals, and the material in question was decades old archival footage of restrained monkeys being forced to smoke pot. The distributor took the case to the media, the ruling was overturned and the Ontario Film Review Board became a laughingstock. The Board gets so little respect that the Ontario Supreme Court recently stripped them of their censorship powers, declaring them unconstitutional.

But lesbian filmmaker, Siobahn Devine, who was on the Board for three years, has revealed the citizen behind the curtain with her documentary “My Tango With Porn” and it’s full of scenes, like the great urination debate above, that make the Film Board look downright cuddly.

The Board is a volunteer army, mostly made up of school teachers and retirees, who work five days a month. And, as in the UK, they have to review and classify lots of porn. In one year, Devine watched 700 porn films, mostly on fast forward, with occasional breaks for very polite, near-rabbinical debates on bukkake and what represents a load too far.

Starting as a “stay out of my bedroom” liberal, her triumphant moment came when the Board ordered the removal of a scene in “Filthy French Debutantes” containing what they believed was an authentic rape. Being Canadian, it took them eight full viewings to reach a conclusion. But the last straw was 2000’s “Baise-Moi” a French rape-revenge flick that was too pornographic to be classified under the mainstream guidelines, but had too much violence to be classified as a pornographic movie. After much soul-searching the Board ordered a 13 second rape scene removed because they worried that if allowed, it would set a precedent for violent rape in porn. “13 seconds of someone’s art wasn’t worth an explosion of explicit rape scenes in porn flicks,” Devine says. Soon after, she retired from the board. “I was tired of watching porn.”

The United States is virtually unique in that its film classification system is 100% voluntary. The Motion Picture Association of America only assigns ratings to movies that have been submitted to its Certification and Ratings Administration (CARA). Although an unrated movie might have trouble finding local papers to carry its ads, there’s nothing to stop producers from releasing any kind of movie they want.

But if you do pay your fee (the MPAA charges between $1500 and $15,000 to rate a film, depending on movie’s budget) and accept the rating, then you encounter a group of hard-working individuals who might just have the most thankless job in Hollywood: the Advertising Administration. These folks ensure that your advertising material is appropriate for all ages. They review everything: every single poster, television ad, print ad, all your video box art, any freebies like t-shirts that are given away with the movie, every clip that plays on “Entertainment Tonight”, every pre-packaged video interview, your trailer, your radio spots, your behind-the-scenes featurettes, your billboards, the stills in your press kit…everything. And if it’s not appropriate, they send it back. Nothing escapes their eyes. Only G and PG-rated movies can advertise that they are “fun for the whole family”. Red blood cannot be shown on posters, it has to be colored black. A gun can’t be pointed directly at the audience in a trailer or a television ad. Individuals who work in the Ad Administration seem happy and well adjusted, but one worries about the medical effects of consuming such massive quantities of inane marketing material.

People are always quick to decry censorship, but the real victims here are the army of unnamed censors who watch the unwatchable to preserve the sanity of the rest of us. They’re the only people who police pornography, the only ones who make sure that a severed head on a poster doesn’t freak out your kid. Who doesn’t feel a tugging at their heartstrings when they ponder the plight of the censor? For us, we can shrug and say, “You couldn’t pay me to watch ‘Stay Alive.” For the censor, there is no excuse.