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Banning the Human Centipede II

A day or two ago, the UK’s national organisation of stopping-you-watching-things, the BBFC, announced that they had rejected The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence) as a work too depraved to be released in the UK, a film that couldn’t be salvaged by any measure of cuts, a story that would corrupt and damage our all-too-fragile sensibilities.

In one word, this is ridiculous.

To explain why, I’m using this post to write out three of the reasons I believe this. Namely, that 1) this move reveals awkward things about what we do and don’t accept, 2) that the evidence upon which we base the ‘dangers’ of watching bad things is pretty slim and 3) that censorship simply doesn’t work.

What we ban.

The BBFC have always had a major downer on sexualised violence. This might not be such a surprise in itself but it becomes more unusual when you consider that they are considered one of the more lenient bodies in almost all other forms of violence or abuse. Although this has always been the case (see David Pirie’s New Heritage of Horror) it is becoming more and more obvious as other very violent films or very explicitly sexual films are released uncut, whilst any combination of the two tends to fall foul of the censors’ scissors.

David Cox’s Guardian article is spot-on in picking out this detail and makes the following point (quoting the BBFC’s explanation):

The board explain that the original film was OK (if “undoubtedly tasteless and disgusting”) because its centipede was the product of a “revolting medical experiment”, whereas its successor is unacceptable because its own centipede is “the object of the protagonist’s depraved sexual fantasy”

So there we have it. Apparently, the minute someone is enjoying their disgusting creation, rather than simply experimenting, it becomes something which no-one should watch. The inconsistency here is phenomenal: this is, as Cox says “an ideological step”, exposing a curious belief that repulsive violence, sadistic actions and grisly surgical detail are in someway only bad if someone in the film derives some kind of sexual pleasure from them.

And if this is the case, as the BBFC seems to think it is, then there had better be some good evidence to support it, right? Oh…

Why we ban.

There really still isn’t very much clear evidence that watching something nasty in any way makes you nasty.

I should point out, I’m talking about censorship rather than restriction. I have no problem at all with limiting children’s access to films but I think we’re on much more troublesome ground when it comes to adults.

The BBFC state:

It is the Board’s conclusion that the explicit presentation of the central character’s obsessive sexually violent fantasies is in breach of its Classification Guidelines and poses a real, as opposed to a fanciful, risk that harm is likely to be caused to potential viewers.

Oh. So this film “poses a real risk that harm is likely to be caused to potential viewers”, does it? Even when we get around the incredibly vague probability of this sentence (risk…likely…potential..) it is quite a bold statement. What kind of harm do they mean? And how is it measured? Even more interestingly, why is it that sexualised violence poses more risk than non-sexualised but equally brutal and graphic violence?

In fact, do they have any evidence to suggest this at all?

It would seem not. Ah well, it hardly matters really because, as anyone with half a brain could tell you…

Censorship doesn’t work.

It’s a curious thing. In a world in which movie and film industries are having remarkable difficulty in forcing their ‘customers’ to actually pay for their ‘product’, how does the BBFC think a ban will effect the viewing figures of The Human Centipede?

It was not submitted for a cinema release, so we can already discount cinema screenings. What the BBFC’s ruling does is to make DVD sales of the film illegal in the UK. Despite this, we can absolutely take it for granted that the moment this film actually hits DVD somewhere in the world, it’ll show up on the internet in high quality, just waiting to be downloaded.

Not only will it be available, however, but it now has a whole heap of free publicity. At the time of writing this, the BBFC’s decision is reported as news on the front pages of several national newspapers’ websites (inc. Guardian, Daily Mail, Independent) and is now something that people have heard of. The classic censor’s argument about protecting the children is also obviously poor: nothing makes a fifteen year old want to see a film so much as being told it’s been banned! And, with the internet, they (and everyone else) will be able to access it easily.

***

So, in short, a disaster. For dubious reasons, the BBFC have inflicted an unenforceable ban which will almost certainly massively increase the number of people who see the film. Gee, that was smart, wasn’t it?

The death of cinema?

So I’ve been meaning to write this for a few days now. Shame it’s taken me so long…

As reported in the Guardian and many other places on Sunday, several big-name directors have joined the cinema industry in attacking movie-industry plans to shorten the amount of time between the cinema debut of a film and its home availability, by making video-on-demand (that’s streaming) films available as little (?) as two months after the film’s release.

They roll out some interesting claims to fight these plans: VOD releases will increase piracy, they say, and will force cinemas to close. These are BAD THINGS and, if big, important names are saying them they MUST BE TRUE. Right?

Wrong.

One of the marks of almost any cultural industry (ugh, I hate pairing those words) is that those who’ve climbed their way to the top tend to have an (entirely to be expected) fondness for the status quo. Things are how they are and should be as they should be. Why would you change anything?

Sadly for them (but not for us), life doesn’t work like that. We like progress. We like exciting new things. We like big shiny fun things that no-one else in the history of mankind has ever had. Hence we invent stuff, we find new ways to look at the world, we radically alter our relationship with life, culture, art and the environment. I am by no means suggesting that this is always positive - it’s not, the obscene quantity of human-created human suffering is testament to that - but I am suggesting that it’s inevitable: we’re just not adapted to maintaining the status quo. Things will change.

So let’s return to Earth for a moment and go back to look at their claim. It will increase piracy. It will. Will it? The evidence that it would is very shaky. Let’s be blunt: it’s very easy to find films on the internet. I (obviously) am not about to link to anywhere you can get it but the current box office smash Fast and the Furious 5 is all over the internet. I have no idea what kind of quality it is, but it’s there and that’s enough.

Now, what we have here is the Film Industry’s Music-Industry-Moment. For the music industry, this happened somewhere around the whole Napster deal. Faced with a very clever technology (hello internet!) capable of delivering high quality content at (even then) fairly decent speeds, they were poised to make an industry revolution. They bottled it. Years later and the Beatles music has only just been made available online (November last year). No-one was keeping count, but thousands of Beatles albums were certainly downloaded in that time. Today’s online music sites still often provide higher quality music than some shops sell.

The point I’m approaching (slowly) here, is that refusal to engage with digital distribution for fear of increased piracy is futile and narrow-minded. The Film Industry has to take the initiative and provide a decent service that people will pay for before they get used to downloading films. If they wander blindly into the same place as the music industry there is no way back.

The second point, and I think the one I object to more, is that it will mean cinemas to close. This relies on out automatic linking of “closing things = bad” without pausing to think about the relation in question: why will people choose to watch a film at home rather than in a cinema?

Some of the answers are related to progress again - we have bigger better TVs with bigger better speakers, the gap between home and cinema has narrowed - but there’s also an implicit condemnation of the way cinemas are run and have been run for years.

Cinema visits in the UK are horrendously expensive. The price for a single ticket is already bordering on the price for a DVD in some cases. I might like the cinema but I can’t afford to go as much as I’d like. If me and four friends each bought a DVD we’d have spent little more than it’d cost the five of us to go to the cinema and we’d see five times as many films.

It’s also astonishing (and, depressingly true) how regular it is to hear serious film-fans describe the cinematic experience as being deeply disappointing. We brave the ticket prices, stump up and march in. The sticky floors and chewing-gum covered seats are what welcomes us. The bunches of screaming kids chucking sweets at each other and talking continues throughout. You leave thinking, ‘I wish I could’ve seen that in my own house’. Seriously, what would it cost a cinema to have a member of staff to kick out the people who ruin a film for everyone?

So there we have it. Cameron, Bigelow et al are clinging to what they love. The cinemas are using this as another excuse to neatly avoid considering why less people go to the cinema and they’re all intent on digging in their heels to slow the inevitable. And, I should add, by the inevitable, I certainly don’t mean the death of cinema. This is not the end. This is another chapter. I love the cinema and will continue to go but it shouldn’t need to be carefully protected: to survive it must make progress too, it must work to provide an absolutely inimitable experience that we’re prepared to pay for.