Censorship: A Necessary Evil

The above picture illustrates perfectly the role of censorship in our lives. For whatever reason, we naturally seek out things that are forbidden or unattainable - a trait so inherent in human nature that it made it into the Bible as the starting point for humanity. The questionable factual accuracy of Genesis is irrelevant but the metaphor is solid and it does absolutely nail the ever recognisable human trait of seeking the 'forbidden fruit' in our lives. Perhaps the most important element in this story is that the rule-maker (i.e God) acts completely arbitrarily. The apple is forbidden for no particular reason. Eve recognises this, and starts to wonder exactly why is the apple forbidden? There must be something about the apple that she doesn’t know, and this curiosity spurs her to ignore God’s warnings. She eats it and is cast, along with Adam, out of Eden, igniting humanity. If that isn’t a reward for disregarding authority then I don’t know what is.

                God’s decree that Eve shouldn’t eat the fruit is the first evocation of censorship. In this metaphor, God represents many forms of censors, and censorship. He can represent parents as censors, the State as censor or prevailing attitudes as censor – really any authority that enforces arbitrary rules over other people can be seen as a censor.  These entities are often extremely unpopular, unfair and oppressive. They restrict our freedoms, make things we like illegal or declare them to be immoral – and yet they are absolutely essential to society. It is no coincidence that all the things that the writer of the above picture likes are restricted, in fact, it is precisely because they are restricted that the writer likes them so much. I daresay that if God really did not want Eve to eat that apple (and as an all-knowing being which also created humans, thus having complete insight into their psyches) he would have gone ‘sure, yeah, whatever, just don’t bother me’ and gone back to reading the paper. The apple would then be boring and Eve would have left it alone, going on to live a life devoid of all the juicy bits in a sea of apathy, for all eternity. 

                Parents are the first censors that we come across in life. They don’t let us do fun stuff for any particular reason; they make us go to bed on time; they forbid swearing; they forbid sex; they forbid drugs; and yes, they forbid rock’n’roll too (or nowadays, dubstep). I’ve come to believe that it is absolutely essential that parents bring up their children in this way, and I imagine that when if or when I become a father it will absolutely kill me to be a boring tight-arse. We seek out the things that they forbid, and we overindulge. It is through this overindulgence that we discover what we really like and through making mistakes we learn our limits…and end up like our parents. It’s a cruel cycle. Liberal parenting, by which I mean a relaxed attitude to typically ‘forbidden’ things, as attractive as it seems (we all want to be the cool dad/mum, don’t we?) is probably a bad idea, and it produces spoiled kids. The children will have nothing to rebel against, and no boundaries will be pushed. 

                This need for something to kick against works on a societal level, too. We relish liking things that authority figures resent, which is why it is so thoroughly dispiriting when David Cameron or Gordon Brown claim to like the Arctic Monkeys or the Smiths. It is understood by absolutely everyone that they are just not allowed. Politicians, just like parents, have to accept that in assuming a position of authority they have to bite the bullet and be relentlessly uncool.

                Of course, an essay on censorship would not be complete without covering actual censorship. In the early 1930s, Hollywood introduced the Hays Code, which, in short, prevented the depiction of anything remotely controversial. Perhaps the most famous rule is that a woman must have at least one foot on the ground when kissing man, otherwise the audience might think that y’know, they might be doing it, but it also blocks drink, violence and derogatory comments against the Church. Looking at it nowadays the Hays Code seems incredibly restrictive and it is a wonder than any good films were made, but made they were. Filmmakers had to find clever ways to circumvent the censors and the result were films that could be read in several ways, allowing the audience to fill in the gaps. Bringing Up Baby (1938), taken at face value, is fairly unremarkable. However, a clued-up audience would easily be able to understand the endless euphemisms at work, making it into one of the dirtiest films ever made. One of the key signifiers in film noir is the lighting of someone else’s cigarette. This innocuous action is laden with sexual significance, and would not be the classic image it is today without the prudish influence of censorship. According to Janet Steiger, ‘censorship opens up, rather than closes down, confessions, talk, absolution, and resistive transgressions.’ Without censorship, there would be no pressure on the writers to invent new ways of getting a message across, and these circumventions created some fantastic films.

                 Another instance of censorship on the Arts is the Lady Chatterley’s Lover trial from 1960. Lacy Chatterley’s Lover is a novel by D.H Lawrence, initially published in 1928. Owing to liberal use of ‘fuck’ and ‘cunt’ and of the groundskeeper Mellors, ahem, fucking Lady Chatterley’s cunt, it was banned immediately. The novel was in high demand and was devoured in secret across Europe, until Penguin went ahead and published it in 1960. It was subsequently tried under the recently created 1959 Obscene Publications Act. Lady Chatterley won; a precedent was set. Just this year a group of pornographers  were tried for distributing videos of people performing very deviant sexual acts. Nothing shown was illegal between consenting adults, it was just weird, man, really weird. They were nevertheless tried for depravity. Of course, the pornographers won, thus effectively allowing anything to be film and distributed, providing the on-screen action was within the boundaries of UK law. Although these two instances seem similar, there are key contextual differences. With Lady Chatterley, the depictions of sex scandalised and excited because Britain at the time was sexually very restrained; with the ‘60s sexual revolution just around the corner Lady Chatterley represented art catching up with life. In 21^st century Britain, pornography is everywhere, including extreme kinds: this can be seen as an equivalent to the liberal parenting idea presented earlier. We govern what we look at and there’s not really much anyone can do to stop us, so the really hardcore, subversive stuff found in the recent obscenity trial just does not carry the same sensationalism as Lady Chatterley fifty years previously. Another good contrast with Lady Chatterley is a film like the Human Centipede. Whereas Lady Chatterley excited through obscenity, the Human Centipede generally provokes feelings of disgust, and a ‘eerrr, why did I just watch that?’ attitude. All restraints have been lifted, and we are worse off because of it.  

                In fact, the easy access of pornography on the internet is emblematic of how society has liberalised at large. In generations previously, artistic movements had the power to shock people. Romanticism, expressionism, modernism and most recently, post-modernism have all had the power to surprise and startle the public. These periods have all developed under the pressure of censorship, this time in the form of taste. People have been known to riot during the debut of certain pieces of experimental classical music so did they offend the taste of the audience. Consistent liberalising of attitudes towards pretty much everything has meant that the closest we can get to rioting off the back of a piece of art is from the ultra-shit like Rebecca Black. Furthermore, because it is so hard to be controversial any more no one is really sure what artistic movement we are going through, if there is one at all. The impression is that the winds on the cultural high-seas have died down, leaving us drifting aimlessly and directionless.

                This essay has put me in a tricky position. I consider myself to be liberal. I support gay rights, and have an open mind when it comes to music and film, and I even feel people should decide what they want to watch. And yet, here I am, advocating the opposite (EDIT - except that gay rights bit. That should always stand. Badly worded sentence). I think it’s time that the government started acting like the strict, boring, curmudgeonly parent it should be. It needs to ban stuff, even if logic says that it shouldn’t. Maybe the internet should be restricted, even though that would make me rage for months. Maybe political radicals should be clamped down on, just so that we can get wound up about something again. The apple must be forbidden once more.

Cloverfield and Hand-Held Camera Storytelling

Much like King Kong (last time I mention it for a while, I promise), Cloverfield (Matt Reeves, 2008) is another film that divided audiences. Some found the hand-held camera nauseating, others described it as "gimmickry" or "YouTube storytelling" (quotes culled from Rotten Tomatoes, cba to fully reference them), or as just another way of telling a traditional narrative. The characters picked up a lot of slack, mostly for being boring yuppies with bad decision-making skills. Get your brains in gear, reviewers.

The most important thing to realise about Cloverfield is that it's not really about the boring New York yuppies. Cloverfield is about the wider picture, of which we get only the tiniest of glimpses: we are locked, from start to finish, into the literal view of ordinary civilians, and we know just the smallest amount more than they (thanks to the incredibly successful viral campaign). We may follow these people for the duration of the film, but essentially they serve as one small perspective on a much larger event. Criticisms that it "lacks tension" are deflected when looked at like this: horror is at its most effective when it is left to our imagination, and Cloverfield works in this same way. The Rob/Beth narrative may not be fantastic or tense, but the glimpses we do get of New York, of the lives of other civilians, of the actions of the military compensate fully. Take for instance the opening title that frames the footage as military evidence. It poses so many questions - what is the state of the US currently? Is the monster still alive? Did it win? Are there other such stories to be told? It expands the story hugely, but crucially this expansion happens only in our imaginations. We are able to create a far more cohesive world than the filmmakers could have, even if the film took a broader view of events.

For this reason Cloverfield is so much more than a "traditional narrative". Keeping the audience in a position of ignorance is fundamentally different from showing the wider picture with different angles and perspectives. Cloverfield doesn't really have an ending. The movie finishes when the camera is lost beneath a collapsed bridge, and while this concludes the Rob/Beth narrative, the story of the monster, which is the main narrative, is far from finished. The hand-held camera format can successfully be accused of "gimmickry" at times - see recent release Project X - but here it is just not the case.

I would go so far as to argue that because the 'monster narrative' is the real core of the film, it doesn't matter that the Rob/Beth narrative isn't that great. The characters are mostly boring, they're a homogeneous bunch taken from a section of society with which most of the audience would have little sympathy with: they're rich, pretty and self-absorbed. Only the Lizzy Caplan character has anything remotely interesting about her. What this serves to do, however, is increase the verisimilitude of the film. It is precisely because they're so mundane that it works - their lack of wit, their irrational decision-making and general helplessness makes them feel like normal people. In subservience to the 'monster narrative' it is more important that the characters are believable New Yorkers than fascinating people. If anything, it is good that the focus is on the wider events; if the 'monster narrative', a nuanced and beguiling character narrative and the audience assimilation into the film through the immediacy of the hand-held camera were all woven together it may well be that Cloverfield would be too cluttered, and the least important is the character narrative.

Had the film been shot like a normal film, yet kept the same level of audience ignorance, it would have been much less effective. We would get impatient, and start wondering why we're not being given any context. Then, when the characters die at the end and the film finishes it would feel like a con. The restrictions would seem incredibly arbitrary and frustrating. Setting Cloverfield up as camcorder footage circumvents this issue entirely - we are happy to accept this as how the film works, and it makes sense that we are left in the dark on the events unfolding in wider New York.

It is worth mentioning that Cloverfield has a 77% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, so it was a far from reviled film. It was praised for the level of immersion and the spectacular set-pieces, but I felt that there is a general under-appreciation of how ably it uses the hand-held format. Hopefully this piece provides a counterpoint.