Careful what you wish for
For when you wrestle with monsters so you risk becoming one.
Ross Fitzgerald: Killer logic bans screen lovemaking but not murder.November 24, 2005
HYPOCRISY is alive and well in our censorship system. This week, a friend in Canberra told me that, while browsing in a local video store, he came across the controversial video Executions.
This film of a dozen real-life executions was banned years ago, I thought. But on checking the federal Government's censorship website, www.oflc. gov.au, I found it was still classified and listed with an R rating. It's legal to sell it anywhere in Australia.
Another friend sent me the current issue of Screen Print, the latest offering from the home entertainment industry. Page four boasts a full-page advertisement for the new-release blockbuster American Soldiers: A Day in Iraq. As you'd expect, the ad read "Strong graphic violence", but it was classified MA15+.
Page eight boasted "The Last Horror Movie: The fine line between fiction and reality is blurred when a serial killer uses a horror video rental to lure his next victim".
I reflected on the kerfuffle raised recently by some family and Christian groups about the violence in films such as Baise-moi, Salo and Ken Park. They had no trouble getting those films banned, so how did Executions slip through and why is American Soldiers so readily available? Delving a little deeper, I also learned that a man in Adelaide is facing Customs charges for allegedly trying to import a DVD of the banned and beastly Baise-moi for his personal use.
So why is Baise-moi banned for its studio-produced violence but the real life and explicit violence of Executions, which in my opinion is far worse, was allowed to be sold and hired in the local video shop almost alongside the Disney family films?
It took a while but it finally dawned on me. Executions has no sex. It is just one graphic and grizzly killing after another. In the case of Baise-moi, it is the sex and not the violence that resulted in getting it banned.
What's going on here?
Only a few weeks ago the chief censor told us: "People are becoming increasingly concerned about violence and slightly more tolerant around language and sex."
I visited Attorney-General Philip Ruddock's censorship site again to see what sort of guidelines or rules his officers use to make these decisions on violent material.
What I found is that no amount or level of violence is enough to have a film banned outright. The R-rated category is open-ended when it comes to gratuitous and explicit violence. But not so for sex. Explicit executions are OK but explicit (and non-violent) sex is banned in all Australian states. Sex also remains the No.1 factor in tipping a film into a higher category rather than violence, bad language, drug-taking or even depictions of terrorism.
So who determined that, as a nation, we would censor images of sex more heavily than images of violence? Why would a government ban a film with sex but allow extreme violence? The reality is that the ratings system applied by governments to films and publications is as close as we get to a formalised national morality register.
Point by point, the censorship guidelines record exactly where and for what reason a government draws the line on certain behaviours, without putting them to an actual judge and jury.
What does it mean for our future society that by 18 the average American or Australian child has seen 200,000 dramatised acts of violence and 40,000 dramatised murders but, thanks to an unbalanced and overzealous censorship regime, few if any dramatised acts of explicit love-making?
And even more worrying, many violent video and computer games on the market are reportedly based on training programs used by the military and police to teach the theory and practice of killing.
You'd expect we would try to keep this sort of material beyond the reach of children by classifying it into a restricted category for adults only.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. Ruddock's website shows there is no adults-only category for such games. There's only an M or MA rating available. Why? Because South Australia's Christian and family values Attorney-General Michael Atkinson won't agree to an R-rated category.
There are 25 computer games with "Kill" or "Killer" in their title that have been classified as suitable for children. Banned is the computer game Strip Poker 3 because it shows adults getting naked around the card table. In my opinion, Atkinson's logic is as crazy as the logic that Ruddock uses in allowing him to veto every other attorney-general in the country who wants an R rating for computer games.
Surely it is unacceptable to formally rate sex as more offensive and more harmful than violence.
Ask any politician which one they think is worse and to a person they'll say violence. Then they turn around in clandestine caucus and cabinet meetings and agree to censorship laws that send people to jail for trading in sex.
Back at the cash register, video stores get fat on the spoils of murders and executions. It's hypocritical and two-faced.
Journalists in Australia's parliamentary press galleries who report on real-life sex and violence are almost as bad. They use sex as a handy lever to dislodge players they don't like and often conveniently ignore personal violence.
Ross Fitzgerald: Killer logic bans screen lovemaking but not murder.November 24, 2005
HYPOCRISY is alive and well in our censorship system. This week, a friend in Canberra told me that, while browsing in a local video store, he came across the controversial video Executions.
This film of a dozen real-life executions was banned years ago, I thought. But on checking the federal Government's censorship website, www.oflc. gov.au, I found it was still classified and listed with an R rating. It's legal to sell it anywhere in Australia.
Another friend sent me the current issue of Screen Print, the latest offering from the home entertainment industry. Page four boasts a full-page advertisement for the new-release blockbuster American Soldiers: A Day in Iraq. As you'd expect, the ad read "Strong graphic violence", but it was classified MA15+.
Page eight boasted "The Last Horror Movie: The fine line between fiction and reality is blurred when a serial killer uses a horror video rental to lure his next victim".
I reflected on the kerfuffle raised recently by some family and Christian groups about the violence in films such as Baise-moi, Salo and Ken Park. They had no trouble getting those films banned, so how did Executions slip through and why is American Soldiers so readily available? Delving a little deeper, I also learned that a man in Adelaide is facing Customs charges for allegedly trying to import a DVD of the banned and beastly Baise-moi for his personal use.
So why is Baise-moi banned for its studio-produced violence but the real life and explicit violence of Executions, which in my opinion is far worse, was allowed to be sold and hired in the local video shop almost alongside the Disney family films?
It took a while but it finally dawned on me. Executions has no sex. It is just one graphic and grizzly killing after another. In the case of Baise-moi, it is the sex and not the violence that resulted in getting it banned.
What's going on here?
Only a few weeks ago the chief censor told us: "People are becoming increasingly concerned about violence and slightly more tolerant around language and sex."
I visited Attorney-General Philip Ruddock's censorship site again to see what sort of guidelines or rules his officers use to make these decisions on violent material.
What I found is that no amount or level of violence is enough to have a film banned outright. The R-rated category is open-ended when it comes to gratuitous and explicit violence. But not so for sex. Explicit executions are OK but explicit (and non-violent) sex is banned in all Australian states. Sex also remains the No.1 factor in tipping a film into a higher category rather than violence, bad language, drug-taking or even depictions of terrorism.
So who determined that, as a nation, we would censor images of sex more heavily than images of violence? Why would a government ban a film with sex but allow extreme violence? The reality is that the ratings system applied by governments to films and publications is as close as we get to a formalised national morality register.
Point by point, the censorship guidelines record exactly where and for what reason a government draws the line on certain behaviours, without putting them to an actual judge and jury.
What does it mean for our future society that by 18 the average American or Australian child has seen 200,000 dramatised acts of violence and 40,000 dramatised murders but, thanks to an unbalanced and overzealous censorship regime, few if any dramatised acts of explicit love-making?
And even more worrying, many violent video and computer games on the market are reportedly based on training programs used by the military and police to teach the theory and practice of killing.
You'd expect we would try to keep this sort of material beyond the reach of children by classifying it into a restricted category for adults only.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. Ruddock's website shows there is no adults-only category for such games. There's only an M or MA rating available. Why? Because South Australia's Christian and family values Attorney-General Michael Atkinson won't agree to an R-rated category.
There are 25 computer games with "Kill" or "Killer" in their title that have been classified as suitable for children. Banned is the computer game Strip Poker 3 because it shows adults getting naked around the card table. In my opinion, Atkinson's logic is as crazy as the logic that Ruddock uses in allowing him to veto every other attorney-general in the country who wants an R rating for computer games.
Surely it is unacceptable to formally rate sex as more offensive and more harmful than violence.
Ask any politician which one they think is worse and to a person they'll say violence. Then they turn around in clandestine caucus and cabinet meetings and agree to censorship laws that send people to jail for trading in sex.
Back at the cash register, video stores get fat on the spoils of murders and executions. It's hypocritical and two-faced.
Journalists in Australia's parliamentary press galleries who report on real-life sex and violence are almost as bad. They use sex as a handy lever to dislodge players they don't like and often conveniently ignore personal violence.
posted by professor rat at 8:51 AM
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