08-06-11, 07:52 PM
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Join Date: Jun 2009
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This hadn't occurred to me, but she's right, of course. Wierd.
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Quote:
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For once, we don't have to see the forbidden film to assess the censor's decision. The British Board of Film Classification's ban on The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence) isn't based on the unacceptability of what's actually being shown. It's based on the concept on which the film is founded.
Tom Six's The Human Centipede (First Sequence), featured a crazed surgeon who sewed three kidnapped people together to produce the arthropod of the title. It was classified 18 without cuts for both cinema and DVD in 2010. His follow-up shows a man becoming sexually obsessed with a copy of the original film and inspired by it to create a "human centipede" of his own.
In their adjudication, the board mention "graphic images of sexual violence, forced defecation, and mutilation". They refer to a scene in which the central character "masturbates whilst he watches a DVD of the original Human Centipede film with sandpaper wrapped around his penis" and a sequence "in which he becomes aroused at the sight of the members of the centipede being forced to defecate into one another's mouths, culminating in sight of the man wrapping barbed wire around his penis and raping the woman at the rear of the centipede".
However, cuts like the 49 snips that rendered A Serbian Film acceptable were not to be considered as a means of dealing with these unpleasantnesses. For the problem wasn't the sights and sounds that would have assailed us, but the idea that gave rise to them.
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". They add: "There is little attempt to portray any of the victims in the film as anything other than objects to be brutalised, degraded and mutilated for the amusement and arousal of the central character, as well as for the pleasure of the audience."
Most arguments about film censorship founder on the difficulty of comparing subjective judgments about the likely impact of particular shots. Underlying issues, for example the ongoing complaint about the acceptability of violence compared with inhibitions about sex, are pushed into the background. This time an ideological stand has been nakedly taken. It offers an unusual insight into the minds of those who believe they must protect other adults from films that would endanger them.
The board refer not only to their own classification guidelines, but also to the Obscene Publications Acts of 1959 and 1964. Understandably, they say they seek to avoid letting through material that may be in breach of the law. Famously, the acts prohibit the publication of works that have a tendency to deprave or corrupt a significant proportion of those likely to encounter them. The board say they engage "in regular discussions with the relevant enforcement agencies, including the CPS, the police and the Ministry of Justice" to determine what this might mean in their own field of responsibility. They concluded that The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence) might indeed be considered obscene.
At last, then, we are offered a concept, rather than mere images, that those called upon to adjudicate in such matters deem to be sufficient in itself to pose what the board called "a real, as opposed to a fanciful, risk that harm is likely to be caused to potential viewers". So what is it?
It's not the "degradation, humiliation, mutilation, torture, and murder" which the board tell us that Six's new film offers. Clearly, it couldn't be, given their indulgence of so much of these things elsewhere. It's "the link between sexual arousal and sexual violence and a clear association between pain, perversity and sexual pleasure" that poses the problem. This link is apparently too dangerous in itself to be dwelt upon, however it's depicted.
Well, Six himself clearly accepts that films can corrupt, since his new offering turns on that very idea. Nonetheless, if it's to be the subject itself, rather than its depiction, that rules a work out of contention, then the notion that the one thing beyond the pale is a connection between sex and pain seems almost quaint.
We're being asked to assume that the avalanche of non-sexual violence that the movies unleash on us is leaving us unscathed, even though most real-world violence seems to be of this kind. Sexual sadism seems to play but a small part in the savagery that surrounds us. Is the big screen really more likely to turn us into kinky torturers than into more straightforward brutes? Or has Mrs Grundy returned to annoy us with a kinky preoccupation of her own?
For
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The Human Centipede sequel: no sexual sadism please, we're British | Film | guardian.co.uk
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