James Ferman, the outgoing chief film censor, came clean the other week. Ferman, head of the British Board of Film Classification for 23 years, declared that he wished he had ordered more cuts to be made to the 1994 film Pulp Fiction than the one snip-a close-up of an injection-he deemed necessary at the time. He accused the film of glamorising drug abuse and increasing the number of young people who inject heroin.
Ferman suggested that viewers might emulate John Travolta, the star of Quentin Tarantino's film. "Travolta takes heroin, drives along blissfully happy, picks up Uma Thurman, goes dancing and wins the competition," summarised the censor-though his synopsis missed the point that Travolta's character is a greasy two-bit hitman who is shot to pieces with his pants down while sitting on the john. Aspiration is a funny thing.
The arguments over copycat behaviour have been well rehearsed. But Ferman's most interesting comment was that Pulp Fiction was "socially irresponsible" and should therefore have been cut, even though to do so would have been to damage a "wonderful" film. In other words, the moral values, not just the content, of a film-which breaks no law-should override its qualities as art. But should we really ask film-makers to be social workers? We are not totalitarians; nor Victorians. Unlike Matthew Arnold, we do not expect our culture to civilise the philistines-at least, not directly.
And even if we do demand a measure of responsibility, how are we supposed to judge film-makers? Who is to say which film treats drugs, or violence or sex, in a responsible way, and which invites us to rush out of the cinema and head straight for our local dealer? Do not some movies, Pulp Fiction included, demand a more sophisticated response, an acknowledgement that they might tacitly challenge us to repudiate their twisted morality?
Many a crusading film proudly wears its heart on its sleeve. For all the sniping at its blatant nationalism, no one could take Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan as other than a lesson in the horror of war and the honour of sacrifice. (Although during the war it would have probably been censored for demoralising the troops.) But what of Scorsese's great modern horror story, Taxi Driver? The film coldly delineates an anonymous urban world of insane violence, without pausing to allow the viewer a brief, cathartic moment of anger, grief or pity. There is no sign of social responsibility in the movie. Scorsese himself has admitted that re-watching it with a younger audience was an uncomfortable experience: their reactions, he said, were not what he had expected. Yet to show is to warn.
Or take the recent film In the Company of Men. In director Neil LaBute's provocative d?but, two male colleagues plot revenge on womankind by waging emotional war on a deaf female co-worker. The first, older but weaker, destroys his own career and peace of mind in the process, while the second has the last laugh on them both. There are moral ideas at work here: is morality, in today's world, a mug's game? Are we conditioned to respect strength? But is the film the work of a cynical misogynist, or a deliberate challenge to the audience to return its own fire?
Opacity is the friend, and transparency the enemy, of art. This is no less true of film than of any other medium. "I'm uncomfortable when people think I'm didactic about something, because I'm a storyteller, not a social worker," says Peter Weir, director of The Truman Show.
And yet film is still treated as a special case. The French director Claude Miller was recently asked whether it was responsible to dramatise, in his new film La Classe de Neige, a son's nightmarish discovery of the truth about his father's ugly living. He replied: "On this subject, one is led to making immodest comparisons: what about Greek tragedy? And Shakespeare? And what is catharsis? And where do terror and pity come from?" Immodest perhaps, but it is true that in western culture at least, only the cinema repeatedly attracts this sort of reproving glare.
So what is it about the moving picture-compared even to the still image-which causes such concern? No doubt it still lacks the respectability conferred by age. There is the sheer size of the audience to ratchet up the stakes. There is the greater realism of the cinematic image, the sense of felt life, compounded by the absence of one clear, guiding imagination to whom to ascribe it all-although, says director David Cronenberg: "Censors tend to do what only psychotics do: they confuse reality with illusion." Audiences, young ones at least, if you believe a recent survey, are more sophisticated.
There is surely something else, though-a stubborn belief that films are mere entertainment for the masses, who must be protected from themselves. Of course an awful lot of movies are just that, and increasingly they are not just being made for the people, but by the people. Every big movie is now subjected to a battery of test-screenings before audiences painstakingly chosen to represent a cross-section of potential viewers. It is then re-cut, re-cooked and spiced-up to please the public palate.
Given the enormous cost of big-budget films and the consequent need to please the audience, the average Hollywood extravaganza is unsuited to hand-me-down morality. In any case, Hollywood can look after itself. Our concern should be for the other films, those that seek out an audience which demands something subtler, grittier, more real, more inventive. Serious film-makers have a hard enough time getting thoughtful, provocative films financed, made, distributed and seen, without being judged on their moral probity by unworkable standards.
It is sensible not to get too po-faced about all this. I would not like to suggest that there should be a free-for-all, or-good grief!-that all film-makers can be relied on to be responsible, well-intentioned types. My point is simply this: that high-sounding nostrums like social responsibility are always more complex than they seem. They rest on slippery ground-recent films about the Irish Troubles, such as In the Name of the Father or The Devil's Own, are examples.
Nor do I mean to criticise James Ferman. Twenty-three years as an arbiter of public morals, with the government breathing down your neck and the industry forcing your arm, would do strange things to the soul you would think. Yet on the whole he seems to have done a commendable job. He has generally been sparing with the censorial scissors. Just recently he has passed films such as Crash and Lolita, X-rated in the US, with few cuts. And, yes, he got it right first time with Pulp Fiction, keeping intact a fine film and just as possibly turning people off as on to drugs.
We have a new censor in Andreas Whittam Smith, and a new mood abroad. Adrift in our moral gulf, out of sight of the land that Matthew Arnold still clung to, it is natural that some should blame culture for society's ills. It is also inevitable that some should turn on its most popular medium to redress the balance. But we should think twice before hacking the next Tarantino film to bits.
