Sex and the cinema: some stuff isn’t even fit for the arthouse

AT the time of writing it seems unlikely that the explicit new film, 9 Songs, will go mainstream in cinemas around Ireland when it’s released this Friday. It’s not for the want of publicity, though.

The Late Late Show featured it some weeks back, there have been numerous media reports on the subject, and film censor John Kelleher has had a mountain of correspondence about it.

The film, according to critic Michael Dwyer, is “the most sexually graphic film ever to be passed with certificate from the film censor”. It shows graphic footage of sexual activity, not simulated but actually performed by the film’s participants, intercut with footage of concert performances.

So why isn’t it going mainstream? Probably because its only point of interest is the graphic footage. It is not, according to the censor, pornographic in the way of films made by the sex industry. The dirty raincoat brigade can go elsewhere for sexual imagery. What they can obtain will be a lot more explicit than 9 Songs, and presumably can be watched in more privacy.

For this and other reasons, the film censor seems somewhat impatient with the Family and Media Association (FMA) for making a fuss over 9 Songs. He’s had more letters about this film than about all others combined, he tells me. Many of the letters, he says, were identical to those sent to members of the Oireachtas as part of a campaign undertaken by the FMA.

Kelleher would prefer to be a film classifier, not a film censor. “I have become increasingly convinced,” he says, “that the majority of adult citizens in our society today share my own view that adults should be entitled, subject to the law, to choose for themselves what they might wish to see.”

He takes heart from the fact that those politicians who received correspondence from the Family and Media Association didn’t take up the cudgels but instead passed the letters on to him and sought his views. It may be naive, however, to read too much into this apparently ‘liberal’ stance among our politicians.

TDs and senators know an awkward subject when they see one, and they know how to dodge it. Values-based voluntary groups like the Family and Media Association don’t have many friends in the media, and politicians don’t want to be ridiculed as old-fashioned.

Such is the reluctance among politicians to talk about sex at all that there wasn’t a single TD or senator present recently at the launch of the Freedom from Pornography Campaign. This campaign launch, at the Equality Authority, featured journalist Susan McKay, representatives of the National Women’s Council and other women’s groups, all coming together to oppose the way “sexism is made sexy” through pornography. “Pornography is not harmless fun,” says spokeswoman Helen Mortimer. “It provides a climate of sexual hostility and encourages the notion that a woman’s worth depends on her sexual appeal to men.”

She can cite international research to show how it links to sexual violence against women. I have no doubt the film censor would agree with Mortimer’s view of pornography. In our interview he is careful to distinguish between the explicit sexual imagery and content of 9 Songs and pornography that is “exploitative, gratuitous and aims to arouse people sexually”.

He acknowledges there are limits to what can be classified as fit for viewing. He originally banned the film Spun in July 2003 because it depicted “sexual violence, all kinds of depravity, and very hard drug abuse”. He says he would refuse to classify anything that would promote drug-taking, breaches of the law, and of course films in which people were actually brutalised and killed.

The censor has his standards. But the question is, has he judged correctly where he ought to draw the line between what, in public cinemas, mature adults might freely choose to watch and what nobody should be allowed to watch? Isn’t it a fair argument, for example, that sexual behaviour between adults is essentially a private thing - an experience which society should value as a high-point of human love?

If so, shouldn’t good public policy discourage the exploitation of actual sexual activity for any commercial purpose, even in an arthouse film? And since it’s just more reality TV - no acting - 9 Songs is of no more value than Big Brother, which also carried its first real live sex this year in another first for western civilisation.

THERE are other reasons to quibble at the censor’s decision. One is that a film like 9 Songs, though it may not intend to be pornographic, may nevertheless be viewed in a pornographic way. The eye of the beholder is what really matters. Secondly, under-18s are likely to see it, since they often purchase tickets in multiplex cinemas for films that are certified for their age group, and then go watch other films instead. Thirdly, films which are passed for viewing in cinemas must, by law, be certified for video release as well. In this context, the film censor points out that he banned Spun partly because, although he felt it might be suitable for an over-18 cert in the ‘controlled environment’ of a limited cinema release, he wanted to prohibit a video/DVD release. Why didn’t he apply the same logic to 9 Songs?

The censor appears somewhat fatalistic about the difficulties with censoring explicit material in a world where you can watch Arab terrorists decapitate a western hostage on a computer screen.

“Given what is readily available today on the internet,” he wrote to one complainant, “on daytime - not to mention late night - television, and even on the shelves of most newsagents, it would be difficult to understand what harm (9 Songs) could cause even to older adolescents, let alone adults.”

He has a point here. But perhaps he is failing to recognise the symbolic value of what the censor approves and disapproves in the name of society.

As a TV producer himself, his attitude may also reflect a view still widely held in the media, namely that we were once too strict. The Late Late Show’s recent focus on censorship was all about past excesses. True enough, things were pretty bizarre. The word ‘virgin’ was cut from films until the 1960s. Also chopped out were phrases like ‘jeepers creepers’ and ‘for Christ’s sake’. But overkill in the past doesn’t justify everything we do in the present.

The censor observes that 9 Songs “contains no violence or sexual violence”. This perhaps reflects a view that violence in the film industry is the real problem and that we should lighten up about the sex.

At some point, though, we will need to ask whether we are doing society any real service by having a no-holds-barred approach to sex on film. We might have to ask ourselves, for example, whether rising rates of sexually transmitted diseases, sexual addiction and related problems are being influenced by what people are being exposed to on screen.

In the meantime, it is difficult to see how real-life sex filmed with hand-held cameras does anything to enhance the human experience. Or why we should shed any tears if it were cut.