First published in Rue Morgue #26, March/April 2002
If I were to guess, I’d say most – if not all – readers of this magazine hold some pretty strong views on the topic of censorship, probably along the lines of combating it at every turn, as if it were some sort of cancerous growth. That’s understandable. After all, censorship has been responsible for some of the greatest travesties in the history of commercial (and non-commercial) art. And I’m not even referring to American Psycho and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre at this point, more like James Joyce’s Ulysses and J.D. Salinger’s A Catcher in the Rye, works that are now widely accepted as classics but were once, apparently, a little too hot to handle.
Nevertheless, censorship is not, it turns out, the grand nemesis of art and entertainment, as it is usually made out to be. Think about it; to have something “banned” in today’s age of information is to essentially bestow on it an unlimited promotional budget and expand its market appeal, since many people who would otherwise not care about the work in question are suddenly spurned to see the item at all costs and as a matter of principle. Because personal commitment to the topic of censorship runs so deep, a ban is usually the basis for a rally cry to champion the underdog to the level of a bona fide marketing campaign. Once the social pressures abate (and they always, inevitably do), success is practically guaranteed, even if it comes in the dubious form of notoriety.
No, there’s something far worse than censorship, something far more sneaky and genuinely dangerous. It doesn’t really have a name, though it’s sometimes referred to as “ostracism” and it usually happens in secret, before the general public has a chance respond. Ostracism is essentially an effective form of censorship, because when it happens, very few people know about it, and how can you fight censorship when you don’t even know it’s happened?
It’s no surprise that the history of horror entertainment is more likely a target of this kind of censure than a highly publicized ban. That’s why a movie like Peeping Tom, which was released just months before Alfred Hitchcok’s Psycho in 1961, only surfaced fifteen years later, and only then because of the efforts of people like Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorcese. Not only was the movie summarily rejected by critics, but its director, Michael Powell, couldn’t find work in his native England for a long, long time afterwards. A terrifying and groundbreaking study of scopophilia, Peeping Tom was clearly a very tough movie for its time, although today you are more likely to find it in college libraries but still not – curiously enough – at your local video store.
Similarly, Gerald Kargl’s serial killer film Angst (a.k.a. Fear, 1983) bypassed standard censorship to be completely ostracized by media and distribution houses alike. The movie, which chronicles the few bleak and genuinely traumatic hours following a psychopath’s release from prison, has never been distributed commercially, not even on videotape or DVD.
Clearly a film like Kinji Fukasaku’s Battle Royale has succumbed to a comparable fate, that nebulous state of not being officially banned… yet being well nigh impossible to access. The story behind Battle Royale is particularly relevant because it reveals that censorship is not motivated by moral outrage, as is often assumed, but by political posturing, usually social sensitivity to a particular issue (in this case, violence in schools).
That Battle Royale is being “withheld” by its makers rather than “banned” by would-be distributors amounts to the same thing; what you don’t know is that the North American film market has essentially ostracized the movie and that the Toei Co., which owns the rights to Battle Royale, has opted not to fight the good fight on the front of independent distribution.
Fortunately, Battle Royale is the kind of movie that has a lot of money behind it and a trail of success across the East and in select parts of Europe. So who cares if the Americans aren’t ready for it? The time will come when school shootings aren’t front page news anymore and negotiations can begin anew. Who knows, some corporate egghead will undoubtedly land the re-make rights and make sure you only get to see this movie as an afterthought to a lot of misspent money and endless script rewrites.
In any case, the unofficial ban on Battle Royale will probably help the movie out in the long run. But just in case it doesn’t, you have this record of it in your hands. And now you know.