National Post (National Edition)
The disease of film censorship
EVERY DAY THERE ARE NEW MORAL MAXIMS FOR CONTENT.
Ontario's budget bill, which is now awaiting second reading in the assembly, contains a measure to extinguish the last vestige of film censorship in the province. It proposes the explicit abolition of age-based film ratings, and the annihilation of the Ontario Film Review Board, whose ancestor was founded in 1911.
Premier Doug Ford's government has designed a new system that keeps traditional rules restricting the exhibition of “adult sex films,” but for other motion pictures in cinemas — the temptation to scatter around scare quotes here is overwhelming — exhibitors will be left to provide their own content warnings, and will be policed on the basis of complaints. So farewell to the Film Classification Act (2005) and greetings to its successor, the film content information act (2020).
Today's motion picture exhibitors have probably long since forgotten that the occasionally onerous and tin-eared Ontario system of film censorship was introduced at their forebears' request. The short pictures of 1911 circulated among cities willy-nilly, and any content considered daring created a dilemma for the local exhibitor. Vice squads had nigh-unregulated powers to storm into a business's premises and start cracking heads. One impresario was quoted in late 1910 as having observed that, “The present law in Ontario was stringent enough, if applied to the very letter, to prevent the display of nearly all moving pictures.”
The founders of the movie biz got tired of wheedling morals inspectors to watch previews and pass judgment, so they appealed for a centralized provincewide censorship system and got it. The rollout of the system was delayed when the provincial treasurer fell ill and couldn't sign off on the original board members; this meant that unapproved content was still circulating in theatres while the public expected to have the benefit of the board's “protection.”
The first censorship controversy in the life of the board that I can find happened during this period, in August 1911, when someone had the poor judgment to exhibit an American movie about “the war of '76.” The audience lost its cool, not at a spectacle of violence or obscenity, but at a scene of the Union Jack being pulled down and replaced with the Stars and Stripes. The board promised to investigate once it got its act together.
That was the temper of the time, you understand. The main concern of the general public over censorship was whether one could possibly have enough of it. In 1911, before antibiotics, disease metaphors hung over men's minds like a sinister, omnipresent cloud: objectionable art was often described with adjectives like “obnoxious” or “polluting” or “unhygienic.” It goes without saying that the “hygiene” in question was unapologetically eugenic.
Censorship, in short, was regarded uncontroversially as a public-health matter and, until after the Second World War, this was extended freely to political utterances and symbols like the one in the American Revolution picture. The mere depiction of a crime was regarded as dangerous, which is why Hollywood's own “Hays Code” incorporated a famous compromise: you can show crime, because crime movies are badass and lucrative, but only on the condition that the crime is eventually punished in the final reel.
Do I even need to come out and say that it is easy to imagine us returning to a world like this, if it hasn't already happened? We're all having disease metaphors branded on our hides, and relearning old lessons in the totalizing character of “health” regulation. If you can characterize an utterance or a depiction as “toxic,” our era's answer to “unhygienic,” you can do as you like to the material. Or its author.
Every day we see corporations scrambling to adapt to new moral maxims and categories of objectionable content, and one of the loudest notes in the chorus of reaction is that centralized regulation by the state would at least be more efficient and consistent. And it would evolve only at the mollusk-like speed of government. This is more or less how we ended up with 21st-century controversies in Ontario over extra-saucy French feature films. The internet is inherently harder to tame, but that won't stop anyone from trying.