Thoughts on Censorship
Thoughts on Censorship:
As I writer, I’m deeply invested in the concept of freedom of expression. Our free speech is protected by the Constitution. We’d like to think that censorship has no place in our society.
Yet, censorship is everywhere. It’s not always government driven, and so, it’s unevenly applied across our media outlets. But, it’s there.
How am I defining censorship? Censorship is the restriction or modification of an artistic vision which runs counter to an established belief or ideology.
Consider the digital blurring of some naked person’s body parts on a TV show like “Naked and Afraid.” It’s a practice so ubiquitous now, so common and ordinary, that we don’t even think about it. You may not think of that as censorship, but it is. You can argue that this is proper, that we don’t want naked bodies on our television shows. “What about the children, after all?” you may cry.
I don’t have the expertise, nor do I have the data, to debate this point from a child psychology perspective. I’m merely stating, unequivocally, that this is censorship.
Who is censoring and restricting our content? More often than not, in our current society, it is corporations, rather than the government, that is doing the censoring. That explains the patchwork, haphazard effort at play across our broader media.
I was streaming the Tom Cruise movie Oblivion recently, courtesy of my Comcast service. I was informed at the outset that “This film has been edited for content.” Why they felt the need to edit a PG-13 film puzzled me. The TV rating they gave it, after editing, was TV-14. If anything, they should have added content. (They did, in fact, add content. They added commercials.)
Not having seen the film before, I may have missed some of the edits, but one did jump out at me. There’s a scene in which one of the female leads is skinny-dipping. In the version of the film I was watching, her bum was digitally blurred.
I wondered, Why the effort to edit such a brief scene? The intensely explicit French film, Blue is the Warmest Color, is available on Netflix streaming, unrestricted and completely unedited. Meanwhile, bare bums are permissible on Instagram, but frontal nudity is not. (According to Instagram, men are allowed to have nipples, but women are not. Bare bums are OK for either sex.) Yet, here on Comcast streaming, bare bums are not allowed. (Comcast has never even heard of French cinema.) That’s what I mean by patchwork.
A logical response may be “Let the Market decide!” I could switch to another cable TV provider in my area, except there isn’t one. Comcast holds a monopoly. Is Oblivion available for streaming, unedited, through some other service? I can’t speak for all of them, but it’s not available for streaming on Netflix. (Because Comcast now owns Universal, the studio that produced Oblivion, they now own the film outright. They may be purposefully keeping Oblivion from their rival as part of their ongoing struggle for market dominance.) I could buy the film, but what am I paying Comcast and Netflix for every month if I have to go and buy the movie anyway?
My point is, Comcast is limiting, though not outright restricting, my access to this film. On top of that, they are editing it away from the original vision of the director. They are censoring it.
The good news, at least for us readers and writers, is that books are not censored nearly to the degree as our visual media is. I took a stroll through the paperback stacks at my local Barnes & Noble recently, and spotted Nabokov’s Lolita, Anne Rice’s Sleeping Beauty trilogy, and two books by the legendary Emmanuelle Arsan. I wonder, though, if these books were brand new and not acknowledged classics, would they be published in this current climate?
How many new books, as daring as Lolita, are being published these days? Not many. I spotted the innovative Japanese masterpiece, Murakami’s 1Q84, during my B&N reconnaissance. It’s important to note that this international bestseller was not originally published in the United States, that it came here after winning acclaim elsewhere. More to NYC publisher’s tastes is 50 Shades of Grey, a rehash of some long established ideas. (See the Anne Rice books, mentioned above, and Story of O, for comparison.)
As good as All the Light We Cannot See was, it was still one of a million books about World War 2. The Goldfinch had the benefit of having its main character live in New York City. U.S. publishers love books about NYC as much as Hollywood loves movies about movies.
Who out there is pushing the envelope? Is anybody challenging the status quo in publishing, mixing styles, turning genres inside out? Are innovative writers being stopped at the gate? Are they lost in the deluge of sloppy, poorly plotted e-books that flood the internet each day?
If our government was censoring us, we could write our Congressperson. We could protest. We could vote.
I can’t vote against Comcast. I can’t switch to its competitor if it holds a monopoly. I can’t buy a book that’s not even being published.
The regime that is controlling our media, that limits and restricts what we see and buy, is a loose collection of corporate entities accountable to no one. Awareness is the first step in taking action.
As I writer, I’m deeply invested in the concept of freedom of expression. Our free speech is protected by the Constitution. We’d like to think that censorship has no place in our society.
Yet, censorship is everywhere. It’s not always government driven, and so, it’s unevenly applied across our media outlets. But, it’s there.
How am I defining censorship? Censorship is the restriction or modification of an artistic vision which runs counter to an established belief or ideology.
Consider the digital blurring of some naked person’s body parts on a TV show like “Naked and Afraid.” It’s a practice so ubiquitous now, so common and ordinary, that we don’t even think about it. You may not think of that as censorship, but it is. You can argue that this is proper, that we don’t want naked bodies on our television shows. “What about the children, after all?” you may cry.
I don’t have the expertise, nor do I have the data, to debate this point from a child psychology perspective. I’m merely stating, unequivocally, that this is censorship.
Who is censoring and restricting our content? More often than not, in our current society, it is corporations, rather than the government, that is doing the censoring. That explains the patchwork, haphazard effort at play across our broader media.
I was streaming the Tom Cruise movie Oblivion recently, courtesy of my Comcast service. I was informed at the outset that “This film has been edited for content.” Why they felt the need to edit a PG-13 film puzzled me. The TV rating they gave it, after editing, was TV-14. If anything, they should have added content. (They did, in fact, add content. They added commercials.)
Not having seen the film before, I may have missed some of the edits, but one did jump out at me. There’s a scene in which one of the female leads is skinny-dipping. In the version of the film I was watching, her bum was digitally blurred.
I wondered, Why the effort to edit such a brief scene? The intensely explicit French film, Blue is the Warmest Color, is available on Netflix streaming, unrestricted and completely unedited. Meanwhile, bare bums are permissible on Instagram, but frontal nudity is not. (According to Instagram, men are allowed to have nipples, but women are not. Bare bums are OK for either sex.) Yet, here on Comcast streaming, bare bums are not allowed. (Comcast has never even heard of French cinema.) That’s what I mean by patchwork.
A logical response may be “Let the Market decide!” I could switch to another cable TV provider in my area, except there isn’t one. Comcast holds a monopoly. Is Oblivion available for streaming, unedited, through some other service? I can’t speak for all of them, but it’s not available for streaming on Netflix. (Because Comcast now owns Universal, the studio that produced Oblivion, they now own the film outright. They may be purposefully keeping Oblivion from their rival as part of their ongoing struggle for market dominance.) I could buy the film, but what am I paying Comcast and Netflix for every month if I have to go and buy the movie anyway?
My point is, Comcast is limiting, though not outright restricting, my access to this film. On top of that, they are editing it away from the original vision of the director. They are censoring it.
The good news, at least for us readers and writers, is that books are not censored nearly to the degree as our visual media is. I took a stroll through the paperback stacks at my local Barnes & Noble recently, and spotted Nabokov’s Lolita, Anne Rice’s Sleeping Beauty trilogy, and two books by the legendary Emmanuelle Arsan. I wonder, though, if these books were brand new and not acknowledged classics, would they be published in this current climate?
How many new books, as daring as Lolita, are being published these days? Not many. I spotted the innovative Japanese masterpiece, Murakami’s 1Q84, during my B&N reconnaissance. It’s important to note that this international bestseller was not originally published in the United States, that it came here after winning acclaim elsewhere. More to NYC publisher’s tastes is 50 Shades of Grey, a rehash of some long established ideas. (See the Anne Rice books, mentioned above, and Story of O, for comparison.)
As good as All the Light We Cannot See was, it was still one of a million books about World War 2. The Goldfinch had the benefit of having its main character live in New York City. U.S. publishers love books about NYC as much as Hollywood loves movies about movies.
Who out there is pushing the envelope? Is anybody challenging the status quo in publishing, mixing styles, turning genres inside out? Are innovative writers being stopped at the gate? Are they lost in the deluge of sloppy, poorly plotted e-books that flood the internet each day?
If our government was censoring us, we could write our Congressperson. We could protest. We could vote.
I can’t vote against Comcast. I can’t switch to its competitor if it holds a monopoly. I can’t buy a book that’s not even being published.
The regime that is controlling our media, that limits and restricts what we see and buy, is a loose collection of corporate entities accountable to no one. Awareness is the first step in taking action.
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