The Case for Censorship

NOT long ago, the most technically gifted of living directors was interviewed upon the appearance of his newest film, Frenzy, which contains a scene of explicit sexual murder that could not have appeared in a general-release film as recently as five years ago. Were you uncomfortable, Alfred Hitchcock was asked, when you read of the young man some years back who, after seeing Psycho, assaulted and fatally stabbed a young woman who was in the process of taking a shower?

For a time Hitchcock parried the question, uncomfortably. The man in question, said Hitchcock, had already committed murder and in all likelihood would have used some other method to kill again had he not seen the film. Moreover, Hitchcock recalled, a young boy had injured himself around the turn of the century trying to fly after having seen the stage production of Peter Pan. Should one therefore suppress Peter Pan? Finally, Hitchcock stopped dodging and answered the question. An artist, he said, cannot be concerned with the moral consequences of his art.

Perhaps not. But society, and in particular the government, can and should. Indeed, in an era when new media like movies and television are more compelling to more people than poems or novels or paintings ever were, the question of art and its influence is assuming rather large proportions. Virtually nobody agrees any longer (if anyone ever really did) with the dictum of the late Jimmy Walker to the effect that no girl was ever ruined by a book. If ideas have consequences, as Richard Weaver believed, movies and television have a capacity to influence the social order for good or ill that could hardly be underestimated, and at least in recent years rarely has been.

In discussing censorship, perhaps the most important task is to brush away some misunderstandings that have gradually encrusted the topic in recent years. First and foremost among these is the notion that "freedom is indivisible"; that censorship of art on grounds of morality or taste will necessarily "lead" to political censorship and suppression as well.

Is this really the case? What party, what elected leader ever used censorship of art as the "cutting edge" of a campaign that eventually suppressed freedom and democracy as well? My own reading of history is that democratically elected leaders who moved toward dictatorship (e.g., Adolf Hitler) have had a funny habit of turning their first attention not toward art, but toward politics, toward such time-worn methods as declaring states of emergency, outlawing opposition parties and disbanding parliaments.

Conceivably, though, some enterprising doctoral candidate could show me a democratic country in which art censorship was the beginning of the end for freedom at large. Even so, what of the many countries where art censorship and political freedom have coexisted quite happily, in some cases (as in Victorian England) growing at the same time? Until ten years or so ago, every democratic country had a considerable degree of art censorship. Was, for example, the England of ten years ago an unfree country? Was political freedom there in grave danger because certain movies available in Gaullist France could not be shown?

I am not very impressed with those radicals who would reply that the England or America of ten years ago were not in fact free countries, since no capitalist country could ever be "truly" free. The countries these people tend to admire for their "true" freedom--China, Cuba, and North Vietnam--all employ not only censorship but positive control of the arts as an integral part of their respective governing strategies. Those who would go further and say that no country has ever had "true" freedom impress me even less, since it's hard to understand how they would recognize freedom in the event it decided to make an appearance somewhere.

The fact is that almost no one this side of the anarcho-libertarian right is really opposed to censorship in all forms, and I'm not talking only about Justice Holmes' hoary example of the man who cries "fire" in a crowded theater. The method of liberals proposing to impose censorship seems to be to call it something else, or to call it nothing at all. Their recent successful campaign to ban smoking commercials from television and radio, though never labelled with the ugly word, was a measure of censorship more nearly political than anything I am advocating in this space, since it involved not art but the right of a licit interest group to freely present its case. Liberals have also been known to advocate selective censorship of pornographic movies, as the anti-censorship New York Times did when things got a little polluted in Times Square. They called it "cleaning up Midtown," I believe.

Perhaps the biggest fallacy in the debate, though, has been the exclusive property of those advocating censorship. It is the idea that something called "exploitation" can and should be censored if not suppressed, while art should not. I would argue not only that the line between art and "exploitation" is difficult if not impossible to draw, but that no attempt should be made to draw such a line at all. The concern of artists, quite rightly, is art. The concern of government is or should be the negative social consequences of media, whether the piece in question can be regarded as art or as something else.

I would go even further. The censorship of art is, in practical terms, more important than the censorship of trash. If a work is attractive and adept, it has more chance of doing serious social damage than a work which is crude and exploitive. My own favorite candidate for total suppression, of all the films I have seen or heard of, is not a "porno" film, but a work of considerable artistic merit--Rosemary's Baby. This film, which made real a universe in which the power and ultimate triumph of evil are inevitable, did more than any five other factors to fuel the cult of Satanism with its growing roll of ritual murders and assorted social pathologies. In spite of (or, in a real sense, because of) its great artistic merit, it would have been better had this film never been shown to general audiences. The leftist British writer, Pamela Hansford Johnson, came to a similar conclusion about the writings of the Marquis de Sade after her study of the Moors murders.

Among those who advocate censorship, conservatives tend to favor suppression of explicit sex, while liberals tend to deplore explicit violence. In artistic terms, which admittedly in my view are not really relevant, conservatives have much the better argument. The depiction of violence, especially in verse and on stage, is an integral part of much great art from Homer to the present. Explicit sex, while depicted by many great writers, has not been comparably important, at least to the art of the West. This lack of important erotica, liberals would reply, was due to the taboos of most western countries until recently. My reaction would be that, for reasons too lengthy to explore here, those taboos were right and contributed to the cohesion of society.

But it is time for conservatives to admit that when it comes to the explicit depiction of violence, liberals have a point. As Sam Peckinpah's films have shown, it is today possible for the first time to make artistic violence look real--and exciting. As Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange has shown, violence can also be made to look beautiful--and attractive. Films like these, precisely because they have artistic merit, raise disturbing new questions about the tolerance of society for such things, assuming as seems likely that they represent a major trend.

If there is one thing conservatives and liberals should, in their respective prejudices against sex and violence, be able to agree on curbing, it is sexual violence. This includes not only rape as in Frenzy and A Clockwork Orange, but sado-masochism in all its ugly forms. Any work of art, or scene within one, which depicts violence as stimulating, or sex as in its essence violent and exploitive, should be suppressed. If the many reviews and plot descriptions I have read are accurate, The Last Tango in Paris fits this latter category in its entirety. Its systematic degradation of the female sex, its depiction of sex as pure violence, and its final scene of sexually motivated murder by the degraded girl, represent the kind of chemistry society can do without. If by suppressing this film we would also be suppressing a great work of art, too bad.

Too bad not only for those who enjoy The Last Tango in Paris (as I probably will not), but too bad for people like me who enjoy Peckinpah and believe that A Clockwork Orange was among the very best films directed by an American in the last decade. To those who say that art is sacred and should take priority over social health, I have no reply--except to say that I disagree. But opponents of art censorship must--and I believe will--increasingly recognize that total freedom exacts a heavy price in social health. By the same token, supporters of censorship must accept the fact that effective censorship by its nature will exact a certain price in art, and perhaps a considerable one. In these terms, the choice is clear, and my guess is that society's answer will not be overly long in coming.

Jeffery Bell, a conservative political activist and writer, is a Fellow at the Institute of Politics.