Respected American judge Potter Stewart once observed: “Censorship reflects a society’s lack of confidence in itself.” That appears to be what we are experiencing with the Ministry of Culture’s ban on the film Arbat, concerning a novice monk who misbehaves.
While the film does enter sensitive territory, newspapers in Thailand have regularly carried reports about monks who have gone off the rails.
That is the reality and the public is aware of it. Not for the first time the authorities seem to think the Thai public is incapable of making its own decisions on what films are worth watching.
The censorship is self-defeating. One would have thought that by now they would have realised that if you ban anything it will become popular, or at least, more widely known. As it is, the publicity created by the ban means that the news has gone around the world and many more people will end up seeing the film than would have originally been the case. News that an edited version, with the titled changed to Arpat, has been approved is at least some progress.
No nipples, please
To be fair, the Thai censors are more liberal now than back in the 1970s. At that time I was one of the movie reviewers at the Bangkok Post.
Apart from the overweight rodents and giant cockroaches that used to roam some of the older cinemas, the most distasteful thing about visiting the theatre was the censorship.
Goodness knows how many films I saw that were ruined by the censor’s scissors. Nudity and disrespect for authority were the two main targets, which wiped out half of the films.
It was as if anything which involved thought was regarded as subversive.
Violence, of course, was left untouched. It was clear that the scissor-hands of Bangkok regarded the odd exposed breast a far more horrifying sight than a mangled corpse, heads being chopped off in all their bloody splendour or someone being blown to pieces.
After dark
One of the most telling examples of the attitude of the local censors concerned the Oscar-winning film Midnight Cowboy, starring Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight.
Regarded as one of the finest films of the 1960s, it did not appear here until 10 years after its release because its homosexual content was thought to be “inappropriate” for Thai audiences.
On a similar topic, Bugis Street was banned from being shown at the 1998 Bangkok Film Festival.
The censors announced that the film, about transvestites on the famous street in Singapore, would offend people in Thailand. One could only assume the dinosaurs who were making these decisions had never set foot on the pavements of Bangkok after dark.
Spreading the news
How a ban can backfire was illustrated a dozen years ago when a regional news magazine was banned for an offensive item.
A small story about Thailand which would normally have only been read by a handful of people suddenly became the talk of the town. Within minutes of the ban appearing in the morning newspapers, thousands of people were logging on to the internet to find what had caused such offence.
And they passed it on to all their friends. The international news agencies soon had their own stories which went around the world.
Never before had so many people read such a small item — not exactly what the moral guardians responsible for the ban had in mind.
Never mind the reality
It is amazing what does cause offence to the authorities sometimes. One of the daftest instances occurred in the mid 1980s when one of the main Thai television stations was ordered to stop showing clips of floods in its opening credits for the nightly news.
It was reasoned that pictures of the floods created a bad image of the country. In other words, floods officially did not exist in Thailand.
One suspects this message was unlikely to have made much impact on the unfortunate people at that time wading around the streets with water up to their waists.
The Blob
On television in Thailand we experience censorship on a daily basis with our old friend The Blob and its unending war on cigarettes.
Everyone must have witnessed The Blob on certain TV channels as it races around the screen in search of rogue cigarettes in an attempt to protect the viewers.
It is particularly entertaining when many people are smoking on the screen at the same time and blobs appear everywhere, reducing supposedly serious scenes to pure farce. One of the most famous scenes in movies involves smoking. In Now, Voyager, a gentleman lights up two cigarettes and passes one to Bette Davis. It was regarded as very naughty at the time.
If they were to show the scene today in Thailand, they would probably have to use carrots so as not to offend anyone.
Ding-Dong
There was an entertaining moment in the 1970s concerning an awful film entitled When Men Carried Clubs and Women Played Ding-Dong, in Thailand simply known as Ding-Dong.
Admittedly the film, featuring hordes of scantily clad cavewomen, deserved to be banned on the grounds of being absolute rubbish. However, it was banned here for being “inappropriate”.
The ban would have been a little more effective had it not come into force two months after the film’s release in Thailand and having been seen by half the country.
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