THE DAY after the tragedy at Dunblane, with a debate on gun laws already raging, some Members of Parliament found a new and incongruous scapegoat for the inexplicable: Oliver Stone's film Natural Born Killers, the subject of enormous controversy in 1994. It has not been suggested that Thomas Hamilton was inspired by the film. He certainly would not have seen it on video, since the video had yet to be released. Indeed, it will not be released for the foreseeable future now; its distributors, Warner, have bowed to pressure from Liberal Democrat MP David Alton to delay such a decision.
Dame Jill Knight, moving debate laterally from the Dunblane atrocity, was sure that the film was potentially dangerous. "There seems to be no doubt that there is a copy-cat effect in many cases — the film Natural Born Killers should not just be temporarily held back, but put in the wastebin forever." David Alton himself asked Michael Howard: "What are you going to do about the British Board of Film Classification's decision to allow the licensing of Natural Born Killers for home viewing?" He concluded that video release would allow children to see the "outrageous" film in their own homes, and later tabled a motion calling for the Government to investigate the BBFC to see if it was in breach of its statutory responsibilities.
Some of those statutory responsibilities were imposed by Alton himself, with his amendment to the Criminal Justice Act in 1994. Alton stepped in during the similarly anguished period following the Jamie Bulger murder trial; there was a widespread belief at the time that the video Child's Play 3 had been a factor in the killing. Under the Alton amendment, the BBFC, when granting a video certificate, had to consider the likelihood of the film being seen by those younger than the classification allowed, and the possible effect of the film on a viewer's behaviour. The BBFC has made it clear that it always did take such factors into consideration. Unlike amateur censors, the BBFC carries out its own extensive research.
That research concluded over a year ago that the much-hyped copy-cat killings referred to by Jill Knight could not be blamed on Natural Born Killers. In each of the American cases picked up by the press, drugs and previous criminality were involved; the intention to kill, or the first killing, preceded the release of the film; in the serial killings there was no evidence that the accused had seen the film. In December 1994 the BBFC classified Natural Born Killers at "18", without cuts.
The film was released in February 1995. The video could have been released at any time. So why did David Alton wait 14 months to raise the matter of the certification? Why link the film to Dunblane? Indeed, Alton could have had the decision submitted to judicial review, if he genuinely believed that it was so manifestly unreasonable and unlawful. Ironically, the BBFC will face just such a judicial review in June, when Nigel Wingrove challenges their failure to grant a certificate to a film he wishes to distribute. But Alton's agenda may be different; he took the opportunity, once more, to link a public tragedy with a demonised film, in order to bring censorship back into the hands of government and away from the appointees at the BBFC.
The truth about Natural Born Killers does not matter now. Nor does it matter that a Home Office inquiry showed no link between Child's Play 3 and the violent crimes with which it had been linked. It does not matter that surveys into the viewing habits of young offenders show their tastes to be no different from those of their innocent peers. It does not matter that the "research" used to justify the 1984 "video nasties" legislation was disowned by the unit who initiated it, because it had been misrepresented for political reasons; nor that many people had not seen the films they discussed so freely. The link has been established in the popular imagination; videos are dangerous, and capable of corrupting innocents and causing anti-social or criminal behaviour. It has become an article of faith.
Indeed, we have been here before and will doubtless be here again. Stanley Kubrick chose to withdraw A Clockwork Orange from Britain because of the allegations that it was inspiring vicious hooliganism in the early 1970s. After the Hungerford shootings, the BBFC tempered violence in Rambo-style action films, though it was not thought that Ryan had seen the earlier Rambo films; while a member of a gun club, he was not a member of a video club. The only disappointment for hacks tracking down explanations for Fred West's horrifying crimes was that he rented Walt Disney films from his local video store.
The fact is that, once again, film and video are becoming the scapegoats for the horrors which they only represent. There have been countless examples of such reactions; and the history of such examples effectively gives the lie to the idea that a new popular medium poses a unique threat to a society suddenly poisoned. Theatre, cheap paperbacks, music hall, rock and roll music, punk, horror comics, and the cinema have all, in their turn, provoked fears of the corruption of youth and the disintegration of public order; until a new medium claimed the attention.
The written word is rarely prosecuted for obscenity — tending to "deprave and corrupt" — in the way it was until the 1960s. The infamous Lady Chatterley prosecution was one of the last gasps for those who thought literature could be dangerous. The written word, it seems, has lost its power to undermine the morals of an individual. But video, and now the Internet — for many technophobes a synonym for pornography — have yielded profitable scare stories in even the most respectable newspapers. Any new medium, especially with mass appeal and best understood by the young, attracts a desire for governmental control.
The attitude underlying that control — that certain material is likely to induce or uncover criminal tendencies in the susceptible user — is that there are a sufficient number of weak-minded people in the country to require their protection from the occult influences and provocations of representations of sex and violence. It is an odd argument when one considers that the astonishing harm caused by the abuse of alcohol and the motor car have not required the prohibition of alcohol and cars. In criminal law, the individual is trusted to bear responsibility for his or her actions.
BUT THIS awkwardness over the argument that adults require censorship for their protection makes children a very useful focus for the pro-censorship lobby. For children are defined as irresponsible, malleable, impressionable. While such a view sits uneasily with calls for the jailing of the young offender, it does allow for the sweeping censorship of video which Mary Whitehouse, David Alton and others have pushed for over the past 12 years. And here, perhaps, we see the subliminal connection between Dunblane and video censorship in David Alton's mind; for him, both are linked to a horrific failure to protect our children from the malign. For video enters the home; and once there it might fall into the hands of the curious young. This very curiosity is one of the issues currently bedevilling censorship in this country.
Alton's amendment made statutory the BBFC's responsibility to consider younger-than-classification viewing. In essence this crystallised the vaguer remit of the BBFC — as set out in the 1984 "video nasties" legislation — to have "special regard to the likelihood of video works being viewed in the home". The BBFC has negotiated this responsibility quite carefully; because although less than a third of video-owning households contain children, the instruction taken literally would require that all videos be censored to "PG" certificate status. There would, simply, be no adult videos. The legislation practically concedes that classification is not a workable option; yet classification is the BBFC's raison d'être.
The BBFC, to judge by its annual report, has done its best to satisfy the freedoms of the individual as laid out in the European Convention of Human Rights, while trying to judge the likelihood of socially harmful consequences of a video. But it also obeys the dictates of a government on whom it relies for continued permission to exist, and necessarily errs towards conservativism. Throughout its history as a film censor, the BBFC has been wary of being seen to censor work by highly regarded film-makers, lest it seem ridiculous; but it was fearful of provoking anger from tabloids or pressure groups such as Mary Whitehouse's Festival of Light. In the face of these conflicting demands, decisions are made secretly and on a case-by-case basis which will always be vulnerable to media scares and political contingency.
The balancing act has been performed with evident care and integrity. Yet the fact remains that films are being cut and banned because they are to some tastes offensive, rather than obscene (in any case a test for a jury, not a quango). The BBFC, whose own research is unable to link videos with social harm, passes frequent judgments on the likelihood of such "harm" when it can have no scientific means of doing so.
What informs all these decisions is the fear that parents can't or won't stop their inquisitive children seeing adult films. (These innocents are not so naive as to lack a prior awareness of the forbidden, it seems.) At its starkest, in the words of James Ferman, director of the BBFC, "We can't have freedom for adults in this country, because we can't trust adults to protect children." The nanny state, as demonised by Mrs Thatcher, has in this sense grown immeasurably under Tory rule, with the support of a mainly Tory press.
It is no surprise that Alton, dissatisfied with the BBFC's surrogate parenting of an infantile nation, should have used the Dunblane tragedy to propose adoption of the V-Chip, a device installed in televisions which will scramble programmes coded as containing sex or violence. Bill Clinton aims to have these chips in every new television in America by 1997. The benefits of such a system are that parents will be empowered to protect their children, rather than demanding that the Government does; just as the proposed Clipper Chip could fence off the more dubious areas of the Internet from children whose parents have ceased to supervise them.
Whether such a measure will have the desired effect is less than certain. It relies on self-certification by television companies; the diligence of parents; and the failure of the young to find their way round the prohibitions. Given that much of the censorship process is based on the premise that children seek out and obtain access to what they know to be forbidden to them, these are in no way guaranteed.
New technology makes censorship harder, and might soon make it impossible. Satellite dishes and modems will give Britons the opportunity to call material from more liberal countries straight into their home. The BBFC is not unaware of these developments. Its annual report concludes with a letter to Sir Ron Dearing, urging him to make media education part of the national curriculum. "The best defence children will have will be their own knowledge and understanding. If you understand how things work, you can usually defend yourself against them; and at least you are not in the power of their mystique. So it is with film and video."
Some will see this as the counsel of despair. But others will welcome it as conceding that children and adults have rights and responsibilities, and that more information rather than less is a prerequisite of a free country. In the meantime the BBFC, a quango constrained by unworkable legislation, could end up facing judicial reviews both from those who feel it is too harsh and from those who feel it is too lenient. They are in an impossible situation.