Film censorship: was Porn Masala really too hot to handle?

by

CHERIAN GEORGE

April 20th, 2013

The government’s well-publicised censorship of the short film, Porn Masala, has provided an opportunity to query Singapore’s arts regulation – an opportunity seized by an excellent panel of speakers at a Tembusu College forum on Thursday.

Porn Masala was one of three tales in the film, Sex.Violence.FamilyValues, written and directed by Ken Kwek. Although originally passed by the Media Development Authority with an M18 rating, complaints about the online trailer caused it to be referred to the Films Consultative Panel, which recommended a total ban. On appeal, the Films Appeal Committee allowed it under an R21 rating – but with cuts.

At issue was the film’s depiction of a sleazy Chinese porn filmmaker spouting vile, prejudiced views about Indians to the Indian actor he is directing. Although Kwek’s intent was obviously to ridicule rather than endorse such views, the regulators felt that these “demeaning and offensive” references crossed some line of acceptability.

The Porn Masala case had been wrapped up and stored away in that overflowing vault in the Singaporean mind reserved for our deepest fears about ethnic conflict. It will be taken out every now and then to illustrate that, beneath our modern, cosmopolitan veneer, there lie deep “fault lines” between ethnic groups, which responsible Singaporeans respectfully recognise.

This should not be the final word on this episode, and thanks in part to last Thursday’s forum, it won’t be. Predictably, Kwek defended his film, as he has before. More significant were the inputs of three other speakers: Walter Woon (former attorney general and the chairman of the Films Appeal Committee), Arun Mahizhnan (former deputy director of the Institute of Policy Studies and a long-time champion of the arts) and the moderator Tommy Koh (who chaired the groundbreaking 1990 Censorship Review Committee and was the first chairman of the National Arts Council).

Between them, they probably have a century’s worth of accumulated wisdom in thinking about freedom of expression and its limits. None of them could be accused of being insensitive to Singapore’s special circumstances. But they made clear their doubts about the current approach to censorship.

Here are three key issues that were raised.

First, the forum questioned the assumption that the complaints against Porn Masala amounted to a community response. Instead, it had all the markings of a campaign instigated by a very small number of individuals. Their efforts did not appear to gain any traction in the wider Indian community, but that did not stop the censorial instinct.

Singapore has an extremely low appetite for risk when it comes to ethnic matters. I have argued elsewhere that this well-meaning approach is dangerously misguided, because it encourages political actors to hype up any offence that they feel, usually to further a private political agenda rather than to protect the public. Worse, it feeds into the stereotype that minorities in Singapore are prone to losing their heads at the slightest provocation.

Second, the panelists suggested that citizen committees can be undermined by members who lose sight of their real responsibility. Too many second-guess what the political masters want to hear – a tendency that was assumed to be limited to civil servants but seems to have infected others outside the public sector who are asked to serve on such committees.

Committee members also display a patronising attitude towards the wider population: they tend to assert that they themselves are mature enough to handle offensive speech, but the Singaporeans out there are not and need to be protected (a universally observed fallacy known to scholars as the third person effect). Those asked to serve on committees should stop hiding behind what they claim others want to hear and instead vote according to their own values and principles, panelists said.

Third, denial is not an option when dealing with speech that is deemed offensive. The instinct to block art belongs to a generation when producers did not have the option of routing around censorship by going online. (Indeed, Ken Kwek revealed at the forum that his film would soon be available online in its entirety.)

This is not to say that even free-to-air TV, which enters living rooms as freely as a family member, should be unregulated; but it is anachronistic to require the government to cut or ban a film that is already subject to classification and that would only be watched by willing, adult viewers. If there is a fear of negative social effects, the answer is to help audiences cope, not rely on censorship, noted Mahizhnan.

Censoring a film like Kwek’s makes even less sense. The correct response to racism and bigotry is not to let it gain power in the darkness, but to drag it out into the open and mock it, Woon pointed out. That is exactly what Kwek’s film had sought to do.