Banning LA Zombie: The Aussie Way

Censors are paid to have dirty minds. The Film Classification Board of the office of Film and Literature Classification is being paid to have particularly filthy ones. A few little darlings, scant qualified to examine anything coming close to art or literature, is content to control what those in Australia see or read. Few in the public know their names. It with some worry that few in the public care about these faceless exertions of power.

The latest victim of the Board’s angst is Bruce LaBruce’s gay zombie film, L.A. Zombie, which was due to show at the Melbourne International Film Festival. LaBruce has described his film as ‘very heavy in terms of imagery. It’s about an alien zombie who finds dead bodies and has sex with them to bring them back to life.’ (Globe and Mail, Jul 22) LaBruce felt hurt that this ‘soft core’ version had been removed, citing no ‘explicit’ scenes of ‘anally penetrative sex’, and merely a flash of ‘flaccid penises’, the only erect one being a prosthesis belonging to the French porn actor François Sagat. Evidently the OFLC, in refusing to give it a classification, was not swayed by allusions in the film to mental illness and rampant homelessness that afflicts the cityscape.

The track record of banning films and literature in Australia is one of overcommitted zeal. Religious activists keen to keep the social body free of various impurities; wowsers disturbed by the pulsations of the flesh; and generally those just terrified by the shock of the new, have reigned Down Under. As Keith Dunstan said as far back as 1968 in his work on the wowser, Australia ‘was to acquire an international reputation on par with Ireland’s, as the moral literary capital of the world’. Peter Coleman’s cheery assessment in 1974 that ‘the censorship of morals, blasphemy and sedition’ had virtually ‘disappeared’ from the Australian landscape of moral surveillance was certainly optimistic.

The rationale for such over-eager restrictions on the content available to a culturally starved Australian public was stated in all its vivid ghastliness by Thomas W. White, Minister for Customs and Trade in 1935. Whether we like to admit it or not, he cautioned, there were ‘minds that are capable of being influenced by specious approaches, with results that are injurious, not only to themselves, but also to the State; and it is both the right and the duty of the Government to protect them.’

During the 1990s, the then Film Classification Board was already getting busy pruning and trimming films of undesirable content, when it wasn’t ditching them altogether. With the massacre at Port Arthur in April 1996, politicians started getting edgy with depictions of violence on Australia’s television screens. Senate Committees were created to investigate supposed links between violent scenes in media and acts of violence. The moralist brigades were rejuvenated. During the next decade, films such as Baise-Moi and Ken Park became scalps for the classification board. Baise-Moi featured, ‘Strong depictions of realistic violence’, some considered ‘gratuitous.’ That the film excoriated the brutality of rape to begin with, rather than extol violence in itself, was a point entirely missed by the wise men and women on the board. Ken Park, in its depiction of children and abusive sexuality, proved ‘confronting’ and replete with too many ‘high impact’ scenes. The Board took umbrage with the ‘stream’ of urination coming from one of the character’s fathers.

The poet Max Harris said it best when he observed at the conclusion of the 1960s that laws such as those on censorship are framed, with prosecutions carried out ‘to prevent us knowing the facts of life, the state of the world, the realities’. The OFLC have again demonstrated their fears, their patronising tendencies, and their inability of trusting the public which they probably fear most of all. Only they, it would seem, were allowed to see zombies having sex with the dead.

Binoy Kampmark was as Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

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