It is very difficult to get any debate

It is very difficult to get any debate going about the banning of Natural Born Killers. The reasons are obvious. Since the film has been banned, not many people in Ireland have seen it. (Hallelujah!) And in that situation, it’s hard for most observers to mount any defence of Oliver Stone’s movie which deals with the specific allegations made by censor Seamus Smith – and apparently upheld by the Appeals Board – that the film in some way goes beyond what are thought to be acceptable levels in depicting violence.

There are of course convincing arguments which can be mounted. Censorship of this kind is fundamentally absurd, condescending and authoritarian. The presumption in a democracy is that adults are capable of exercising the right to choose what they will read, watch and listen to, whether in the arts or in the media. There should always be a strong presumption against prior restraint: censorship, by the State, of the right to free expression is acceptable only where that expression involves an incitement likely to lead directly to criminal action or to violence against another person. And even that must be qualified. Just a couple of years ago, it was deemed to be a crime here to engage in consenting homosexual acts between males. It would be absurd. however, to suggest that the censorship or banning by the State of any call to homosexual men to express themselves sexually at the time would have been legitimate.

Censorship is a minefield. Institutionalised censorship is a farce, giving as it does the power to the few to dictate to the many what they will be permitted to see, hear and experience. But these are abstract arguments, except to those who know enough about Oliver Stone to passionately want to see what is undoubtedly an important film. The irony is that there is a real need for a debate about movie violence and Natural Born Killers might have been the film to inspire it.

The debate should have nothing to do with deciding what is ‘acceptable’ – all the evidence suggests that a huge number of people find the most horrendous acts of violence being depicted on screen not just acceptable but highly entertaining. The question confronting anyone interested in cinema as an art form is whether its potential is being critically undermined by its apparent addiction to violence as an essential ingredient. And the broader question, for cinema audiences, is whether or not they want to live half of the remainder of their movie-going lives to a soundtrack of guns blazing, blood splattering, cartoon characters mumbling their final dying whimpers and so on and on and on ad nauseum.

The vast majority of films shown here come through the Hollywood system. Most of them are so crass and stupid that the huge investment in making them almost always seems grotesque and obscene. It is impossible to separate the issue of violence in film from that basic, depressing reality. Somebody out there approves of Steven Seagal’s ludicrous (and ludicrously violent) On Deadly Ground enough to give it a certificate. Fine. Could it be that the violence in films like this is ‘acceptable’ precisely because it is dumb? This is mainstream Hollywood fodder, with mainstream Hollywood moral values: the world is separated into bad guys and good guys and we’re all supposed to know whose side we’re on. Or at least the lumpenprole towards whom this kind of low-rent movie-making is directed, are supposed to.

Questions are only raised, it seems, when the codes are scrambled. Quentin Tarantino’s motives are less prettified than Steven Seagal’s. His films take the violent conventions of Hollywood and rob them of any obvious moral content. Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction are sharp, funny, entertaining and highly self-conscious. In bombarding audiences with images of violence, however, they implicitly ask a key question of cinema-goers: why am I sitting here watching this squalid caricature of human experience? Tarantino’s own stance is ambivalent. But in deliberately eliminating any need for character development or plot, he has distilled the genre of Hollywood violent movie (forget action movie – that’s usually a pathetic euphemism) down to its essential ingredients. This is the bride stripped bare – what movie fans lust after in its most potent form. Violence for its own sake.

The crazy thing about banning Natural Born Killers is that it makes these questions posed by Tarantino explicit. It is a film about media violence. About the unholy alliance that has developed between commerce and criminality. And, most chillingly, about the extent to which the public, hooked on a toxic diet of vicarious thrills and celebrity-fucking, collude in this twisted exploitation game. Natural Born Killers is, like Tarantino’s brace of hits, sharp, visceral, exciting, technically superb and visually stunning. It is also a highly moral film in its intent which challenges audiences to confront their own reactions to media violence and the way in which we make stars out of people capable of committing the most monstrous deeds. And finally it also puts the sham morality of those charged with upholding the law under grim focus.

Having seen the film, I believe that Quentin Tarantino disowned it precisely because of this moral dimension, and the way in which it questions his own oeuvre, which at times it seems almost to parody. You don’t even have to take sides in that argument to conclude that the debate itself is a healthy one. Not healthy enough for the Irish public to be involved in, however.

What a fucking farce.

• Niall Stokes

Editor