Nobody Knows Anything

No cinema visits this week. It’s like I’m not even trying anymore. Actually, I’ve watched a lot of DVD extras, and next week Euro 2008 starts, so I may be watching even less films. Still, at least this week’s solitary movie is a doozie.

Ichi the Killer (2001)

Famously, the BBFC has been through some changes in the last few years. Films that would previously have been cut to ribbons have been passed uncut; controversial films that The Daily Mail hates but film buffs love have been passed uncut; and generally speaking the BBFC has approached the DVD era with a lot more success and interaction with the general public, now James Ferman is no longer running the place like his personal fiefdom, and in fact died in 2002. Films that had formerly been subject to BBFC cuts were reclassified and in a majority of cases, the phrase “all previous cuts waived” started appearing with a heartwarming regularity on its website.

But, somewhat inevitably, sooner or later, a filmmaker produced a film that tested the BBFC to its limits, and in 2001 that film was Ichi the Killer. The BBFC removed three minutes and fifteen seconds from this film at the height of its supposed great liberalisation period. Apparently, these cuts were required because of this: “Cuts required to scenes of mutilated, raped or savagely beaten women or of sexual pleasure from violence. Cuts required in line with the requirements set out in the BBFC Classification Guidelines.” So that makes it all right, doesn’t it? The BBFC has published its guidelines after consultation with the public, and if it follows them and censors films that contain scenes of sexual violence, then somehow, magically, rape will cease to exist and the world will become a nicer place. Right.

Bearing in mind the present mood of the BBFC, I look forward to the uncut release of Ichi the Killer in 2020, when someone at the BBFC acquires both a) a sense of humour and b) comes to the realisation that such a profound failure to comprehend the Japanese culture that produced Ichi the Killer is in urgent need of redress. For the record, I watched the uncut version of the film because I am a) not a fucking idiot that I’m going to buy a cut BBFC-censored version of the film and b) someone who has come to realise that Takashi Miike, a filmmaker who pushes at the boundaries of what is taboo in contemporary cinema, will always be an inherently more interesting filmmaker than someone like Brett Ratner, who can always be relied upon to deliver something that is exceptionally safe, and dull, and really rather boring.

Essentially, Takashi Miike has been punished for doing his job too well. What is interesting about the rape scenes the BBFC has such objection to is that they are difficult to watch, our sympathies are with the victims, and the actresses have been made up to look like men have been horribly and realistically abusing them for weeks on end. There is no sophisticated Straw Dogs (1971) style ‘is the victim enjoying the rape?’ complexity going on here. I should point out, somewhat respectfully, that obtaining sexual pleasure from violence is one of the driving forces in rape, and that depicting this in a film is more an act of honesty than it is an act of transgression. I am not saying from any point of view that this is a justification for sexual violence, because I find rape abhorrent, and a crime for which there is no defence. But you absolutely have to have the right to depict rape in film, even in a film as cartoonish as Ichi the Killer; in fact, especially in a cartoonish film like Ichi the Killer.

Generally speaking, somewhat in the vein of Morgan Freeman in Se7en (1995), I don’t think the world is a horrible place, clothed in darkness and evil, but I do think that there are horrible people in it, who will perform horrible acts at the drop of a hat if they think that they can get away with it. Or, and this is even more chilling, if they plain don’t care about the consequences of their evil. That is what Takashi Miike is telling us, and why it is a nonsense to dilute his message by cutting three minutes out of his work.