I find that it's always interesting to THEN consider, okay -- while there's no centralized board or anything -- what does e.g. American censorship go after?
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Easy example: compare the Marvel "Civil War" comics to the movies. The former was critical of the military in a way that could not happen in any big blockbuster movie.
The question is why the people making the content in the US and China don't want to certain content. Is it because they're worried it won't be popular or because they're worried that it will be popular.
I can't prove anything (how would you?) but I tend to think in the U.S. it's the former and in the China the later.
Unpopular opinions can lead to censorship, firing, lawsuits and death-threats. It works pretty good.
You can, in fact, have critical views of the military in blockbuster movies in the US. But not if you want to use US military bases and aircraft and ships as sets for those movies, or to get support of the US military in making the movie. Depending on the particular movie, this could be a make-or-break deal for them (Top Gun, for instance, would be pretty shitty with stock footage of US aircraft carriers and aircraft instead of actual footage staged for the movie).
Is this better than explicit censorship? That's more of an open question.
This is not outright government censorship - you can still make a picture that says “the US military sucks” - but it certainly has an effect on big-budget films that want every dollar they can get.
It most certainly "could" be made as there is nothing preventing a studio from doing so if they wanted to. It may not be commercially viable and thus it would not get green-lit by a studio but that's a world away from the government explicitly forbidding it.
US programming is highly censored.
30 Rock had to pull episodes because of a gag where a 'completely insensitive dupish character' wore black makeup, to sing as a black person. It wasn't a problem in 2010 but all of a sudden it is in 2020. NBC will not be releasing the original.
A ton of jokes and gags are self censored for a variety of reasons. Eddie Murphy's early specials would absolutely not be aired today for example and I suggest they may face some shelving at some point.
Cultural standards differ.
Now - obviously, there are political elements of censorship, and being in possession of 'banned materials' may be punishable etc. - and that form of censorship is 'not comparable'. But the cultural standards issue is.
It's not directly available. As in, you can't film on a US naval vessel or on a US military base without their support. Stock footage or footage from public spaces are allowed. You may also be able to get the support of another country or make use of mothballed or otherwise decommissioned systems if you have the right connections and money.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimson_Tide_(film)
Used footage of the real USS Alabama, used a decommissioned (and sold-off) submarine, and a French aircraft carrier.
Another is censorship of LGBT books in certain states.
In I, Robot, a scene that showed in the European version did not show in the US version. It was a full body nudity shower scene and the point was to show you how extensive his robotic parts were. They had to find some other means to explain that to the audience in the US and it wasn't even a sexual scene. Just full nudity (of Will Smith, to be clear).
"Tentacle beasts" in, I think, Japan can do all kinds of sexual stuff that would be outrageous in the US and not shown here. I am not super familiar, so can't really elaborate.
We also have a long history of using "coded messages" to talk about racial stuff in the US. When Elvis first aired, he sounded so much like a Black musician compared to what was the norm for music at the time that they would talk about what high school he was from as code for "This is a White guy" because segregation was a thing, so naming his high school was signaling his race.
We have a history of censoring LGBTQ topics. I saw something once where they showed a deleted scene from an old black and white film about Roman history and the scene was a coded message about whether someone was gay or bisexual or something. They used some euphemism or other and it was considered too much and got cut.
Violence. I have become a fan of things that are careful in how they show violence, showing just enough to know something bad happened while sidestepping unnecessary gore. I think that's generally a good thing, but it is a form of censorship nonetheless.
Even blatant censorship like the Hayes Code or the Comics Code was never enforced by the government and therefore never in conflict with the 5th amendment. It was a voluntary "certification" manged by the industry itself, which just meant movies/comics not adhering to the code would not get a mainstream audience. So the code was implemented from the writing stage.
Otherwise, the rest of censorship comes from social pressure; or someone with hurt feelings trying to twist the courts to enforce their will.
Nudity.. maybe. Sex? Most American shows I have seen just CANNOT STOP talking about sex. Sure, they won't display it, but it's all about it. Even TBBT.
(FWIW, comparing to Czech culture and TV series.)
Then you've got things like Full Metal Jacket, which I don't think is getting anyone to sign up for the forces.
Like Top Gun did well recently, but is one of the only movies I can think of in the past couple of years that actually portrayed the US military in a mostly positive light rather than the usual gamut which runs from ineffective bumbling ossfied and useless to straight up evil.
I'm just saying you can make whatever you want in the US and portray pretty much any idea or theme, that doesn't mean people will like it, but you can make it. In China there is no similar comparison they'll take your studio at best or imprison you at worst.
That's the "beauty" of arbitrary censorship: they'll start to self-censor for fear of being butchered like this. I'm sure there's a lot of stuff that they don't put into popular American media for fear that the censor board _might_ object.
The US government hasn't been able to resist censorship entirely. Comedians have been arrested for "obscenity". The FCC will happily go after certain violations in TV and radio. The US government has also censored news broadcasts and journalists.
Bush in particular was very aggressive in censoring the news coverage of his war. Most notably, the flag-draped coffins of dead American soldiers were banned from TV news. During the Regan administration the Justice Department also briefly banned the Canadian film "If You Love This Planet" for being "foreign political propaganda".
So the ones that seem "anti-Military" are really "anti-traitors-in-the-Military," and/or the healthy kind of self-criticism.
For example, during the AIDs epidemic, Reagan used his social and political power to effectively ban the mention of that word on primetime television (remember, not only was he the president of the United States, he was also once the president of the Screen Actors Guild). Not even Will And Grace, a 1998 sitcom about a gay couple, was allowed to mention AIDs or HIV at all in its 11 season run!
He's also the reason movies in the 80s got away with so much more than they did even in the 90s, when cultural values themselves hadn't changed that much comparatively. the MPAA board was completely sized up, what was allowed to be said on TV was changed, and seemingly arbitrary rules put in place ("Fuck" can be said only once in a PG-13 movie or once-an-episode in certain network shows ONLY if it's non-sexual). This is why you have classic kids movies like Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988, PG) that if they were re-released today would be either R or possibly not even allowed to be shown a wide release in theaters.
And you know, now we have the whole "banned books" things in (my home state of) Texas, Florida, etc, which almost exclusively censors books with deal with LGBTQ and race issues from even being available in a library to be checked out by a curious student on their own time (including, in a Dallas suburb and throughout Virginia, Anne Frank's Diary).
For example, the Transformers movies: https://www.wired.com/2008/12/pentagon-holl-1/
The general concept: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military-entertainment_compl...
That's untrue. A trivial example is porn involving 17 year olds.
Of course, they're not really TV shows anymore when they're unregulated streaming programs.
https://www.cnn.com/2016/06/01/entertainment/80s-hollywood-a...
St Elsewhere might have been the first in 1983. Golden Girls, Trapper John MD. There was plenty of hesitancy to deal with a difficult subject, and the gay element compounded the difficulty (openly gay characters were not common). But to suggest it was at the direction of the Federal Govt is totally absurd. Reagan was as disliked and mocked almost as much as Trump was.
Are you sure this is true, and not an apocryphal story? I've seen the German and US version of the movie, and they are identical. There is a nude shower scene in both, and Will Smith uses has hand to cover his groin.
I've seen two interviews, one where he said his penis was so big they had to tape it down, and a second where it was so big, they had to CGI it out because it was distracting. They both seem like they may have been self serving jokes that got evolved into the "full frontal I Robot euro cut."
It is also possible that a Euro theatrical version with full frontal existed, but the DVD/BluRay releases used the US cut.
Also, your examples are not particularly illustrative. Reagan did not even publicly mention AIDs until 1985 (though reporters had been asking him about it since 1982), when it first started to become worrisome to straight people (and still created no presidential task force or dedicated funding until 1987). Golden Girls mentioned it after that. So did Trapper John, MD. St. Elsewhere was notable precisely because it was one of the only primetime shows that did when it was exclusively thought of as a "gay disease".
To truly understand how insidious Reagan's administration was, when doctors were ringing the alarm bells in press conferences years prior (and the next, and the next, and the next...) Reagan's response was to ask any reporter if they were gay to a crowd of laughter and move on. In fact, Nancy Reagan even arguably personally condemned movie star Rock Hudson, who was a personal friend of theirs, to an earlier death by explicitly refusing his appeal to have him admitted into a retroviral trial in France because they did want to be associated with the gay community in any way.
https://www.vox.com/2015/12/1/9828348/ronald-reagan-hiv-aids
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/03/nancy-reagan...
It's really not too big of a jump to make the connection between a man who basically started the "moral majority" movement and created virtually all modern film and tv regulation to this day (aside from the MPAA, he also repealed the FCC Fairness Doctrine, which basically is what gave rise to the giant split in media today, and really all major legislation around what can/cannot be shown on TV/in theaters that still persists to this day), would actively use his power to discourage AIDs from being talked about in media, just as he did Communism, anything non-nuclear family, and really anything that fell outside his bubble of conservative values.
This was the man who effectively started the war on Hollywood. He came from Hollywood. He knew the studio execs, the donors, the investors (they funded him!), it wouldn't take much for them to listen to him.
But you can't cite a single one? That's pretty suspicious.
"It's really not too big of a jump"
So in a very long winded way, you are saying you made it up and have no evidence? wow...
There is a federal law on the books against obscenity, but it has never been used to arrest a comedian. Comedians like Lenny Bruce, and Musicians like Jim Morrison have run into trouble with city governments. Bruce was ironically arrested in both San Francisco and New York. Morrison was more expectedly arrested in New Haven.
the Justice Department also briefly banned the Canadian film "If You Love This Planet" for being "foreign political propaganda"
The film was never banned, classifying it as foreign political propaganda meant that before it was shown the audience had to be informed: "This material is prepared, edited, issued or circulated by the National Film Board of Canada, which is registered with the Department of Justice, Washington, D.C., under the Foreign Agents Registration Act."
Honestly, with the ubiquity of CGI in film, whether the military choses to participate in a film is hardly a barrier to making a movie.
That's just self censorship for the global market. Why leave it to the censors when you can make a better product that works within the constraints.
It's like in 20 years if someone were to say that because neither Trump or Biden explicitly passed a singular law requiring you to work from home that they had no effect on the rise of remote work during Covid. That's what "It's really not too big of a jump" is meant to illustrate– that one thing directly leads to another. Obviously presidential policy isn't just purely laws. But here's a collection of links from a wide variety of sources (including his own foundation) that support my point. There's hundreds, if not thousands, more.
If I'm wrong, please provide _me_ some concrete proof that Reagan had nothing to do with US's societal paralysis and suppression of the AIDs epidemic, because I think that's the point that more obviously needs defending.
https://www.wpr.org/how-reagan-helped-usher-new-conservatism... https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2020/the-other-time-a-us-presid... https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9780230616196_9 https://www.reaganfoundation.org/education/curriculum-and-re... https://www.press.umich.edu/331707/the_president_electric https://daily.jstor.org/ronald-reagan-the-first-reality-tv-s... https://www.vox.com/ad/18175876/ronald-nancy-reagan-white-ho... https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/beloved-media/ https://www.press.umich.edu/331707/the_president_electric http://www.wiu.edu/cas/history/wihr/pdfs/Banwart-MoralMajori... https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/8/29/20826545/hoberman-make... https://lithub.com/ronald-reagan-presided-over-89343-deaths-...
In fact, even the article you yourself linked (aptly titled Hollywood’s struggle to deal with AIDS in the ’80s) supports my point:
"So perhaps it isn’t surprising, then, that it wasn’t until the mid to late ’80s that a few flutterings of references to the AIDS crisis began to pop up. And even then, many of the artists who first used their art to broach the delicate topic were obscure pop bands or directors of fringe movies."
The bit of the Espionage Act that conflicts with my previous post is unconstitutional.
https://www.networkworld.com/article/2276921/porn-producer-s...