One Rule to Rule Them All: a Study of Singapore Censorship1

“Outsiders”,”Solos” and “Lan Yu” are just few of the films which have been banned or sub­jected to cuts by the Media Authority of Singapore (MDA), never to see the light of day within the island city state in its intended form. Singapore has always prac­ticed strict cen­sor­ship in regards to all forms of media be it the press, film, tele­vi­sion or in most recent times, videogames. The MDA reviews each piece of media on a case to case basis; the rule of thumb is that any­thing that can be linked to exces­sive sex­ual, homo­sex­ual, polit­i­cal, exces­sive vio­lence, racial or reli­gious issues has to be removed. A spe­cial cat­e­gory called the “out-of-bounds” mark­ers is the excep­tion in that the media that fall within this area usu­ally gets banned entirely. (“Censorship in Singapore”, 2010). So what is the rea­son­ing behind such strict cen­sor­ship prac­tices? The author­i­ties claim that cen­sor­ship is a nec­es­sary ele­ment of Singapore’s soci­ety sim­ply because the gen­eral pop­u­la­tion is still largely con­ser­v­a­tive and such con­tro­ver­sial con­tent would prove too much to han­dle. But is this truly the case? Is cen­sor­ship a nec­es­sary evil or merely a hin­drance to local film­mak­ers? This paper will attempt to take a closer look at the beast that is cen­sor­ship and study its role and neces­sity in 21^st cen­tury Singapore. Singapore cen­sor­ship begun in 1910 as a Theatres Enactment that had all films screened approved by local author­i­ties. In 1923 this evolved into the first cen­sor­ship office of Malaya, which prac­ticed strict cen­sor­ship till World War 2. The Cinema Ordinance Act was laid down in 1953 and the Board of Film Censors (BFC), which would sub­se­quently be known as the Ministry of Information, Communication and the Arts (MICA), was formed. The gain­ing of self gov­er­nance in 1959 was a turn towards even tighter cen­sor­ship with the 1953 act changed into the Cinematograph Films Act. All through the 1960s a large num­ber of films were banned; 60 fell to cen­sor­ship in 1960 alone com­pared to the 10 just a year before that and only in the 1970s did cen­sor­ship begin to loosen. (Uhde & Ng, 2010, pp. 174 – 179). In real­iz­ing the need for a sys­tem of rat­ing films and media, a film clas­si­fi­ca­tion sys­tem was born in 1991 along with the for­ma­tion of the Censorship Review Committee (CRC); a body which would con­vene every decade to review and keep the country’s clas­si­fi­ca­tion and cen­sor­ship sys­tem up to date with the changes in soci­ety. The ini­tial rat­ing sys­tem with General (G), Parental Guidance (PG), and Restricted 18 ®, slowly evolved into the multi-rating sys­tem we know today. Most recently, 2009 and 2010 mark impor­tant times for Singapore’s cen­sor­ship. Due to the rapid changes of the media and social world, the CRC has formed at a mid-term point to access the need for change in the area; the results of which will only be known mid this year. (Siew, 2009). The role of cen­sor­ship has always been about pre­vent­ing media that could “put ideas into the heads…” of the peo­ple. (Uhde & NG. 2010. P. 175). Simply put, cen­sor­ship has always been about thought con­trol. In the 1960s, when the coun­try was expe­ri­enc­ing “polit­i­cal changes, social tur­bu­lence and gen­eral uncer­tainty with the Malaysian Federation, sep­a­ra­tion from the Federation, and com­mu­nal riots”, the jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for hav­ing strin­gent cen­sor­ship so as to not allow “unwanted” and “unde­sir­able” influ­ences that dis­tract from the goal of indus­tral­i­sa­tion and nation build­ing could arguably be valid and nec­es­sary. (Uhde & NG. 2010. p. 176). Today how­ever, with Singapore being one of the more devel­oped coun­tries in Asia, more focus has been placed in arts, media and cul­ture. Yet despite hav­ing taken a sig­nif­i­cant turn towards a more “lib­eral” stance in terms of cen­sor­ship by adopt­ing clas­si­fi­ca­tion, films in Singapore still seem to have trou­ble get­ting past the cen­sors when it comes to cer­tain themes or issues. This is espe­cially true for local films because of the sug­gested dou­ble stan­dard, which will be dis­cussed later in the paper, that local cen­sor­ship author­i­ties prac­tice. In gen­eral, films that fall within the clas­si­fi­ca­tion sys­tem tend to have lit­tle trou­ble in this regard, it is when films end up beyond the R21 mark and fall within the “out-of-bounds” area that the issues arise. When this hap­pens, films are either asked to make cuts in order to fit in to one of the exist­ing cat­e­gories or are out­right banned alto­gether. The result of this is that some are led to think that this change that MDA has made in mov­ing to clas­si­fi­ca­tion is merely cos­metic while the con­ser­v­a­tive mind­set inher­ent within the body still remains unchanged. According to Tan (2007), in ref­er­ence to the lat­est released 2003 report from the CRC, cen­sor­ship is nec­es­sary today in order to main­tain social order, to safe­guard moral val­ues of soci­ety, to pro­tect mul­tira­cial­ism and to pro­tect the vul­ner­a­ble like the young. Apparently, cen­sor­ship is given this role because the large major­ity of Singaporeans are still too con­ser­v­a­tive to accept such con­tent and this “major­ity” looks to the gov­ern­ment to reg­u­late and con­trol the flow of such con­tent within the soci­ety. The prob­lem with this jus­ti­fi­ca­tion is that the con­sti­tu­tion of mate­r­ial that is deemed unsuit­able seems arbi­trar­ily decided based on the author­i­ties’ bench­mark on suit­abil­ity con­trary to what they claim. Ironically, the rec­om­men­da­tions made by the Censorship Review Committee of 2002 pro­vided some inter­est­ing results regard­ing cen­sor­ship. The report shows through sur­veys done, that 53 per­cent of par­tic­i­pants wanted less cen­sor­ship. Half of the par­tic­i­pants also felt that homo­sex­ual related con­tent was fine as long as it was not exploita­tive in nature and apart from the reli­gious bod­ies, most peo­ple felt that such con­tent could be shown in pub­lic under an ade­quate rat­ing; echo­ing the opin­ion voiced by cer­tain groups that homo­sex­ual themed films should see the light of day in the com­mer­cial world. (Au, 2003). However, despite such results, homo­sex­ual related con­tent remains largely excluded from the film indus­try in Singapore with numer­ous such films like “Solos” and “Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly”, banned entirely. In rela­tion to such con­tent, MDA has appar­ently placed the terms exploita­tive and pro­mot­ing homo­sex­u­al­ity under such large all encom­pass­ing umbrel­las that ren­der almost any homo­sex­ual con­tent as such. As stated by Au (2009), it seems like any con­tent that depicts homo­sex­u­als as nor­mal human beings who expe­ri­ence hap­pi­ness is deemed as a pro­mo­tion of homo­sex­u­al­ity. An exam­ple given by Au (2009), deals with the issue of a film “Devotee” in which there was a scene that MDA had claimed to be explicit in nature. In fact, the scene merely con­sisted of implied sex­ual inter­course through depic­tion of the posi­tion of two male bod­ies and involved absolutely no frontal nudity; a method which is com­monly seen in many het­ero­sex­ual movies. In con­sid­er­ing the facts, one can­not help but ques­tion if the cen­sor­ship author­i­ties are truly act­ing out the will of the major­ity or is it that these sup­posed “heart­landers” are merely an ide­al­is­tic entity and clever polit­i­cal move to make peo­ple think the way they want them to think, result­ing in peo­ple fol­low­ing and accept­ing such ideals in fear of being “dif­fer­ent” than the rest of the com­mu­nity? A closer look into the other rea­sons given for the neces­sity of cen­sor­ship ren­ders them to seem unsound as well. In terms of social order, although to a lesser degree, the cen­sor­ship body finds issue with what they deem to be overtly vio­lent films in fear that they may instill vio­lent behav­ior amongst the peo­ple. The debate in regards to the effects of vio­lence in media has been ever ongo­ing but accord­ing to Hill (1997), a study that was car­ried out showed that most peo­ple who watch vio­lent films can fully dis­tin­guish between real vio­lence and fic­tional vio­lence. In fact, peo­ple who enjoy watch­ing vio­lent movies all tend to abhor actual vio­lence. Contrary to MDAs rea­son­ing, vio­lence in films tends to instill stronger emo­tions from audi­ences because they grow to care and feel for the char­ac­ter. Instead, it is vio­lence that is viewed in news reports that desen­si­tizes the viewer because of their “out of con­text” nature. To sim­ply say that the films depict­ing vio­lence influ­ence the indi­vid­ual beyond mere thought and moti­vates acts that threaten social order is as Tan (2009), puts it, an exag­ger­a­tion moti­vated by para­noia. (p. 82) “Party polit­i­cal films”; that is, “films that are made by any per­son and directed towards any polit­i­cal end in Singapore”, have long been banned with­out hes­i­ta­tion as well. (Uhde & Ng, 2010. p. 181). Numerous films such as “Vision of Persistence” (2002), “Singapore Rebel” (2005) and “Zahari’s 17 Years” (2006), all of which revolve around mem­bers of polit­i­cal oppo­si­tion in Singapore come under this umbrella. However, in 2005 a polit­i­cal doc­u­men­tary series by Channel News Asia man­aged to fall out­side of what con­sti­tutes a party polit­i­cal film. The inter­est­ing thing to note here is that what is dif­fer­ent in this case, is that the show was about Singapore’s rul­ing People’s Action Party and its min­is­ters instead of any other oppo­si­tion mem­bers. The show was called to be a depic­tion of cur­rent affairs and was hence per­mit­ted. This con­tra­dic­tory episode fur­ther backs up the claim of the sub­jec­tiv­ity and ambigu­ous nature of the arbi­trary deci­sion mak­ing of author­i­ties when it comes to what falls into what cat­e­gory of cen­sor­ship. It is a known fact that films like the ani­mated film “Princess”, which deal with racial or reli­gious issues are as likely to fall from the ban ham­mer in Singapore as those that con­tain con­tent men­tioned above. In claim­ing to pro­tect mul­tira­cial­ism, Singapore has always done so by avoid­ing the sub­ject alto­gether instead of actively engag­ing it and devel­op­ing under­stand­ing between the races. The method of main­tain­ing mul­tira­cial har­mony is reflected here in the way race and reli­gion related con­tent films are cen­sored. What this effec­tively does is that instead of pro­tect­ing mul­tira­cial har­mony, author­i­ties have deprived the chance for peo­ple to address exist­ing issues in Singapore’s soci­ety that have long been swept under the car­pet. It dis­al­lows them to engage in crit­i­cal think­ing there­fore mak­ing the so called demo­c­ra­tic soci­ety a “dead soci­ety” as expressed by Tan (2009) in ref­er­ence to “The Satanic Verses” by Salman Rushdie, which has also been banned in Singapore. Swedish film “An Extraordinary Study of Human Degradation” was made to cut its sex scene by the MDA before allow­ing its screen­ing in the 22^nd Singapore International Film Festival (SIFF). Excessive sex­ual con­tent goes against what author­i­ties claim to be moral val­ues of soci­ety and have to be cen­sored. As Tan (2009) explains, an individual’s moral stan­dards are highly ambigu­ous and can hardly be ascer­tained as a def­i­nite truth more so with the moral stan­dards of an entire soci­ety. Whose stan­dards then are we talk­ing about? The sub­jec­tiv­ity of the cen­sor­ship body here is unques­tion­able. But the most con­tra­dict­ing part is that these moral val­ues, were instilled in the peo­ple by things like thought con­trol through cen­sor­ship, and to now have cen­sor­ship author­i­ties claim that cen­sor­ship is nec­es­sary to pro­tect the very same moral val­ues is cer­tainly an irony. The pro­tec­tion of the young might be the only rea­son­ing that holds up against scrutiny. The young are extremely impres­sion­able and eas­ily influ­enced by what­ever they come into con­tact with. Hence, it is nec­es­sary to watch over them to ensure that mate­r­ial unsuit­able for their age group is either held back from them, or viewed under the appro­pri­ate guid­ance. The prob­lem how­ever is that this is a role that does not belong to the cen­sor­ship author­i­ties. In one of the sur­veys con­ducted by the 2002 CRC, the results reflected that 71 per­cent of par­tic­i­pants felt that par­ents were the ones respon­si­ble for what chil­dren are exposed to. Add to that is the fact that the clas­si­fi­ca­tion and rat­ings sys­tem exist for this very rea­son. Once again, the facts show that despite all their rea­son­ing for the neces­sity of the cur­rent cen­sor­ship sys­tem, when placed under scrutiny what it points to is a dra­con­ian and arbi­trary act of thought con­trol and polit­i­cal safe­guards in regards to con­tent that chal­lenges the con­ser­v­a­tive mind­set of the author­i­ties rather than what is claimed. As Davies (2004) puts it, “Censorship is a basic form of thought con­trol, thought con­trol is a basic form of dic­ta­to­r­ial gov­ern­ment.” (as cited in Tan, 2009, p. 83) So it seems the author­i­ties prac­tice some­what dra­con­ian meth­ods of cen­sor­ship while claim­ing to act in line with the will of the peo­ple. But how is that a hin­drance to local film­mak­ers? Strict cen­sor­ship laws are noth­ing new in Asia. However in coun­tries such as Hong Kong and Korea; two of the more promi­nent Asian film indus­tries, it has been shown that the relax­ation in cen­sor­ship laws fac­tor in as a major rea­son for the suc­cess of their respec­tive indus­tries. In the case of Hong Kong cin­ema, its gen­eral free­dom from gov­ern­men­tal cen­sor­ship has for a long time allowed it the breath­ing room to cre­ate won­der­ful films that con­tain depic­tion of vio­lence, sex and that involved con­tro­ver­sial top­ics like homo­sex­u­al­ity, reli­gion and even pol­i­tics. It is with­out a doubt one of the rea­sons why Hong Kong’s film indus­try was able to flour­ish. But more sig­nif­i­cant to Singapore’s sit­u­a­tion, is the case of the film indus­try of South Korea. From Japanese inva­sion to Communism to Militarism, South Korea has always had to deal with polit­i­cal inter­fer­ence in regards to the arts, which of course included films. Held back by cen­sor­ship the coun­try used to pro­duce films that ranged from pro­pa­ganda mate­r­ial to films that failed to cap­ture the hearts and atten­tion of the Korean pub­lic. It was only dur­ing the 1990s that saw a dras­tic change in the way films were allowed to tell sto­ries. The break­ing free from mil­i­tary rule and into democ­racy saw the lift­ing of cen­sor­ship which gave unprece­dented free­dom to film­mak­ers to weave their films around cul­ture, mod­ern­iza­tion, the nation and even pol­i­tics. Robinson (2005) states that this was what effec­tively led to the now com­monly known Korean Wave. This free­dom is also what brought Korean cin­ema to new heights with movies such as “Shiri” (1999) and “Joint Security Area” (2000), both of which had char­ac­ters revolv­ing around the polit­i­cal divi­sion of North and South Korea and both of which were huge suc­cesses in the Korean box office. (pp 25 – 29) By using Korea’s evo­lu­tion in the film indus­try with the lib­er­al­iza­tion of cen­sor­ship as an exam­ple, the pos­si­bil­i­ties of the direc­tion that the local film indus­try can go upon a sim­i­lar lift­ing of cen­sor­ship is clear. Yet despite Singapore pro­claim­ing to be a demo­c­ra­tic soci­ety and despite the so called “lib­er­al­iza­tion” of its cen­sor­ship sys­tem, the con­trol in con­tent by the author­i­ties remain dog­matic and strict due largely to what direc­tor to “Outsiders” 2004, Sam Loh calls a “Double Stardard” prac­ticed by cen­sor­ship author­i­ties. In an inter­view with him, Sam Loh who with­drew his film from the 2004 SIFF due to MDA insist­ing that cuts had to be made, laments how the MDA would be dou­bly strict when deal­ing with local made films. When given some thought it is not dif­fi­cult to see where that there is truth in the state­ment. Films such as “Da Vinci Code” and “Brokeback Mountain” which deal with reli­gious and homo­sex­ual themes respec­tively would not be able to pass the cen­sors if local coun­ter­parts were made. This added strict­ness to the already con­ser­v­a­tive bound­aries of the cen­sor­ship sys­tem leads to one unde­sir­able effect in local film­mak­ers – Self Censorship. Because film­mak­ers here are con­sciously aware that numer­ous kinds of con­tent may ren­der their film unsuit­able as deemed by the cen­sors, most of them prac­tice self cen­sor­ship before the film is even made. By rul­ing out what they think can­not be done they effec­tively remove pos­si­bil­i­ties to poten­tial sto­ries, and that is ulti­mately a fac­tor that kills off what may oth­er­wise be poten­tially good films. Tripathi (2002) aptly expresses, “Singapore’s lead­er­ship bemoans the lack of cre­ativ­ity among its peo­ple, and exhorts them to dare to be dif­fer­ent. But when some do, the estab­lish­ment comes down upon them, because it fears spon­tane­ity.” In con­clu­sion, the cen­sor­ship in Singapore has cer­tainly come a long way to reach where it is today but despite the claims of mov­ing from cut­ting to clas­si­fy­ing, the basic mind­set of MDA in deal­ing with cen­sor­ship remains very much sub­jec­tive and arbi­trary; seem­ingly still based on pol­i­tics and thought con­trol. The only dif­fer­ence is hav­ing the respon­si­bil­ity of cut­ting shifted to the dis­trib­u­tors or film­mak­ers them­selves. In plac­ing the jus­ti­fi­ca­tions for such cen­sor­ship under scrutiny, the rea­sons for its neces­sity fall apart and make it seem to truly be a hin­drance that lim­its local film­mak­ers. With Korean and Hong Kong Cinema as prime exam­ples of the pos­si­bil­i­ties, in order for any hope of hav­ing the local film indus­try go any­where from here, cen­sor­ship author­i­ties need to stop think­ing of Singaporeans as imma­ture, igno­rant, nar­row minded and intol­er­ant and imple­ment changes that go beyond a mere facelift in the cen­sor­ship sys­tem that reflects the demo­c­ra­tic soci­ety that Singapore claims to be. Though cer­tainly not the sole fac­tor that deter­mines the suc­cess of local cin­ema, a lift­ing of dog­matic cen­sor­ship and the mov­ing towards a more refined clas­si­fi­ca­tion sys­tem to let view­ers actively choose what to view will cer­tainly prove to be a great step for­ward in the right direc­tion. After all, cen­sor­ship should be a mat­ter of choice not to men­tion the imprac­ti­cal­ity of it all in today’s inter­net age. With the gov­ern­ment openly stat­ing they wish to head towards more free­dom in cen­sor­ship and with the CRC cur­rently hold­ing a review as this paper is being writ­ten, there is at least some hope that things may turn for the bet­ter… Written by Tan Quancai Eugene References Books Hill A. (1997). Shocking Entertainment: Viewer Response to Violent Movies. United Kingdom: John Libbey Media. Robinson M. (2005). Contemporary Cultural Production in South Korea: Vanishing Meta-Narratives of Nation. Chi-Yun S. & Stringer J. (Eds). New Korean Cinema (pp. 15 – 31). Great Britain: Edinburgh University Press. Tan K.P. (2007). Censorship in Whose Name? Tan K.P. (Ed). Renaissance Singapore? (pp. 71 – 94). Singapore: NUS Press Uhde J. & Ng Y.U. (2010). Latent Images: Film in Singapore. Singapore: NUS Press. Web Au W.P. (November 2009). 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