Rare News Desk
Sony’s decision to pull The Interview over threats from North Korea was an embarrassment. It sets a dangerous precedent, too: North Korea’s threats aren’t the first (remember Iran’s threats against Salman Rushdie or the Muhammad cartoon controversy?) and they won’t be the last. A truly open and free society can’t clam up at the first hint of danger.
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But the main enemy of free expression in popular movies isn’t North Korea.
It’s China.
Chinese censors exert growing influence over the American film industry—and the industry has been all too eager to let them. China’s a big country with hordes of potential theatergoers. Getting a film past Chinese censors and into Chinese theaters can “add up to a quarter of takings,” reports the Guardian’s Edward Helmore.
Tempting. No director, no producer could not have the Chinese market in the back of her mind as she works. Deciding to include a joke about, say, Xi Jinping’s paunch is a bit harder if it might mean a hundred-million-dollar hit to the film’s revenue.
But Hollywood hasn’t merely been tempted: it has utterly kowtowed to Beijing’s censors, shaping films to fit their whim and letting their red pencils dance through the pages of the hottest scripts.
The most sordid example is Iron Man 3, where Chinese censors were reportedly “invited on set to monitor filming,” and where special scenes were added to the Chinese version of the film, including one in which Chinese doctors save Iron Man’s life and, as Washington Post China correspondent William Wan put it, “discuss how the world’s expectations […] hinge on them and their unique Chinese medical abilities.” The film ran in China—and was mocked for this groveling obsequity.
Similarly, a 2012 remake of the 1984 classic Red Dawn, in which American high-school students wage guerrilla warfare against Communist invaders, was edited after filming to make the invaders North Korean, not Chinese, “lest the leadership in Beijing be offended.” One of the film’s producers whimpered that the changes made the film “scarier, smarter, and more dangerous,” though it’s hard to say how trading a Chinese invasion (merely unrealistic) for a North Korean invasion (entirely ridiculous) made the film “smarter,” or how toning it down to appease authority figures made it “more dangerous.” The head of an American firm that helps films get into China’s market said the unaltered film was “like being invited to a dinner party and insulting the host all night long.”
Fair enough—but the changes applied to the American version, too. You don’t even have to be at this dinner party for the host to tell you to mind your manners.
How much does this matter? After all, some of the censors’ objections—too much blood in Tarantino, for example—wouldn’t sound unfamiliar to Americans. And the movies we market to China are hard to call “art.” Michael Bay’s work doesn’t exactly speak to the longings of the human soul, to the Good, the Beautiful, and the True, or to what it means to be human.
Yet popular culture does matter. By definition, it reaches a bigger audience than your hifalutin art-house films or la-ti-da literary novels. For many, culture is popular culture. And culture is important: culture connects us to our ancestors and our past, and we transmits it to our children to build our future. Culture contains messages about who we are and what we value.
As weak and misguided as the values in many blockbusters are now, they’ll only get worse if they’re being crafted to appeal to Chinese officials whose only values are obedience, nationalism, and consumption.
We should have seen this coming. Hollywood isn’t doing this because it agrees with China’s values, but because it wants China’s money. And in the age of global markets and global corporations, the Chinese consumer’s money is as good as the American’s.
Artists have always had to accommodate their patrons. In popular culture, the public is the patron. But now a great share of that patronage is controlled by a few members of the Chinese Communist Party—and he who pays the piper is calling the tune.
