very since the Janet Jackson Affair at the 2004 Super Bowl, I've been dying to have my say on the whole business of censorship and public taste. I am, after all, a pundit—it says so right here on the label.
The problem with the subject is that it is a perennial, like budget deficits, poverty and the licentiousness of the young. The desire to unleash a jeremiad about the death of artistic expression, the growing (or returning) Puritan streak in American culture, blah blah blah—well, it's always good for 1,200 words, but not always relevant to a sci-fi audience.
Ah, but wait. Two weeks ago, President Bush signed into law the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act, which, among other actions, allows companies like Clean Flicks and Family Flix to offer edited or sanitized versions of existing feature films and television series without being subject to lawsuits for copyright infringement.
To listen to the tremors in the blogosphere (a sci-fi concept in itself), this is The Beginning of The End. The rights of filmmakers are being trampled. The censoring Philistines have taken over. (The head of one company is on record as saying he felt the need to censor the naked male victims in Schindler's List ...)
And yet ... maybe it's not such a bad thing.
Santized for your protection
Of course, I may have a biased perspective on censorship, since I have actually been one. I worked as an "editor" at a major television network, sanitizing prime-time comedies and dramas as well as children's shows.
This work, of course, wasn't censorship per se—it was not a government entity ordering images to be deleted or pixilated to protect the public. It was a corporate editing job, ensuring that the material offered by the network was acceptable for broadcast by its owned-and-operated stations, and its affiliates. Nothing more, nothing less. There were no written rules—at least, not for covering prime-time programs (there were written guidelines for daytime programming, especially game shows—unsurprising, given that history.)
We operated by precedent. The job required a knowledge of the existing standards of the broadcasting community. If a certain phrase had already established itself in the marketplace, then it was fine—whether I personally liked it or not.
The whole business of community standards is the issue with the post-Janet Jackson uproar: It wasn't just the sight of a naked breast, it was the sight of a naked breast during a Super Bowl halftime. Many Americans felt that this was a violation of their community standards.
They feel the same way about broadcast television in general—which is loaded with phrases and situations and images that wouldn't have gotten past me in 1983, I can assure you. Cable and motion pictures are such a cesspool of explicit sexuality, violence and bad behavior that drainage is no longer possible—the only responsible response is damming the area. And let's not even try to discuss the Internet. ...
Hence legislation like the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act.
From now on, concerned parents will be able to purchase appropriately sanitized versions of popular movies and television. Sex and the City without the nudity. (They might as well just call it The City.) Pulp Fiction will be about 10 minutes long ... and silent.
Now, aside from the some naughty language in Terminator, Seven of Nine's wardrobe on Star Trek: Voyager or the odd destruction of an entire planet of sentient beings in, yes, Star Wars: A New Hope—all candidates for sanitization—what the heck does this have to do with sci-fi?
Storming the castles—again
For a generation or longer—from the 1930s to the 1960s—sci-fi literature and its rare movie and television adaptations consisted of, as Ursula Le Guin said recently in the New York Times, "a set of metaphors." That is, sci-fi stories were representations of our world ... exaggerations ... nightmares ... skewed mirrors.
Consider monster movies of the 1950s, and their reflection of Cold War fears.
What about the development of robots (from a Czech word that actually means "work") on the heels of the Depression?
How did the portrayal of alien races mirror national concerns about civil rights?
Was sci-fi's fascination with space travel a metaphor for our "lost" frontier? It seems so, especially when you consider the drastic downturn in sci-fi publishing in the late 1950s, directly attributable to Sputnik and the space race.
Television series such as The Outer Limits (all about monsters) and the original Trek (all about Vietnam and race) worked best when they explored this "set of metaphors."
In the decade of the 1960s, however, American society changed. Barriers fell. Skirts got shorter, hair got longer.
Why? Two words: the baby boom. Children became the dominant market force. "Television is for 14-year-olds," one pundit sniffed famously. He said this around 1969, when the median age of the American population was, indeed, 13. (The same network training that made me a censor also alerted me to the role of demographics in our world. In fact, using demographics and related tools is in itself a sci-fi concept from the 1940s ... recall Asimov's Foundation.)
And sci-fi went from being a set of metaphors to being a genre in which other worlds were represented literally: the future of John Brunner's 1969 novel Stand on Zanzibar wasn't satirical, it was supposed to be realistic.
There are critics of sci-fi, notably the late Kingsley Amis, who thought that the fun went out of written SF around 1965. I don't think that's quite true—I think it was just a function of Amis reaching middle age.
Well, the baby boomers have reached middle age. Demographically, the American audience is much older today than it was in 1970—the median is in the high 30s, not 14. And while there are people who are just as devoted to, uh, open lifestyles and the freedoms of the 1960s as they were then, most people, in my experience, have gotten more conservative in their tastes.
If nothing else, they have children, and don't want them seeing things they judge to be inappropriate.
In other words, the pendulum has swung. We will be facing more and more restrictions on presentations of language, wardrobe, action.
Sci-fi writers will be forced into the metaphor business again.
But if you believe that art flourishes in difficult times ... if you suspect that artists need castles to storm ... then this should be good news.
Sound plausible?
It does to me—but then again, the mark of a real sci-fi writer is ability to convince yourself of anything—if only long enough to get a column written.
When not composing calls-to-arms, Michael Cassutt writes scripts (currently for the SCI FI Channel) and books (most recently, Tango Midnight from Forge). He lives in Los Angeles.
