This essay is an expanded version of a presentation made at Cine-Excess in 2011, in the presence of Ruggero Deodato, and Giovanni Radice who played Ricky in Deodato’s film House on the Edge of the Park (1980).
In 2006, I was asked to head a team of researchers to explore how audiences understood and responded to a group of films which had challenged the British Board of Film Classification when they came to classify them, for release to cinemas or as DVDs. Among the films which the BBFC wanted us to consider was Ruggero Deodato’s 1980 House on the Edge of the Park. This research, it has to be said, was a ‘first’ for the BBFC, in at least two senses. There is a considerable tradition of them either conducting or funding research into public opinion, to gauge levels of acceptability for a range of things, from nudity to violence to swearing, to ‘being for the wrong kind of audience’[1]. And there is also a considerable tradition of them funding or drawing upon research centred in those psychological approaches which work by artificially assembling people who would not normally choose to watch films of this kind, and then measuring their responses, in order to assay what if any ‘harm’ might be done.
The research we promised to do fitted neither category. It was of no interest to us what a ‘general public’ might think of Deodato’s film, or of the other four films we were invited to examine (Irreversible [Gaspar Noé, 2002], Baise-Moi [Virginie Despentes & Coralie Trinh Thi, 2000], Ichi the Killer [Takashi Miike, 2001] and À Ma Soeur (Catherine Breillat, [2002]). Nor were we interested in finding putatively ‘average’ audiences who could stand in and be tested on behalf of Joe and Joanna Public. For it was very clear that none of these kinds of films are for ‘average audiences’. And the problem is that, with films of these kinds, ‘average audiences’ can be packed full of presumptions and prejudices about what a person must be like, to watch and enjoy such ‘dangerous trash’. The question is, rather, what kinds of specialist audiences had been and might be attracted to them, how did a taste for any of these films work, and what could this reveal about the meanings of these films for their naturally-occurring audiences? And that really was the key phrase: ‘naturally-occurring’. We offered to the BBFC that we could locate sufficient people who had chosen, in the ordinary course of film-viewing, to watch one or more of these films. We would survey them, we would meet and discuss with them. We would hear their accounts of these films: what was memorable about them, what they compared them with, and how they judged them. Using a complex set of methods which had been trialled in, for instance, the massive international Lord of the Rings project, we were the first group of researchers employed by the BBFC who situated themselves within a cultural studies-inflected film studies tradition.
But of course the kinds of film we were dealing with, for the BBFC, were not only completely different; they also raised one of the prime contemporary scare-issues: the inclusion of scenes of sexual violence. Over the past few years, this has become one of the BBFC’s bete noirs and bugbears, something which they feel raises special questions and must be responded to with the greatest caution. Their reasons for this come from a mix of factors: some public opinion surveys; a voluble critique from a particular feminist position; and a body of research deriving from the USA
Among the key ideas which carried forward from the broad tradition within which we situated ourselves, and from the findings of the Rings project, was the idea that ‘commitment’ is a key variable. The extent to which audiences care about and engage seriously with a film will shape the character of what they experience from it, and the ways those experiences will sediment into memory and understanding. Audiences which restrict their depth of engagement, and enclose the experience within the time of viewing, will simply form a far less coherent sense of the film, and consequently take much less away.
The BBFC project set us some tough challenges. The research had to answer four key questions:
- How are audience responses affected by cuts that are required by the BBFC?
- How is comprehension (eg, of characters, story-arcs and outcomes) affected by viewing, or knowing of, different versions of each film?
- What do audiences mean when they measure sexual violence against ‘context’?
- How in particular do committed audiences respond to cut/uncut versions of the films?
These questions are so specific, and detailed, that it is not easy to conceive methods that would allow them to be answered. But after a process of negotiation we were able to offer the BBFC a research design which they accepted – and our final report, upon completion of the research, was accepted in full.
Among the problems and challenges that we faced were these. The research tradition in which our research was sited was, in a broad sense, a cultural studies tradition. And that tradition has over the years mounted a sustained critique of the main alternative tradition of media audience research: the American-centred, policy-driven mass communications tradition. This alternative tradition has worked almost entirely with psychological models, seeking to isolate and test personality variables which might interact with specific ‘message-contents’ in the media to produce dangerous responses. The great majority of this research uses laboratory experiments in which people who would not probably otherwise encounter the materials are asked to watch, and then tested for their individuated responses. The central criticism has always been (apart from sheer exaggeration of research findings) that there is an inevitable risk in setting up such artificial encounters. People in real life do not have such isolated experiences. They belong with a range of groups and cultures. They have prior knowledges and expectations. They come with knowledges, accumulated experiences, judgement systems (all, of course, more or less formed, but all nonetheless involved). Experiments which try to set these aside will suffer from a mix of contamination by ‘wild’ elements of these, and irrelevance (because the results cannot be transferred to any real-life situations).
There are many other problems, on top of this central one. American political and media culture is hungry for explanations at the level of the individual, and the hunt for the ‘lone danger’ plays a considerable part in this (think the part these play in the horrible dramas of recurrent multiple shootings). The mass communications model is arguably complicit in sustaining this depoliticised and deculturalised obsession. There are wider problems in the belief that it is possible to measure ‘attitudes’ (presumed to be relatively fixed personality variables). The powerful critique of attitude psychology triggered by, for instance, discourse psychologists has hardly penetrated this domain. Alternatively, the cultural studies tradition emphasises the need to explore people’s histories of engagement with particular media, genres, stories. It aims to catch people already talking so that the research enters into the ordinary practices of media in people’s lives. And it is for this reason that we focus on the most engaged in order to explore how particular media become meaningful in within people’s ongoing lives.
Within this frame of understanding, our research was conducted in a mix of ways. We carried out a survey of 250 websites, seeking out the 50 per film in which we could find the greatest amount of debate about each of the films. We looked at reviews, discussion boards, fan sites, etc, as well as obviously the more generic sites such as the Internet Movie Database. We constructed a web questionnaire, which used a quali-quantitative design, which (put simplistically) asks people to position themselves on a number of dimensions, but then asks them to explain what that self-positioning means to them. 839 individuals completed this questionnaire, giving us a total of 1,257 responses across the five films (since some people had seen, and were willing to talk to us about, more than one of the five). From the questionnaire responses, we constructed twenty Focus Groups (four per film), particularly reaching out to people who had told us in their responses that they valued and appreciated one of the films. These became known as our ‘Embracers’ (as against, at the other extreme, the ‘Refusers’). [The full Report to the BBFC is available on their website – see Barker et al. (2007).]
The BBFC and House on the Edge of the Park
What kind of a film is House on the Edge of the Park? It is hard to give non-evaluative descriptions of any film, and particularly hard with one so laden with controversy. But an attempt must be made. House follows the story of Alex, a smilingly vicious garage attendant, whom we see at the start of the film capturing, raping and murdering a passing young woman. The film then moves forward to its main narrative – whose connections to the opening of the film only become apparent at the very close of the film. This narrative tracks Alex and his slightly dim friend Ricky to a party in a remote house – a party which degenerates into increasing hostility between the hosts and the two men (much of which has a strand of class dislike to it). This spirals into violence, including sexual violence, which reaches its nadir with the arrival of a young innocent teenager, Cindy. Alex captures and strips her, threatening her with a knife. (At this juncture, a theme-tune we have heard repeatedly becomes diegetic, as Alex sings a mock-soothing song ‘Cindy, oh Cindy’ to her as he runs the knife over her breasts.) But Ricky, who has himself been drawn into a part-consensual encounter with one of the other women at the party, is now deeply disturbed by what is happening, tries to stop him, and is stabbed. At this point one of the men manages to grab a gun, Alex is shot, and dies clumsily in the house pool. Only at this point do we learn that the party organisers were relatives and friends of the woman raped and murdered at the beginning, and the party was an elaborate ploy to enable them to take revenge on Alex.
House had not fared well at the hands of the BBFC. They had required a considerable number of cuts from it, before allowing it distribution at all. Their arguments for these were important and symptomatic of the ways in which they examine films, generally. In a summary of their judgements on the film with which they supplied us, as we prepared our research, the BBFC declared:
The BBFC required cuts to all sexual assault scenes to remove forcible stripping of women, inflammatory dialogue, the suggestion of Lisa enjoying rape, and the extended razor play with Cindy. These were on the grounds that the scenes both eroticised and endorsed sexual assault.
It is not difficult to see the key words in this summary: ‘eroticised’, and ‘endorsed’. How does one know if a film is doing either of these things? In its further elaboration of its reasons, the summary used similar wordings. They spoke of the film “… eroticising sexual assault”, “endorsing rape”, arguing that “sexual titillation primes the viewer for the violence”, and concluding that “illicit pleasures become sexualised”. Clearly in such phrasings (and in the judgements that underpin these), claims are being made about how audiences are likely to experience the ways in which the film displays events, and links scenes together. The film’s construction, as perceived by the BBFC, is designed (deliberately or otherwise, really does not matter) to evoke some predictable responses. These claims led the BBFC to identify one scene in particular which they found utterly unacceptable and reprehensible: the scene with Alex and Cindy:
The most pernicious scene is that in which the virginal Cindy is sexually assaulted - sexual tension is built up as razor is played over her body and her breasts. The scene is further eroticised by being intercut with an unlikely consensual sex scene between one of the attackers and one of the party. The effect of illicit pleasures sexualised is increased by the apparent youth of Cindy, full-frontal nudity, and lingering shots of her naked body being marked by the razor. This is a potent sexualisation of violence. … The often extended assault scenes seem to serve no purpose within the plot and instead seem clearly designed to titillate a largely male audience.
'Pernicious' paracinema; Deodato’s film raises official concerns around sexuality fused with violence
‘Sexualisation of violence’ is perhaps the ultimate remaining taboo in the BBFC’s lexicon, sustained of course not only by their perception that ‘public opinion’ sees this as an un-crossable boundary, but also by a body of research coming from America. This research appeared to show, from laboratory studies, that a kind of crossing over or arousal from sex to violence and back again could take place. Such claims had come into play in more than the BBFC’s judgements on films of this kind. It had not long before been cited in evidence given by anti-pornography feminists to the Ministry of Justice, in response to their Consultation on ‘extreme pornography’. Here is one such view:
Sexual explicitness per se does not have harmful effects. However, when a message is presented within a sexually-explicit context, it may have different effects than presented within a non-explicit context, because the content is perceived differently and because arousal is generated. (Malamuth, 1993)
Such representations are seen to create a ‘feedback loop’ of arousal, in which the lines between sex and violence become blurred. These were and are powerful ideas, not to be dismissed. However, the tradition of research form which they are derived, has in recent years come under sharp, critical scrutiny for a host of reasons.
Our Research Results
Of the five films whose audiences we were studying, House unsurprisingly generated the lowest overall level of responses. This was an old film, hardly on the map and not easily available for quite a long time. Because of this, we set out to expand our recruitment of responses by hosting a special screening of the film at Aberystwyth Arts Centre, which we advertised as widely as we could in the local area. Admission was free, we only asked that people complete our questionnaire after viewing the film. With supplement, we managed to reach 165 responses to our questionnaire (79 of them from the special screening). But of course, in light of our own critique of mass communications’ artificial methods, we had to take into account the difference that might be made by watching the film in this constructed context.
The results from analysing these questionnaires were interesting and surprising in a number of ways. Perhaps not surprisingly, House’s natural audience was older than the overall spread of people responding to us – surely a function of the fact that this was a 1980s film. Of those responding, 122 were male, 45 female – again, hardly startling. Our research also confirmed that this was a specialist audience. While House came out massively below the all other four films in terms of votes registered at the Internet Movie Database (with Irreversible top at 12,931, House – a considerably older film – had only 589), when prolific reviewers alone were counted (that is, those who operate as semi-professional reviewers, seeking to comment on as wide a field as possible), House outdid the other four films (with 40 comments against just 17 for Irreversible). However, when we examined participants’ responses to two questions – how highly did they rate the film in terms of quality, and how highly did they rate the ideas which it sought to address? – we found that women were considerably more appreciative of the film’s ideas than men.
Embracing or rejecting: differing audience perceptions of an exploitation controversy
A key feature across all kinds of audience responses, be they positive or negative, was the naming the film as an ‘exploitation movie’. This is one among a number of what we would call ‘vernacular labels’. And the notion of ‘exploitation cinema’ has a considerable history, which researchers have explored in depth. ‘Exploitation cinema’ has become over time a specialist domain. Specialist publications, circulation systems, distributors and suppliers, screenings (often late-night) at known cinemas, festivals (of which of course Cine-Excess is one variety), a tradition of special guests: all these and many more produce working cultures around ‘exploitation’ that are very knowledgeable, delight in detail, make intense comparisons, and so on. Whether they were within these circuits or not, our audiences have a good working understanding of this as a particular kind of cinema.
Those studying exploitation cinema identify a number of features in it. Exploitation doesn’t stint on showing us the ‘forbidden’. It makes a virtue of deals with the grubby side of life. It has few pretensions to be seen or understood as art. It rarely if ever gives us easy moral answers or outcomes. And as a result, it doesn’t allow its audiences to take sides safely. The implications of this are well caught in one response by a quite ambivalent respondent: ‘This film is pure exploitation and a good one as far as this type of film can go.’ There is here a combined recognition that ‘exploitation films’ must be ranked – but also a belief that there are boundaries to what such films can achieve.
This identification of House as an ‘exploitation flick’ doesn’t necessarily overwrite people’s individual emotions, responses, and judgements upon watching the film. On the contrary. Mapping people’s talk about their feelings about house against their judgements on its value, a clear pattern of oppositions emerged.
Table 1: Comparison of the judgement systems of Refusers and Embracers of House. Refusers Embracers Rejected the ending of the film as a ‘weak excuse’
The key point in here is that everyone is appalled at the treatment of Cindy – but the grounds of that disgust change, as people show greater engagement with the film as a whole. To Refusers, it is gratuitous, pointless, and just nasty. In this, they are not very far different from the judgements and criteria used by the BBFC itself – except that, when we looked at people’s views on the cuts to the film, very few indeed wanted to take their dislike of the film to the point of agreeing with its censorship. We might say that they responded at an individual level, but were not inclined to make their personal judgement into a judgement on others’ likely uses of the film. What we saw earlier was the BBFC’s deployment of a model of how audiences might be ‘corrupted’.
For Embracers, on the other hand, the assault on Cindy provided the point at which characters, generally understood as exploitation-fictional, transgress the boundaries of the genre. This is the point at which the genre becomes a site for experiencing extremes of discomfort, for the purposes of thinking about the world. As one Embracer put it:
It is a pure exploitation film although one which is a lot more thought-provoking and well made. Its themes of leading on the main protagonists as well as the abuse of an obviously retarded man both by his friend and those who they capture are most difficult to watch.
But being ‘difficult to watch’ is a virtue in the film, not something which should be debarred, as far as he is concerned. This is because difficulty is part of the expected demands of this kind of film. Here is how one woman summed up her overall response to the film. There is a powerful double-direction in her responses, which must not be lost.
I was very angry ’cause I actually find Alex a very simplistic character, he’s just a supposedly evil man doing these terrible things, but he and his friends are these working class Americans trapped with these rich Americans whose only aim is to manipulate them and use them for entertainment and sort of abuse the working class, and then it looks as if it’s going to turn on them, and they’re actually being attacked by the people they’re trying to repress, but even at the end they still win. It’s like all their wealth just sort of lets them do whatever they like. And that’s my impression of the film, somehow it felt to me that the whole way through it was about power games between these really rich people and these really simple bad working class people.”
Is she angry at the film? At dominant perceptions of class, which the film is reflecting on? Does this mean that she likes and approves of the film, or dislikes and disapproves of it? The answer to all these is: yes – she is doing all these things at the same time, and that is one way in which the complexity of an ‘exploitation flick’ is taken up and used by its audiences.
Embracers and Refusers in important senses ‘see different films’. But weirdly, the Refusers – who dislike and disapprove of House – are the ones who see in the film what the BBFC does. A summary Table of phrases by response to the film hopefully captures this. At the corners of the square are typical wordings taken from those who express strong positions on House, while comments in the middle circle derive from those declaring little interest, and finding little value, in the film: The two empty corners signals the virtual absence of people taking up those combinations (Enjoying with Disapproving, or Approving with Not Enjoying)
Table 2: Summary of audience positions by self-placement on dimension of judgement.
The question we were asked to explore by the BBFC was, in sum: how do people understand and respond to the screening of sexual violence in these five films (and, potentially, by generalisation, other related films). I would summarise our conclusions in a series of contrasts with the still-dominant model – and one to which, sadly, it looks to me that the BBFC is retreating once again.
Table 3: Standard models of sexual violence in film
The results of our research Controlled visuality is dominant – to see is to be invited in. This is the fundamental reason for special treatment for film (as against, for instance, books, or theatre).
Visuality is just one aspect of a film. Sound and hearing can be every bit as powerful. But also genre, traditions of story-telling are key factors in the kinds of invitation audiences experience.
Where sexual violence is concerned, notions of ‘representation’ vanish – it is too literal.
Engaged audiences put question-marks over the nature of representations of sexual violence, and judge on the boundary.
There is a generalised danger that people (men) will become aroused, and that this will overwhelm constraints and moral rules.
Arousal (for both men and women) increases critical engagement and appraisal.
To see any woman attacked is to see all women attacked. Sexual violence is automatically generalisable.
Sexual violence is not abstractable from other dimensions, such as class, and power.
It is inevitable that we will take sides as ‘men’ (watching and enjoying the spectacle of sexual assault) or as ‘women’ (knowing the horror of this).
Both men and women respond in complicated ways, which go far beyond ‘taking gendered sides’.
MOVING AWAY FROM NATURALISTIC RESEARCH?
The trouble is that, while the BBFC accepted our research in the sense that they agreed to mount it on their website as a strong contribution, its findings simply don’t fit with their continuing model of how films work, and what they need to do about them. Indeed, there are clear signs in some of their recent policy-moves that they are shifting further away from any interest in the kinds of findings that naturalistic research such as ours produces. Instead, recent policy statements have consolidated their claims on what ‘harm’ from films might be, and locate these very definitely in that American style of laboratory research. And in another direction they have recently announced a ‘major survey’ of opinions on what is acceptable or unacceptable in the screen presentation of sexual violence.[2] This is of course not wrong it itself (although, as a long tradition of research again shows, ‘public opinion’ is a highly moveable feast, from which almost any desired conclusions can be derived). But the wordings in their announcement appear to suggest that they are going to continue a trend which has been noticed in other ‘opinion’ work in recent years: giving special attention to parents in the role as moral guardians. This biasing of their research-base is disturbing. It will inevitably not only privilege a specific segment of the population, but it will ask people to respond in their capacity as moral guardians – that is, not giving their own responses, but imputing responses to those whom they are responsible for. And as very many researches have shown, there is a great gulf between how people respond for themselves, and how they attribute responses to ‘others’ – notably, of course, ‘children’.
My challenges therefore to the BBFC were and are these:
- If you commission research, either show how you make use of it, or critique it publicly, so that people can hear and debate the issues.
- Examine your own role in the creation and use of ‘figures of the audience’, that is, those kinds of speculative claim about who might be watching, and with results or effects.
- Consider seriously the possibility that among the virtues of cinema is its ability to make issues morally ambiguous – and that engaging people with that is not especially dangerous, just because it happens in film (as against books, or theatre, or any other cultural form).
- Commission some research on the ways in which location of audiences affects their responses. Or in other words, be willing to explore the possibility that, for instance, film festivals are precisely the places to show films that might even give you cause for concern in other contexts – because viewing at festivals sustains distinctive ways of watching.
- And finally, have the courage to commission some research (again, not easy to design, but not impossible) which would take that most forbidden of issues – sexual arousal – and consider where and how it occurs, and what it means that it occurs in different contexts.
Sadly, I don’t have any serious hope that the BBFC will respond in any meaningful way to these suggestions.
References:
Barker, Martin, Ernest Mathijs, Kate Egan, Jamie Sexton, Russ Hunter and Melanie Selfe (June 2007) ‘Audiences and Receptions of Sexual Violence in Contemporary Cinema’, Report to the British Board of Film Classification. (Available via https://www.bbfc.co.uk/downloads/index.php).
Malamuth, Neil (1993) ‘Pornography’s impact on male adolescents’, Adolescent Medicine, 4:3, 563-76.
Footnotes
[1] The British Guardian marked the BBFC’s 100th anniversary with a substantial article on its history. Coming to the present day, they quote BBFC Director David Cooke on a compilation DVD Terrorists, Weirdos & Other Wackos, arguing that this was “probably calculated to be viewed by young blokes when they were just about to go to the pub”. See Kira Cochrane, ‘Now you see it, now you don’t: how Britain’s censors have dealt with a century of sex, violence and swearing’, Guardian, 27 July 2012.
[2] “Partly as a result of [its judgements on Human Centipede II and Bunny Game], the BBFC is commissioning a major new piece of original research into depictions of sadistic, sexual and sexualised violence, mainly against women, to determine what the British public today believes is potentially harmful and therefore unacceptable for classification. The research will be completed in 2012 and the BBFC will publish it in the usual way, not least because it might be helpful to other regulators.” https://www.bbfc.co.uk/newsreleases/2012/07/bbfc-annual-report-2011-bbfc-find-out-their-value-in-the-internet-age-announce-plans-for-new-research-into-sexual-violence-and-adopt-a-tougher-line-on-exempt-video-content/.
[1] The British Guardian marked the BBFC’s 100th anniversary with a substantial article on its history. Coming to the present day, they quote BBFC Director David Cooke on a compilation DVD Terrorists, Weirdos & Other Wackos, arguing that this was “probably calculated to be viewed by young blokes when they were just about to go to the pub”. See Kira Cochrane, ‘Now you see it, now you don’t: how Britain’s censors have dealt with a century of sex, violence and swearing’, Guardian, 27 July 2012.
[2] “Partly as a result of [its judgements on Human Centipede II and Bunny Game], the BBFC is commissioning a major new piece of original research into depictions of sadistic, sexual and sexualised violence, mainly against women, to determine what the British public today believes is potentially harmful and therefore unacceptable for classification. The research will be completed in 2012 and the BBFC will publish it in the usual way, not least because it might be helpful to other regulators.” https://www.bbfc.co.uk/newsreleases/2012/07/bbfc-annual-report-2011-bbfc-find-out-their-value-in-the-internet-age-announce-plans-for-new-research-into-sexual-violence-and-adopt-a-tougher-line-on-exempt-video-content/.