Carol
Topolski, a former film censor, has written a debut novel, Monster
Love, whose horrifying premise might itself have a twitchy editor
reaching for the blue pencil.
Her long spell on the BBFC - between 1983 and 1995 - was, she said, my
best time, the most intellectually stimulating job I've ever done. She
combined it with work as a therapist. There I was at one end of the
week encouraging freedom of speech from my patients, and there I was at
the other end of the week cutting and banning it. I very much liked that
tension.
She served on the board through an era of great public anxiety about the
corrupting effects of 'video nasties' - in 1993, for instance, the judge
in the trial of James Bulger's killers suggested that the boy murderers
had been inspired by the video Child's Play 3. Topolski thought
the judge's comments irresponsible - he put those boys in a horror
film category, she said, from which they have never emerged.
Though she loved the wonderful culture of debate on the
classification board, Topolski and her fellow censors grew frustrated by
what they saw as an increasingly dictatorial attitude in their boss,
James Ferman. We all felt that he was sucking the debate out of it,
she said. We would debate and make a decision and he would slide
up to his directorial eyrie and change it. The 1973 horror film
The Exorcist was a particular point of conflict. Ferman refused
to allow it out on video, point-blank refused, so it was effectively
banned. Every few years we'd come back to it, rehearse the arguments
again, and he was just unbudgeable.
Topolski considered The Exorcist a 'splendid' movie. As the
mother of a teenage daughter in the late 1980s, she came to see the film
as really an excellent portrayal of adolescence. When you have a
teenager, quite often, even if you don't say it, you think, "What the
devil's got into you?" because they do seem suddenly to be possessed by
some maniac energy that's coming from left field.
In 1995 the tensions within the film board came to a head and Ferman
sacked the other censors, Topolski among them.
When I asked Topolski if she had been truly shaken by anything she had
seen, she cited scenes in a film called The New York Ripper (we
actually banned it) that depicted a man slicing open women's breasts
and genitals, and two pieces of paedophile film shown to the film
classification board by the head of the Obscene Publications Squad.
These are acid-etched on my mind, she said, and then, quietly,
and I really, really, really wish they weren't there.
...as a film censor, there was also that strange split. You have to
inhabit the film in the terms in which the film was working - that is,
be a punter - at the same time as have the censor's part of your mind
saying, "We can't have that."?
When she took up her place on the film classification board. The board
was expanding to cope with the rise of video: This was new territory
we were mapping out. It was fascinating. Of the films that appeared
in that era, Pulp Fiction is my bête noir, she said.
It's brilliant. Tarantino understands the medium, his writing is superb,
his direction is pitch-perfect, the characters are funny and so on, but
I think it is a dangerous film, actively a dangerous film, because it
gives you the psychopathic experience with no comeuppance.
Tarantino says, "Look! See how entertaining it is to blow someone's
head off! Or to laugh at them when they're humiliated! Or to anally rape
them!" There's no consequence. You just enjoy it.
Did she think it should have been banned? No. I think there's a lot
of dangerous art out there, and you've got to assume that the majority
of people in the audience are going to have enough internal resources to
be able to process it and not act on it. You have to trust your
audience.
