the human centipede I can’t understand why there isn’t more outrage over the BBFC’s banning of Human Centipede II (Full Sequence). Like me, you probably weren’t planning to rush out and buy a DVD of this movie, which tells the lovely story of a bloke who stitches 12 people together to create the eponymous beast while pleasuring himself with sandpaper and barbed wire. But you should nonetheless be angry at the BBFC’s blanket ban on the film, its unilateral removal of our right to decide for ourselves whether to watch it or to snub it.
Because it sums up brilliantly the tyrannical elitism of censorship and the BBFC’s treatment of the public as potential perverts who are only one sick movie away from going completely mental. The BBFC justified its ban on the basis that the film, with its scenes of “graphic sexual violence”, poses a “real risk” of causing “harm” to potential viewers. Apparently the film could “deprave or corrupt a significant proportion of those likely to see [it]“. Which immediately raises a question in my mind: why did it not warp the minds and morality of the men and women at the BBFC who, poor souls that they are, had to sit through it? Are they now depraved? Have they been corrupted? Why not? What is so special about them which means that they are capable of watching the two-hour-long fictional creation of a sexual monster without going doolally, whereas the general public .
you and I – apparently are not? This captures the elitism of the BBFC, and of the bossy, self-appointed censoring class in general, which clearly considers itself morally superior, possessed of a stronger stomach and a clearer mind, than the ordinary man in the street. Normally such elitism is well disguised, hidden behind claims that censorship must be enforced to “protect the children” or to “preserve national security”. But here, in the unfettered blacklisting of a film that might deprave and corrupt “even adults”, in the words of the BBFC, we can see the snobbish authoritarianism of Britain’s chief censors in all its unglory. The message of their ban is: We, the incorruptible few, have a duty to protect you, the corruptible mass, from your worst, most depraved instincts.
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