What South Park Missed About Censorship
This past Wednesday, in the second episode of its 23rd season, South Park took on China, Chinese censorship, and, as has become common for them lately, legal weed dealers. Randy decides that the best way to grow his weed business is to sell his product to the Chinese. He heads over to China to make it happen, where he meets the entire Disney canon (including The Avengers, Elsa, and The Beast), who have been successfully doing the same. He’s thrown in a prison labor camp for carrying massive amounts of weed, where he meets Winnie the Pooh, who is locked up because people said he looks like the Chinese president. (A Winnie the Pooh film was actually banned in China for just that reason.) Meanwhile, Stan’s new death metal band tries to make a biopic, but their producer insists the only way it can make money is if it’s China-friendly. Then, Chinese censors actually show up to nitpick Stan’s script and censor content they don’t like. The sum of these parts paints a picture of Chinese censorship as decidedly oppressive and artistically confining.
This isn’t the first time South Park has condemned the concept of artistic censorship. Indeed, the topic made up the main plot line of the South Park movie, in which Kyle’s mom tries to lead the US into war with Canada after the country’s comedy duo, Terrance and Phillip, supposedly “corrupt” the kids with foul language and potty humor. With the obvious meta-commentary reflecting on people accusing Matt Stone and Trey Parker of doing the same, there’s something delightful about watching a show, which has deliberately pushed every button that exists, make fun of the people who are most sensitive to their transgressions.
But this most recent episode felt a little bit strange due to its characterization of China as a singular force of censorship, with no reference to the way America restricts its artists. This point obviously comes with a major caveat: South Park peddles in 22-minute episodes jam-packed with plot points, and can’t possibly cover the entire issue of global censorship thoroughly. Still, it’s rare to see the show miss a chance to do one of it’s favorite things: make fun of smug Americans who get high on hypothetical freedoms. In short, it’s odd to see South Park fail to point out American hypocrisy on the issue of censorship.
You probably know that China isn’t the only country whose government implicitly or explicitly censors the media its citizens consume. Still, as Americans, we tend to associate government censorship with totalitarian regimes or communist nations. But censorship is about as American as a Quarter Pounder with Cheese.
You might be aware that, in its past, America experimented with strict censorship. For decades, the Supreme Court denied film the designation of “art,” thereby subjecting movies to the same standards of decency as other commodities. Then, for years, the self-imposed Hays Code required movies to be moral and wholesome. By 1968, the Motion Picture Association of America switched to the film ratings system it uses today. Problem solved, right?
Sort of. There are certainly fewer restrictions on cinematic creativity today. We no longer have a strict doctrine meticulously policing the sleeping arrangements of on-screen married couples. But that hardly means that censorship has disappeared entirely. Instead, the rating system has become its own brand of censorship-lite that unmistakably reflects certain societal biases. It takes place in almost-complete secrecy amongst a group of anonymous California parents who each hold their position for two years. The board tends to scrutinize sexual content more than violent content, including “sex between two people who either aren’t already mairred or about to be married.” According to a documentary on the topic, This Film Is Not Yet Rated, the MPAA is also stricter with depictions of queer characters and queer sex. This matters because a higher rating can mean your film won’t reach large swaths of the population. An NC-17 rating is practically a death sentence for a film, which is why many production companies go out of their way to adjust films to avoid being stamped out of theaters.
So, it’s interesting that the newest episode of South Park lampoons Hollywood for curating their content to make it more attractive to China in order to maximize profits, when producers have been doing the exact same thing to succeed in America for decades.
While everyone knows something about the MPAA, there’s another form of American film censorship that is rarely spoken about: the kind enforced by the Pentagon. Indeed, the Pentagon has an entire office dedicated to media relations, as chronicled by David Robb in his book Operation Hollywood: How the Pentagon Shapes and Censors the Movies. Robb explains the way the Pentagon has the power to mold war and action films to fit their preferred narrative. That’s because they essentially bribe producers with cheap or free access to billions of dollars worth of military equipment and personnel. This kind of “donation” can mean the difference between your film getting made or not. What’s more, it means that films generally have to depict the U.S. military and our warfare in a positive light. This is eerily similar to the way this most recent South Park episode criticizes China when it shows a decidedly pro-military Chinese ad for “‘Tegridy Weed” at the end of its episode.
And the Pentagon’s influence is vast; Files obtained by The Independent via the US Freedom of Information Act indicates that between 1911 and 2017, the Pentagon sponsored more than 800 feature films — ranging from Transformers to The Hulk — and more than 1,000 TV shows — from Hawaii Five-O to America’s Got Talent. Any time you see military equipment on-screen, that film or TV show almost certainly went through the Pentagon’s Entertainment Liaison Office, where it was parsed for content that might be construed as offensive to the military, or depict any soldiers in a bad light. For instance, Robb chronicles the way that, in the original script for the World War II film Windtalkers, one Marine nicknamed “The Dentist” goes around battlefields stealing gold teeth from dead Japanese soldiers’ mouths, a practice that actually happened. (In fact, things got much, much more grisly than that.) The Marine Corps demanded that this scene be taken out — and so it was.
The CIA has similar influence, with an entertainment liaison office of its own that has affected everything from Zero Dark Thirty to The Recruit. Their overwhelming sway can create surprising changes. Take the film Meet the Parents — the CIA admitted that it “asked that Robert De Niro’s character not possess an intimidating array of agency torture manuals,” according to The Independent.
Ultimately, it’s quite insightful for South Park to point out the effect that Chinese censorship is having on American production companies desperate to penetrate Chinese markets. And without question, there are aspects of Chinese censorship that are far more severe than the kind practiced in America. After all, our government today doesn’t go around banning films or cartoon characters. However, South Park’s argument is a bit misleading and misses the opportunity to criticize high and mighty Americans who think there’s no such thing as the red, white and blue putting limitations on artistic freedom and creative expression.
