COMMENT: What does approval of 'Lang Tong' with no cuts mean for censorship in Singapore?
Kirsten Han is a Singaporean blogger, journalist and filmmaker. She is also involved in the We Believe in Second Chances campaign for the abolishment of the death penalty. A social media junkie, she tweets at @kixes. The views expressed are her own.
The trailer for Lang Tong is one-and-a-half minutes of steamy, raunchy debauchery. Sex, sex, bak kut teh, violence, sex, sex… one would have expected the Media Development Authority (MDA) to scramble for a ban, but the film – surprise surprise! – has been given an R21 classification, no cuts necessary.
The decision came as a surprise to director Sam Loh, who in 2004 had withdrawn his previous film, Outsiders, from screening because he would have been required to make cuts to it. “To be honest, I really didn’t expect it to be passed, (so) I guess you can say that censorship here has changed a bit from 10 years ago when I made Outsiders,” he told the Business Times.
Has censorship changed?
It stands to reason that there have been shifts, at least in certain areas. Looking at how much of a hit a sexy, violent shows like Game of Thrones or Walking Dead has become, one might posit that the MDA has recognised some commercial value in raunchier, edgier films. Plus it just seems silly to still be a stick-in-the-mud if Singaporeans are consuming such content anyway.
But if censorship has changed, then why did Singaporeans have to go to Johor Bahru to watch To Singapore, With Love?
This suggests that progress in terms of free expression has been far from linear; there are various considerations that the authorities take into account when they decide what to do with certain content. And, unsurprisingly, the state appears to be much more willing to make concessions for commercial gain rather than political expression.
As a friend involved in the arts put it recently: “You can do stuff about taking off clothes, but you can’t do stuff about CPF.”
Take, for instance, the restrictions imposed upon The Kids Are All Right, the 2010 comedy-drama about a lesbian couple whose children have established contact with the sperm donor. Apart from the fact that the couple is a same-sex one, the film is actually your pretty standard Hollywood character-driven fare. All explicit sex scenes in the film are actually heterosexual ones.
Although I’ve only seen the trailer of Lang Tong I’m fairly confident that it has more explicit sex scenes than The Kids Are All Right, and violence to boot. Yet although both films received R21 ratings, only the latter film was restricted to only a single-print release.
"The majority of the members agreed with the board that the film normalises a homosexual family unit and has exceeded the film classification guidelines which states that ‘Films that promote or normalise a homosexual lifestyle cannot be allowed’,” said the Board of Film Censors.
LGBT rights in Singapore is, like in many other parts of the world, a controversial political issue. Singapore continues to retain S377A, and parliamentarians have shown little motivation to repeal the anti-gay law. Until that’s changed, it seems unlikely that things like the film classification guidelines will be amended to allow for more positive representation of LGBT characters in Singapore’s media.
The same goes with To Singapore, With Love; it gives voice to those who are directly opposed to the official narrative, and is highly political. In this case, the state, too, was unwilling to relinquish control.
The decision to leave Lang Tong uncut is promising. It shows artists that there is more leeway than a decade ago. But the struggle with censorship continues as long as the state chooses to continue exerting control over more controversial and politically sensitive material, instead of trusting Singaporeans to have the maturity to come to their own conclusions.
