Censorship is in the mind

WILDE AND DARNELL. Controversial starrer.

I recall the night in 1949, when I saw “Forever Amber,” starring the lovely Linda Darnell and Cornel Wilde. The film was banned by the Catholic Church, because the film featured a scene where the pair was supposed to do what “comes naturally.”

When the lights went up after the screening, everybody’s eyes were on me—because I was the only youth in the theater!

I felt mature, because I had already seen films starring Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. I used to wonder why adults thought only they should be allowed to watch such movies! I knew that Darnell and Wilde were trying to make a baby—wasn’t that done every day? What was so scandalous about that?

Since I was accustomed to seeing adult movies, I never thought much about censorship.  I always believed that an “adult” mind would respect artists whose expression of life may differ from the average citizen’s.

Lino Brocka, Ishmael Bernal, Joonee Gamboa and Adul de Leon saw adult-themed movies and never found sex dirty. So, we fought against censorship when sex was used as the foundation for it, because I found gratuitous violence more abhorrent than sex!

Mothers

The censors then were scandalized by women’s boobs, which I saw regularly in jeepneys and buses, when mothers nursed their babies. A female writer once observed that Filipinas didn’t wear bras and panties till much later in our Americanization. Besides, what’s so scandalous about women’s breasts?

I learned a vital lesson after watching “Forever Amber”—that no one could put a dirty thought in my mind, because I saw things as they were. I always wondered why nudity in cinema was considered “wrong,” while nudes in paintings and sculptures were nothing out of the ordinary.

I likewise learned the difference between sex in cinema and literature: The more maturely you treat children, the more mature will be their reaction to adult themes and issues in cinema, literature and the arts.

Thus, when the “nonthinking” adults in the moviehouse in 1949 looked at me as though I didn’t belong there, the more adult they made me feel!