Subject
Australia's Senator Draper and the Lolita Movie (fwd)
Date
Body
From: ptudor@budfin.co.nz
http://www.smh.com.au/news/9903/11/index.html
Thursday, March 11, 1999
The new Lolita film was bound to cause a stir when it
reached our shores. Indeed, so eager have Canberra's self-styled moral
guardians been to denounce it, they have condemned the film without actually
seeing it. LAUREN MARTIN reports.</WOF>
SHE forced
herself through the novel Lolita. Many times, Trish Draper wanted to pitch
it, "just rip it up and throw it in the bin" to end her "traumatising
experience". But she had to read it, says the South Australian MP, to have
credibility in her personal battle to have the new film version banned - a
crusade in which she has enlisted no less an authority that the Prime
Minister. Draper could have picked up the book at a local Canberra bookshop
- the Penguin Classics paperback version sells for $16.95 - or at her local
library, because it has certainly not been banned here, an irony that
escapes many. She could also have rented the video of Stanley Kubrick's
film adaptation, released in 1963 with the Nobel prize-wining author
Vladimir Nabokov's co-operation. The Kubrick video will be legally on sale
again soon, too, as Warner Brothers are set to reissue all of Kubrick's
films in July. In fact, Draper has seen the original film already,
presumably with minimal traumatisation: "I vaguely remember James Mason",
who played Humbert Humbert, the middle-aged man who falls for his teenage
stepdaughter and kills her mother in the process of seducing the child.
Draper has not seen the new film, starring Jeremy Irons and directed by
Adrian Lyne, the man who brought you such exploitative efforts as 9 1/2
Weeks, Fatal Attraction and Indecent Proposal. Nor has Independent Senator
Brian Harradine, who is also extremely angry with the fact that the film
this week received an R18+ classification. Both, however, may have the
opportunity to accompany John Howard to an exclusive screening in the
Parliament House theatrette, expected to be arranged "shortly", according to
the distributor, Beyond Films. Howard, a recently revealed Baywatch
supporter, may as well sit in between Draper and Harradine - for their
objections to Lolita put him in a political pincer which demands he cannot
simply ignore it, though to many the issue may seem slight considering his
Government's other priorities. On one side, the moral forces on his own
backbench - who cheered "Hear, Hear!" when Draper brought the matter up at a
joint party room meeting on Tuesday, and clogged the meeting wanting to
speak about it - expect his leadership. And on the other side is the moral
agenda of Harradine - which he has carried long and through some lonely
times - whose vote the Prime Minister is keen to secure. On Harradine's
agenda may rest the future of the Howard Government's most ambitious and
crucial legislation: the proposed goods and services tax. Though the GST may
seem a long way from Lolita, and though the senator has repeatedly said he
does not trade off issues for his vote, it is hard to separate the two now,
because Harradine holds the balance of power in the Senate until the end of
July - the deadline, too, for passage of the GST. As the long-suffering
moral crusader Brian Harradine said, after discussing a litany of his
disappointments with the Government's attentiveness to such matters: "It's
about time it woke up to itself." LOLITA has had its own long struggle to
be heard - or read or viewed - but at every turn it has been aided and
abetted by the moral forces who are reviled by the story. Some may think
the recent public furore over pedophilia is what is driving opposition to a
story already available in print and, in what is said to be a slightly less
sexually explicit version, on celluloid. But, of course, neither of those
works came to prominence without controversy. Four American publishers had
already turned down Nabokov's novel, despite the fact his other books were
published in Russian, German and English. It was not the occasional French
phasing or literary allusions they objected to, but the nymphet. "She was
Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet 10 in one sock. She was
Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line.
But in my arms she was always Lolita." That sort of stuff - and then some.
But a French porn publisher, who worried it was too high-brow, took a punt
in 1955. The reaction, according to film author John Baxter, was nil. He
writes: "The few people who bought it as porn were baffled by the style and
unstimulated by the content. Lolita might have sunk without trace had a copy
not found its way to [Graham] Greene [who had already had himself sued over
a review seen to sexualise Shirley Temple]. "In December 1955, The Sunday
Times in Britain asked Greene to list his three best books of the year. He
chose Boswell on the Grand Tour, The State of France and Lolita. People
who'd never heard of the book started hunting for it. "[It came to] John
Gordon, the notoriously right-wing editor of The Sunday Express. Gordon made
Lolita a household name by describing it as 'without doubt the filthiest
book I have ever read'. Suddenly everyone was looking for a copy. By 1960,
the book was in print all over the world." Trish Draper knows she may be
walking in Gordon's footsteps here. The Adrian Lyne film has received mainly
poor reviews. "At the risk of giving it extra publicity, I had to speak
out," she says. "As a society, how low do we go? We cannot mainstream
pedophilia." Promoting the movie in Australia earlier this year, a weary
star Jeremy Irons told the Herald's Richard Jinman: "The whole subject
should be discussed sensibly, rationally, morally, kindly and generously
without the tabloid headlining, opinion-making rubbish that is spewed out by
moralists and politicians who want to jump on a bandwagon." But his further
comments would not have assuaged Draper. He expanded: "It's a subject we see
reported stupidly in most of the media where we think of it as black and
white and there is a breed of person called pedophile which we have to
protect everyone against. "It's not that [simple]. There's a pedophile in
all of us. We can all murder, all rape if pushed to the extreme. If we take
off those moral barriers that hopefully we have all been educated with. We
can all behave appallingly. There is the evil in all of us. We should
recognise that and see it for what it is." He further infuriated the
censorship critics by saying he thought teenagers could handle the film. "It
depends on the individuals, but if children are mature enough at 16, they
should be allowed to go with their parents. I think even younger actually,
because children grow up so quickly now. I would have thought 14 with their
parents. This is a subject they will be faced with." Ironically, the film
received an R certificate in the United States. Since Lyne agreed to cut two
sex scenes, you would not even need to be 17 to see Lolita - if it were
screened in theatres. But distributors still won't touch it. Says
Harradine: "I must confess that I rarely say this if I haven't actually seen
the films, but I think I've read enough about this film to see that it
should not be granted classification - that is, it shouldn't be able to be
seen by 18-year-olds." HARRADINE blames, first, the recently appointed
chief censor, Kathryn Paterson, and second, the Attorney-General Daryl
Williams who appointed her over the objections of "many" including Harradine
himself, and finally, the Prime Minister. "They've created a rod for their
own back and everyone else's," he says wearily. The Tasmanian Catholic is
scathing, in his soft-spoken way, about Paterson. She was born south of
Sydney, obtained a psychology degree, worked at the national Office of Film
and Literature Classification and in the academy. She then became chief
censor in New Zealand, where she was largely uncontroversial. Paterson last
night would say only that "the board made its decision in accordance with
the legislation ... weighing all the issues very seriously". Harradine
objects to Paterson's education in the "incestuous" censorship system.
"She's part of the set, part of the push," he laments. "Look at who she got
as a panel of experts to help her in respect of this," he cries, reading her
press release announcing the Lolita R18+ decision. Experts included
representatives from the Australian Institute of Criminology and the NSW
Child Protection Enforcement Agency, an academic researcher and a clinical
practitioner in the area of child sexual abuse. "Well, blow me down, where
were the ordinary people? Where were the ordinary people?" Harradine repeats
for effect. "She's got her feet off the ground, she wouldn't ... she just
doesn't understand. And this is the person appointed by none other than
Williams." The Attorney-General was a voice of caution against a tide of
hysteria in the party room, some of those present report - which is
precisely the reason he, too, earns special ire from Harradine. Draper's
case was also boosted yesterday when the West Australian Government moved
against a sadomasochistic documentary set to be screened at a film festival.
It has been screened before in Australia, leading to the inevitable
question: how far can censorship go in the political climate? After the
Port Arthur massacre, which many sought to blame simply on the killer's
response to violent movies, a new check on the censors was introduced. The
Government set up community panels of Harradine's "ordinary people" to
review decisions of the OFLC. The panels, however, found decisions to be
spot-on, even occasionally too restrictive. The hope of some MPs, including
censorship campaigner Senator Julian McGauran, rests in a restacked Review
Board, which now has a children's television expert, Barbara Biggins, as
chair. But the real hope for the moral members, at least until June, is not
the Classification Review Board, but the office of Senator Brian Harradine.
Paul Tudor Ph 64 9 3587035
Information Manager Fx 64 9 3582055
Buddle Findlay Email ptudor@budfin.co.nz
Level 13, 191-201 Queen St
P O Box 1433, Auckland
New Zealand "If you build it, he will come!"
http://www.smh.com.au/news/9903/11/index.html
Thursday, March 11, 1999
The new Lolita film was bound to cause a stir when it
reached our shores. Indeed, so eager have Canberra's self-styled moral
guardians been to denounce it, they have condemned the film without actually
seeing it. LAUREN MARTIN reports.</WOF>
SHE forced
herself through the novel Lolita. Many times, Trish Draper wanted to pitch
it, "just rip it up and throw it in the bin" to end her "traumatising
experience". But she had to read it, says the South Australian MP, to have
credibility in her personal battle to have the new film version banned - a
crusade in which she has enlisted no less an authority that the Prime
Minister. Draper could have picked up the book at a local Canberra bookshop
- the Penguin Classics paperback version sells for $16.95 - or at her local
library, because it has certainly not been banned here, an irony that
escapes many. She could also have rented the video of Stanley Kubrick's
film adaptation, released in 1963 with the Nobel prize-wining author
Vladimir Nabokov's co-operation. The Kubrick video will be legally on sale
again soon, too, as Warner Brothers are set to reissue all of Kubrick's
films in July. In fact, Draper has seen the original film already,
presumably with minimal traumatisation: "I vaguely remember James Mason",
who played Humbert Humbert, the middle-aged man who falls for his teenage
stepdaughter and kills her mother in the process of seducing the child.
Draper has not seen the new film, starring Jeremy Irons and directed by
Adrian Lyne, the man who brought you such exploitative efforts as 9 1/2
Weeks, Fatal Attraction and Indecent Proposal. Nor has Independent Senator
Brian Harradine, who is also extremely angry with the fact that the film
this week received an R18+ classification. Both, however, may have the
opportunity to accompany John Howard to an exclusive screening in the
Parliament House theatrette, expected to be arranged "shortly", according to
the distributor, Beyond Films. Howard, a recently revealed Baywatch
supporter, may as well sit in between Draper and Harradine - for their
objections to Lolita put him in a political pincer which demands he cannot
simply ignore it, though to many the issue may seem slight considering his
Government's other priorities. On one side, the moral forces on his own
backbench - who cheered "Hear, Hear!" when Draper brought the matter up at a
joint party room meeting on Tuesday, and clogged the meeting wanting to
speak about it - expect his leadership. And on the other side is the moral
agenda of Harradine - which he has carried long and through some lonely
times - whose vote the Prime Minister is keen to secure. On Harradine's
agenda may rest the future of the Howard Government's most ambitious and
crucial legislation: the proposed goods and services tax. Though the GST may
seem a long way from Lolita, and though the senator has repeatedly said he
does not trade off issues for his vote, it is hard to separate the two now,
because Harradine holds the balance of power in the Senate until the end of
July - the deadline, too, for passage of the GST. As the long-suffering
moral crusader Brian Harradine said, after discussing a litany of his
disappointments with the Government's attentiveness to such matters: "It's
about time it woke up to itself." LOLITA has had its own long struggle to
be heard - or read or viewed - but at every turn it has been aided and
abetted by the moral forces who are reviled by the story. Some may think
the recent public furore over pedophilia is what is driving opposition to a
story already available in print and, in what is said to be a slightly less
sexually explicit version, on celluloid. But, of course, neither of those
works came to prominence without controversy. Four American publishers had
already turned down Nabokov's novel, despite the fact his other books were
published in Russian, German and English. It was not the occasional French
phasing or literary allusions they objected to, but the nymphet. "She was
Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet 10 in one sock. She was
Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line.
But in my arms she was always Lolita." That sort of stuff - and then some.
But a French porn publisher, who worried it was too high-brow, took a punt
in 1955. The reaction, according to film author John Baxter, was nil. He
writes: "The few people who bought it as porn were baffled by the style and
unstimulated by the content. Lolita might have sunk without trace had a copy
not found its way to [Graham] Greene [who had already had himself sued over
a review seen to sexualise Shirley Temple]. "In December 1955, The Sunday
Times in Britain asked Greene to list his three best books of the year. He
chose Boswell on the Grand Tour, The State of France and Lolita. People
who'd never heard of the book started hunting for it. "[It came to] John
Gordon, the notoriously right-wing editor of The Sunday Express. Gordon made
Lolita a household name by describing it as 'without doubt the filthiest
book I have ever read'. Suddenly everyone was looking for a copy. By 1960,
the book was in print all over the world." Trish Draper knows she may be
walking in Gordon's footsteps here. The Adrian Lyne film has received mainly
poor reviews. "At the risk of giving it extra publicity, I had to speak
out," she says. "As a society, how low do we go? We cannot mainstream
pedophilia." Promoting the movie in Australia earlier this year, a weary
star Jeremy Irons told the Herald's Richard Jinman: "The whole subject
should be discussed sensibly, rationally, morally, kindly and generously
without the tabloid headlining, opinion-making rubbish that is spewed out by
moralists and politicians who want to jump on a bandwagon." But his further
comments would not have assuaged Draper. He expanded: "It's a subject we see
reported stupidly in most of the media where we think of it as black and
white and there is a breed of person called pedophile which we have to
protect everyone against. "It's not that [simple]. There's a pedophile in
all of us. We can all murder, all rape if pushed to the extreme. If we take
off those moral barriers that hopefully we have all been educated with. We
can all behave appallingly. There is the evil in all of us. We should
recognise that and see it for what it is." He further infuriated the
censorship critics by saying he thought teenagers could handle the film. "It
depends on the individuals, but if children are mature enough at 16, they
should be allowed to go with their parents. I think even younger actually,
because children grow up so quickly now. I would have thought 14 with their
parents. This is a subject they will be faced with." Ironically, the film
received an R certificate in the United States. Since Lyne agreed to cut two
sex scenes, you would not even need to be 17 to see Lolita - if it were
screened in theatres. But distributors still won't touch it. Says
Harradine: "I must confess that I rarely say this if I haven't actually seen
the films, but I think I've read enough about this film to see that it
should not be granted classification - that is, it shouldn't be able to be
seen by 18-year-olds." HARRADINE blames, first, the recently appointed
chief censor, Kathryn Paterson, and second, the Attorney-General Daryl
Williams who appointed her over the objections of "many" including Harradine
himself, and finally, the Prime Minister. "They've created a rod for their
own back and everyone else's," he says wearily. The Tasmanian Catholic is
scathing, in his soft-spoken way, about Paterson. She was born south of
Sydney, obtained a psychology degree, worked at the national Office of Film
and Literature Classification and in the academy. She then became chief
censor in New Zealand, where she was largely uncontroversial. Paterson last
night would say only that "the board made its decision in accordance with
the legislation ... weighing all the issues very seriously". Harradine
objects to Paterson's education in the "incestuous" censorship system.
"She's part of the set, part of the push," he laments. "Look at who she got
as a panel of experts to help her in respect of this," he cries, reading her
press release announcing the Lolita R18+ decision. Experts included
representatives from the Australian Institute of Criminology and the NSW
Child Protection Enforcement Agency, an academic researcher and a clinical
practitioner in the area of child sexual abuse. "Well, blow me down, where
were the ordinary people? Where were the ordinary people?" Harradine repeats
for effect. "She's got her feet off the ground, she wouldn't ... she just
doesn't understand. And this is the person appointed by none other than
Williams." The Attorney-General was a voice of caution against a tide of
hysteria in the party room, some of those present report - which is
precisely the reason he, too, earns special ire from Harradine. Draper's
case was also boosted yesterday when the West Australian Government moved
against a sadomasochistic documentary set to be screened at a film festival.
It has been screened before in Australia, leading to the inevitable
question: how far can censorship go in the political climate? After the
Port Arthur massacre, which many sought to blame simply on the killer's
response to violent movies, a new check on the censors was introduced. The
Government set up community panels of Harradine's "ordinary people" to
review decisions of the OFLC. The panels, however, found decisions to be
spot-on, even occasionally too restrictive. The hope of some MPs, including
censorship campaigner Senator Julian McGauran, rests in a restacked Review
Board, which now has a children's television expert, Barbara Biggins, as
chair. But the real hope for the moral members, at least until June, is not
the Classification Review Board, but the office of Senator Brian Harradine.
Paul Tudor Ph 64 9 3587035
Information Manager Fx 64 9 3582055
Buddle Findlay Email ptudor@budfin.co.nz
Level 13, 191-201 Queen St
P O Box 1433, Auckland
New Zealand "If you build it, he will come!"