Ottawa, August 31, 1999 – The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council (CBSC) today released its decision concerning CHCH-TV’s (Hamilton) broadcast of the theatrical film Strange Days. The viewers who complained were “extremely shocked by the content of this movie”, which some alleged “had the content of nothing short of a pornographic movie”.
The Ontario Regional Council considered the complaints under provisions of the Canadian Association of Broadcasters’ (CAB) Violence Code. The Council found that the movie contained “elements of gratuitous violence and violence against women which are not permitted by the CAB Violence Code.”
The very difficult question for this Council is to determine whether the violent scenes portrayed in Strange Days are ... so integral to the development of the plot that they do not amount to gratuitous violence. The difficulty in this case ... is that violence is one of the premises of the film itself, which is set against the backdrop of Los Angeles, a city futuristically conceived as being under siege and, as described above, “marked by a crumbling social order and scarred by crime, violence, poverty and racial conflict.” To the extent that a program has violence as its fundamental premise, the question for the Council is to determine whether that premise alone will justify any and all portrayals of violence which the creators of the program might wish to include in it. To this circular argument, the Council must answer no. If this were the case, Article 1 would be rendered devoid of substance and the Council cannot presume that this was the intention of the codifiers.
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Accepting that the Code has set limits on the depiction of violence which can be included in the televised version of a feature film, where use of the public airwaves is in question, the Council must decide what these limits are from case to case. In applying the foregoing principles to the televised version of Strange Days, the Council acknowledges that much of the considerable violence in the film is ambient, providing the evidence of the decaying and violent city of Los Angeles at the projected turning of the millennium. Some of that violence, particularly the not infrequent fights involving Lenny Nero, the film’s Playback peddler hero, is rather tongue-in-cheek. The one scene, though, which has most troubled the Council is the gruesome strangulation and rape of a woman which, in its length and graphic presentation, exceeded in the television context what may have been necessary to advance the plot. Whether the scene should have been as long (or longer) in the theatrical version is not at issue. For the television version, measured against industry codes, it is the view of the Council that it could have been edited without sacrificing any artistic integrity, and ought to have been edited in order to be long enough to make its point but not so long as to amount to violence for violence’s sake. Moreover, the matter is exacerbated by the requirement of Article 7 to the effect that “Broadcasters shall be particularly sensitive not to perpetuate the link between women in a sexual context and women as victims of violence.” That link could not be more evident than in a case such as this, where the recording of the event for sale as a thrill-seeking narcotic is its raison d’être. The length and graphic component of the scene constitute an unacceptable example of gratuitous violence against women, contrary to Article 7 of the Violence Code.
Canada’s private broadcasters have themselves created industry standards in the form of Codes on ethics, gender portrayal and television violence by which they expect the members of their profession will abide. In 1990, they also created the CBSC, which is the self-regulatory body with the responsibility of administering those professional broadcast Codes, as well as the Code dealing with journalistic practices first created by the Radio Television News Directors Association of Canada (RTNDA) in 1970. More than 430 radio and television stations and specialty services from across Canada are members of the Council.
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All CBSC decisions, Codes, links to members’ and other web sites, and related information are available on the World Wide Web at www.cbsc.ca. For more information, please contact the National Chair of the CBSC, Ron Cohen, at (###) ###-####.