A first-hand account of Oppen­heimer and Barbie’s cen­sor­ship in Pakistan

At the out­set, it felt like the cin­e­mas of Pak­istan were just as excit­ed for Bar­ben­heimer as the local movie-goer com­mu­ni­ty. Local the­aters were offer­ing two-for-one deals – cheap­er tick­ets for one of the biggest movie events in recent mem­o­ry. The fact that they were even acknowl­edg­ing the exis­tence of the dual release of Oppen­heimer and Bar­bie felt promis­ing: if you could buy tick­ets, that had to mean you would get to see the films, right?

Cin­ema­go­ers weren’t so sure, since the local cen­sor board can be volatile. It’s usu­al­ly safe to strike any­thing that isn’t a four-quad­rant block­buster off the cal­en­dar, and even local films aren’t safe: last year, Saim Sadiq’s Joy­land, a film that won the Jury Prize at Cannes, was banned from screen­ing in the Pun­jab province. That movie, which touch­es light­ly upon queer issues, has noth­ing on the full-frontal nudi­ty and con­tro­ver­sial maps of Oppen­heimer and Bar­bie, and the prospect of both films being banned felt depress­ing­ly conceivable.

It was a pleas­ant sur­prise, then, that tick­ets for Oppen­heimer and Bar­bie went up for sale a full three days ahead of July 21. What’s more, Oppen­heimer wasn’t marked with a red 18. That implied they were screen­ing a cen­sored ver­sion cleared for exhi­bi­tion – a guar­an­tee of sorts. As we got clos­er to release, how­ev­er, my friends in Pun­jab got antsy: they’d been told that the tick­ets they’d pur­chased for Bar­bie were at risk of being refund­ed, since the cen­sor board hadn’t cleared the movie. The anvil dropped on Fri­day with the announce­ment that the Pun­jab Cen­sor Board had banned Gre­ta Gerwig’s lat­est for fea­tur­ing ​“objec­tion­able con­tent.” Ear­ly screen­ings were cut short and audi­ences were told to leave after sit­ting through half the film.

The ban, tem­po­rary only in name, is lim­it­ed to the province of Pun­jab, and it hasn’t stopped peo­ple from buy­ing tick­ets in droves through­out the rest of the coun­try. In Islam­abad (where I live), show­ings for the week­end were com­plete­ly booked, and we bare­ly got tick­ets for Sun­day. When our group arrived at the the­ater, it was swamped with peo­ple in pink (there was even a group of boys wear­ing suits with pink ties, Gen­tlem­i­n­ions-style), and we found that most of our crowd was there for the dou­ble fea­ture. The atmos­phere was electric.

Our screen­ing began at 4:30 with Bar­bie, and we tried to catch the objec­tion­able con­tent Ger­wig had snuck into the Mat­tel movie. The film was fun, and com­plete­ly uncen­sored – by its end, we were per­plexed as to why the cen­sor board had tak­en issue with a film whose clos­est aes­thet­ic ref­er­ence point is Lazy Town.

Oppen­heimer was anoth­er sto­ry. Usu­al­ly, when the cen­sors need to prune a film, they make brutish cuts that make the omis­sion obvi­ous. The cen­sor­ship in this case is dif­fer­ent. It’s an inter­na­tion­al hatch­et job, and the cen­sors appear to have appre­ci­at­ed the painstak­ing care Christo­pher Nolan and edi­tor Jen­nifer Lame put into the edit. That’s why, instead of upset­ting the rhythm, they decid­ed to try their hand at post-production.

This dis­tracts most dur­ing the two sex scenes. The cen­sors have zoomed into the back­ground of cer­tain close­up shots, while wide shots have their nudi­ty con­cealed behind fuzzy black columns. A friend of mine thought the first such col­umn was a wall in the fore­ground, mis­tak­ing it for a strange aes­thet­ic deci­sion on Nolan’s part. To me, the columns look more like the mono­liths from 2001: A Space Odyssey (which Bar­bie does such a great job of spoofing).

The most tech­ni­cal­ly inno­v­a­tive cen­sor­ship occurs in the scene where Mur­phy and Pugh are seat­ed oppo­site one anoth­er in the nude. The cen­sored ver­sion drapes Pugh in a pitch-black shift dress that looks like it was applied by a gift­ed artist work­ing in MS Paint. The inclu­sions obvi­ous­ly rob the scenes of their inti­ma­cy, but they at least allow them to remain leg­i­ble. I was par­tial­ly grate­ful for the cuts – obtru­sive as they were, they had allowed me to see the film on the big screen (albeit while seat­ed next to a 10-year-old who asked his par­ents if the bomb had gone off dur­ing the silent part of the Trin­i­ty Test sequence).

Barbie’s ban­ning feels more dis­turb­ing, since our cen­sor board doesn’t usu­al­ly ban films with mes­sag­ing as innocu­ous as Gerwig’s. It sets a dan­ger­ous prece­dent, even though it’s become clear that the cen­sors aren’t near­ly as influ­en­tial as they think they are. Ban­ning a film these days is the same as giv­ing it free pub­lic­i­ty for the home video release, and even now hard­core Bar­bie-heads have been embark­ing on cross-province road trips for the movie. I’m sure a few of them must’ve been present dur­ing the screen­ing I attend­ed on Sunday.

I’m glad for them, since the phe­nom­e­non has been a joy, and not just because the films are excel­lent. Cin­e­ma cul­ture in Pak­istan has been in the death throes for ages, and it’s been amaz­ing to see peo­ple come togeth­er in their appre­ci­a­tion of the medi­um. Case in point: my audi­ence broke into applause as the cred­its for Bar­bie rolled. I saw the boys in suits get up, and thought they were going to give the film a stand­ing ova­tion. But no; they were chang­ing their pink ties to black ones. And nobody bat­ted an eyelid.