Straw Dogs by Simkin Stevie;

Author:Simkin, Stevie;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

Straw Dogs Unleashed

The decision to pass Straw Dogs uncut with an ‘18’certificate appears to have been formalised, finally, on 1 July 2002. 34 Reports appeared in the press the following day, including in the Guardian, which noted that, ‘The decision … follows advice from clinical psychologists who specialise in work with sex offenders, and a focus group panel’ (Travis, 2002). The release attracted a degree of press attention, including interviews with Susan George (Thomson, 2002; Campion, 2002). On 24 July 2002, a one-minute-forty-second trailer was passed uncut and granted a ‘15’certificate and on 21 September, Pearson Television International Inc. (of which Fremantle was a subsidiary) had their submission of the film passed with no cuts for home video, rated ‘18’. On 7 October, Fremantle Home Video released Straw Dogs, uncut, on both DVD and VHS videotape. The rush to meet the Christmas market meant that one or two authoring errors crept into the process – some typos in the pages of information on the DVD, and a delay before the beginning of the film caused by problems synchronising the video with a commentary track – but the DVD release otherwise did full justice to the film, and the hard work of all those involved in its production.

The apparent contradiction between allowing Straw Dogs an uncut certificate and denying Last House the same privilege was undoubtedly a further embarrassment. As I noted above, Whittam Smith had offered what had seemed to be a definitive position as recently as 1999, indicating that he believed the film would never be passed. In a radio interview in the same year, James Ferman had expressed satisfaction that, even if the boundaries had shifted since his retirement, the BBFC had nevertheless remained consistent in holding his firm line against attempts to certificate Straw Dogs. Peter Woods believes that the BBFC attempted to give their change of policy a degree of plausibility and coherence by stressing in press releases and interviews the difference between the uncut version of the film and the ‘R’-rated cut in terms of reception of the rape scene. As I have already detailed, the idea that the ambiguity of the first rape was ‘given context’ by the second rape was crucial to their justification; its inclusion mitigated against the notion of the so-called rape myth: by including the second, more violent rape, the BBFC implied, the film countered the charge that it endorsed or eroticised sexual violence. However, as Woods pointed out in a conversation with the author about the matter, the BBFC had both versions in front of them in 1999, and had chosen to reject both. In retrospect, it is hard to see the decision to certificate Straw Dogs for home video uncut after eighteen years as anything but a U-turn by the BBFC.

The story of Straw Dogs’ journey to home video in the US is much more straightforward. The ‘R’-rated version was released by CBS Fox/ABC in 1992. In September 1996, Twentieth Century-Fox released Straw Dogs on VHS in its

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