It will be interesting to see if the media takes the bait, and if they group can profit off of it the way Madonna did with Justify My Love.

She pocketed an extra $40 million, she would never had made without the controvesey/publicity surrounding MTV banning the video.

It's been a while since someone actually expected music from MTV, and even longer since someone actually expressed that here...lamenting that they are censoring one of the few videos that they choose to play is like a coke fiend lamenting that half of his last line blew away in the middle of Hurricane Rita.

message from the director

oh and fuck off panbien thanks

this video has been about censorship from the moment i proposed the idea. you were looking at a leaked, unfinished rough cut of a video attempting to address about 40 cuts mtv had asked us to make so they'd even air the video.

the unfortunate problem mtv had with censoring the video is that there was nothing explicit in the video to take out to begin with. they were trying to censor an idea, which is really hard to do. the video is deliberately unsettling. to me it's about the end of the line of american behaviour - bad fart jokes, pornography, voyeurism, old women and their fucked up intimate relations with pets because human beings just don't cut the mustard, technology driving us away from one another by bringing us closer to one another in other more obscene ways, etc. but is there really any actual sexual content in this video? not really. christina aguilera shakes her booty with a gaffer-taped thong two inches from the camera for three minutes and that's ok, but we can't show a blurred out image of women wearing bikinis in a magazine in a wide shot for half a second, at least according to mtv, because it's disgraceful to women. what does this actually mean? is mtv up in arms about lesbians on a rooftop, or are they disturbed by how the lesbians on the rooftop are presented - as material for a man to jerk off to in the dark? by showing the end result of the pornographic chain maybe i've done something truly disturbing. i've shown what people do when they go home at night and sit in front of their computers. now that's a censorable offense!

what mtv eventually forced me to take out caused the video's narrative through-line to fall apart. it got so bad, in fact, that i took my name off the video, the first time i've ever had to do something like that. they drove what i was saying into the proverbial closet, as it were.

the censorship on this video has so many layers to it it's staggering. it began before we even started filming it, fueled by a statement made by julian in all good humor about the possibility of "full frontal nudity" being in their next video and that "mtv will never air it". that comment created a buzz storm on the internet and started the narrowing-down process of what the video was going to be allowed to be in everyone's heads. that is to say, people began to expect something that i never intended to deliver, a XXX video in a compartmentalized way that they were used to getting. but people are barfing in this video. scumbags with DV cameras are filming cheesy hookers on a roof. a woman is driven to orgasm by her dog through a ritual of scrubbing a floor with champagne so he'll finally bark at her. gay men are hooking up in bathrooms and they don't even know or care what the other person looks like. that's not sexy, it's fucked up and disturbing. for a reason! i'm holding up a mirror to the parts of our culture that are gross and tasteless. that's why the video makes you want to take a shower when you're done watching it. it's intended to have that effect.

when the video finally surfaces, people are so unsettled by it that everyone wants to censor it. RCA wants to censor the first version because they think it's too violent and won't even show it to the band. MTV wants to censor an approved version because it's so unsettling. i suggest using censors as a way of getting around the problem like "scene deleted". the band doesn't want to use censors on the censored version as it censors their own air time. to be fair, the band didn't want to use censors for another reason: they were tired of going up against mtv and losing the battle. they've been doing that for five years. fair enough, we all reasoned, at least we have our director's cut.

so much has happened since my delivery of the director's cut to the band - who fought tooth and nail for me to have it, btw - that i've actually altered my own cut in an attempt to keep up with the entire experience. i've created a "censored director's cut" for my own site and reel. it's the most artistically truthful representation of an entire process which has been so totally focused on censorship to begin with. plus having another version (i think there's like 10 now) is like figuring out a puzzle inside of a maze while being stuck inside of a looking glass. you saw the director's cut? oh... but you didn't see the real director's cut, the one with the censors on it. no, not that one, but that one... and you should have seen what the director left out! it's scandalous! what a wonderfully fitting, enigmatic end to an awfully long process of delivering a creatively and sexually neutered video: the director's vision is censored, and in being censored he ends up saying more than he ever could have with the video in any way shape or form, by censoring his own final product... with help from you!

the end has no end, indeed.

rawK!
mike p.

its not about mtv not playing music. its about censoring something that doesn't need to be censored in the first place. I don't think this video crosses the line at all, and if it does, it's already been crossed in all the crap they've played and continue to play.

B.S. This video was about publicty for the band and director, nothing more.

uh why would they need the publicity?

I'm confused. Tell me again why Batman is being censored.

Just how naive can you be?


One more point, the First Amendment doesn't cover private enterprise or business. As much as I hate MTV, they have their guidlines and are not obliged to show the vidoe if they don't want to. If a band wants to get their videos on MTV or any TV station, that band is going to have to put up with those stations guidlines. Even if those guidelines make no sense to others, it still that companies guidlines. If a band don't want to follow those guidlines, that's their right, but those stations are not required to show the video.

I believe, it has something to do with his costume fetish.


There is also the entire Boy Wonder and Batgirl issue, he has to answer to.

ok aside from mtv, tell me why the original video can't be viewed anywhere else? even on the internet. you have an answer for that? of course you do. lemme have it dude.