This ambitious British documentary takes an unusual and refined look at the most recent and controversial cases of censorship in the United States. A number of senators are seen on their crusade against ‘state-financed’ pornography and blasphemy. One of them is the notorious Jesse Helms.îMotivation to make Damned in the USA was the increasing tendency shown by fundamentalist christian lobbies in America to prosecute ‘obscene art’, in particular the provocative photographs by the recently-deceased photographer Robert Mapplethorpe depicting male genitalia and work by Andres Serrano, including his ‘Piss Christ’. The Reverend Don Wildmon: ‘I’m not a great art connoisseur but I’ve seen Michelangelo’s David. It’s a nude. But if you’re going to say a photo of one man urinating in another’s mouth is equal to David, then I say you’re sick.’ William Stevenson (Variety) also describes how sensitive the issue is in the United States: ‘Ironically, these images may hurt the film’s theatrical prospects and may have to be cut for US TV.’Other examples of censorship which we get to see in Damned in the USA are for instance the texts of the rap songs by 2 Live Crew and Madonna’s music video Like a Prayer. Live fragments are used from the show of the stand-up comic Jimmy Tingle, whose sketch about censorship puts the subjects in the film nicely into perspective.The documentary’s power of persuasion is increased by the fact that Paul Yule allows proponents and opponents to speak without wanting to be purely polemical. Damned in the USA is part of a series of programmes from Channel 4, entitled ‘Banned Series’.
