One of the salutary effects of reading entertainment industry trade publications is that every time I get depressed about our abilities to have serious conversations about major issues in American entertainment, I get a very specific reminder of the fact that things are much, much worse elsewhere. Today’s reminder comes from India, where the Information and Broadcasting Ministry has shut down the broadcast of a movie called The Dirty Picture. While the title might suggest otherwise, this isn’t like the Scary Movie franchise (though such a thing would be pretty entertaining to watch). Instead, it’s a biopic about Indian actress Silk Smitha. And specifically, it’s about the fact that Smitha was typecast into what, by Indian standards, counts as soft-core pornography even though she garnered critical acclaim for more straightforward work. And the televised broadcast of the movie’s been shut down precisely for its exploration of themes like typecasting and the way women can get trapped in their looks:

While The Dirty Picture does not show any graphic nudity, the film had run into controversies even before its theatrical release for its bold portrayal of a struggling starlet making it big as a sex symbol. Last week, a lawyer from the central Indian town of Nagpur filed a court order seeking a ban on the film’s telecast since it “contained obscene shots.” But the High Court cleared SET to go ahead with the screening after the I&B Ministry and the Central Board of Film Certification stated that the film had been re-edited with over 50 cuts.

“Whatever is shown on TV – whether it is a film, a serial or a commercial – has to be as per the program code of the Cable Television Network Regulation Act. As per the code, films that have U/A rating can be shown on TV… Some films have adult themes and the treatment and public perception is such that even after making many cuts the film retains its mature theme,” CBFC CEO Pankaja Thakur told a newspaper defending the government’s directive to reschedule the film after 11 p.m.. But Thakur also added that the incident will force the CBFC “to look at the whole process of cutting an adult film to make it suitable to be watched by children.”

I should note that The Dirty Picture did get theatrical play, and its director, Milan Luthria, has pointed out that it’s ridiculous that an extremely edited version of the movie, which would have aired at night and with significant notices of its rating, can live in theaters but is barred from broadcast. It’s a reminder that what counts as brave and what counts as difficult discussions aren’t the same everywhere. We take for granted a lot of what we can depict and what we can discuss.

The American Library Association’s annual count of the books that people most frequently tried to get removed from school libraries and classrooms is out, and of 326 reported challenges, these were the books that raised hackles most frequently:

1)ttyl; ttfn; l8r, g8r (series), by Lauren Myracle
Offensive language; religious viewpoint; sexually explicit; unsuited to age group

2) The Color of Earth (series), by Kim Dong Hwa

3)The Hunger Games trilogy, by Suzanne Collins

4)My Mom’s Having A Baby! A Kid’s Month-by-Month Guide to Pregnancy, by Dori Hillestad Butler

5)The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie

6)Alice (series), by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

7)Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley

8)What My Mother Doesn’t Know, by Sonya Sones

9)Gossip Girl (series), by Cecily Von Ziegesar

10) To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee

Of course we’ve got the old favorites in there. We’ll probably know we’re a healthy, mature society when people stop calling for To Kill a Mockingbird, one of the most well-rounded, humane explorations of racism that exists, stops getting challenged. Brave New World‘s an illustration of how anxiously people can react to science fiction, in part because of discomfort it inspires about what the world might end up looking like. And calls to get Sherman Alexie out of classrooms always strike me as inspired by the same sentiments that suggest Bully might not be appropriate for teenagers—we have to protect children in fiction what other children and the world at large inflict on them in real life.

Of the more recent additions, some of the rationales for challenges are amusing. The challenges to The Hunger Games, for example, suggest that the series is “Anti-ethnic; anti-family; insensitivity; offensive language; occult/satanic; violence.” Almost all of those allegations are significant misreadings of the novel, which makes pretty clear that it would be delightful for its main characters to grow up in a world with an economy that allowed all parents to support their children without taking on extremely dangerous work, or people weren’t divided into districts that restricted their social and economic brutality. And I’d actually love to know what challengers interpreted as occult or satanist sentiments in the book, which depicts a world in which any form of religious belief is actually conspicuously absent.

I’d also suspect that Lauren Myracle’s Internet Girls series, Sonya Sones’ What My Mother Doesn’t Know (which is one of the most challenged books of the last decade) and the Gossip Girl books are challenged not just for their content, but because of what they suggest about how the Internet has changed children’s and young adult’s lives. If I were a parent, I might be anxious about the possibility that my child’s life was essentially unmonitorable, and that there was a whole frontier beyond the real world where they could get into trouble (and as someone who grew up in the beginning of that era, I know what I’m in for). Removing one source of inspiration may delay a discovery, but there’s no way to prevent it completely. Kids will poke around and get themselves in trouble online whether or not they’re inspired to start trashy gossip blogs or pick screen names that will haunt them in adulthood. Open channels of communication, whether it’s on books, or on bullying, will probably prove more effective in the long run than panics about individual books.

It is, of course, a good thing for the American movie industry that China and America have resolved their dispute over market access, and the number of American movies released in China is set to rise from 20 to 14. That’s not huge overall compared to the number of movies that come out of American studios every year, but ut Chinese moviegoers spent $2 billion at the box office last year, and that number’s supposed to rise by 20 percent this year.

There are limitations, of course—those 14 movies all have to be Imax or 3D editions of movies. So the pictures that can make it overseas are somewhat limited by what the studios are already shooting in those formats or willing to convert, and that likely means more big blockbusters rather than small but clever indies. I’m torn between wanting to see more of that money come back to American moviemakers and knowing that it’ll likely increase the profit margins on precisely the movies that don’t need the extra proof that they’re successful. Maybe I can have it both ways, and those jacked-up margins will give studios a little more permission to experiment with smart original ideas because they’ll have more of a cushion to absorb those projects if they fail.

It’s also worth a reminder that at the same time that China’s opening up its movie market, it’s banned all imported television during primetime broadcasts and issued new regulation saying that no channel can have more than a quarter of its programming be imported. Abiding by one World Trade Organization ruling doesn’t mean that China’s given up on trying to protect the growth of its domestic entertainment industry. And it doesn’t mean the regime’s about to let in a lot of entertainment that might undermine the values it’s trying to promote. If I was trying to maintain a vaguely Communist economic system, I’d be a lot more concerned about the plucky entrepreneurialism of 2 Broke Girls than the loud and goofy fantasies of the Transformers movies.

The bridge is yours.

-It makes a lot of sense that in our multi-threat environment, American talent agencies would be going after Bollywood stars.

-The weird rationales foreign countries give for banning American movies.

-Even if La Scala’s gotten better about anorexia treatment, firing someone for blowing the whistle about what the environment used to be like there seems a tad defensive.

-Lifetime takes on the Columbine massacre. I doubt this will be as scary was We Need to Talk About Kevin.

-If Wes Anderson made Batman.

In December, an Arizona judge upheld a state law that bans classes that “promote the overthrow of the United States government, promote resentment toward a race or class of people, are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group or advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.” That ruling’s already cost Tucson public schools their Mexican Studies program, and as part of that elimination, Shakespeare’s The Tempest is being removed from classrooms and sent to the district’s book depository. As nuts as it is to think that the Bard’s story of a sorcerer and his daughter could promote a rebellion in Arizona, there are a lot of other books that could fall under scrutiny if this law is allowed to stand.

1. Paradise Lost, John Milton: Sure, this is supposed to be John Milton’s repentance of his republican apostasy, but what if red-blooded American kiddies get confused by the eloquence of that wily creature Satan? That whole “Farewel Remorse: all Good to me is lost; / Evil be thou my Good” thing could cause all sorts of kerfuffles and uprisings, like those darn video games my grandson is always playing.

2. A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens: It’s a short leap from Marquis Evrémonde to Mitt Romney, and we wouldn’t want to invite that comparison, now would we? Darnay is such an avatar of the politics of envy.

3. The Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling: This one might be a squeaker. Sure, the hero advocates strongly against the anti-Muggle, Squib, and Mudblood race politics of Voldemort and his cronies. But that Potter kid is awfully disrespectful to the Minister of Magic and forms of authority in general.

5. Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card: Pre-teens plotting an overhaul of world government and resisting the efforts of the military that’s recruited them to manipulate them. Total recipe for disaster. Especially now that blogging is an actual thing that kids can do. Nuke this one. And parents, shut down your kids’ Tumblrs just to be safe.
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Father Gabriel Amorth, the former Vatican chief exorcist who’s been warning about the risk that J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels will tempt children into Satanism since 2000, is at it again, and this time he’s inveighing against both kid wizards and yoga practitioners. Per the New York Daily News:

“Practicing yoga is Satanic, it leads to evil just like reading Harry Potter,” Father Gabriele Amorth said this week. Those seemingly “innocuous” Potter books convince kids to believe in black magic, he said. “In Harry Potter the Devil acts in a crafty and covert manner, under the guise of extraordinary powers, magic spells and curses,” said Amorth. As for yoga, it leads to Hinduism and “all eastern religions are based on a false belief in reincarnation,” the 86-year-old priest said.

In an odd way, I respect the honesty of this kind of statement, even as I think it’s ludicrous and somewhat paranoid to see the Harry Potter novels as anything other than a reaffirmation of the power of Christian theology. There’s a refreshing honesty in admitting both the power of ideas, and the fact that your doctrine may have trouble competing with other worldviews. I tend to want to be in the scrum, in part because I think well-articulated progressive visions tend to have a pretty good shot at winning the battle of ideas, and because I don’t think those ideas can survive only if they don’t face competition or opposition. But I do respect people who withdraw from the things they consider temptation entirely.

The problem for folks like Amorth is that abstinence, whether from sex or from generation-defining young adult fantasy series, isn’t likely to be a particularly effective pitch. And when you can’t convince people to abstain from culture voluntarily, bans or purges from libraries like the one instituted by a Catholic priest in a Massachusetts parish school in 2007, who said he was just instituting a “spiritual peanut butter ban on Harry Potter,” like rules that are meant to avoid exposing children to possible allergens, seem likely to result even if only on a small scale. But if I were a member of the Catholic hierarchy, I look at book bans as a fallback position rather than a victory. There are only so many enclaves you can carve out that are untouched by the larger culture. And settling for enclaves at all is an acknowledgment that your ideas have a limited appeal.