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 bridge is yours.

-Great background on and analysis of the decency case argued before the Supreme Court yesterday.

-For Downton Abbey fans, this piece about Virginia Woolf’s relationship with her cook is a fascinating read.

-We are, apparently, getting an Into the Woods movie.

-As usual, Caitlin Flanagan makes with the totalizing, but there is interesting stuff in her review of Blue Nights.

-Why is Hollywood suddenly so nuts for Linda Lovelace?

I don’t really think that the Linda Lovelace biopic starring Amanda Seyfriend (there are several, one has to keep track) is going to do what The Playboy Club should have and didn’t do: capture the benefits and pitfalls that the sexual revolution offered women, including the freedom to have more sex without fear of pregnancy, and the corresponding expectation that they’d be more sexually available. But I do think it sounds like it might argue the inverse of The Playboy Club‘s silly assertion that the show was going to be about women’s empowerment, and take a hard line against pornography. My guess is based mostly on the fact that the project’s cast Demi Moore to play Gloria Steinem, suggesting her 1980 Ms. Magazine piece “The Real Linda Lovelace” will be some sort of frame device for the movie.

I don’t really think that either of these perspectives really captures the tension of the period. Just because Linda Lovelace was coerced into performing in pornographic films, or because Chuck Traynor coached her on her oral sex skills doesn’t mean no woman can ever find fulfillment in the adult industry or enjoy performing oral sex. Just because the Playboy Club wasn’t a model employer doesn’t mean that no woman ever found independence by working there. There’s no question that a pornografied culture has made headway in America, but it speaks to the success of feminism that it’s made those advances by wrapping itself in the mantle of women’s liberation and independence. Neither a purely anti-porn pitch, nor a pitch that women will be most happy by making themselves sexually available and fine-tuned to men has proven entirely successful. What women wanted was more subtle and complex than any one very successful pornographic movie then, and it remains as tricky and elusive now.

Amanda Seyfried has apparently officially taken the role of Linda Lovelace in a biopic of the Deep Throat star that’s been in development for a long time and been through multiple recastings. I’ll be curious to hear what folks who work in or closer to the industry think of the casting and the project, but I’ve always found Lovelace fascinating — she was, as Daphne Merkin pointed out in her obituary, at the crux of every major debate about pornography since she helped the genre go mainstream, or close enough to it, in Deep Throat, and through her conversion and years as an anti-port crusader, and her withdrawal from a feminist movement she felt used her and into an accommodation with her past — in other words, sort of where society as a whole is today. Given the breathless and panicky debates we have about pornography, it’s worth a serious and considered look at that history in its context. The People vs. Larry Flynt is a great movie, but it’s largely from a free-speech perspective, which isn’t the only one worth considering here.

I also really like Seyfried, who’s very good at playing ingenues with more going on beneath the surface than she lets on, whether in Mean Girls or Big Love. I don’t think In Time gave her very much to do, but it proves she can put on a bit more of an edge. I hope the script is enough to do the issue and the actress justice, and to make clear the distinction between the idea that doing porn is inherently oppressive and the idea that forcing people into porn and taking their compensation from them is oppressive.