While Scram continues to gain international recognitions as a leading film in the new age of cinema, controversy has erupted over the portrayal of the Vietnam War. This article looks at the various arguments about the controversy, and whether or not the film is as shocking as some claim.

"Packed in more of a message than Oliver Stone's Born on the Fourth of July and Platoon put together"

That was the assessment of leading Psychologist Professor Dumsign. He has noted a marked increase of Vietnam flashbacks in veterans as a result of the seemingly surreal (Dumsign assures us that there is no surrealism in the acting) flashbacks {flashforwards?} of Joseph Halavazis' character in the Scram film. Says film critic David Stratton:

"What makes the performance so truly remarkable is that he doesn't even have the army greens on. He transcends the entire absurdity of the performers and environment around him, and brings into stunning reality a filmic vision grander than any hullicination Francis Ford Coppolla can ever have, even after being, so to speak, off his face with drugs."

Professor Dumsign has also noted that the performance has seen an increase in his Vietnam patients desperately seeking to hide their inner desires they had supressed psychologically:

"two or three of them have already spoken of being unable to control themselves at the meat section at the local supermarket. Others have even tried to nibble the ear lobes off their wives while engaging in sexual activity. Even one heavy weight ex boxing champion patient of mine, who mind you, didn't even go to Vietnam, reckons that his father's spirit came into him while he was in the boxing ring. The underlying canibalistic overtones in the film have never ever been fully explored in previous films because even a director like Oliver Stone is unwilling to confront the true horrors and consequences of war. I mean, these vets were fighting on rations that tasted like shit. When they bombed a village, the smell of char grilled corpses must have really been tempting. When Joseph Halavazis says "I can smell him", it is perhaps the most haunting piece of dialogue and imagery put to film."

Indeed, this is the exact feeling that the Australian Film Classification Board had when it gave it an RA rating, stating that it contained "graphic depictions of pseudo cannibalistic fantasy which implies a degradation of those who fought in the Vietnam War." Thus, the only way the film will ever be seen at a commercial screening will be if those offending scenes are cut. Mr Bruce Ruxton, former head of the RSL, began criticising the film as soon as the depictions contained therein became apparrent. He claimed that it was wrong to degrade Vietnam veterans as "cannibals" when they had fought bravely and against adversity. In an official statement to the press, he had this to say about the film:

"I think what he says in the film is wrong, and to say our vets were cannibals or could be cannibals is also wrong. From my experiences in World War Two, we had one goal in mind, only one, to fry those bastard nips. What japs we didn't finish off, Truman did."

Alan Jones also went on the rampage against them in a pre-recorded segment for channel nine's Today show:

"The disrespect shown by Joseph Bennie - who I might add, is from a country geographically close to those commo viets - in his highly unoriginal and downright defamatious short film Scram, highlights the state that our society's youths have stooped to in that not only do they engage in criminal activities by congregating in groups around shopping malls, steal handbags from defenceless old women, smash car windows of expensive BMWs, steal tissue boxes from peoples' offices and aid and abbett in the illegal importation of illicit drugs and thousands of boat people, but they also have the tenacity to harbour dark wishes against those quintessential Australians who battled their way through adversity, fought in our wars, and died a brave death in the pursuit of (transmission stopped while Jones recovers after forgetting to take a breath).... This film has rightly been banned. Finally, some sense has come from our sensors."

However, Joseph Bennie (pictured below), the film's director publicly can't understand what the controversy is all about:

"I was just trying to be funny. You know, trying to have a bit of fun and so forth"

Margaret Pomeranz, one of Australia's most respected film critics, laughed when we told her Joseph's thoughts:

"eh eh eh eh, Well, it's obvious there's much more going on than "fun" in this film. I mean, the vietnam issue is just one of the many layers in this multi-textured masterpiece. There's the whole incorporation of the cinema veritae style in a reverse-Thin Blue Line sense. I mean, the school scenes look like amateur videocamera work. It's done so finely, that he convinces us we are at a school, that it is a student making a movie with a fake documentary as its central plotline. The way he imports veritae or documentary technique into the fictional filmic vision is masterfully done, much better than Forrest Gump's pretentions. And the opening scene is chillingly Kubresque. I think even Kubrick would be happy with the result. The intensity of the opening scene goes beyond anything we have seen on film. The miming of the killers' words in the character played by Ian Bennie are so gruesome. It's as if he's visualising his own demise, or quite possibly, imagining his own death. The whole film questions our perceptions of reality, our perceptions of memory and our understanding of the basis of human nature. I wouldn't call that 'fun' or 'funny', but I'm sure Joseph was just being humble."

That's exactly what Spielberg said when he personally asked for a screening:

"This movie has the punch of the Poltergeist, the narrative post modernism of the Scream films, the social conscience of Platoon, the historical revisionism of Birth of a Nation, etcetra. I mean, this is a major film. It certainly brings cinema into the new millenium. With my films, I try to infuse the ordinary with something extraordinary. That's why you believe ET is alive and follow his journey, why you believe the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park are real, why in Saving Private Ryan, you are actually there on the battle field. They are based in reality. Technology, or the deconstruction of technology, is at the forefront of bringing cinema to a realism that was once never imagined. And now comes this film, which employs basic technology (a camera), but in which the performances overcome yet compliment the filmic image. Where the fusion of score and narrative paint a picture quite different to what is actually on the screen. It is as close as you can get to the perfect film."

Joseph Bennie is happy to gain so much publicity, but continues to maintain that it wasn't such an intellectual film

"All I wanted to do was to make fun of Stanley Kubrick and shoot a film during school hours that would make fun of Scream and so forth"

David Strattonscoffs at such an understatement:

"Bennie is just revising the value of his own work, which is ironically, revisionistic. The scenes transcend all formative genres of cinema, they defy classification, they defy standard explanation, they warrant one viewing after the other. I think it's a national tragedy that this film has been banned, all because of the serious issue of psychological trauma and the demoralising effects that war can have on those fighting for their country. You know, John Wayne always used to downplay his assured direction and amazing cinematic style. Joseph Bennie is engaging in the same behaviour, allowing us, the critics to discover the true nature of the film."

Since Stratton's comments, and after a torrent of complaints, the decision banning the film has been overturned, but still no major theatre will pick up distribution because the RSL is threatening to urge all its members to boycott any chain that shows the film (at least if the movie was shown, we'd be able to walk into a cinema without waiting in queues for hoardes of pensioners asking for their 50 cent concession coffees). It is clearly obvious that the artistic genius that the film encompasses is second to none (with the exception of the brilliant films in the Captain Super Human Universe series, where coincidentally, similar controversies have erupted over accusations of perverse sexual undertones towards plant life, animals and sculptures). In any society, healthy criticism is always welcome, as well as a good sign of a movie that contains "pure and intense genius". When Citizen Kane came out, it too was massively boycotted because its depictions were "too close" to the reality of the situation of a media mogul at the time. Greatness always seems to attract controversy, and it seems no surprise that this film too, would attract similar reactions.