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It makes sense for movies shown on airplanes to be appropriate for most if not all ages. That limits the selection, needless to say. On my flight home from France, I chose Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, of which none of the reviews had reported any sexual component or aspect of violence that would warrant cutting, and I wanted a grown-up film that hadn’t been butchered.
But wait — language. At the beginning of the film, there’s the announcement that it has been modified from the original, “edited for content.” Grown-up movies are laced with spoken obscenities, what was once called blasphemy, and insulting terms. Not all of these would earn the film an R rating, but once you start substituting terms in order to get a showing on a long-distance flight, you might as well go the distance, so to speak.
You hear the substitution within the first few minutes of the movie, when Woody Harrelson explodes with “Oh, fudge!” From that line onward, fudge and flip and freak get plenty of play, as do shoot, gosh, and darn. Several things about these substitutions, which ran through the dialogue, struck me. One was that all the substituted lines were in the actors’ voices. So now I know a little secret about the movie industry. Presumably sometime before the film completely wraps up, these actors have to record versions of their lines — and sometimes it seemed as if these changes applied to more than half the spoken dialogue — with words very few adults in their situations would use. I can only imagine the fits of giggles into which Harrelson and his costar, Frances McDormand, were tempted to fall.
Another striking feature of the euphemisms was how inappropriate they came to feel. Not just because the characters in question would not be speaking this way, but also because the terms used as substitutes would never fit that way into the syntax of the sentence. A very few examples:
What the shoot you saying to me?
What the flip!
Do it to the motherlovers!
Give me my fudging gun.
Don’t be a witch.
Freak ‘em.
I’ll go out to dinner with you but I’m not gonna freak you,
Well, I don’t wanna fudge you either.
It’s all quite weird. Which brings me to my third observation: To understand what these people are on about, you sort of have to know the original words that have been dubbed over. When Woody Harrelson, speaking heatedly to his wife during family dinner, says, “Gosh darn motherlovers! Sorry, kids” — no kid innocent of what Harrelson’s character was supposed to be saying could understand what he’s apologizing to his kids for. Saying darn? And when Harrelson’s wife, after an afternoon of lovemaking, says to him, “You’ve got a nice car” and he responds, “I’m glad you like my car” — with no body language cueing, for instance that car is some kind of code for this couple — the innocent listener would be wondering what this has to do with an automobile. Aren’t these people married? Don’t they own their vehicles jointly?
Finally, it’s interesting to note the dubbing that eliminates not just vulgarities but blasphemies; as far as I know, you can exclaim “My God!” not just in the pages of The Chronicle but also in a PG-rated movie — but you won’t find the Lord’s name taken in vain by any of these fudging and flipping characters in Three Billboards. And when one of the local cops is accused of racism, there’s some discussion of how he ain’t allowed to say he’s Negro-torturing anymore; he has to say he’s people-of-color torturing. That he’s torturing seems damnable enough, but a certain bite goes out of the characterization when he uses an outdated term rather than what we call the n-word.
I’m not condemning any of this. While I’d like to see more emphasis on graphic violence in movie ratings, which sometimes seem fixated on obscene language and sexuality, it’s perfectly reasonable to adjust films that children may choose to watch while Mom and Dad sleep off the last day of a whirlwind vacation. Adjusting them in a more realistic way — having a character say, for instance, “I’ll go out to dinner with you, but then I’m going straight home,” isn’t practicable when the character’s lips are already moving to form a different sentence. But the distractions involved in watching and listening to the airplane-movie version of Three Billboards gave me new respect for the power and efficacy of certain expressions in their original form. Sometimes, there just isn’t a substitute for profanity.