Here’s What I Don’t Get

Alright, so I was watching Braveheart on some channel or other the other day (And, yeah, I’m not the biggest fan of Gibson nor of the sort of historical revisionism that sees the Battle of Stirling Bridge being portrayed without any bridge in sight but even if it’s sappy and manipulative it’s still a nicely done movie that I happen to like). This was cable – though I can’t recall the exact station at the moment – but not a premium channel so there were ads and the like. But I don’t really mind that because I was eating so I just had the TV on in the background to give myself a little company as I so often do. But even though I was hardly paying attention every so often I would be completely taken out of the moment through some ridiculous piece of dubbing like one character turning to another and going “Well, you’re forked alright.”

Now, while there were some cuts to remove some of the more grisly moments that I can remember – like one particular character getting their arm chopped off – there was still plenty of gore. Blood splashing, characters walking around with ichor dripping off of their bodies, swords slicing into people and everything else made it on screen. I mean, you could hardly cut such things out of the movie and have much of it left at all. Yet the merest hint of an offensive word gets scrubbed out and replaced with something innocent sounding.

Putting aside that it’s extremely annoying in the extreme to have such marbled phrases as “freak you trashbag!” escape from character’s lips – I’m not at all happy that they’ve even been covered, I don’t want to create the impression that I’d like to see the people responsible for such things actually get better at it (No, I’d rather they go back to doing what I remembered from my own youth when they’d just have a few seconds worth of dead silence to spare my tender ears from words I’d already heard dozens of times by that point.). What I wonder about is just when it became okay to show what amounts to a hour long bloodbath on the screen yet one with all the swear words removed. At what point did killing someone become less objectionable than saying bad words at them?