The mad world of subtitle censors

The face on the TV screen spat, “She’s such a pissy little high school c… .” The subtitle primly excised the “pissy little” and left in the “c…”. So, it read, “She’s such a high school c… .”

A few minutes later, an actor said, “My ass got so fat.” The subtitle read, “My got so fat.”

Maybe now someone in the Censor Board or the subtitling company in Mumbai will get stood up against a wall and shot. I’m hoping it’s the Censor Board, all of it. The subtitling company for films on TV was just doing the worst it could do for the undoubtedly huge amount that it was being paid by the Censor Board to do the best it could do.

I think I know that subtitling company but we’ll leave that for another blog.

The subtitles were from Knocked Up, which I watched yesterday on TV. It’s an Indie romantic comedy starring the ineffable Katherine Heigl and the very effable Seth Rogan. Since it’s about premarital childbearing, and how you flounder into that stage of rage and making out and mix-ups and making up, it’s got to have some searing language, or language that the government considers wicked. And it did, inasmuch as the production house suits in the US would allow in a romantic bumbledom. The rest of us call such language the language of common discourse.

But the suits cater to Middle American tastes. Indian tastes are more refined, and less shatterproof, and the Indian government knows it. So, these days when I watch films on TV, I get the feeling that the government has roped in the censors to turn me aphasic. Better a viewer who can’t repeat the crassness he’s heard on TV than a viewer who internalises it all to spew it out in – horror of horrors! – public.

Why does every film have to have subtitles in English? I can understand that some foreign films – not all, by any stretch of the imagination – need translation, although, equally, 90 per cent of them lose every bit of nuance and sense in the translation. I couldn’t understand, though, why all films in English needed subtitling.

This was till someone with deep contacts in a subterranean, unspyable, dark, mossy-walled, cold and utterly intractable hole in North Block told me that the government had a Plan on how to stop films – foreign films, for Indian-language films are more, well, governable – from sullying the pure hearts and minds of our populace: Subtitle the Life Out of Miramax and MGM. And Others of the Ilk.

It’s worked. They’re succeeding in buggering with my head.

My aphasia goes like this: I watch an English film, or I watch that part of the film that my eyes can see when they are not busy reading the subtitles – which are scrambled into alphabet soup. Sometimes, I catch the actors’ lips say something and the subtitling saying something else.

Often enough, I catch the subtitles saying something that the actors entirely never intended. Films end up having parallel but asymptotic communications tracks separated by a dimensional divide. In today’s India, I’d hate to be aurally challenged and watching a movie on TV, because when the movie ended, I wouldn’t have the faintest notion of what it was all about. Contrary to living myth, not all deaf people are lip readers.

The subtitling company – here we go again – operates within very firm, knowledgeable parameters set by some hammerheaded bureaucrat: subtitles must leave margins of this width from the edge of the frame, and must be restricted to two lines. No, I don’t care if the actor is an autodidact or a motormouth with a tall-geared fifth. It is the director’s business to fall in line with this regulation.

Meanwhile, no more films on TV for me. I’m going back to buying bootleg DVDs or downloading movies using BitTorrent. This is how pirateheads grow in power. And the government hasn’t got round to subtitling cyberspace yet.