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 August 1, 2005
Getting the [Bleep] Out I can’t remember when I first heard about Thomas Bowdler, but his name and the verb it spawned, bowdlerize, were always spoken with scorn. Bowdler was a medical doctor born in the mid-1700s who turned to literary pursuits later in life. He is most famous for producing a ten-volume edition of Shakespeare’s plays, and another of Edward Gibbons’ The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. In both cases, "those words and expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family." Bowdler’s censoring often rendered Shakespeare’s plots incomprehensible; although Bowdler’s work was praised in some quarters at the time, it has mostly been regarded since then as literary vandalism. Chambers’ Biographical Dictionary says, "bowdlerizing has become a synonym for prudish expurgation."Dr. Bowdler came to mind recently when I received a letter from a US reader who says that he loves watching movies on DVD but is often offended by the language used. He wondered if there might be a device that would remove the offending material. From my perch in Canada, where people tend to be somewhat more tolerant of such things (HBO’s The Sopranos runs uncut on network TV, for instance), I thought this an unlikely prospect, and wrote to say so. My editors were quick to point out, however, that this was not the preposterous notion I first thought, and that something very much like what this man wanted now exists. I realize that several outfits sell edited versions of DVDs, and that Hollywood is trying to put them out of business. I have little knowledge of the intricacies of American copyright law, but it seems that the spirit of it is violated if someone not only makes an unauthorized copy of something like a movie, but changes it as well. But the new technology, from companies such as ClearPlay, doesn’t do that. Instead, they market software that contains codes for almost 1500 movies on DVD; you can download it from the Internet or they’ll send you a disc by mail. Updates will be forthcoming to cover later films. The software contains time codes for what the company considers offensive material -- sex, violence, drugs -- and a suitably enabled player will mute or skip over it. The DVD itself is not affected, so someone who is not bothered by the language can turn the system off. My first reaction was that the effect was exactly the same as with an edited disc: material included by the director as part of the artistic process was deleted. I’ve since changed my mind. I’ve never really bought the argument that the creator of an artistic work had an absolute right to dictate how a buyer uses it (as long as he doesn’t sell it). The old notion that, say, because a record producer made decisions based on the speakers he used to monitor the recording as it was made, the listener must have speakers that sound the same in order to hear the record correctly, never held much water with me. Ditto the idea that movies must always be watched in their original aspect ratio (a real pain sometimes, in the days of small-screen TVs). So who’s to say that a viewer can’t simply fast-forward past something he doesn’t want to see, or mute something he doesn’t want to hear? If there’s a system that accomplishes that automatically, there should be no objection. I do have a bit of a struggle with the notion that someone else is making those value judgments. But then, I’m unlikely to be a customer for such services anyway. …Ian G. Masters
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