DVD censorship

[Jamie (K)]

In the department store last week I saw a type of DVD player with the brand name "Clearview".

These DVD players have a special function. They are made to censor sex, violence and obscenity out of the movies people watch. Users can download the settings for thousands of movies onto a flash drive, load them into the DVD player, and set the level of censorship they want.

Some Americans like these DVD players, because they think that American movies and TV shows have become too violent, vulgar and obscene over the past 20 years or more. They think American movies are now so bad that they can't let their children see them. Some families even limit themselves to very old movies or movies from India for this reason.

Companies that sell these DVD players, or similar censorship products, claim that much of the obscenity in movies is added as an afterthought, that when it is censored out, the viewer has no sense of having missed anything, and that sometimes the movie is better without it. I have some experience with this. There was a movie I had seen twice in the cut-down form that's shown on daytime TV, and I thought it was really good. Later on I rented the DVD so that some friends could see the movie, but this was the full version, including a lot of obscenity. It turned out that the obscenity was not integral to the story and seemed to have been added artificially. Plus, it dragged out the story, making it slow and VERY boring!

So maybe the people marketing these censorship products are right about something, but they also get sued by movie studios for tampering with their "products".

What do you think? Should people have access to products that allow them to censor material from films they watch at home?

[Torsten]

Hi Jamie,

I think that a truly great movie doesn't contain any obscenity or excessive violence so there is nothing to filter out. As for your question, yes it's probably a good idea to offer movies and devices that have a 'censorship feature' giving you control over which scenes you or your kids see. However, I could imagine that many people would want to watch the film in the original version instead of the censored one simply because forbidden fruit is sweet.
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[Alan]

Hi,

If you did this 'bowdlerising' of some of the American films I have almost seen but stopped watching because of what the BBC refers to as 'strong language' (what a quaint way to describe it!), there wouldn't really be much left to see.

Alan
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[Jamie (K)]

That's right, Alan, but there's another twist to it. A lot of American films are made in at least three versions. The "standard" one has a lot of sex and obscenity. The second version has a lot of the sex and obscenity cleaned up for American TV. There is (or was) often a third version made for the European market that had more sex than the "standard" version for American release. I think, though, that as American TV and cinema get more and more obscene, this third version doesn't need to be specially made. However, I was amazed at the level of obscenity in the American movies shown on European TV, because on most US networks, even in their present degraded state, it wouldn't be tolerated.

[Ralf]

[Jamie (K)]