Monday, May 04, 2009

Subtitles Censorship

I was surfing channels casually yesterday and HBO was showing 'Blood Diamond', one of my favorite movies. Leonardo Di Caprio was explaining to Jennifer Connelly about how he lost his parents - the dialogue goes like this

JC: You lost both your parents.
L: That's a polite way
of putting it, yeah.
Mom was raped and shot...
...and Dad was decapitated
and hung from a hook in the barn.


The subtitles on HBO actually did not show the word 'raped' - I can't understand the reasoning behind this.. who is going to get affected if the word 'raped' was shown in the subtitle? They didn't bleep the word in the dialogue, so anyway people are going to hear it.. so why bother not showing it in the subtitle? I am wondering if there is a separate team sitting around removing all such words from the subtitles.

And how is 'raped' any more grotesque than 'decapitated and hung from a hook in the barn'?