The United States of America is not at all an isolated country with a third rate language. Therefore, all minor errors and misunderstandings our media create do matter elsewhere in the globe. They matter because we are ahead in many important fields. Our cultural media, especially movies and television, are known in every corner of the planet. But they are also fun house mirrors, which, in most of the cases, project an artistically distorted image of us. We take it for what it is; but people abroad tend to take it literally. Let’s take a peek.
“Who says we don’t watch what we do,” some might say. He may even add “Not only do we have plenty of freedom, but also a critic under every stone.” That may be right. But are we aware of our clichés, conceptual errors, and things like that?
TV and movie producers and directors, for instance, while shooting a scene, go through excruciating extremes to make sure that all props are right. They also watch that nothing accidentally appears out of sequence. However, few waste time to check for ethnic, language or geographic errors. In fact, ethnic slurs are actually the twilight zone of the art and entertainment industry. Ethnic slurs along with all kinds of clichés creep, crawl and reproduce in a fertile environment.
In all fairness, we must point out that this traditional carelessness is noticeably decreasing nowadays. Perhaps it is the result of a more sophisticated attitude of the U.S. audience; perhaps, it is the result of an increased refinement acquired by today’s more knowledgeable traveling Americans. (American tourists are not viewed as peasants any longer, as they were in a recent past.)
Lately, an increasing number of films and TV programs use subtitles in the scenes in which people talk other languages. This adds realism to the work. In the past, as I had already stated, the convention was to use dumb phony accents to signify that the performers were talking other language (Remember the phrase “Say it with an accent, Ethel, you’re speaking Spanish...” — in the I Love Lucy, hacienda/British play episode).
Since we love to criticize — sometimes viciously — nobody pays attention to the fact that American TV is constantly grilled by your everyday American critic. In fact, we tend to be too harsh on television. I hear people from other countries saying: “You don’t know what you have.” Maybe we do. Maybe we don’t.
We often hear phrases from our fellow Americans like “There’s nothing to watch on television tonight.” In reality, we have more choices than anybody else in the world. Compared to ours, European television stinks (maybe Italy, Spain and England excepted — maybe).
Save a few good classics, European programs are so boring! It is no surprise to me that they go wild for soap operas like Dynasty or Dallas. They badly need USA imports, which may have other defects, but being boring is not one of them. Boring programs don’t have a chance to survive in our country — dumb programs, maybe, boring, never.
As importation of American programs in Europe and other places in the world increases, so does our responsibility. If the producers of exportable programs show no interest in excelling professionally, they will contribute to export a deplorable image of the USA.
