How Hollywood Wear-Realism has penetrated Bollywood and OTT platforms in India!
The use of abusive words or slang has been universal in the daily conversations of human beings throughout the world, perhaps since time immemorial. However, in this article we are only interested in how those swear words have progressed into stronger and more hardened forms on celluloid and how they have conquered other very conservative forms of celluloid. This is by no means a research paper either; but interestingly, there is a lot of research on progressively hardening swear words in Hollywood movies: researchers even list movies with the maximum number of swear words used in dialogue by characters, and one finds a maximum of close to a thousand such utterances in a movie around 90 minutes long. In the early days, Western societies were also more conservative and therefore swear words were of the relatively innocent kind like ‘heck’, ‘what the hell’, ‘damn’, ‘shit’, etc. The shift towards hardened profanity involving the ‘f***’ or ‘f***’ or ‘ass’ varieties dates back to the early 1970s in Hollywood movies. Over time it progressed steadily until the early 1990s and then the progress has been exponential with almost every movie using those words liberally. It is said, or even believed, that developing countries like India lag behind any ‘progress’ in the US or the rest of the world by about two decades. So, first we examine the scenario in India.
When we were in schools, times weren’t as modern as they are today, but families were definitely more cultured than conservative, and for decent families, swearing was taboo. Whatever profanity was in circulation, it was limited to a handful of MPs and the usage was purely local slang. Most of us are shocked to hear such words. However, sometimes we would learn some very unusual local slang, and in the spirit of a new discovery by learning about a word never heard before without understanding its meaning, I once chanted it in front of my mother. My mother angrily ordered me to shut up immediately, and I instilled ‘decency’ in her, again.
In the college days, some outside influences from other parts of the country, mostly from the North Side, gave new and stronger abusive lingo that invariably involved the mother or sister. In the course of higher education the words learned increased substantially, slowly graduating to ‘f’ or ‘a’ types in the 1980s, which is corroborated by the fact mentioned above regarding Hollywood movies that started the initiative in the 1970s. Of course, this does not mean that the phenomenon of word use is a growing function of higher education. However, we can confidently say that this has a lot to do with modernity, urbanization and frequent international film festivals which in turn means more “exposure” to Hollywood and other “liberally realistic” films from other countries.
From the Golden Age of Bollywood or Hindi cinema of the 1950s and 1960s to the technically sound movies of today, the mainstream films thus far are mostly free of hardened or modern profanity, limited only to relatively innocent local abuse, thanks to their “family entertainment” goal for a more robust trade. Only a handful of movies that claimed to be different in terms of themes, plots, or “pure realism” used those harsh words, albeit selectively enough, so as not to offend censor board members too much. Most of the filmmakers noted the use of hardened swear words in the daily conversations of the particularly modern ‘progressive’ young population, but still didn’t go ahead with a liberal dose for fear of the board of censorship where members still leaned towards decency or conservatism, of course, becoming more and more tolerant. Major TV series in India have, of course, been totally free of specific profanity, again thanks to the perception of “family”. Of course, we are not talking about sexual content or vulgarity in any movie or national or regional series.
Hollywood movies with the increasing exposure of youth in a modern digital India have managed to penetrate Over The Top (OTT) series/movie production and broadcasting in a brutal way, because there were no censors or regulatory authorities for these productions until recently when the Indian Government became aware of this “threat” to decency. Go to any series or movie on an OTT platform these days and you’ll immediately find a ‘content tip’ starting with the ‘obscene language’ aspect among others. R- or X-rated movies that were previously restricted to youth under 18 are now available with 13+ ratings. This means that words of the ‘f’ or ‘a’ varieties are destined to engulf the country soon or have already done so. Almost every male or female character in OTT productions utters an ‘f’ or ‘a’ word in almost every dialogue with or without needing to. Thanks to Hollywood, this is a fashionably ‘liberal’ trend that’s all the rage right now.
But still. Why at all? Is this third class realism in humanity? Researchers say that Americans or Westerns use only about 1% of the profanity of the hardened varieties in daily life, while their movies use more than 25% in a single movie. This rule can also be fully applied to Indians regarding OTT streaming. We guess the phenomenon of a spouse addressing his or her life partner as a ‘fucking ass’ is still considered highly offensive in any household around the world. But sadly, we find such expressions in abundance in the ‘family’ scenes involving parents and even children from Hollywood movies or Indian OTT.
I’ll leave it up to you if we just need to laugh at or worry about this unique ‘realism’ creeping across the big, small and micro screens through households, households whose members are actually separated from each other by those very screens.