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Why pulled TV drama re-emerged, sans cleavage
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A popular Chinese TV drama featuring women in revealing costumes has been suddenly pulled and put back on screen again, fully purified.
The series in question, “Saga of Empress Wu Zetian,” is a semi-biographical account of the first empress in China, who reigned during the Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD).
Many suspected that the 300 million-yuan (US$48 million) series was pulled only a week after it hit the screen because many actresses wear revealing costumes, which probably irked the state broadcast watchdog.
In the original version, most actresses, be they concubines or court maids, are attired in low-cut, tight-fitting costumes that invariably reveal a cleavage.
When the series resumed broadcasting recently, many were stunned to find it disfigured, to the extent that most scenes showing women from the neck down have been cut. All one sees is close-ups of the characters’ faces as they speak.
Many rightly point to the fact that the Tang Dynasty was an era when low-cut attire was a popular and acceptable dress code for women. So it is not historically inaccurate, or raunchy, to portray women from that period as buxom sexpots.
Our TV landscape indeed needs to be cleansed of obscenity, and some criticisms of censorship may have gone too far to be justified, but however well-meaning censors are in purging the series of supposedly risque content, the manner in which they went about doing this is somehow arbitrary.
Internet users have posted computer-generated screenshots in an apparent mockery of the blunt deletions. In one particularly racy screenshot, the emperor is seen popping his face where the empress’ bosom once was.
Such exercises in what is popularly known as e gao, or a spoofing culture, may be harsh and unfair to the censors, who feel they have just edited out stuff undesirable for the young and innocent.
But a more plausible approach than mere cutting and cleansing is to introduce a rating system, to shield our children from unseemly sight intended for adults only, as the Liaoning Daily, a Party newspaper, argued on Tuesday.
A side issue is, exactly how much cleavage is widely acceptable on Chinese TV? How tolerant should censors be of supposedly “erotic” scenes with which the audience has grown comfortable? Are Tang Dynasty women more open than modern Western women?
In the case of the “Saga of Empress Wu Zetian,” if the state watchdog decided that historical female characters had revealed too much cleavage, it should not have allowed the series to be aired in the first place.
Any sensible move to make our TV screens cleaner and smut-free is commendable, provided that it goes beyond the sometimes mindless deleting and censoring work.
A line needs to be drawn. Any film or soap that crosses the line should be banned outright, instead of being aired and hastily called off and then relaunched in a barely recognizable form.
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