posted by Charles H. Russo on Oct 30
Inspired by an afternoon MSN chat on Django Reinhardt, banjos, and country music, I jokingly recommended Deliverance, that twisted-but-classic American outdoor movie, to a colleague. Within minutes, he located the film file online and the following day, I was the proud recipient of a copy of his illegal download.
Sunday evening, saucisson, cl?mentines, and a steaming tisane in hand, we settled in for a night of tense, clandestine cinema. JB popped in the disc, and almost immediately, I began moaning and cringing. As the opening credits rolled onto the screen, the voice-over narration accompanying it followed — en fran?ais. Commanding the player to stop, I yanked the defiled disc out of the computer and looked at JB with an apologetic, but firm regard. “I can’t,” I asserted vehemently, “I just can’t.”
I cannot watch dubbed movies, in any language. It drives me insane. (Short drive, I can hear my Pop quip.) Particularly a film set in the South, a region of the United States so entrenched in its accent and colorful expressions, that the verbal idiosyncrasies are as inherent to the culture as its music. The idea of watching banjo-dueling, moonshine bootlegging hillbillies use the subjonctif, while ordering their victim squeal like a pig at gunpoint, seemed so absurd, so surreal, and so beyond my capacity to tolerate this type of manifestation of the very real fact that the soundtrack to my life is now in French, my suspension of disbelief came flailing facedown into the bottom of the rocky Appalachian canyon, much like Drew, post-pigsty.
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