Spanish TV Censors Edit Words, but Offer An Eyeful

Provocative is not the first word that comes to mind in connection with Spanish-language television. So I was astonished to stumble onto shows on Channel 34 that were sexy, smart, shocking.

And censored!

It was a Sunday-night movie that caught my attention recently. I must warn you, though, I am about to reveal the movie’s title, complete and uncut. Parents, stop reading this column aloud to your impressionable children.

Ready? Entre Pancho Villa y una Mujer Desnuda. Translation: “Between Pancho Villa and a Naked Woman.”

Now that wasn’t so bad. This excellent Mexican production tells the tale of a modern, middle-aged couple whose relationship disintegrates against a backdrop of middle-class success and turbulent social change. The film was written and directed by women and it skewers machismo with a sharp, funny script. More about the plot in a moment.

But first, a few words from the censors. The TV version bleeped out all the emphatic profanity that makes everyday Mexican speech as arresting as smelling salts.

But I noticed the station also inexplicably deleted the innocuous word “naked” (“desnuda”) from the title. At every commercial break, viewers saw this emasculated alternative: “Between Pancho Villa and a Woman.”

A minor irritant, you might say. But stay tuned and get really hot and bothered. To fill time after the movie and before the late news, the station ran a music video by hunky vocalist Alejandro Fernandez, the gifted son of mariachi icon Vicente Fernandez.

While he pines away for some lost love, the handsome singer is pictured getting into a bathtub--totally naked. As he slumps into a melancholic crouch, he barely conceals his equipment.

I was struck by the contradictory moral standard in relation to nudity. On KMEX, apparently, you can see it but you can’t say it.

The disturbing ending of the music clip revealed an even deeper contradiction in content between the censored film and the flagrant video with its soft-porn overtones.

The dopey song has the brooding crooner burning love letters and pictures of his old girlfriend in a fireplace. In a burst of anger, he starts throwing and smashing things around the room. Then, like some psychotic Prometheus, he takes a flame from the fire and torches the house. Fade out on his eerily tranquil face while the blaze destroys his world around him.

Is that the message a pop star should be sending all those spurned men out there with their short fuses? If you can’t have her, burn the house down. The next step: take her down with you.

On the news the very next morning, I heard an account of a man in South Pasadena who expressed his passion by torching his woman’s automobile while it sat in some carport. Now that brings the heat closer to the potential victim.

I wanted a response from KMEX or its network, Univision. But I made a dozen or more calls and got bounced from L.A. to Miami without a soul to tackle the issue directly.

One thing I discovered: women are everywhere in that operation. From public relations to programming to practices and standards, a woman was at the helm. They don’t seem to like reporters, but oh, how they love Alejandro Fernandez.

The offending video caused a stir in Mexico about a year ago. But nobody here complained, the TV ladies said.

“The women loved it,” said Jose Rosario, a vice president at the singer’s label, Sony Discos. “And women are the buyers.”

Rosario doesn’t buy my concern about the impact of the clip. It’s only acting, he argues, and the incineration scene is symbolic.

“He’s destroying everything that’s related to that relationship,” Rosario explained. “He’s finishing that world.”

Funny. That was precisely Pancho Villa’s advice in the movie.

The general appears as the husband’s alter ego, visible only to him and whispering outdated advice on how to win his wife back. Every time the woman shoots down the man’s arguments, Villa takes a bullet from some off-screen feminist rifle.

When the woman walks away, Villa with his wounded pride exhorts the husband to take his gun and kill her. No choice left.

“I can’t,” says the husband, who’s just finished a book on Villa and the “Betrayed Revolution.” “Because I’m crying.”

The woman is alive and free, and Villa finally gives up the ghost. The spirit of machismo falls dead, splashing melodramatically face down into a fountain.

Water and fire. Censorship and expression. Machismo and liberation.

Just another provocative night on Spanish TV.

Agustin Gurza’s column appears Tuesday and Saturday. Readers can reach Gurza at (714) 966-7712 or [email protected]