Monday, April 30, 2012

Voting with Your Wallet


“Vote with your wallet” is a common free market refrain. Allegedly you’ll let the company know you support a product by paying for it. If you dislike Wal-Mart’s treatment of employees and engagements with sweatshops, you don’t buy anything there. And if you like that organic grocery on the corner, then you buy everything you can there in encouragement. There’s are flourishing e-communities of consumers who only buy self-published indy books for just these reasons.

But economic moralizing like this forces your message to be simple. In the last week, I’ve been wondering about the lack of nuance in “voting with your wallet,” thanks primarily to The Secret World of Arriety.

The Secret World of Arriety is a Japanese film by Hayao Miyazaki of Studio Ghibli. Miyazaki's an incredibly lauded and popular director, responsible for Spirited Away, Ponyo and Howl's Moving Castle. The Walt Disney Company bought the rights to distribute his movie in the U.S., like they do with all of his stuff. Before you grumble about the evils of Disney, recognize they paid to widely release a foreign 2D cartoon in our theatres. A wide release for any foreign film is hard; The Artist had to be a heavyweight Oscar contender just to get billionaires to consider distribution, and that was from Europe. When you compound that Arriety is an Asian movie, the chances of it otherwise showing up at the multiplex are alarmingly small.

Now let’s grumble about Disney. They removed the original Japanese voice track from The Secret World of Arriety, and recorded a fresh lip-synched English voice track. This is typically called “dubbing,” and is the alternative to subtitling a film. U.S. audiences notoriously dislike reading subtitles while watching a movie and are more likely to turn out in larger numbers if it’s dubbed instead of subbed.

Purists, particularly the kind of film fan who wants to experience something closest to the director’s original intent, were naturally unhappy with the change. Now all those voices Studio Ghibli had honed and coached were out in favor of Tobe McGuire and Amy Poehler. Instantly you got people buying foreign DVD’s, torrenting subtitled copies, and the argument, “Vote with your wallet.” In this case, that meant not paying for a movie that was presented in such a form.

But it’s not so easy to vote with my wallet here. Refusing to paying to see this movie does not send the message that I dislike dubbing. It’s a lost ticket sale on a foreign film, so the message they get is, “Another white guy won’t pay for foreign films. Let’s do Transformers 4.”

There’s no nuance in this protest. There is only the money a corporation can make off distributing movies I deeply wish would flourish in American markets. Friends, what do you do here?

9 comments:

  1. Go see the movie, then send a photocopy of your ticket stub to Disney, along with a letter that says you will buy the subtitled Japanese version DVD from Disney and encourage others to do the same on your wildly popular blog.

    Express regret that they did not release the movie in any markets as a subtitled version, and express hope that the next Gibli movie will be so released. Hint that your wildly popular blog would be promotionally inclined, were they to do so.

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    1. Love the flattery about this wildly popular blog! Now what effect do you think such a letter would have? The typical appeal of "voting with your wallet" is that, in aggregate, it shifts what companies do. Unless I had such a campaign repeating this action, I don't imagine it would effect much, though the same goes for any individual wallet-vote.

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  2. You make some excellent points. As always, the trouble with fitting a thought onto a bumper sticker is that it encourages thinking only small thoughts.

    In general, I'm one of those lazy American gits :-) who prefer dub to sub… although I would also argue that certain scenes would be enhanced by the use of sub-titles. Avatar did it right, for example. Beyond the economic issues, the dub vs. sub argument is also oversimplified!

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    1. Presenting foreign works is different to me than domestic. Avatar was something we made and incorporated non-English language in. I don't actually recall how it was implemented, though, beyond the standard implementation of non-English in English-speaking film. How was it unusual?

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  3. Dub instead of sub [shudder /] Can't remember the last time I saw a film dubbed. Oh wait, I do. Howl's Moving Castle. Hmmmm....

    My problem with "vote with your wallet" (which your post also mentions) is that it assumes the option I want to pay for is even available. Instead, it often isn't, which means I either do without or do a DIY version -- neither of which get the message across to the market either.

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    1. I thought the dub on Howl's Moving Castle was pretty good, actually. Disney works hard on dubbed screenplays and getting competent voice actors. I actually saw Arrietty, and wasn't surprised the voice acting was perfectly good. The girl playing Arrietty, and whoever played her dad, were both spot-on for presenting those personalities to an American audience.

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  4. Move to Australia.
    On free to air TV we have a station which regularly plays foreign films with subtitles. They never play a blockbuster.
    They even have people of all different colours, with names I can't pronounce, reading our national news in accents I rarely hear.
    Plus we have a much better health care system than you guys.

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    1. "Move to Australia." I had not considered this as a viable response before to a disappointing movie industry...

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  5. Judge Whisky has a point. The television station in question has been offering these delights for many years. Some of their newsreaders have cult followings now. I really love the different perspectives I get this way - though I sometimes wonder who does the sub-titling and whether their cultural prejudices are putting a new slant on the production.

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