The Emmys are a time of high emotions for everyone involved – although mainly those emotions include tiredness, irritability and suicide-inducing tedium – so who can blame Sally Field for getting excited at this weekend's Emmys?
You see, Sally Field made the night's obligatory anti-war speech at this weekend's Emmy awards after winning the Emmy for Lead Actress In A Drama Series for Brothers And Sisters. However, part of Sally Field's speech was bleeped and there's now a growing controversy surrounding the reasons why. We think we've nailed it down to four options: 1) The Emmys bleeped Sally Field for saying 'goddamn', 2) The Emmys bleeped Sally Field for expressing an anti-war sentiment, 3) The Emmys bleeped Sally Field because of her crackpot ideas on motherhood or 4) The Emmy bleeped Sally Fields for doing something other than furiously apologising to Edie Falco for somehow winning the award over her.
Censorship's a knotty issue, isn't it? On the one hand a person should be able to freely express their ideas and opinions without fear of being persecuted, but on the other hand most people are stupid wrong idiots and listening to their piggish ill-considered opinion about anything just makes us want to hurl ourselves down the nearest elevator shaft. So, you know, there's a case for both sides.
But ever since Janet Jackson flopped out a nork during the Super Bowl, censorship is becoming more and more of an issue – whether it's Eddie Vedder's lameish George Bush insult being cut from Lollapolooza or Starbucks refusing to sell Bruce Springsteen CDs because they contain songs about Bruce Springsteen spooging up a whore's bum – and now The Emmys has been hit with a number of censorship controversies, too. Although yesterday the big news was about The Sopranos winning some Emmys, today everyone is asking why Sally Field couldn't shout the word "goddamn" at the top of her lungs like some kind of mad-eyed Biblical heretic who looks a bit like Forrest Gump's mother. Reuters reports:
Three instances of frank language during the telecast caused the network to cover itself, including a four-second delay triggered by Field's usage of the epithet "goddamn" as she accepted the trophy for lead actress in a drama series for ABC's "Brothers & Sisters." Referring to the Iraq War, she said, "Let's face it, if the mothers ruled the world, there would be no goddamned wars in the first place."
Even though Sally Field's point isn't strictly true – although we're sure the world would be in a much better state if it was run by a gaggle of chronically tired, overstressed women who rue the day they ever gave up their independence in order to push a screaming blood-covered animal out of their body just so it can gnaw at their tit and take them for granted for 25 years and then just bugger off and leave them without ever visiting – it has raised the issue of why the Emmys censored her.
Is 'Goddamn' really enough of a swearword to warrant a bleep? Or was Sally Field censored because she was trying to express an anti-war standpoint on Fox – a station that couldn't be more pro-war if its emblem was the decapitated head of a Taliban soldier. We may never know, although the Emmys' censoring of Ray Romano's "Frasier's screwing my wife" crack is more easily explained – the censor momentarily got the characters of Everybody Loved Raymond mixed up, had a brief mental image of the old woman from it having sex and threw up, the force of the vomit holding down the bleep button for four seconds.
But surely if Sally Field was censored for her opinion, then none of us are safe and the censors could have cut The Emmys to shreds, leaving only a 15-second blip of a show in its place. Not that we have a problem with that, of course – we're just a little bummed out that they didn't.
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