I was just watching the Simpsons on TV in Spanish. In this episode, Lisa has to babysit Bart and Maggie. She sends Bart to bed, and Bart gives her a Nazi salute and says, "Sieg Heil!" In Spanish, though, it's changed to "Tú mandas". There's a minor difference there. The discrepancy is obviously intentional. Therefore, they made the change either 1) as a question of good taste, which everybody who has watched more than about thirty minutes of Spanish prime time TV knows ain't the reason or 2) because there's some kind of regulation prohibiting using Nazi slogans on the air. This is funny coming from the Spaniards, who are always quick to jump and accuse the Americans of censorship, mostly because they say coño and joder on network TV but we can't say their English equivalents except on cable and in movies and, like, everywhere else.

Pedro Almodóvar is one of those quickest to yell "American censorship". This is because many of his movies have been rated NC-17 (no children under 17). So where's the censorship, Pedro? Nobody's telling you you can't make any kind of movie you want. What we're telling you is that if you want to show explicit scenes of rape, bondage, fetishism, and Victoria Abril masturbating in a bathtub, we're not gonna let the kids in. So what's the problem? America, obviously, has the right to establish an appropriate age for kids to see certain things on screen. Every country has some kind of movie classification board. Spain certainly does. And for all we care, Almodóvar can make a movie consisting entirely of transsexuals dressed up as nuns sticking dildoes up each other's butts. Just don't expect to see it down at the mall multiplex--for reasons of business, not censorship.

No, the problem is that movies rated NC-17 don't make it into the big commercial multiplex movie theaters because they can't tap into the lucrative teenage market, which is where the industry makes and loses its money. Besides, it's not like any American teenagers want to go see a bunch of transvestites camping it up, anyway; they want Scream VII. So Almodóvar movies are usually reduced to playing the art houses, where only adults go, and not many of them. This means Pedro's movies don't make him as rich as he would like them to. So he's very angry at America and accuses us of censoring him.

Interestingly enough, you could say that there's an effective censorship of American films here in Spain. See, there's some kind of law that says movie theaters have to devote a certain percentage of screen time to movies made in Europe. What this means is that the movie theater owner has to spend, say, one day in four not making any money because he has to show a deeply touching portrait of two Victorian-era lesbians in a socially judgmental mining town starring Emma Thompson, Nurse Ratchet, and some guy named either Yves or Giampiero who looks like a junkie which is filmed half in Belgian and half in Swiss. This means that he wants to fill his theater on the days when he can actually show movies people want to see and make some money, so he wants the biggest, splashiest Hollywood movies he can get. What gets left out here are American independent, art-house, and low-budget films. They never show those here except at 5 AM on Sunday morning on TV2. This is why Spaniards think all American movies are for mental retards; all the ones they ever see are, so it's hard to blame them. So, for example, the highly overrated Jim Jarmusch is just as censored in Spain as Big Gay Pedro is in the United States.