From ‘ Too much slapping on TV’, 23 July 2010 ST Forum online
(Teh Joo Nah): THE Taiwanese show titled Love, currently airing on Channel 8 at 7pm daily, seems to have attracted a good following from a wide spectrum of viewers.
I have noticed a behaviour commonly seen in many Taiwanese dramas which worries me, and that is the slapping scenes – men slapping women, women slapping women, men punching men.
As more and more Taiwanese dramas are being aired on TV and on prime-time slots, what kind of message are we sending to our youngsters about such physical aggression?
In your face!
Taiwanese drama serials have turned the humble yet humiliating slap to an art form. If you notice the preview above, the camera cuts away right on cue with the earsplitting ‘Piak!’ sound effects. Chances are the actual impact experienced by the male actor is never more than a cheek nudge. Tight slaps are hardly seen as instruments of gross violence, and serve only for dramatic effect, often the exclamation mark at the end of any argument, with the ‘slappee’ left hanging his head in shame or bewilderment. Public slapping benefits neither the sender nor the receiver, and no Taiwanese melodrama will increase the rate of people slapping each other even if someone in the show gets it in every one of its 650 episodes, especially since slapping is not a novelty that our ‘youngsters’ would want to imitate, provided they even watch such trash in the first place. You can’t popularise drama without the cliche, and I would rather get a slap in the face and be done with it than to be the receiving end of a litany of furious, uncouth Hokkien. It’s more likely that our attention -span deficient kids would probably be corrupted by Angry Whopper ads instead of serials that play longer than 10 reruns of the The Little Nyonya combined.
Filed under: 2010, Violence Tagged: | Ai, local TV, Love taiwanese drama, slapping, Violence
