Abstract
Mickybo and Me, directed by the Northern Irish Terry Loane in 2004, falls into the category of initiatory tales that reveal a society in crisis. It is a rite-of-passage film that takes place during the ‘Troubles’. The script presents two eight-year-old Protestant and Catholic boys from Belfast in the 1970s, who become and remain friends, despite bigotry and violence. Notwithstanding the progressive contemporaneity of the original scenario and its attempts to render characterizations in a nuanced way, my contention here is that the representations of the Protestant and Catholic communities, as well as the representation of the so-called innocent childhood, are rather safely stereotyped in the film. I will propose that this is perhaps most evident where the scripted language is concerned. In fact, it is clear that the dialogue in the film, an adaptation of a play by Owen McCafferty first published in 1998, has sometimes been toned down, thus rendering the stereotypification all the more simplistic in its legibility; something that is all the more marked in the French subtitles, although perhaps surprisingly less so in the dubbed version. Subtitling and dubbing films are very difficult tasks and are subject to certain constraints; with general concessions, namely, that a line of subtitles should not exceed 32 alphabetical characters for legibility on a television screen and that they should not be sustained for more than four or five seconds (Bellos, 2012: 149). Where dubbing is concerned, the synchronization of the words spoken by the indigenous actors and the lip movements of the original performers add significantly to this difficulty. Of course, these technical requirements determine the choice of words, but I would like to foreground in this chapter how the language used is also crucially influenced by the target culture.
Keywords
- International Audience
- Target Culture
- Progressive Contemporaneity
- Catholic Community
- Alphabetical Character
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2015 Brigitte Bastiat
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Bastiat, B. (2015). Mickybo and Me: A Cinematographic Adaptation for an International Audience. In: Monahan, B. (eds) Ireland and Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137496362_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137496362_13
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-56410-1
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-49636-2
eBook Packages: Palgrave Media & Culture CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)