Watching Without Language

There is only one advantage of having a poor command of the Malay language while living in Malaysia. And that is that I can gain a unique appreciation of local TV programmes.

This is especially so with the rash of Indonesian TV dramas shown on the ASTRO Aruna satellite channel here in Malaysia. My wife is addicted to them, making me something of a TV widower in our household. These shows are highly distinctive in a number of ways, and even though I don’t understand much of the dialogue, I can discern their characteristics very clearly.

Firstly, the Indon TV dramas seem to be populated with incredibly good-looking, beautifully-dressed and coiffed people who live in vast palatial mansions and have servants who call them ‘bos’ all the time. The working classes are inevitably represented as living in dark, crime-ridden shanty towns full of rapists and bandits who hijack cars and drag the poor female occupants into the nearest bush.

The poor in these dramas tend to ride around on motorbikes whereas the well-heeled drive around in luxury sedans the size of a 747. The poor wear shabby, simple clothes and seem to have darker skin than their rich counterparts. In fact, it seems that the wealthy characters in these programmes have skin the colour of fine porcelain, despite their Asian-ness. How do they do it? Is it clever use of lighting? Or is it the clever application of skin-lightening creams?

Many Indonesian dramas, like their Malaysian counterparts, are set in or around schools. And the pupils seem to look around twenty-five. My wife tells me that many of the Indonesian actors and actresses are very good at making themselves look much younger than they really are, especially when they put on a school uniform. I can believe it.

These school-based stories are full of bitchy bullying among these improbably-young porcelain-skinned girls, boys having crushes on girls, girls framing other girls for crimes they didn’t commit, girls being raped after drinking spiked cola, girls screaming at boys, boys screaming at and beating up other boys, and so on ad nauseam. And there are hardly any teachers in sight. And when they do come into the classroom the teachers are usually barely older than their pupils, and frequently shout a lot.

As a matter of fact, all of the Indonesian TV dramas seem to include an awful lot of shouting and screaming. I always know my wife is watching one of these shows because I can hear the TV from the bottom of our street. The characters rarely seem to be speaking at a normal volume – and there always seems to be some white-heated argument going on involving a (usually mustachioed) man screaming at a woman who either screams back at him or – quite frequently – find herself either slapped across the face, dragged to the front door by her long black hair, or pushed to the ground. Sometimes, she might find herself locked in a bedroom.

Quite often, the poor person being screamed at or otherwise verbally brutalised will be a young girl or a child, often a step-daughter. It seems that children and young girls in Indonesian TV dramas are constant fodder for physical or verbal abuse. And the abuser is typically their father (often with a moustache), a perpetually angry stepfather, a jealous husband or a dragon-faced evil stepmother whose garish make-up and rock-hard perm would scare the living crap out of Darth Vader.

And talking of make-up, I have noticed that the Indonesian male actors often wear lipstick as well as their female counterparts. I guess this is because of the studio lights or something, I don’t know. But as a result of this glaring anomaly, I sometimes find it hard not to laugh during those scream scenes where some male character is verbally roasting someone. I mean, come on, how can you expect to convince the audience you are really pissed off and angry when you’re wearing bright pink dayglo lipstick? It’s rather like beating someone up with a banana and expecting to draw blood.

And one final thing that I can never forget about the Indon actors is that they use their whole faces to act, especially when delivering an angry tirade at someone. Their eyes bulge, their eyebrows rise and fall dramatically with each rise and fall of emotion, and their mouths perform twisting contortions of hate, jealousy or lust. Heads roll around and nod, to punctuate their emotions. So even if I can’t make out the words, the meaning of what they say is crystal clear.

To be honest, I am not really a fan of TV dramas, or soaps as we call them in the UK. But in our household, I don’t get a great deal of choice. You might be asking me why I don’t buy a second TV? Well, my mum and dad did just that years ago – my dad watching his Italian satellite TV shows on his TV in the kitchen and my mum watching Coronation Street on hers in the living room. And they hardly spoke to one another for years.

So you see, having one TV does promote communication. And with TV programmes like these to choose from, who needs language to understand them?!