Six Reasons to Say “Yes!” to Subtitles
There are two kinds of people in this world: people who turn on the subtitles while watching movies and shows, and people who I don’t understand.
Because admit it … captions come in handy for more than just the viewing of foreign films and aiding the hearing-impaired. They are a crucial tool for conscientious (or borderline obsessive-compulsive) film and TV viewers like myself who can’t abide missing a single word of dialogue. Forget French, Portuguese or any other language you no speaka … it’s no easy task making sense of Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s serial mumbling in Brick (2005) or keeping up with the tech-speak satire of Silicon Valley (2014) without a little subtitular assistance. But sometimes, subtitles aren’t just a nice little onscreen shoulder to lean on—they’re essential to understanding what you’re watching. So, taking foreign films and hearing impairment as givens, let’s explore six other perfectly practical reasons you really need to switch on those captions.
1. Atrocious Accents
Your unique manner of speaking makes you a special snowflake, but it also makes it hard for me to understand what’s coming out of your mouth. The most common cause of subtitle-itis? Accents thicker than bank vault walls.
Prime Offender: Snatch (2000)
Guy Ritchie’s cockney crime-comedy is the one of this list’s most egregious offenders. The film is absolutely riddled with English accents so strong that they render much of the dialogue utterly incomprehensible. Brad Pitt’s gibberish-spewing gypsy character, Mickey O’Neil, takes the top (or perhaps bottom) spot. Mickey speaks Pikey, a heavily accented language that, according to Snatch’s protagonist Turkish (Jason Statham), is “not Irish, it’s not English, it’s just … well, it’s just Pikey.” Pitt is so impossible to understand that there is an entire scene in the film where even the subtitles don’t understand what he’s saying, simply displaying “?” rather than words.
Other Culprits: Trainspotting (1996), In Bruges (2008), Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998), The Town (2010), Bronson (2008), Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011), Scarface (1983), Layer Cake (2004)
2. The Bard Strikes Back
Nearly 400 years after Bill Shakespeare’s death, his writing lives on. Unfortunately for us, the Bard’s plays, so frequently quoted or converted into films, are worded in a way that’s extremely hard to parse for modern audiences when read, let alone listened to.
Prime Offender: Much Ado About Nothing
In his 2012 take on Shakespeare’s classic comedy, Joss Whedon makes a directorial decision that film fans like us will rue for the rest of our days: he chooses to update the mise en scène of Shakespeare’s tale, moving the proceedings into modern times, but leaving the Elizabethan dialogue intact, down to the last “thou.” The result is a film so hyper-literate that even subtitles can only help so much. Characters spout knotty lines like: “Why, i’ faith methinks she is too low for a high praise, too brown for a fair praise, too little for a great praise.” Best of luck to those of you viewers who majored in anything but English.
Other Culprits: Romeo + Juliet (1996), Shakespeare in Love (1998), Richard III (1995), Hamlet (1996, 2000), Coriolanus (2011), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1999), Cymbeline (2014), Love’s Labour’s Lost (2000)