March Issue 2020

THE ONE As he accepted an award for his film “Parasite” at the Golden Globes, South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon Ho started a cinephile revolution by mocking close-minded viewers.

“Once you overcome the one-inch tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films,” said Ho in Korean, which was carried through by his translator. “Just being nominated along with fellow, amazing international filmmakers was a huge honor. I think we use only one language: the cinema.”

In the following month, “Parasite” became the first ever foreign film to win best picture at the Oscars. Since then, it appears everyone has lost their minds — including myself.

Ho’s words to the Golden Globe’s audience collide feverously with Hollywood’s slow-burning debate surrounding subtitles, in which the American attitude of impatience is tested on the accusatory waters of cultural insensitivity. So, is it actually racist not to read subtitles?

The answer is more loaded than you might think.

In order to respectfully and thoroughly dissect such a complicated question, I need to provide some background.

For as long as East Asian culture has obtained the interest of the American people, two types of viewers have been at each others’ throats: those who experience film and television in their original audio and read the closed captions, and those who listen along to the dubbed over versions in English.

Viewers who argue in favor of subtitles do so because they preserve the content the way it was meant to be. Voice actors are cast as the producer intended, which is telling of each character and how they come across to the viewer. Still, many who don’t speak the original language of the film complain that having to read the bottom of the screen takes away from the overall experience and gets exhausting in a matter of minutes, sticking with dubbed audio for its convenience and simplicity.

In terms of cognitive experience, however, this argument falls apart. Back in 1992, psychologists Gery D’Ydewalle and Ingrid Gielen published a study tracking eye movement and attention while watching movies with subtitles. They found that the overlapping of sound, image and text was not a distraction, but rather a balancing act that the brain adjusts to in time. In 2007, D’Ydewalle published another study on children participating in the same eye-tracking test. Apart from a slight increase in the time for the eye to transition from text to screen and back, their conclusion remained the same.