The year of COVID-19 is coming to a close, and it’s worth assessing some of the curious ways our culture has been shaped by finding ourselves at home for months on end. We are all familiar with technologies, such as Zoom, that made it possible to do business or attend classes from home. But not all of the technologies that came to the fore this year were new or whiz-bang. I suggest that 2020 was notable for the prominence of a technology as simple as it is old: the lowly subtitle.
Have we ever watched so many movies or television series in Spanish or French, Italian or German, Hindi or Japanese? Months into the national quarantine, many of us had exhausted the English content we were interested in watching. But at the time content was being consumed most voraciously, the pandemic was preventing Hollywood from meeting demand. And so the streaming services loaded up on international entertainments that I suspect would otherwise not have been promoted. I presume that most of us have been reading more subtitles than ever before.
I remember the first fully foreign-language film I saw. I was 10 years old. My father had taken a job in Hawaii for a year, and we lived on a street with a typical ethnic mix: Our neighbors were Japanese, Filipino, Chinese, and Hawaiian, and there were even a few haoles like us. Next door was a Japanese family. We became friends, and one weekend, they invited us to join them in going to the movies.
I had a fourth grader’s notion of what a Japanese movie was. That is, I was very excited to see a Tokyo-stomping Godzilla on a big screen. Instead, I found myself in a small art house watching a very long, very quiet story of doomed romance. It was shot in something not unlike the French New Wave style, not that I had any notion of French New Wave style back then, but I still have images of the film in my mind. I can see the young couple as they talked and talked in Japanese. The girl had just found out she was pregnant, and this seemed to be a problem — not that I understood why.
But the dialogue was not lost on me. It was all there in English at the bottom of the screen.
It was exotic and wonderfully strange to my fourth grade self to see a film in a foreign language. I wasn’t entirely new to subtitles. I had seen The Longest Day and Patton. (My father had a simple standard by which to judge war movies: Did the Germans speak German? He was decidedly against the ersatz practice of having foreign characters speak to one another in accented English.) Though we didn’t seek out foreign-language films, my brother and I were inclined to stop flipping through our TV’s four channels on the rare occasions that we spotted subtitles being used.
Subtitles on television are rare no more. Not only has this made available content that would otherwise have been incomprehensible, I’ve found it has made me engage with entertainment more actively. Reading dialog is curiously more compelling than hearing it, perhaps because it demands a different sort of participation. Looking back on the film and television I’ve streamed this year, the material I remember most vividly was all subtitled.
Some were classic movies: I finally watched the French hit man noir Le Samourai. I stumbled across an actual samurai movie, one I had stupidly overlooked merely because it was not made by Akira Kurosawa, the brilliant 1958 film The 47 Loyal Ronin.
A willingness to read subtitles opens up modern multilingual television shows, such as the excellent ZeroZeroZero, an international crime drama in which the locales are made real not only by being filmed on location but by using the local language.
Without streaming TV and the quarantine-imposed time to watch it, would I ever have seen anything as funny as the French secret-agent series Au service de la France?
Here’s to the subtitle, which proved that an ancient technology can make modern technologies feasible.
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
