The Captions Close In
Are we watching entertainment now or just reading it?
For the last two years, starved for stimulation, clinging to pandemic home viewing for slices of life, aging faster than we prefer, my husband and I have found ourselves straining to hear film dialogue. We pause and rewind repeatedly to get the gist of a climactic scene. The sounds emanating from the pricy high-tech sound bar beneath our massive screen seem muffled, raspy, phlegmy and faint.
We certainly glean a great deal from actors’ faces and body languages — we are often moved to tears by their silent eloquence. Who really needs to hear them? Well, we do. Every once in a while, we need to know the facts of the plot and the hinges of the turning points.
I’ve faulted today’s naturalistic performers expressing themselves in a new “method” style of effort-free acting. Today’s screen stars seem far removed from the days of stage projection when even those in the back rows of the theater balcony could pick up every nuance. Where are the big voices — our enunciators, our resounding orators, our James Earl Joneses, our Viola Davises, our Patti Lupones, or our Barrymores? Not in recent films we’ve seen — but not heard.
These sotto voce film stars of today must depend on the skill of an expert sound person sneaking into range with overhead or underhand booms or by implanting intimate body mics who the hell knows where. But sound technicians and mixers in post-production can only do so much to enhance the audibility of stutterers and mutterers.
With foreign films, there’s no problem. We habitually rely on subtitles to tell the tale. We obediently follow the written storytelling, noticing the speeches are far shorter in the writing than in the hearing, wondering what in hell the translators may have skipped (“Silly Americans wouldn’t understand this anyway”). We strive to get the gist of stories when white titles are so often projected on glaring white backgrounds, rendering them unreadable. And we have willingly made this adjustment motivated by the variety of ideas and faces foreign fare offers in subtitles made more desirable due to our lack of free range travel these last two years. I’m amazed at our adaptability and sublimation in limited circumstances.
Certainly, our forefathers and foremothers made do with the silent films of their day. They thrived on pantomime and mugging with occasional fancy placards — “Look out!” “Hey, you!” — announcing dialogue before the herky-jerky moving pictures that came up afterward. They loved the piano accompaniments. Who needed human voices? No one thought the “talkies” would even last, or color TV. Now we’ve gone from the “silents” to the “talkies” to the “caption-ies” en route to virtual reality headsets which will soon feed everything directly into our ears and eyes with scary clarity.
After a long period of denial, my spouse and I have finally admitted to ourselves that it’s our waning ability to hear soundtracks rather than the actors’ sloth that’s affecting our enjoyment. Our ability to hear any darn thing has worsened. In everyday life we repeat the punch lines — “TO GET TO WHAT OTHER SIDE?” — the sweet nothings, “I SAID I LOVE YOU, DAMMIT!” — the grocery lists — “OAT MILK OR GOAT MILK?” shouting, “I CAN’T HEAR YOU!” many times a day. Exhausting, always projecting like we’re on some Broadway stage. We text each other from two ends of the same room sometimes.
So now we have fully surrendered to the “closed caption” option for home viewing. We fought it for awhile, as it made us feel our senses would fail us sooner with less use. And now, as we feared, there is no turning back. We have become sniveling dependents, lazy about exercising what little remains of our hearing. We put on a new program and immediately cave in to the captions. Of course, we still keep the sound on to hear the vocal intonations and sound effects and music expressed by supplemental hash marks and musical notes in parentheses on screen. We have no idea what we are missing in the lower portion of the screen the captions cover. Maybe we’re better off.
We’ve reached a phase in which watching the big screen with no captions makes us feel insecure — like we’re driving without safety belts. What did we miss??
Watching CNN or other live feed captions out of habit and disinclination to remove the captions for news viewing is hilarious. We can hear the talking heads just fine as they speak directly into or near the lens of the camera, but we get a kick out of the many mistakes made as the robotic transcripts butcher the language of what’s actually being said.
We’ve gone from the “silents” to the “talkies” to the “caption-ies”
Lately we wonder if we are really reveling in actors’ performances or spoken dialogue at all anymore. Watching/reading captions on Ethan Coen’s “The Tragedy of MacBeth” the other night, it was not the florid language of the Bard appearing on our screens, but a shorthand, speedread version of some of Shakespeare’s greatest speeches. Watching the incandescent Judy Dench in a tight close-up speaking her last lines (“Go. Go Quickly.”) in “Belfast,” I found myself reading white closed captions below her face, like a moth drawn to a bright flame instead of absorbing her poignant emotionality from her performance alone.
At least this part of aging has been made easy. And so, our shame has given way to relief and gratitude for this free feature of modern television viewing, and for what remains of our senses.
