Suzy Says

Love/hate for Friday, February 28, 2003
Subtitles

I have a theory – I have many, but for today, I’ll just focus on this one: people grow to be more like themselves over time. Your core personality, if you will, is more or less formed by the time you are, say, five years old. Then you go to school and start the process of trying things on, especially during high school. You go through various fads and trends, some things you keep, others you cast off, but eventually, you revert to the Original You.

So when I was in college, I would go to foreign movies all the time, including suicide-inducing Bergman movies. I probably referred to them as “film” rather than movies, since they were Art with a capital A, unlike the crap churned out by Hollywood (insert disdainful sniff here). Now, you would pretty much have to resort to firearms to get to me to see a foreign movie. I have reverted to my Original, shallow self, the one who wants movies to be:

1. Less than two hours long.
2. Full of pretty people living in pretty places and wearing pretty clothes.
3. Amusing enough to take my mind off the alternating horror and dreariness that is everyday life.
4. Very low on: battle scenes and chase scenes and sex scenes. Just tell us who won and let’s get on with the story.
5. Completely devoid of: the noble terminally ill (especially children); romance between those who are any kind of challenged; the insane; show tunes and singing (children singing in unison in particular) and production numbers of any kind.

Now, in foreign movies, life is always horrible and there are always subtitles. The subtitles make it very hard to watch the movie and figure out what’s going on, particularly for someone like me who has a hard time figuring out what’s going on in the movie in the first place. I can watch a whole movie and not realize that one of the two guys in question was a bad guy. In Schindler’s List, I couldn’t tell Ralph “Don’t Pronounce the L” Fiennes from the other guy. The fact that they were both wearing hats pretty much guaranteed that I couldn’t tell them apart. If it’s a black & white movie with brown-haired guys wearing hats, they all look the same to me. And don’t expect me to try and tell them apart when I have to be reading subtitles, too. I just can’t pay that much attention.