Mumbling Actors, Bad Speakers or Lazy Listeners? Why Everyone Is Watching Tv With Subtitles On
29th January 2023
There’s a reason Bradley Johnston watches “literally everything” with subtitles on. It’s not an accessibility issue – the 25-year-old is a native English speaker and isn’t hard of hearing. He is “the kind of TV viewer that just doesn’t want to work for it”.
“Like, if there’s a subtle moment some people might miss that’s integral to the plot, let me know about it,” he says.
Take, for example, the recent season of HBO hit The White Lotus. “There is so much going on in that show … I know there’s something being shown to me that I need to pick up on, so just tell me what it is.” Or the horror movie Barbarian, which Johnston saw first at the cinema and then watched again at home with a closer eye. “I honestly reckon it was a better watch the second time around because of the subtitles,” he says.
Lazy listeners it is, then.
January 29th, 2023 at 22:16
I can’t go with that one. I find that no longer how loud R turns the TV, I still miss about a third of the dialogue. Yes, I need hearing aids, but not that badly.
I blame Robert Altman.
January 31st, 2023 at 10:19
My best friend and I call the subtitles “subtleties,” because that’s what the word looks like to us when seen on a screen from across the room. We’re both old and hard of hearing, and if we watch a movie without the subtleties, we spend way too much time stopping and rewinding and trying to figure out what the characters are saying. Some actors/actresses do fail to enunciate, but some just talk too fast, or they talk over each other, or their accents make their speech difficult to understand.
January 31st, 2023 at 16:36
I remember the first time I saw a British sit-com that had subtitles so that Americans could figure out what was going on.