My girlfriend and I have this ongoing thing on movie nights: I like to watch the movie without having to read the book at the same time, and she, with loving understanding, argues that watching a movie without the subtitles on is objectively the wrong way to watch movies.
But lately, I've found this strange thing has been happening. It seems that, more and more often, I need subtitles to understand whatever we're watching.
I'm not just talking about finally catching that one line from that one movie that we all suddenly realise we have misheard for years (Rubeus Hagrid it turns out is "keeper of keys and grounds at Hogwarts" ... not keys and grains). No, I'm talking about this apparent new trend where if you want your movie to sound Oscar-worthy, just ask your actors to mumble inaudibly for about 120-odd minutes and you're a shoo-in.
I don't care how good looking Timothee Chalamet is, I still have absolutely no idea what anyone said in The King (2019). That whole flick was about two-and-a-half hours of me sitting at home in my pandemic pyjamas flicking Strepsils at the TV, wishing Timmy and his cast of mumblers would just sip some hot lemon and honey before the director called "action". Seriously, when did everyone on screen suddenly start taking acting notes from Tom Hardy?
Well, in a desperate bid to avoid admitting I've lost the home front in the subtitles war, I did some digging this week and it turns out the answer to mumbling in movies is more complicated than it first appeared.
Back in the golden days of Hollywood, capturing sound on set was a bit more like theatre. Microphones were big and bulky units that you had to work hard to hide and it meant that actors had to work hard and face a certain way to make sure their performance was captured.
Scoot forward a couple of decades and not only have microphones become smaller, better and more prolific, but big, bombastic sound is what audiences seem to want.
So now actors find themselves freed up to give more naturalistic (read: mumbly, poorly articulated, dramatic) performances and sound editors find themselves in a bind of wanting to turn the noise up on Timmy Chalamet while also preserving the comparative bigness of the sound of the explosion or gunshot or Battle of Agincourt that comes straight after his dramatically-mumbly speech. If dreamboat Timmy is whispering at top volume, then Argincourt doesn't sound so impressively big and bombastic afterwards.
This battle of dynamic range (the comparative distance between really quiet noises and really loud ones) seems to have become more of a common conundrum on the silver screen as we move further into the post-Game of Thrones era of mega-budget TV shows, or movies that follow the bombastic heights of franchises like the Marvel universe.
That's just on the recording end. When we get to the listening end, the more-than-100-odd sound channels that you might hear in the movie theatre capturing everything from dialogue to explosions are necessarily mixed down to barely a handful of separate channels for when the movie plays on TV or, as is more likely these days, through your phone or laptop speakers. That's where you're probably watching something right now, while you're reading this.
It seems, at least for now, that this is direction the entertainment industry on the whole is going, so there's a fair chance that we're all going to be watching a lot more stuff with the subtitles on, and admitting that our better halves were right all along.
