What's the Real Reason Parasite Could Win?

There have been dozens of stories in the news about Parasite being the first non-English language film to win the best picture Oscar. Few believed it could win because of an insurmountable hurdle: it's in Korean with subtitles.

I haven't seen this movie, or any of the other nominees for that matter, so I can't comment on the artistic content. But I can address the issue of subtitles.

This prejudice against subtitles has always baffled me. People complain that subtitles and closed captions are bad because they take your eyes away from the action, or the surprise is "spoiled" because the text appears before the actor speaks the words.

I turn on closed captions in English language shows all the time. My hearing is slightly damaged, but I don't want to expose myself to loud sounds because they'll just damage my hearing further. So when there's a background noise, like the dishwasher running, I turn on captions.

And on the completely altruistic side, I turn them on when my wife is sleeping.

Then there are production problems in some shows: sometimes the music or sound effects drown out the dialog and it's impossible to tell what the actors are saying. Sometimes the actors have accents that are difficult to understand -- usually English actors with regional accents in BBC shows.

This prejudice against subtitles gets a little ridiculous. My dad has severe hearing loss but refuses to wear hearing aids. He watches TV with headphones turned up to 11, but won't turn on closed captioning. Which is required by the FCC for people just like him.

(I do have one complaint about closed captioning, however: it's often riddled with errors. They seem to use automatic voice recognition on a lot of shows, and the text produced is often missing words, or misunderstands what was actually said.)

Then there are shows that make creative use of subtitles. The first series I noticed doing this was Heroes, which featured long conversations between two Japanese characters. The subtitles were often deployed inventively in different locations around the screen, almost like speech bubbles in comic books.

In the case of non-English language films, some people say they prefer dubbing in English because subtitles are too "distracting." But for me, the mismatch between the words on the audio track and the actors' mouths is far more irritating (like the infamous Godzilla dubs). Frequently the intonation or emotional content of the English language track doesn't match the scene, or is over the top, or the voice actor they chose just doesn't fit the character. Sometimes the English dubbing or translation sounds so stupid that it completely ruins the scene.

In short, I would much rather see the film as the original writer, director, and actor intended it to be seen, without interference from another writer, another director, and another voice actor, all of whom were hired by the studio in what always seems to be a rush job.

There have been many suppositions as to why a film with subtitles was finally able to win an Oscar: it's the Netflix effect (they have a lot of popular non-English shows with subtitles), or the FCC's closed captioning mandate.

Admittedly, there is a downside to subtitles: they don't help slow readers, dyslexics or the illiterate. I wouldn't want to stigmatize people who don't like subtitles, but it's true that captions require a certain facility with the written word.

But I think a large part of it is that the voters in the Academy are like average Americans who are just getting older and harder of hearing, and like me are using closed captioning every day.