I am not a subtitles person, and you will be hard-pressed to convince me otherwise.
Sure, spending two years wearing masks to go out and buy a McChicken only to find out the local McDonald's was out of McChickens was weird, but little has felt more apocalyptic and otherworldly in the last few years than seeing that every single one of my friends now uses subtitles when watching anything, as if the inability to understand dialog is some sort of long COVID side effect we're all suffering from. It's not that I just don't feel the need to put them on; I think putting them on is actively a bad idea.
I get why people like them. Humans are betting at reading than listening. TV shows and movies have gotten noticeably harder to understand in the last few decades, and turning on the subtitles is the only way to ensure you never miss any lines.
But the price of hearing every line is devoting at least half of your attention in any given scene away from the actors' performances and camera work and editing choices and refocusing it on some bargain-bin Sans Serif font that spoils all the jokes before they're even spoken. Nobody has ever once in their life seen a beautifully written, filmed, directed, and performed movie scene and thought, "That was great, but you know what it was missing? Arial." Actors and actresses burn their mental health to the ground trying to nail each and every component of a performance, and turning subtitles on means we're spending a considerable amount of our time simply not watching them, and that just feels wrong.
Sure, there are obviously exceptions to this theory. I'll always turn on the subtitles momentarily if there's a key line I don't understand, and I like how subtitles can really help someone who might not be perfectly fluent in a language follow the plot better. But even if I love a good script, you don't really need to understand every line to get the same enjoyment out of it, and you'll probably more than make up for that lost line or two in all the subtle smiles and nods and glances you'll notice instead.
Down with Big Subtitle.
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