Living in the age of captions and subtitles

Closed captioning for TV is relatively ancient technology. The NTSC analog TV specification, released in the 1950s, allows TV-decodeable captions on line 21 ¹. These captions are the same ones used by VHS tapes and some DVDs ².

About a decade ago, I learned that these analog captions—which aren’t in the same format as the digital ones you see on streaming shows, Blu-ray-ray Discs, or even more recent-vintage DVDs—at the time required a composite cable input, when being sent from an external source device such as a VCR or optical disc player to a TV. A set of DVDs I had emblazoned with the “CC” logo wouldn’t show any text via HDMI or component cables ³, but would via composite.

But recent players, such as a Panasonic 4K UHD player I got in 2020, can render analog captions on-device and pass them to the TV over HDMI ⁴. I’m grateful for this functionality, and for captions and subtitles more broadly, because they exemplify accessibility at its best.

Accessibility

Although designed to assist people with hearing issues or who could otherwise not listen to or comprehend the speech in a show, captions provide a richer experience for everyone:

• They serve as an escape hatch from whisper-quiet speech that can’t be turned up without risking getting your ears blown out by a huge on-screen explosion in the next scene.
• They’re the only way to engage with dialogue in languages you don’t know, or that’s delivered in accents or cadences you can’t grasp.
• They often offer descriptions that are colorful, humorous, informative, or artistic on their own terms; for example, a caption I once saw that read “a la De Niro” right before someone did an impression, or any of the art-in-themselves subtitles on Stranger Things, a show whose writers are deeply attentive to how they style their subtitles:

There’s the scene where Henry/Vecna/001 is creating the Mind Flayer. I remember listening to the sound design and it reminded me a lot of the sound design of Arrival. The atonality is meant to get at an alien harshness, so one of the tags I used — and I chose this word because Karli and I wanted to go big; we wanted to bring our A-game — was “[unearthly susurration]”. I chose “susurration” because it’s an alien word that automatically makes you go, Oh, this is unusual, strange, and eerie. But also, I liked the fictive sense of it, like when you say “susurration,” it feels like it’s scraping the inside of your ears. Karli thought it was great but said, “Let’s have ‘unearthly’ do the heavy lifting here. This is a bit much.” And she was dead right!

We always leave captions or subtitles on because our household includes people and visitors who don’t speak English as their first language. The text is invaluable to them.

Reading TV

But others see this text as distracting and even damaging to the aesthetic vision of a show. Writing for The Atlantic, Devon Gordon chronicled an internal monologue he had at seeing everyone around him putting on subtitles for everything:

Because now I’m reading TV, not watching it. Because now, instead of focusing my attention on the performances, the costumes, the cinematography, the painstakingly mixed sound, and how it all works together to tell a story and transport me into an alternate world, my eyes keep getting yanked downward to read words I can already hear. My soul can’t bear the notion of someone watching The Sopranos for the first time and, as Tony wades into the pool, looking down to the bottom of the screen to read [ducks quack]. Subtitles serve an important purpose for people with hearing or cognitive impairments, or for translation from a foreign language. They’re not for fluent English speakers watching something in fluent English.

TV is a visual medium that conveys most of its details in ways other than text. But it’s also, as Gordon adeptly describes, under pressure from sound mixes that bury dialogue. Text offers a comforting way to literally turn down the volume.

And then there’s the issue of “second screens,” ⁵ that is phones, which draw people’s attention away from the show on the larger screen. Aren’t subtitles, with all their descriptive detail begging to be parsed as in Stranger Things, a way of fighting back against this multitasking?

I’ll keep leaving the captions and subtitles, for this reason and all the others described here.