How Far We've Come

I suspect I'm among the only people who has seen See No Evil, Hear No Evil. A shame.

Back in the glorious 1980's, Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor teamed up to make one buddy comedy after another. Most of them, including this one, were terribly written. The studios saw no need to put a lot of resources into writing and direction: they knew from Silver Streak that they had a winning combination of chemistry, timing, and racial harmony between the two comic geniuses. So, it seems as though they threw them into any wacky situation they could find, and slapped a title on it.

In this case, Wilder and Pryor took the emphasis off race and put it on disability: namely, deafness and blindness. You can imagine all the wacky antics that go with this. The plot of the movie fails to pull the antics together, nor to fill a single gaping hole in the story (of which there are many). But it does give us a young Kevin Spacey with a bad British accent, and the required beautiful female villain.

The two characters spend a lot of time shouting, "I'm deaf!" and "I'm blind!" Sometimes they interject a curse or two. And, while Pryor blind man is startlingly incompetent at mobility of any kind, Wilder's deaf man can read lips better than I can hear them. These are flaws, to be sure, but at the heart of each character there is... well, a heart. Each man has a passion, a sense of shame (or lack thereof), and a weakness. They are, in fact, fully developed characters, who happen to be missing one of the five senses.

In fact, while the story is about as thin as Kate Moss during Lent, the characters are three-dimensional. How nice. I'm not going to make one of those "better in the old days" arguments, mainly because there were plenty of one-dimensional characters in early film, but the 80's did present us with a lot of earnest, open characters. The current trend goes against that: irony does not lend itself to genuine feeling.

I still wouldn't give this movie more than a few stars, but it does hold a special place in my heart. It's one of those movies I saw over and over again when I was a kid, all within the first few years that my condition had popped up and was getting worse. I knew how unrealistic it was, even then, but it didn't matter. Watching it now -- I just saw it for the first time in more than ten years -- it still makes me laugh.

So I guess what I really need is a not-not-deaf buddy who can help me solve crimes.

Subtitles

People used to tell me I should see Fellini films. The conversation would go something like this:

FRIEND: You should see Eight and a Half.
ME: Isn't that in Italian?
FRIEND: Yeah, it's amazing.
ME: I can't read subtitles.
FRIEND: You don't have to read the subtitles. It doesn't really make sense anyway.

Well, I saw it, and I'm pretty sure it made about 100% less sense to me than it did to anyone else in the room. Call it a wild guess, but I'd surmise that the subtitles did help a little.

Fully-sighted people don't understand just how helpful those little words at the bottom of the screen can be when every word of the film is in a foreign language. I do speak French, but I don't understand it when other people speak more than a sentence at a time, so I'm pretty much relegated to films in English. My French class took use to a film about a French queen once, and at the end of the movie, I figured out who the king was.

Having said all that, it's also pretty distracting to sit in a movie theater and have somebody whisper the subtitles in your ear. It's necessary sometimes: I went with friends to see Kill Bill, which we expected to be in English, and half of it turned out to be in Japanese. Had it not been for my roommate reading me the subtitles, it would have been a lot like Fellini (except for the bloody sword fights). But I do prefer to just watch the film and pick up on what's said by the context, if possible. I'd rather just hear the actor speak and concentrate on the stuff I can see.

I saw Gran Torino last night. There were a few subtitles, but it was brief, and I could tell the tone of the lines without knowing the actual words. People did laugh, and knowing the subtitles would have clued me in to the specific joke, but it was funny to me too. And, luckily, they stopped subtitling once we saw the Mung families through the old bigot's eyes. I thought it was great.

Incidentally, my favorite film set in a foreign country is Lost in Translation. There are no subtitles. We're all in the same boat.