Cognition Dissemination: We Had a Dub vs. Sub Debate in 2020?

Perhaps the largest topic in the entertainment industry in the last week has been Parasite’s win of the Best Picture award at the Oscars this year — for good reason. It became the first foreign film to win the accolade, because its story about the personal perils of massive wealth inequality resonated with a large audience, a problem also very prevalent outside South Korea. (It’s actually even worse in the good ol’ US of A, for instance, something else we’re better at.) The win has put director Bong Joon-ho (and perhaps some of Parasite’s actors) on the worldwide radar; in fact, Joon-ho has already drawn serious interest from Hollywood, though it’s whether he’s changed his mind about taking them up on their offer since September is a mystery.

The Oscar win has prompted expected reactions, with the curious among us not only seeking to watch Parasite, but also view Joon-ho’s other films. One of them, Memories of Murder, is even free to watch on YouTube (though the quality isn’t the best). The real surprise is that this somehow revived the Dub vs. Sub debate.

Anyone who’s watched anime for over a decade will be entirely too familiar with debates about whether to watch English dubs or go with Japanese voices with subtitles. Hell, I’m rolling my eyes just thinking about them as I’m typing this. This debate went mainstream thanks to a short blog from Mother Jones political writer Kevin Drum, who claimed, without evidence, that no one likes subtitles. It often seems that way with Americans, but evidence showing how the general public feels the same is anecdotal. Importantly, this reemergence revealed how different this debate is between anime and live-action.

There’s nothing wrong with preferring dubs, but they often (but hardly not always) come off better in animated form compared to live-action thanks to how they’re easier to create. There are times were I’ll even prefer watching dubbed anime compared to subtitles. But even the best examples have to rearrange words to fit the lip flaps, which can sometimes slightly alter the intended meaning; this gets far worse with an anime that deals with Japanese cultural issues. It’s better to watch something with a very Japanese setting in the original language and subtitles, especially if it involves a historical Japanese setting, thanks to the unique terminology used and how it fits the overall theme.

It’s easy to see why one option is often preferable to the other, but neither is definitively better. Anyone who claims subtitles all-around blow should stop being close-minded.

This is very different when it comes to live-action, where the performances from the original actors are important for the emotional impact in several scenes. That’s tough to do when it’s impossible for lip flapping to match actors speaking another language when dubbed over, not to mention that it looks awkward as hell. Personally, the only time I can tolerate a dub for a live-action film is with an extremely cheesy tokusatsu flick — like a Godzilla or Mothra movie. But even there, I’ll check out the Japanese version first.

It’s at least true that there’s a vocal set of Americans who would rather not watch anything subtitled — I’ve heard my fair share of complaints. But it’s my hope movies like Parasite can open the minds of at least a plurality of them to watching entertainment works in languages that aren’t their own. Signs of that happening are encouraging, with this movie having the biggest post-Oscar box office bump in the last decade, it being sold out at Amazon.com as of this writing, and how it will soon join the much-hallowed Criterion Collection. You may want to hold off on getting the home video release at the moment, if that’s your plan.

There’s a whole world of good entertainment out there that too many people won’t experience due to having no desire to read subtitles; but I’m not agreeing that most of them are that way with no proof like a certain someone. Hoping that moviegoers broaden their horizons is admittedly wishful thinking on my part, but hey, it’s possible.

It’s also possible that this could be the moment for Korean films, and that a whole swath of moviegoers and movie watchers will be looking to see more of them in theaters and streaming services. If Joon-ho is still resistant to taking offers from Hollywood producers, another could take a similar opportunity. It’s not as if Joon-ho needs Hollywood to make a worldwide film, considering that Snowpiercer exists. Ideally, Hollywood won’t neuter any director’s vision, or there wouldn’t be any point to this.

Dub vs. Sub debates are tired, but they’re still far more tolerable than arguments about why an AMERICAN movie should have won at the AMERICAN awards. That’s just predictable inanity in our year 2020. Retorts saying that “actually, inequality is good” are just as dumb. Let’s just hope the Academy doesn’t listen to the internet’s finest xenophobes and will continue to give high accolades to foreign films, instead of relegating them in their own category. At least that desire is less wishful thinking, right?