Lifestyle
From ‘The Sympathizer’ to ‘Past Lives,’ American Audiences Warm to Subtitles
The sequence is emblematic of a significant shift in how Asian languages are featured in American film and TV.
Just a few years ago, when his Korean dark comedy “Parasite” won the 2020 Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film, the writer and director Bong Joon Ho ribbed Americans for their aversion to “the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles.”
Bong Joon Ho and his interpreter, Sharon Choi, at the Golden Globe Awards in 2020.
Paul Drinkwater/NBCUniversal Media, via Getty Images
But in 2024, “The Sympathizer” is among a growing number of American works — including the recent prestige films “Minari” (2020), “Past Lives” (2023) and “Everything Everywhere All at Once” (2022); the television epics “Pachinko” (2022) and “Shogun” (2024); and the family-friendly series “Ms. Marvel” (2022) and “American Born Chinese” (2023) — that use Asian languages to bring additional depth and nuance to their stories.
“I don’t think it is just a temporary blip,” said Minjeong Kim, the director of the Center for Asian and Pacific Studies at San Diego State University. “The trend has shifted.”
It’s a startling evolution from how Asian languages have typically appeared on American screens. Don McKellar, the co-creator of “The Sympathizer,” said that after the show’s multilingual writing staff watched the 1978 Vietnam War film “The Deer Hunter,” there was confusion about what language that film’s Vietnamese characters were even speaking.
“No one could understand them,” he said. “They were either Thai speakers who had been given a word or two of Vietnamese or they were just speaking Thai with a ‘Vietnamese’ accent.”
McKellar has seen a shift, though. When he wrote the 1998 film “The Red Violin,” which has dialogue in several languages including German, French and Mandarin, he had to tally up the percentage of English dialogue to reassure studio executives who were nervous about a Western audience’s tolerance for subtitles.
“It was one of those understood things,” he recalled. But with “The Sympathizer,” which has long stretches in Vietnamese, “I never had to count.”
“The Sympathizer”
Hopper Stone/HBO
Nowadays, some 50 percent of Americans would prefer to watch videos with subtitles regardless of the language they’re hearing. Videos on social media are increasingly closed-captioned and, as sound mixing becomes more complicated across devices, the near universal accessibility of subtitles — a rarity before the rise of streaming — has made them more of a boon than a barrier.
The internet’s broad entertainment ecosystem has also diversified the American media palate. “YouTube, social media, TikTok, those things that are really open — people can actually access and be exposed to content in different languages,” Kim said. That means “they might be less reluctant to watch movies or TV shows that have different languages.”
Many experts point to Netflix’s 2021 hit series “Squid Game,” a Korean import, as an early catalyst. The monumental success of the dystopian thriller, which is the platform’s most-watched show, took even the streamer by surprise. “You have a non-English show, a Korean show, that ends up being the biggest show in the world ever,” said Bela Bajaria, the chief content officer for Netflix, whose overall subscriber base is largely outside of the U.S. “We did not see that coming.”
“Squid Game” topped a growing wave of non-English worldwide hits, such as the Spanish “Money Heist” and the French “Lupin.” The success of these projects helped shift the industrywide perception of non-English dialogue: Where it was once seen as a liability, it became an asset — a change that coincided with a rising number of Asian and Asian American filmmakers helming major Hollywood projects.
“Amazon is all over the world and they are trying to tap into international audiences,” said the filmmaker Lulu Wang, whose recent Prime series, “Expats,” takes place in Hong Kong and has portions in Cantonese, Mandarin, Tagalog, Punjabi and English. “So the word they kept using was: ‘We see this as a global show for us.’”
The making of “Expats” was a stark contrast to Wang’s experience pitching her acclaimed 2018 film “The Farewell,” she said. Back then, skeptical executives asked her to relocate the story, which is set primarily in China, to New York and translate a majority of the dialogue from Mandarin into English. Wang refused.
“There was just this constant awareness that we were doing something that was on the periphery and that was in the margins,” she said. “And in order to make it successful, we had to find a way to take it out of the shadows and bring it into the light.”
The market, it seems, has changed. This year’s FX/Hulu adaptation of the James Clavell novel “Shogun,” a heavily subtitled series that includes Japanese and English dialogue, notched one of Disney’s most watched debuts. While much of the show’s political and emotional intrigue is managed through the act of translation between characters, its predecessor, a 1980 series adaptation, was mostly in English and didn’t even bother subtitling its sparse Japanese lines.
Across many films and series about Asians and Asian Americans, language is increasingly used as a world-building tool. On “The Sympathizer,” McKellar said, there was a committee of people across all levels of production that was meticulously tweaking the Vietnamese dialogue.
“The Northern accent and then the Southern accent, they’re vastly, vastly different,” said the show’s star, Hoa Xuande, who plays a spy for the North who is planted in the South. Then, he added, there were prewar and postwar accents that had to be accounted for.
These finer details of language are, in other words, positive markers of stories told with “authenticity,” that vaguely praiseworthy term that nevertheless is viscerally felt when, for instance, you hear the “Chinglish” patter, a mélange of Mandarin and English, between Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan in an early scene in “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” Their back-and-forth, dancing seamlessly in and out of English midsentence, is a mode familiar to most Asian Americans — 66 percent of whom speak a language other than English at home.
“Everything Everywhere All at Once”
Allyson Riggs/A24
Still, authenticity can be an abstract badge of honor. Multiplicity of language is most interesting when it’s used to progress these stories — to ratchet up tension, to encase or reveal secrets, to create emotional resonance, to reflect or deflect identity.
One of the most affecting uses of foreign language can be found in the 2023 film “Past Lives,” an Oscar nominee that its star Greta Lee, who plays Nora, said was a story about how to “capture identity through language.”
Nora’s Korean slowly shifts and loosens from the start of the film to the end, Lee said, as she reconnects with her childhood sweetheart, Hae Sung. On their first call, “she’s been living in New York for X amount of years, she doesn’t really speak Korean anymore,” Lee explained. But as their connection rekindles and her Korean becomes more fluent, it’s as if Nora is slowly unearthing her past self.
Lee worked with Sharon Choi, who gained recognition as Bong Joon Ho’s interpreter during the international press run for “Parasite.” Rather than being a traditional dialect coach, Choi explored speech patterns with Lee that were crucial to communicating her character’s journey.
“My priority wasn’t getting a particular accent,” Choi said. Instead of focusing on technical proficiency, “I was approaching this language from a storytelling perspective.”
The evolution of Nora’s Korean helps define a progression of playfulness, curiosity and eventually heartbreak as she revisits an old language, an old friend and an old life. These layers of storytelling do not register with English-speaking audiences, but for those who do speak Korean, they add depth to the film.
“You dream in a language I don’t understand,” Arthur, Nora’s American husband, wistfully tells her at one point about her sleep talking. “It’s like there’s this whole place inside of you where I can’t go.”
Taylor Swift performs in France during the European leg of her record-breaking Eras Tour on June 2.
Jeff Pachoud/Getty Images
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Jeff Pachoud/Getty Images
As summertime gets into full swing, the charts of the country’s most popular songs and albums are still being dominated by two very familiar names: Post Malone and Taylor Swift. Given that summertime is usually ruled by individual (and often ephemeral) bangers rather thanfull albums, we might be seeing a full Swiftie season ahead on the albums chart. The Billboard Hot 100 songs chart, on the other hand, is less steady, especially in recent years, when we’ve seen the meteoric rise of newbies’ hits springing out of social media (“Rich Men North of Richmond,” anyone?), so that’s where we might see more movement in the weeks to come.
TOP SONGS
Most of this week’s top five on Billboard’s Hot 100 looks remarkably like last week’s: Post Malone’s “I Had Some Help” featuring Morgan Wallen is at No. 1 for the third week in a row, trailed by Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us,” Tommy Richman’s “Million Dollar Baby” and Shaboozey’s “Tipsy (A Bar Song).”
There’s one newcomer among their ranks: former Disney star-turned-singer Sabrina Carpenter, whose disco-inflected pop confection “Espresso” climbed one spot from No. 6 to No. 5. And right behind her, there’s still another indication that 2024 will indeed be the Summer of Country: Zach Bryan’s weeper “Pink Skies” makes its chart debut at No. 6.
This week also marks the annual return of (yet) another Billboard chart: Songs of the Summer, which the magazine introduced in 2010. This chart looks at songs’ cumulative performance throughout the summer (which Billboard begins with this week’s chart and ends the week of Labor Day). This early in the season, this chart is a snooze — all 20 positions are an exact replica of the top 20 spaces on the Billboard 100 chart — but it will be worth keeping an eye on in the months to come.
TOP ALBUMS
In news that is most likely a surprise to no one, Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department is spending a sixth week in the No. 1 slot on the Billboard 200 albums chart. What may be slightly more startling information: following a bump after she released many deluxe and special issues of Tortured Poets, Swift is starting to experience a downturn in sales and streaming — and she’s not the only one.
Last week, Swift moved (to borrow a reviled music industry term) 378,000 equivalent album units (I promise, that’s the end of the jargon — at least for now). This week, she only had 175,000 units, per Luminate, the company that compiles the data that make up the Billboard charts. That’s a nearly 54% drop in just seven days — and many psychic worlds away from the first week of Tortured Poets, when Swift earned 2.61 million equivalent album sales a mere month and a half ago.
But Swift may not the only artist starting to sing the summertime blues. Although Bilie Eilish’s album Hit Me Hard and Soft is right behind Swift in the No. 2 spot for a second week in a row, she too has experienced a big drop with 145,000 units, down from last week’s 339,000 — which was a career high for Eilish.
While we’re not at the doldrums of the early 2010s, this is a trend to watch.
WORTH NOTING
One of the not-so-hidden industry secrets of the Billboard 200 chart is that generally, a rather bountiful proportion of its membership is comprised of so-called “catalog” titles: albums that have been commercially available for at least 18 months and sometimes for far, far longer than that.
This week’s chart is a textbook case in point: By my cursory estimate, about 57% of this week’s entries are deep catalog titles, with even more just approaching the 18-month mark. For example, Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, which was originally released in 1977, is currently at No. 31, having now racked up 583 weeks on this chart; the Bob Marley & the Wailers’ perennially beloved greatest hits collection, Legend (issued in 1984), sits at No. 35, 837 weeks strong and counting. Other nearly eternally charting artists include Journey, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Eminem, Bruno Mars and Guns N’ Roses.
All that is a reminder of just how hard it can be for current — and especially emerging — stars to break through all those longtime favorites, even at the more modest chart positions. If anyone is going to challenge Taylor Swift’s hegemony on the Billboard 200 this summer, perhaps it will be one of these elders.
Calling all music enthusiasts … got deep pockets? If so, a signed copy of John Lennon and Yoko Ono‘s “Double Fantasy” album is up for grabs.
MomentsinTime.com has listed this rare gem from a private collector — and it can be all yours for $54,000.
Fun fact: Yoko’s signature doesn’t really affect the price. Her signed items don’t fetch much on their own, so the value is all down to Lennon’s signature.
Nonetheless, the album is the holy grail for collectors — especially since it dropped just 3 weeks before John’s tragic murder in 1980.
“Double Fantasy” was John and Yoko’s 5th and final studio album. It got some initial hate, but after John’s murder, it shot to worldwide fame, snagging the Album of the Year Grammy in 1981.
Of course, Lennon already had a few Grammys with The Beatles — And, as we all know, tons of their iconic memorabilia have gone for hundreds of thousands at auction.
From signatures to unseen movie footage and lost recording tapes, the music collectors’ industry is always buzzing to get their hands on Fab 4’s items.
Sharks in the Seine — mon dieu!
Netflix
/Sofie Gheysens
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Netflix
/Sofie Gheysens
I will be the first to admit I didn’t even know there was a French shark movie until I saw it appear at the very top of Netflix’s top 10 movies. And it’s not as if it’s hiding anything about its topic: It’s called Under Paris. You know why? Because it’s all about sharks under Paris. Specifically, it’s about sharks in the Seine. Initially, there are just a couple of sharks. But then, there are a lot of sharks. And the movie is apparently an enormous hit, although/because it is, while not as silly as Sharknado, very silly.
Under Paris (aka, to me at least, Sharknadeau) begins as a standard menacing-creature story. Sophia (Bérénice Bejo, Oscar nominee for The Artist) is a scientist studying sharks in the vicinity of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (a real, depressing thing). She and her team get a signal from one of their tagged sharks, named Lilith, and several members of the team go on a dive to obtain a blood sample. This dive does not go well (I mean, I suppose it goes OK for Lilith), leaving Sophia traumatized.
A few years later, a shark-saving group in Paris alerts Sophia that they know where Lilith is: in the Seine. Now, sharks in the Seine are not a real thing, but perhaps the only upside of climate change is the expansion of options for disaster movies. After all, a movie like this can throw its hands in the air and say, “Honestly, you don’t know what’s possible now that you can go to the beach on Christmas, do you?” So: sharks in the Seine. Not just that, but multiplying sharks in the Seine.
Bérénice Bejo stars as Sophia, a shark scientist.
Sofie Gheysens/Netflix
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Sofie Gheysens/Netflix
Of course, Paris has an arrogant, careless mayor who, like all government officials in shark movies, suffers from a pathological failure to be adequately afraid of sharks. She has only one priority: making sure that the upcoming triathlon goes off without a hitch. That’s right: The Seine is infested with ravenous sharks at the very moment when crowds of swimmers are about to throw themselves into the Seine at a highly public event. Mon dieu! Now, if it were you or me, perhaps we think to ourselves, “Better to cancel the event in advance than have it canceled on account of all the swimmers being devoured,” but no, the mayor of Paris has no such caution.
For the first half or so, Under Paris unfolds like a fairly classy suspense film about a rarely seen threat. It does not look cheap in the way Sharknado did, for instance. It’s quite competently shot and edited, it’s tense, and it’s frightening. In other words, it gets the job done.
In the second half, the movie goes fully bazoo. Certain arguments about the sharks’ intentions are resolved when some participants in those arguments are eaten. You get your first of a couple of overhead shots of a shark leaping out of the water, mouth first, the better to show you someone in its jaws (heh) who is thinking, “This seems bad.” Crowds run in terror. Blood gushes. If you are watching the movie in the original French (which I recommend) and you have the English subtitles on, you will see a lot of the caption “[panicked screams].”
All this to say: It’s not hard to understand why this is such a hot property at the moment. It gives you half of a fairly normal movie and half of an absolutely wacky one. About half of it is suspense, and about half of it is full-on creature horror, incredibly bloody and with a very (very) high body count. And at the end, there’s no question that just as these sharks are under Paris, the next ones will be under London (or New York, or wherever). If you’re looking for a popcorn movie and you don’t mind a lot of cartoonish gore, you could do a lot worse.
This piece also appeared in NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter so you don’t miss the next one, plus get weekly recommendations about what’s making us happy.
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