Lifestyle

From ‘The Sympathizer’ to ‘Past Lives,’ American Audiences Warm to Subtitles

Published

2 years ago

May 23, 2024

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.”

Lifestyle

Doctors says ‘The Pitt’ reflects the gritty realities of medicine today

Published

8 hours ago

January 9, 2026

Press Room

Doctors says ‘The Pitt’ reflects the gritty realities of medicine today

From left: Noah Wyle plays Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch, the senior attending physician, and Fiona Dourif plays Dr. Cassie McKay, a third-year resident, in a fictional Pittsburgh emergency department in the HBO Max series The Pitt.

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The first five minutes of the new season of The Pitt instantly capture the state of medicine in the mid-2020s: a hectic emergency department waiting room; a sign warning that aggressive behavior will not be tolerated; a memorial plaque for victims of a mass shooting; and a patient with large Ziploc bags filled to the brink with various supplements and homeopathic remedies.

Scenes from the new installment feel almost too recognizable to many doctors.

The return of the critically acclaimed medical drama streaming on HBO Max offers viewers a surprisingly realistic view of how doctors practice medicine in an age of political division, institutional mistrust and the corporatization of health care.

Each season covers one day in the kinetic, understaffed emergency department of a fictional Pittsburgh hospital, with each episode spanning a single hour of a 15-hour shift. That means there’s no time for romantic plots or far-fetched storylines that typically dominate medical dramas.

Instead, the fast-paced show takes viewers into the real world of the ER, complete with a firehose of medical jargon and the day-to-day struggles of those on the frontlines of the American health care system. It’s a microcosm of medicine — and of a fragmented United States.

Noah Wyle plays Dr. Michael "Robby" Rabinovitch in The Pitt.

Many doctors and health professionals praised season one of the series, and ER docs even invited the show’s star Noah Wyle to their annual conference in September.

So what do doctors think of the new season? As a medical student myself, I appreciated the dig at the “July effect” — the long-held belief that the quality of care decreases in July when newbie doctors start residency — rebranded “first week in July syndrome” by one of the characters.

That insider wink sets the tone for a season that Dr. Alok Patel, a pediatrician at Stanford Medicine Children’s Health, says is on point. Patel, who co-hosts the show’s companion podcast, watched the first nine episodes of the new installment and spoke to NPR about his first impressions.

To me, as a medical student, the first few scenes of the new season are pretty striking, and they resemble what modern-day emergency medicine looks and sounds like. From your point of view, how accurate is it?

I’ll say off the bat, when it comes to capturing the full essence of practicing health care — the highs, the lows and the frustrations — The Pitt is by far the most medically accurate show that I think has ever been created. And I’m not the only one to share that opinion. I hear that a lot from my colleagues.

OK, but is every shift really that chaotic?

I mean, obviously, it’s television. And I know a lot of ER doctors who watch the show and are like, “Hey, it’s really good, but not every shift is that crazy.” I’m like, “Come on, relax. It’s TV. You’ve got to take a little bit of liberties.”

As in its last season, The Pitt sheds light on the real — sometimes boring — bureaucratic burdens doctors deal with that often get in the way of good medicine. How does that resonate with real doctors?

There are so many topics that affect patient care that are not glorified. And so The Pitt did this really artful job of inserting these topics with the right characters and the right relatable scenarios. I don’t want to give anything away, but there’s a pretty relatable issue in season two with medical bills.

Right. Insurance seems to take center stage at times this season — almost as a character itself — which seems apt for this moment when many Americans are facing a sharp rise in costs. But these mundane — yet heartbreaking — moments don’t usually make their way into medical dramas, right?

I guarantee when people see this, they’re going to nod their head because they know someone who has been affected by a huge hospital bill.

If you’re going to tell a story about an emergency department that is being led by these compassionate health care workers doing everything they can for patients, you’ve got to make sure you insert all of health care into it.

As the characters juggle multiple patients each hour, a familiar motif returns: medical providers grappling with some heavy burdens outside of work.

Yeah, the reality is that if you’re working a busy shift and you have things happening in your personal life, the line between personal life and professional life gets blurred and people have moments.

The Pitt highlights that and it shows that doctors are real people. Nurses are actual human beings. And sometimes things happen, and it spills out into the workplace. It’s time we take a step back and not only recognize it, but also appreciate what people are dealing with.

2025 was another tough year for doctors. Many had to continue to battle misinformation while simultaneously practicing medicine. How does medical misinformation fit into season two?

I wouldn’t say it’s just mistrust of medicine. I mean that theme definitely shows up in The Pitt, but people are also just confused. They don’t know where to get their information from. They don’t know who to trust. They don’t know what the right decision is.

There’s one specific scene in season two that, again, no spoilers here, but involves somebody getting their information from social media. And that again is a very real theme.

In recent years, physical and verbal abuse of healthcare workers has risen, fueling mental health struggles among providers. The Pitt was praised for diving into this reality. Does it return this season?

The new season of The Pitt still has some of that tension between patients and health care professionals — and sometimes it’s completely projected or misdirected. People are frustrated, they get pissed off when they can’t see a doctor in time and they may act out.

The characters who get physically attacked in The Pitt just brush it off. That whole concept of having to suppress this aggression and then the frustration that there’s not enough protection for health care workers, that’s a very real issue.

A new attending physician, Dr. Baran Al-Hashimi, joins the cast this season. Sepideh Moafi plays her, and she works closely with the veteran attending physician, Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch, played by Noah Wyle. What are your — and Robby’s — first impressions of her?

Right off the bat in the first episode, people get to meet this brilliant firecracker. Dr. Al-Hashimi, versus Dr. Robby, almost represents two generations of attending physicians. They’re almost on two sides of this coin, and there’s a little bit of clashing.

Sepideh Moafi, fourth from left, as Dr. Baran Al-Hashimi, the new attending physician, huddles with her team around a patient in a fictional Pittsburgh teaching hospital in the HBO Max series The Pitt.

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Part of that clash is her clear-eyed take on artificial intelligence and its role in medicine. And she thinks AI can help doctors document what’s happening with patients — also called charting — right?

Yep, Dr. Al-Hashimi is an advocate for AI tools in the ER because, I swear to God, they make health care workers’ lives more efficient. They make things such as charting faster, which is a theme that shows up in season two.

But then Dr. Robby gives a very interesting rebuttal to the widespread use of AI. The worry is that if we put AI tools everywhere, then all of a sudden, the financial arm of health care would say, “Cool, now you can double how many patients you see. We will not give you any more resources, but with these AI tools, you can generate more money for the system.”

The new installment also continues to touch on the growing corporatization of medicine. In season one we saw how Dr. Robby and his staff were being pushed to see more patients.

Yes, it really helps the audience understand the kind of stressors that people are dealing with while they’re just trying to take care of patients.

In the first season, when Dr. Robby kind of had that back and forth with the hospital administrator, doctors were immediately won over because that is such a big point of frustration — such a massive barrier.

There are so many more themes explored this season. What else should viewers look forward to?

I’m really excited for viewers to dive into the character development. It’s so reflective of how it really goes in residency. So much happens between your first year and second year of residency — not only in terms of your medical skill, but also in terms of your development as a person.

I think what’s also really fascinating is that The Pitt has life lessons buried in every episode. Sometimes you catch it immediately, sometimes it’s at the end, sometimes you catch it when you watch it again.

But it represents so much of humanity because humanity doesn’t get put on hold when you get sick — you just go to the hospital with your full self. And so every episode — every patient scenario — there is a lesson to learn.

Michal Ruprecht is a Stanford Global Health Media Fellow and a fourth-year medical student.

Lifestyle

In Beauty, Private Equity Is Hot Again

Published

9 hours ago

January 9, 2026

Press Room

As strategic firms slow down their shopping sprees and venture capital dollars dry up, PE firms’ reputation for asset stripping is a thing of the past. Founders are now often hoping for private equity buyouts, but want to be sure there can be a true partnership.

Lifestyle

10 books we’re looking forward to in early 2026

Published

20 hours ago

January 8, 2026

Press Room

10 books we’re looking forward to in early 2026

Two fiction books about good friends coming from different circumstances. Two biographies of people whose influence on American culture is, arguably, still underrated. One Liza Minnelli memoir. These are just a handful of books coming out in the first few months of 2026 that we’ve got our eye on.

Fiction

Autobiography of Cotton, by Cristina Rivera Garza, Feb. 3

Garza, who won a Pulitzer in 2024 for memoir/autobiography, actually first published Autobiography of Cotton back in 2020, but it’s only now getting an English translation. The book blends fiction with the author’s own familial history to tell the story of cotton cultivation along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Crux, by Gabriel Tallent, Jan. 20

Tallent’s last novel, My Absolute Darling, was a harrowing coming of age story about a teenage girl surviving her abusive survivalist father. But it did find pockets of beauty in the outdoors. Tallent’s follow up looks to be similarly awestruck by nature. It’s about two young friends, separated by class and opportunity, but bound together by a love of rock climbing.

Half His Age, by Jennette McCurdy, Jan. 20

The former iCarly actress’ bracing and brutally honest memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died, was a huge hit. It spent weeks on bestseller’s lists, and is being adapted into a series for Apple TV+. Now McCurdy’s set to come out with her fiction debut, about a teenage girl who falls for her high school creative writing teacher.

Kin, by Tayari Jones, Feb. 24

Similarly to Crux, Kin also follows two friends across the years as options and opportunities pull them apart. The friends at the center of this book are two women who grew up without moms. Jones’ last novel, 2018’s An American Marriage, was a huge hit with critics.

Seasons of Glass & Iron, by Amal El-Mohtar

Seasons of Glass & Iron: Stories, by Amal El-Mohtar, March 24

El-Mohtar is an acclaimed science-fiction writer, and this book is a collection of previously published short stories and poetry. Many of the works here have been honored by the big science-fiction/fantasy awards, including the titular story, which is a feminist re-telling of two fairy tales.

Nonfiction

A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides, by Gisèle Pelicot, Feb. 17

Pelicot’s story of rape and sexual assault – and her decision to wave anonymity in the trial – turned her into a galvanizing figure for women across the world. Her writing her own story of everything that happened is also a call to action for others to do the same.

Cosmic Music: The Life, Art, and Transcendence of Alice Coltrane, by Andy Beta, March 3

For decades, the life and work of Alice Coltrane has lived in the shadow of her husband, John Coltrane. This deeply researched biography hopes to properly contextualize her as one of the most visionary and influential musicians of her time.

Football, by Chuck Klosterman, Jan. 20

One of our great essaysists and (over?) thinkers turns his sights onto one of the last bits of monoculture we’ve got. But in one of the pieces in this collection, Klosterman wonders, how long until football is no longer the summation of American culture? But until that time comes, there’s plenty to dig into from gambling to debates over the true goat.

Kids, Wait Till You Hear This! by Liza Minnelli, with Michael Feinstein, March 20

Minnelli told People that previous attempts at telling her story “didn’t get it right,” so she’s doing it herself. This new memoir promises to get into her childhood, her marriages, and her struggles with substance abuse.

Tom Paine’s War: The Words that Rallied a Nation and the Founder of Our Time, by Jack Kelly, Jan. 6

If you haven’t heard, it’s a big birthday year for America. And it’s a birthday that might not have happened if not for the words of Thomas Paine. This new book from historian Jack Kelly makes the argument that Paine’s words are just as important and relevant to us today.