I have an addiction to watching movies, which I indulge with embarrassing regularity. A significant portion of these films are in languages other than English. Though my three years of high school French and one year of high school Japanese have me damn near fluent in those tongues, I’m nonetheless forced to observe a divisive viewing practice, which has a largely negative reputation outside the realm of unapologetic cinephiles. The practice to which I refer is the reading of subtitles.

In my attempts to expose friends to foreign films I think are worth watching, two factors are consistent culprits in dissuading people’s interest: a film’s length and whether or not it has subtitles. The former always occurred to me as somewhat reasonable, not necessarily as a reflection of Muggsy Bogues-sized attention spans but because life is finite: if some people don’t feel like spending time watching an inaccessible work by Godard, who am I to force it upon them?

Instead, the agent of dissuasion I always found more curious was the presence of subtitles. This curiosity was exacerbated when I heard the same complaint from several people.

First, I wanted to understand the nature of this allergy and where it originated. In superficially spatial terms, the subtitle takes up a very small portion of the frame, hardly ever directly concealing the onscreen image. If people are concerned with having things blocking their field of vision, they’d be better served worrying about the heads of audience members or the chance their eyes might wander from the image should a haze of boredom suddenly cloud their focus.

A more popular excuse for the opposition to subtitles is that many see reading sentences as a task, no matter what the situational context. The essence of this excuse seems to be linked purely to the perception that reading is a form of work; I have nothing explicitly critical to say about that notion. But it’s this excuse in particular that makes me doubt the subtitle’s necessity.

My uncertainty splits from the aforementioned popular opinion that reading subtitles is an unwelcome task. It’s not that I find reading a miniscule amount of text to be at all arduous. Instead, my uncertainty is founded upon the question of the subtitle as a distracting presence, and by extension, an agent of distortion acting against the film being watched.

Cinema is an intensely empirical branch of art. If we think of a movie as a work of art, then we think about it in the same way we think about a painting or a sculpture: We can’t digest the work of art until the work is experienced. Taking this a step further, we think about it in a similar fashion as we think about a play: Though one is struck by various impressions as they watch a film, the digestion of the work of art as the artist intended is not accomplished until the work is viewed in its entirety.

But if the proper digestion of a work of art is supposedly contingent on the complete experience (i.e. not just looking at a small portion of an image), then the subtitle has to be thought of as a problematic presence. One second in a movie is constituted by 24 frames, which can be thought of as 24 images streamed to produce the illusion of motion. So, it’s probably impossible to completely perceive each individual frame as we would a photograph. File it as a problem to be addressed by evolution in the coming millennia.

But while each frame can’t be perceived completely, it seems like it can. We can look at the image and notice specific elements, all without missing the stream of audio running alongside the image. Yet, the subtitle has a presence on the screen: it takes up a tiny amount of space, but it necessarily diverts the eyes. In reading the subtitle, the person watching the movie looks away from parts of the image without looking away from the image itself. The subtitle momentarily commands one’s focus. This problem is inflamed by the possibility that the image could drastically change at any millisecond. Even in watching a static shot of two people in conversation, looking down at the subtitle obscures the perception of expressive facials or atmospheric backdrops. In short, with the presence of subtitles, one watches a movie without watching it completely.

I’ve characterized subtitles as being problematic, and so I would seem pretty silly if I didn’t propose some sort of solution. Unfortunately, the only solution that comes to mind is one that will likely make me seem pretty silly anyway: dubbing. Dubbing has a reputation for being able to make any film unintentionally ridiculous, but if it were handled properly by distributors of foreign films and their studios — not that I have any faith in their ability to do so — tone and content wouldn’t be compromised. Rather than being a petty concession to foreign audiences, this could be a means of liberating films from the inherent limitations of our ability to focus on multiple visual objects. In the age of globalized culture, it’s not an unrealistic idea.

Dan Sullivan is a junior majoring in history. Do you hate subtitles too? Tell him about it at [email protected].