Lost in the accent

Khaleej Times (life) / 5 October 2012

MY HUSBAND and I recently got two free tickets to the latest Batman movie. Although popular wisdom and practice prescribe that anything that comes gratis must be grabbed and gobbled at once, I asked my husband to pass on my ticket. He could watch the movie with whomever he wanted, for all I cared. I wasn’t interested in watching it because I don’t, for the life of me, understand a word of what goes on in an English movie!

The last English film that I watched in a cinema was either the first or the second part of the First Blood series during the early eighties. I still can’t say which was worse on my ears — the guttural mumblings by Sylvester Stallone or the rattle of his machine gun. I was accompanied by my neighbour and family, whom I considered superior creatures for being able to enjoy the movies. But the best I could think of doing was plugging my ears and squeezing my eyes shut till it hurt, and wait for the lights to come on at the end of the movie. (One can’t even doze off with so much noise around you!)

And now decades later, I still don’t have the guts to walk into the cinema to watch an English movie. Believe me, I have let gems like Titanic and The Beautiful Mind, and magnum opuses like Gladiator and Braveheart pass, while the world was raving about them.

My friends were surprised at my linguistic deficiency and I guess they even chortled in secret. It is just a mind thing, they said. You will get tuned to it if only you started watching them, they averred, almost like one gets used to driving in Dubai. But the truth is, I cannot follow the movies, and the bigger truth I deeply suspect is, not many of them can either.

I wonder what it would be like to walk up to a non-native speaker, who has just stepped out of a cinema playing a Hollywood blockbuster, and ask him whether he understood every word spoken in the movie. Chances are — assuming they are not offended and are willing to be candid — that they will give me a coy grin and say, “Well, kinda. We understood what was transpiring.”

Now, I don’t want to spend money to ‘kinda’ understand things, especially when I can follow things almost completely free of cost in the cosiness of my living room. God bless Mr. Whoever for tagging English sub titles to movies on TV and DVDs. All right, watching classics on screen does make a sinking Titanic in the Atlantic look like a paper boat sinking in a plastic tub (especially on the 21-inch screen that we had way back then), the Roman army look like a swarm of ants and the Spiderman look less amazing and more like the commonplace gossamer spider crawling on our house wall. But at least, I don’t have to strain my ears, glue my eyes, blow my brains and yet come out of the hall completely disoriented just like I used to after our Calculus classes in junior college.

I don’t know if this issue with English movies is a woman thing, becase I haven’t heard men grumble about it as much as women. Men are probably more able to, by some strange design, able to follow the different accents of the language. Or does the truth lie elsewhere? What’s your bet on the possibility that a majority of those proficient, self-styled, non-native English movie buffs are in the same boat as me, but are merely too vain to concede that they too only ‘kinda’ follow things?

“Believe me, that’s generally the case,” a male acquaintance recently confessed.

Ah, that’s some relief! I now feel completely vindicated about a prolonged feeling of inadequacy. It’s okay to not understand English in the movies, after all.