Marvel's Eternals showed up on Disney+ yesterday. So, I watched it.
My expectations were low, and thus I was pleasantly surprised!
The most obvious linguistic thing about it is that it features a bunch of different languages in dialog! Including Babylonian, for which Assyriologist Martin Worthington was consulted, and ASL.
But, for the most part, its usage of them is non-notable. It's just using subtitles all the time, all over the place.
I suppose that is kind of notable, however, insofar as it demonstrates that you really can do that. In case there was still any doubt, it seems that movie audiences are just fine with reading subtitles--so if that's keeping you from writing a screenplay featuring a secondary language, get over it!
Now, Eternals does not have the best audience review score ever (78% right now according to Rotten Tomatoes), so you might be thinking "well, what if the people who hated it hated it because of subtitles? I don't want to drive away 22% of my potential audience!" So, I read every audience review on Rotten Tomatoes, to find out exactly why people liked or disliked it. (Well, skimmed; there are a lot of audience reviews!) And in all of those reviews, I could only find one that kinda sorta obliquely may have been related to language issues:
"Like why is there even a deaf chick? How does that help the story?"
So, I'm pretty sure subtitling was not the problem. Go forth, screenwriters! Let your characters be multilingual, secure in the knowledge that if you can't figure out anything more interesting, you can just subtitle them, and it'll be fine!
There were, however, two actually interesting things done with Babylonian & ASL early on in the film: First, we have a brief shot in which ALS is diagetically interpreted into, not English, but Babylonian, while simultaneously being translated in English subtitles for the audience. Three languages at once (two diagetic and one non-diagetic) is not something I have seen before, and certainly something that is much more suited to the medium of film than to prose. Second, we have this line spoken (in English) by Ikaris:
"If I want to spend more time with you, I need to get to know them."
as an explanation of why he had just spoken his previous line in Babylonian. In other words, the writers are showing Ikaris learning a new languages specifically in order to insert himself into a social position that that language will give him access to! Good job with the (probably unintentional) sociolinguistic awareness! This nicely ties back into my comments on Toolmaker Koan, regarding the need for a secondary language to serve some purpose in the story. Without some secondary language in play (which one in this case being dictated by the setting), would have been missing a tool to establish Ikaris's character development.
Now, let's look back at that Rotten Tomatoes review: why is there a "deaf chick" speaking ASL? How does that help the story? Well, sadly, it didn't help the story quite as much as it could have. Several scenes show Makkari relying on lip-reading to understand lines spoken by other characters who totally knew sign language as well, and could've signed to her. But, for some reason, they just... didn't, always. Nor were the unique advantages of the visual vs. auditory medium ever exploited--e.g., to communicate more effectively in noisy environments, or without attracting attention by making noise. And without those kinds of plot-integrated justifications, we are left wondering why a godlike Celestial like Arishem would create an Eternal hero with an apparent sensory disability. Nevertheless, the use of ASL, and the associated insertion of a Deaf character, does have a purpose in the story even if it doesn't have relevance to the plot--it's simply characterization. Why should there be a Deaf character? Well, because why not? Why shouldn't there be a Deaf character? She is there to challenge the audience's implicit conceptions of what a "default" character type is, and to provide representation with which an additional audience segment can identify. Now, there is almost always a way to make the secondary language plot relevant, whether signed or auditory, as Michaelbrent Collings did with Portuguese in This Darkness Light--and I do fault the writers of Eternals a bit for not bothering to find those ways. But simply representing someone from a different speech community is a totally valid reason to have a secondary language all by itself, despite what certain Rotten Tomatoes reviewers might think.
It is also worth noting that, as in The Dragon Prince, ASL is used to establish a second narrative translation convention alongside English. While we can assume that, in the contemporary scenes, the Eternals are in fact speaking English when they appear to be speaking English, and thus may actually be speaking ASL when they appear to be speaking ASL, this cannot be the case for the historical scenes, in which none of them would ever have heard of English or ASL yet, let alone had a chance to learn those languages. (Some media sources have reported that they actually created a whole new sign language for the movie, but that's a severely misleading headline--in fact, the actor Lauren Ridloff and her husband Douglas, who was the film's ASL consultant, just created new ASL name signs for the characters.) Thus, the Eternals circa 5000 BC were presumably using some unspecified fictional alien sign language, which is merely represented as ASL no-diagetically for the benefit of the modern audience
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