A Simple Misunderstanding | My ‘Interpretive Gap’ in Radiohead, Shakespeare and Just About Everything Else

I mumble a lot in conversation. It’s super frustrating because it takes a fair bit of effort for other people to understand me speaking naturally – especially when it comes to work or times when I need to be super clear super-fast. I really have been trying to avoid it recently but doing so comes at the cost of not feeling relaxed in conversation with close friends or even people I’m meeting for the first time.

Communication is super important, not just to me but to everyone. It’s our essential and intangible link to everyone else outside of our brain – from our self and the voice in our head to what is beyond our shells. I work in marketing, and mass communication is also a big part of what I do for a living. One of the words in my professional lexicon is ‘messaging’. We must always “nail the messaging” or make sure the “key messages” are simple enough to see at first sight for the consumer to understand.

As ad man Don Draper aptly describes it in Mad Men (Season 3, Episode 10 ‘The Colour Blue’):

“…my job is about boiling down communication to its essentials so that when people see it they instantly recognise what it means.”

Copywriting is essentially the same as it was 60 years ago by the above definition, except in a much shorter form due to reduced attention-spans and more difficult to accomplish since clients have all watched Mad Men clips on YouTube, aren’t easily impressed anymore and thus like to challenge agencies.

But to be honest uncertainty in interpretation is often kind of refreshing. One of the key building blocks to communication is references – visual, verbal, cultural – it’s all anchoring on to the familiar in our heads. There are many metaphors employed to help us understand complicated concepts easily.  The excitement in uncertainty opens you up to new things you’ve never heard before, don’t register and can even build a world if you hear something that simply doesn’t exist. Ignorance is a special kind of bliss at points as it gives you a challenge to attempt to understand it even if you can’t at first instance.

I have started to notice that when I watch something with friends they choose to opt-in with subtitles – which I initially found super interesting and have recently taken to. It could be for a myriad of reasons – one such being different viewing environments (the commute etc.). However this is still the case in a quiet, controlled viewing space and I attribute this to being unable to understand and absorb all the details in the dialogue by simply listening to it.

The first few shows where I instantly recognise the usefulness of subtitles to me are The Crown, The Thick of It, The Simpsons and very recently I’ve been watching Mad Men and watched The King. To really understand them properly I’ve turned on the subtitles to additionally experience it as a text based narrative and fully experience the language used and references that one would only register with foreknowledge. And quite honestly, it really makes things much easier to Google and learn from. I can’t overstate how much I’ve learned from the above shows to expand my general knowledge. I sound like an absolute bellend with that last sentence but this is how it works when you see a name drop or a plug – you expand what you know of. I’ve learned a great deal and more from the above examples – The Thick of It and The Simpsons having been just two big influences on myself.

Whenever I do hear something in a show that doesn’t register with me; something that sounds off, unfamiliar, alien and unrecognisable I rewind a few frames, slap on the subtitles and start Googling to slip into a tangential Wikipedia session. As for specific examples from the above: The Crown got me browsing about its key events (the Profumo affair, the Aberfan disaster), The Thick of It (“Iago with a Blackberry” introducing me to the characters of Othello, Leonard Coen too if you can believe it), The Simpsons (too many to list), Mad Men (‘The Marshall Plan’, ‘Potemkin’, ‘Bye Bye Birdie’) and The King (definitions for ‘beguiled’, ‘Christendom’, ‘gunstones’, ‘madrigal’, ‘precis‘ etc.).

Often times, something unfamiliar just doesn’t register as such and I beg to think what is happening in my brain to just let that slide. Was I not paying attention? Where was that curious itch when I needed it? Why did I just stop caring for a moment? In the age of information where we can learn anything we want, what happened? Common knowledge is so much more complex than it used to be and so many unfamiliar things are referenced so quick and fast and that they’re lost on people to the point that they’re not even noticed. We would rather just not know.

You could say that textual narratives have been really important to me from a young age, but surprisingly not with books. Most of it comes from text-based videogames, specifically religiously playing Pokémon games which easily helped me become a fast reader from an early point, so maybe that’s one reason why I and so many others take to subtitles-by-default so well – since it’s how we take in and appreciate information easily.

Another explanation for the big influx of subtitles-by-default is that we’re starting to see more and more mumbling dialogue in television and film. I know that a few of my friends struggled to get through 2011’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy due to their croaky voices. I guess that’s why one of the essential techniques of acting in a theatre space is speaking loudly and clearly.

Actors hop between screen and stage, but technology means that performances don’t necessarily have to be proclaimed as loudly as they do to a live audience. It’s a fantastic thing that television shows are becoming more nuanced and cinematic – people say that we’re living in the golden age of television with prestige shows and production values, but then I believe this is creating an interesting dilemma. I recall there was a bit of controversy around the BBC adaptation of Jamaica Inn where the dialogue was nearly inaudible and got a few complaints – who’s responsible for it? The actors? The sound editors? The director? A more recent example of this is Tenet, which someone in the comments section for Mark Kermode’s review dubbed “multi-million dollar mumblecore”.

Appreciating misunderstanding, this ‘interpretive gap’, is also quite important to me beyond TV and film but also in music too, and no example is stronger than that of Radiohead. According to my Spotify Wrapped of the 2010’s, Radiohead are my artist of the decade. Yet with all the times I’ve listened to their music I still cannot fully understand a lot of the things that Thom Yorke is singing.

However, in discussion about the band I find a lot of other people quoting and commenting on how good the lyrics are but I silently ask them “did you really understand it on first hearing?“. Don’t get me wrong, Radiohead‘s lyricism is brilliant, but you’ll have to most likely study the record’s liner notes or visit Genius in order to hear them properly.

In a way though I do very much enjoy this experience. Often times I don’t know the lyrics to not just Radiohead but for many artists – and when I do recall them I often forget. I once went to a Radiohead gig with some of my friends and Harvey’s dad who was also in attendance kept calling me out for audibly mumbling along to the vocal melodies. I remember joking to my friend James about Alt-J‘s gigs essentially being a full room of people mumbling along to Fitzpleasure because of Joe Newman‘s indecipherable vocal style.

It is a funny scenario to imagine, yet it has a bite of truth to it. In the example of Radiohead it really makes the case that the voice is another musical instrument to add texture to a piece of music, oftentimes mistaken as the centrepiece of an entire track. Sigur Ros made their own language for an album to illustrate this point too. You even see this in action with western audiences listening to sounds and music from across the world – K-Pop, J-Pop, Serge Gainsbourg, Four Tet‘s Morning/Evening as some examples.

I personally like listening to Bossa Nova because of the instrumentation – including how I very much like the sound of Portuguese vocals. Sometimes relaxing music needs to deflect your focus away from itself and tiptoe around your attention. Consider it one tier up from muzak. Or conversely it can be appreciated as part of the full artistic package and a blissful ignorance is what makes the sounds so pleasant to enjoy, where listening to something that’s unintelligible to the audience is exactly what they want. Isn’t that a beautiful thing too? It may come across as a bit globalist but the fact we can transcend geography to discover and share so much is something that we often take for granted.

The ‘interpretive gap’ is a beautiful thing – sometimes not knowing is fantastic. This is a slight contradiction to what I was talking about earlier with needing to know things (in my personal mission you can boil it down to the binary desire to know if a namedrop is diegetic worldbuilding or grounded in our reality).

Of course, another example of the ‘interpretive gap’ in action that snapped to mind was that of Shakespeare. Shakespeare is something I really enjoy when I get the opportunity to experience it but it isn’t something I fully understand (without having to study the text in depth) and I think this is the beauty of art in a nutshell.

With TV, film and theatre you observe. The semiotics of human action, reaction, emotion, empathy from agents who are saying things you don’t fully understand still allows you to come to an emphatic conclusion. Try muting and then watching the argument scene in Marriage Story that had been doing the rounds – you know that they’re emotional and you see and feel that with them.

I’ve only taken the time to study one Shakespeare play in depth – Romeo and Juliet in school. I remember finding Shakespearean vaguely simple to understand. With Shakespearean you can have a stab at understanding every other word depending on how good your vocabulary is. You see and recognise the familiar words if not slightly augmented and adjusted; you feel the essence of what they’re saying but you don’t fully understand the meaning. Yet when performed with a crafted combination of acting, delivery, intonation, language, mood, setting, costume etc. it creates this beautiful thing called a play but a play in a half foreign, unfamiliar language that you experience and do understand.

You understand in King Lear when he’s exiling Cordelia (note that I watched the BBC’s King Lear with Anthony Hopkins with the subtitles on) you can see it in his voice and you understand albeit not exactly word for word. Another example is how you can really enjoy Beatrice and Benedick’s witty sparring in Much Ado About Nothing. I’ve seen two seperate performances of them (Emma Thompson/Kenneth Branagh and Catherine Tate/David Tennant) and the chemistry is always delightful regardless of the words spoken.

Misinterpretation will always have a role to play in art. You can’t have pure empathy with someone else. There is beauty though in narrowing down communication between one individual and another and in the case of a writer and audience – ultimately provoking a feeling in the audience through a character’s dialogue and action can be the most validating thing for both parties. You may not be able to ever fully eloquently communicate exactly how you’re feeling to another and what you want to say but there’s still a lot of value in trying. I guess it comes down to your skill in trying to be precise with that, or even coming up with a hitherto unseen way to do it or a method you are good at and most importantly, a method that makes you happy.

Take this entire article for example: I may come across as absolutely bonkers but I like to hope that the more I ramble on about it and demonstrate it the best I can then it’s likely you’ll be able to at least have some semblance of what I’m talking about with this piece of writing – and hey, maybe you might feel the same way!