My love for fan-made subtitles started with the Norwegian TV series Skam (2015-2017). Skam is a drama aimed at teenage girls that became popular across the world when it went queer in its third season, and has since been adapted in seven countries. Each season of Skam revolves around a different teenager, with all of the main characters so far attending the same school. The third season of the original Skam follows a gay boy, Isak, who falls in love with Even, the new boy at school. The various adaptations of Skam mostly repeat the same characters and central storyline with some changes to cultural references and character biographies. In some of the more significant changes so far, the Spanish adaptation has skipped a season and replaced Isak’s storyline with one about a queer girl, while the US adaptation, still in its second season, is lined up to have actress La’keisha Slade play Skam Austin’s equivalent to Isak. Meanwhile, Even’s equivalent in the German adaptation is trans, with his trans identity being an important part of the season’s storyline. In all of the adaptations, sections of the week’s episode are released throughout the week in real time. In between the release of these clips, screenshots of characters’ messages to each other pop up on the series platform or, in the case of the German adaptation, as WhatsApp messages viewers can subscribe to. Characters also have Instagram accounts in which photos are published to their page or uploaded to their Instagram story in accordance with the series timeline. Sometimes, when trying to find the Instagram account of a character, I accidentally click on the actor’s account, and feel a disorientating jolt, momentarily unsure of whose life I’m looking at.
After each clip comes out a variety of fan-subtitled videos appear online. These subtitles are often written in a significantly different style to professional subtitles, which is what makes them so enjoyable. It’s like watching a TV series with a stranger who is somewhere else in the world, and this invisible stranger becomes part of the show itself; their commentary merging with the dialogue of the characters. Given that Skam plays with the boundary between reality and fiction, I wonder if the hidden work of fan subtitlers risks being co-opted as free labour to fit into the show’s format. But this new media format is also what opens Skam up to its own unravelling. Within the repetitions of Isak’s archetypal coming out story, both compelling and monotonous, there is the unruly presence of the subtitlers: one that knows another story, and speaks from another place.
Like a Greengage Plum
While reading reactions to fan subtitles on Twitter I came across a screenshot of a Turkish fan-subtitled version of the Norwegian version of Skam. The person who posted the screenshot explained that the subtitler had added an on-screen note in brackets, in reference to one of the characters, saying: “the guy is like a greengage plum, crunchy, mashallah”. The image in the screenshot is from an early meeting between two white Norwegian characters: the not-yet-out gay main character, Isak, and his pansexual love interest, Even. In this subtitle the unnamed desire of the protagonist is merged with the specifically sexual desire of the anonymous, possibly queer, presence of the subtitler. The erotic image of crunching into Isak’s love interest is tied to a Turkish cultural reference – where greengage plums (unripe, sour green plums) are a popular fruit – and so the queerness of the moment is brought away from its Norwegian setting. Skam’s attempts to talk about racism, Islamophobia, and the relationship between Islam and queerness have been criticised by some fans and former fans for being racist and Islamophobic in themselves. This subtitle, with the image of the greengage plum and the Arabic phrase “mashallah” (God willed it) as an expression of sexual desire inserted into a white LGBT narrative, ruptures Skam’s white-washing of queerness.
While experimental subtitles have also been used in the context of official subtitling, these often don’t have the disruptive power of fan subtitles. Take, for example, the international release of the Russian films Night Watch (2004) and Day Watch (2006), in which director Timur Bekmambetov experiments with colour and animation to create the English subtitles for his films. The subtitles resonate with the emotional state of a scene and merge language and place, with sentences scrambling, turning red, drifting and vanishing, or appearing in blood and meat.1 He has described these subtitles as “another character in the film”, which are designed to “make the movie more entertaining for English-speaking audiences”.2 As subtitles made by Bekmambetov for official distribution, they are a part of the sanctioned story of the films and cater to the demands of the international market. By contrast, Skam’s fan subtitles are a rogue presence, one that blurs the boundary between the fanbase and the official story beyond the sanctioned framework. As a presence that is collectively and anonymously produced, fan subtitles never gain the character coherency that Bekmambetov believes his subtitles do. These invisible strangers move in and out of the narrative, disrupting both the director’s vision and the market value of the video.
Gay Panic
One of my favourite English subtitles of Skam is a scene in Skam France (2018 – present) in which Lucas and Elliot (Skam France’s versions of Isak and Even) bump into each other at a party. In this scene, the subtitler added “gay panic” in brackets after the girl to whom Lucas is pretending to be attracted greets Elliot. Similar bracketed insertions crop up elsewhere in the subtitles with the phrase “love eyes” when Lucas greets Elliot at school and “liar” when Lucas says “no one” in response to his friends asking who Elliot is.
The phrase “gay panic” is borrowed from a meme format that adds “[gay panic]” and “[gay silence]” in the style of subtitles to moving and still images of queers and people imagined to be queer. Sometimes, these memes are used to convey reactions to situations such as cis-straight family members asking a queer person about their love life, or hearing homophobic jokes as a gay person who isn’t out. Other times the memes are used in fan edits that comment on queer subtext in existing videos. A recent video posted to Twitter with the caption “kathryn hahn being absolutely smitten by rachel weisz while the carol opening score plays in the background” adds the gay panic subtitle, spelt as “gay panique”, to a Hollywood Reporter interview. Fan edits like this also use other subtitles in parentheses to indicate subtextual queerness. A YouTube compilation of the K-pop band NCT adds subtitles such as “[realises what he just said]”, “[is literally heavy breathing]” and “[feels the gaze burning on him]” alongside standard subtitles to show the queerness of the band members’ interactions with each other.
By referencing an anonymously and collectively produced meme, the “gay panic” subtitle in the scene from Skam France opens out the interpretation of queer meaning in the scene beyond the authority of the subtitlers. This memed queer panic has a history and, though not a universal reference for all queers, shifts across a proliferation of contexts. In doing so, it establishes a sense of collective, fragmented queer panic, translating the queerness in a story aimed at non-queer as well as queer audiences into variations of a specifically queer dialect. “Gay panic” and “trans panic” are also terms used to describe the legal defence in which a straight and/or cis person can claim that a queer/trans person hit on them as a defence for murdering them. The reappropriation of “gay panic” in this subtitled scene and elsewhere brings it into a playful queer terminology, but also leaves a trace of the threat of violence that underlies our queer panic; a trace which, depending on positionality and context, varies in its immediate recognisability.
Queer Silence
The gay silence meme is rumoured to have originated from a series of images showing a young and not-yet-out Jodie Foster being asked in an interview if she has a “steady boyfriend”. It also reminds me of memes that combine images of the Telenovela character Soraya Montenegro with subtitles that say things like “[cries in Spanish]”, “[dies in Spanish]” and “[judges you in Spanish]”. Like “[gay silence]”, these subtitles characterise moments without dialogue as belonging to a specific cultural frame of reference. To me, a lot of the fun in seeing a Soraya Montenegro reaction meme with a subtitle that specifies that her action is “in Spanish”, or in refusing to just call a queer silence “silence”, is in the identification of an event as belonging to the theatrical world of telenovelas and queer secrets. The thrill of these memes is that they suggest an irreducible difference between gay silence and other silences, or the untranslatable specificity of Telenovela-style crying, dying and judging. Unlike regular subtitles, “[gay silence]” and Soraya Montenegro memes let us know that translation is never complete; something has always gone unsaid.
In Cinema Babel (2007), Abé Mark Nornes argues that conventional subtitling assimilates the source film into its own language and culture at the same time as claiming to give direct access to it.3 By contrast, a style of subtitling that openly plays with the impossibility of direct translation reminds the audience of the unknowability of the source. Skam fan subtitles are filled with both overt and implicit references to untranslatability. This happens through on-screen footnotes that explain culture-specific references and give lengthy explanations of words that don’t have a direct equivalent in English (such as the meaning of the Norwegian word kos or the geographical connotations of the Italian words figo and fico); summarised speech (such as “bread pun” and “continuation of the bread pun” in place of word play, or the explanation that the characters are “basically just yelling ‘calm down’ or ‘stop it’”); and notes from the subtitlers that express uncertainty about the accuracy of their own subtitles.
Nornes imagines this style of subtitling as one that does right by the source film by not hiding the original behind a false replica. What is exciting about Skam subtitlers, though, is that they are not always trying to do right by the original: sometimes they consciously move against it.
On 9th June 2017, during the fourth series of the Norwegian version of Skam, a group of subtitlers with a huge following who worked under the name ‘Skam English’ posted on Twitter that, while they would continue to subtitle the full episodes of Skam at the end of the week, they would no longer be daily subtitling the individual sections of the episode that are released in real time throughout the week. They objected to a scene in the episode that came out the previous week, which depicts a conversation between Isak and a Muslim character called Sana, who is the protagonist of the fourth season. In this scene, Isak gives Sana a speech in which he denies a lot of what she has just recounted to him about her experience of racism and Islamophobia and at the same time lectures her on how she should respond to it. At one point in the conversation, according to the Skam English translation, Isak calls Sana “a condescending, bossy bitch” and says that this might be the real reason that a girl at their school, who Sana has told him is racist, doesn’t like her. At this point, Isak is supposed to be a likeable character: this conversation, as well as the broader storyline that it fits into, is somehow intended as a lesson for Sana.
Later in the day on the 9th June 2017, in response to backlash, the subtitlers tweeted: “We’re fans. We don’t work for NRK, this is not a job, and we don’t owe anyone anything.” The next day they added:
“[W]e’re a team of people. Many of us are POC [people of colour]. Many of us are MI [mentally ill]. And most of us are LGBT…We’re not stopping specifically because of the latest clip but because of SKAM’s treatment of MI [mental illness], Islam, and Racism. This has been building.”
As the subtitlers explained, they do not work for NRK, the Norwegian national broadcasting company that produced the original Skam, and so they have total power to decide on their own grounds what gets translated and when. One of the most radical powers that fan subtitlers have is the power to stop translating. Skam’s real time format means that its release schedule is inseparable from the content of the series. The last episode of the fourth season, for example, includes a clip about Even on Isak’s birthday where Even refers to a birthday video that he made for Isak and has uploaded to YouTube for Isak to find. If the clip is seen on this day, the experience of looking for Even’s video on YouTube is shared. In the penultimate episode, Sana is anxious because her friend Noora has not contacted any of her friends for days. The audience of the real-time release schedule participate in Sana’s waiting differently to how they would in a conventional narrative format. The subtitlers refused to subtitle, and so the experience of waiting for news from Noora is prolonged for the audience, falling out of sync with Sana’s waiting. The fan subtitlers interrupted the release schedule of a series that relies on real time as part of its format, radically inserting their own queer silences into the narrative. These silences are not only the withdrawal of labour but also another axis on which the subtitlers rework the show’s meaning, disrupting its temporality and unsyncing it from reality.
Invisible Strangers
In Queer Cinema in the World (2016), Karl Schoonover and Rosalind Galt reject an LGBT globalisation that connects queers through the motors of capitalism and neocolonialism. Instead they imagine a form of queer world-making that reaches for “alternative scales, unusual linkages, and unexpected lineages”.4 For me, the joy of watching fan-subtitled versions of Skam is in the queer linkages and lineages that I have with the anonymous presence of the subtitlers. This presence, importantly, is not outside of place and time. Donna-Dale L. Marcano warns us in the essay ‘The Difference that Difference Makes’ that “a dream of being everywhere […] obscures the located, limited, inescapably partial, and always personally invested nature of human story making”.5 To imagine queerness outside of place and time would be to reduce the historical, cultural and personal specificity of queer lives that I have not lived to my own frame of reference. I would be translating a form of queernesses that I do not know while pretending that no meaning has been lost. Queers always exist in relation to a place. Subtitles are a way that we can map those places together in a geography of our own imagining. Such a map draws away from a white geography that places an Isak-esque storyline at the centre of queerness, and instead leaves space in its distances for what goes unsaid; the Telenovela specificity of Soraya Montenegro crying in Spanish, the eroticism of a Greengage plum.
In their silences, collective anonymity and refusal of direct translation, these fan subtitlers participate in the queer act of living in the realm of the unknowable. I get a feeling of friendship when in the presence of those invisible strangers. I feel them slip in and out of the story, watching the series with me from inside it, sharing their desires, interrupting conversations, letting me know that they are here, there, somewhere.
1. Alice Rawsthorn, ‘The Director Timur Bekmambetov Turns Film Subtitling into an Art’, The New York Times, May 2007. 2. David Bannon, The Elements of Subtitles, Revised and Expanded Edition: A Practical Guide to the Art of Dialogue, Character, Context, Tone and Style in Subtitling, Lulu, 2009, p. 157. 3. Markus Nornes, Cinema Babel: Translating Global Cinema, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. 4. Karl Schoonover and Rosalind Galt, Queer Cinema in the World, Durham: Duke University Press, 2016, p. 29. 5. Donna-Dale L Marcano, ‘The Difference That Difference Makes: Black Feminism and Philosophy’, in Convergences: Black Feminism and Continental Philosophy, ed. by Maria del Guadalupe Davidson, Kathryn T. Gines, and Donna-Dale L. Marcano, SUNY Press, 2010, p. 64.
Devan Wells is a filmmaker and writer living in London. She is the founding editor of Queer Grief Zine.
