I had written something really clever and profound here, but mother#$@&ing blogger.com sent it into oblivion instead of publishing it. I'm so very pissed off right now, but I will attempt to recreate it, although nothing is as good as the first time you spewed it out.
My husband and I own over 1000 movies that we watch in our dedicated theatre room on our 22-foot screen (diagonal). And yes, I mention this mostly to make all of you movie buffs jealous. There are several foreign films in our collection (hey you've gotta mix it up when you have that many movies) of which my favorites are German. When you watch as many movies as I do, you quickly come to the conclusion that most American movies are the same stories being told over and over and over again, but with different special effects and characters. When you discover German cinema a whole new world of orginal stories is opened before you (Check out Girls Don't Cry, The Princess and the Warrior, and of course, Run Lola Run.) We watch these films in German with English subtitles, but when I think back on them, (I do this often, because it's not enough for me to watch a movie, I have to get why they bothered to make it) the people in my head are speakking German-accented English! (When I say "the people in my head" in this instance, I am referring to the actors in the movies and not to the permanent residents of my head. They speak British-accented English.) I thought that this phenomenon was unique to me until I discussed it with my husband and it happens to him too. It's not just German films either, it also happens with movies in Chinese, Japanese, and French (although not necessarily German-accented.) So my question is, why does this happen? Is it one of those things where your brain makes things up based on what it expects to hear or see? For example, I should see double all of the time because my eyes don't align, but I don't because my brain shuts off the doubled image from one eye. Does my brain produce English in my memory because I read English (subtitles), even though I heard German? Actually this seems pretty likely now that I've written it down (twice, damn blogger.com). Although, it is a bit ethnocentric on my brain's part, but hey, I can't control purple puss monkeys everything it thinks.