Closest I’ve seen to this being done was the movie Black Hawk Down. Meanwhile can you imagine everyone screaming at each other in the John Wick films? Other movies like Aliens would have been a whole different level of horrifying as the sound fades away until its just the sound of the actor’s muffled heart beat and their cluelessness that the xenomorph is crawling up behind them.
Protagonist spitting machine gun fire, and giving tactical instructions to his troops between bursts…
Camera cuts to one of the troop’s POV: protagonists mouth is moving, and he’s making important looking hand gestures, but all you hear is:
eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
muffled popping
eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
Protagonist shoots another machine gun burst - louder but still muffled popping
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
…fast forward 15 years, troop is laying in bed awake with his sleeping wife. Camera cuts to wife: silence. To troop: eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee. back to wife: silence. back to troop: eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee. Wife: silence. Troop: eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.
Pans out to exterior of house.
eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
muffled pop
credits roll in silence
As a veteran this is pretty much on brand. A joke at the VA is that half the reason they’re so recalcitrant with declaring tinnitus and hearing loss as a disability is because everyone has some sort of measurable hearing damage from service.
For myself, I’ve had tinnitus for so long I don’t remember life without it always being there.
yeah thanks 3m. foam fucking plug bullshit. I knew it was gonna be a problem, too, when I realized half the nco ranks were obviously hearing impaired already just from range and field training.
I can’t remember if it was at psab or what but I was in a smaller detail (20) wedged between two Army company’s (I think that’s the right name, like ~150 or people?) in the same chalk. The group rotating back in were way fucking louder then the other and I pointed that out to someone with me who also noticed the same thing. At the time our guess was the quieter group were national guard going in for the first time while the others were active duty/permanent party and dealing with the funk differently.
Now I am starting to wonder if the one group’s hearing was just collectively fucked?
can certainly happen to units coming home from IED’s and shit. I can’t wait until they figure out how to cure tinnitus. I just wish the VA was realistic about hearing loss being a much wider problem than they’re acknowledging going back to the 70s and 80s even.
I am sorry to be a bummer but it is pretty obvious the VA and DoD will never willingly acknowledge it because the least cases of hearing damage might only be with the medical people in the Navy and USAF.
eh, valid.
Ironically I know navy vets who got it working in crowded hulls (they have a name for it, machine spaces lol!) where the cacophony and vibration never stopped, and lots of chairforce vets who worked the flight line.
Reminds me of a time where I was stuck in one of the extra shitty versions of the humvee for about half an hour because I parked just outside of a command post that was directly adjacent to the flight line where half a squadron of F-22’s were just spooling up to leave. All of these fucking things were parked with their jets pointed in my direction, so absolute maximum noise levels. I had no hearing protection because I didn’t know I was going to this spot until someone told me to “just stop by” over the radio and grab something for my squadron’s commander (LtC). If I tried opening the door it was just pure auditory pain and I couldn’t just cover my ears because I had been issued a shotgun (I was a tech and this was a punishment prank) plus a satchel of stuff I was given strict orders to keep 100% control over. Tried to go park somewhere quieter but then the airmen on the flight line were signalling I couldn’t leave.
Anyway, I was told the reason the USAF’s slogan is “Aim high!” is to make sure they don’t shoot themselves in the feet.
rofls
Does anyone’s tinnitus actually sound like eeeeeeeee? Because my various layers (caused by three different things) don’t.
Yep. High pitched eeeeee right now. I feel inferior as to its cause, given military servicepeople above were mentioning what caused theirs. I just stupidly stood next to a very large speaker at a concert when I was much younger. You figure I’d have gotten used to it by my 50’s.
If it makes anyone feel better, I get Exploding Head Syndrome!
Mine is currently doing an eeeeeeeeeee sound, but it varies at different times
Mines more of an nngg sound but I could see sometime describing it as eeee. It’s a more or less solid constant tone but it’s more nasal for me, if that makes sense?
I wouldn’t say it’s a vowel. But it’s closer to E than anything else.
Agreed. It’s a raw pitch, with no articulation. For me it’s a very high pitch, kind of a digital hum like when you turn a computer monitor on in otherwise complete silence, just louder.
Not everyone will experience the same pitch either. It’s caused by the micro hairs in your inner ear dieing, which for some reason causes the pitch they were responsible for detecting to be stuck permanently on.
Closest thing to silencing tinnitus is distracting yourself from it with other, louder sound - I tend to have music or something on as often as possible, but that constant loudness is slowly killing more micro hairs and expanding the range of the tinnitus over time.
Old man me is gonna be deaf as fuck. 🤘
I got tinnitus for free. I have had that ringing sound nonstop since I was 4 or 5, and I’m now almost 70. You do get used to it. But you will experience hearing loss as you get older.
yep. the only movie I recall that paid it any attention was Saving Private Ryan.
Baby Driver uses it as a plot point, and in the cinema the simulated tinnitus was borderline painful at the start.
I have very mild tinnitus (too much time working nightclubs), anyone with it badly has my sympathy :-(
They use it in Children of Men too if I recall correctly. I need to rewatch that movie, it’s been decades.
There’s a moment in Fury Road, but it fades very quickly … that’s one of the very few niggles I have with that movie
ooh fuck. I do my best to try not to think about it but it’s like a good friend, always there.