The Movie Doctors. Simon Mayo

speaking, tinnitus is not an illness, it’s a condition. There are no measurable symptoms but the constant ringing in the ears – a pulsing, never-ending, clangorous, nerve-shredding interference – should be familiar to cinemagoers who have experienced the aural sensation of any Michael Bay film. The effects can vary from mild (The Lionel Ritchie Collection, 2003) to total-pain-in-the-ass (Transformers, 2007).

      As a youth you may have strayed too close to the front of a concert and stood unnervingly near to the speaker stack – you paid the price. Later you may have turned your headphones up beyond the European recommended limits – you coped with the consequences of your foolishness. You may have witnessed a party of five-year-old boys just after the Haribo kicked in and just before the entertainer (not to be confused with The Entertainer, the 1960 Laurence Olivier movie or ‘The Entertainer’ from the soundtrack to The Sting (1973)). The aftermath was with you for days.

      Prescribing films for tinnitus is a tricky task. Silent movies are a disaster (although, as Dr Kermode is constantly reminding us, ‘silent cinema was never silent – actually, it was quite noisy’). Gentle, softly spoken movies won’t work either, as everything will take place with the seemingly incessant chirruping of a thousand crickets in the background.

      What is needed is a big, thumping, flamboyant film to distract and console. This might appear counter-intuitive: why go see a noisy movie if tinnitus is your problem?

      Here’s the answer: YOLO. There is no cure for tinnitus so you might as well forget it for a while and take in some meaningful noise instead. There is good noise and bad noise. The Movie Doctors have selected these films for having the right kind of noise. The coolest headphones are noise-cancelling headphones. These films are head noise-cancelling films.

      INTERSTELLAR (2014)

      A film you don’t hear with your ears. Bypassing that buzzing in your head, you hear Interstellar with your chest. You feel it in your diaphragm (this won’t work if you’re watching it on a phone. Or if you are using any fewer than the 1,000 speakers per channel system recommended by your local IMAX/THX/Dolby dealer.

      When it was first released, some viewers complained about the sound, arguing that they couldn’t hear the dialogue above all the effects and Hans Zimmer’s score. This isn’t tinnitus, this is idiocy (see ‘Films for Idiots’ below). Director Christopher Nolan has said that he and sound designer Richard King mixed the movie over a six-month period, using dialogue as a sound effect. You are not supposed to hear what Matthew McConaughey is saying. It’s the Tom Waits school of enunciation. And anyway, what’s a little ringing in the ears compared with the time-warping bedlam of inter-universe space travel?

      ALADDIN (1992)

      A riot of flamboyant distraction which will quieten your infuriating, roaring head for all of its ninety minutes’ running time. Magic carpets, silk pantaloons, palaces, jewellery, curly slippers, treasure, the world’s grumpiest parrot, the Sphinx, singing, bazaars and dastardly moustaches – what more does your tired and noisy brain need?

      The big, dazzling, fabulous star is of course the genie, as played by Robin Williams. It doesn’t really matter that the other characters seem a bit feeble, the story a little ho-hum and the Arab characterisation somewhat lazy. This genie has been silent for ten millennia, and he has a lot of catching up to do.

      ‘I’m kinda fond of you, kid,’ he tells Aladdin. ‘Not that I want to pick out curtains or anything . . .’

      The movies sometimes struggled to capture Williams’s comic genius (though Dr Mayo still maintains he enjoyed Patch Adams) so maybe it was always going to be an animation that could keep up with the speed of his character changes. By the end, Williams’s performance, taking in his Nicholson, his De Niro, Groucho Marx, Arnie and so many others, will leave you exhausted. And your head, for the moment at least, quiet.

      SCHOOL OF ROCK (2003)

      Of course, School of Rock. Jack Black playing accidental music teacher Dewey Finn is an irresistible (if obvious) choice to cure your tinnitus. Loud rock gives you tinnitus! A loud rock movie takes it away again!

      ‘Immigrant Song’, ‘Sunshine of Your Love’ and ‘Substitute’ have caused millions of ears to ring for decades, so we might as well put them to good use now. The research into laughter’s curative properties in this area is admittedly in its early days. Just about to get going, in actual fact. But it is true that exercise increases the blood flow to the different parts of the ear (genuine medical fact) and this is a good thing. Therefore, the more you laugh, the better the karma flows and the biorhythms of healing will flood your body (less factual). For example, here’s Dewey’s new, improved school timetable: ‘8.15 to 10, Rock History. 10 till 11, Rock Appreciation and Theory. And then Band Practice till the end of the day.’ Here he is addressing his class: ‘It’s gonna be a tough project. You’re gonna have to use your head, your brain and your mind too.’ And the staff: ‘Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach. Those that can’t teach, teach gym’ (a great line, albeit lifted from Woody Allen).

      The thing is, we all know that Jack Black’s rocking Gareth Malone figure will have tinnitus and have it a whole lot worse than you. And because Jack plays for real with his band Tenacious D, he understands and feels your pain. Does it stop him raising his goblet of rock? Of course it doesn’t.

      THE RAID (2012)

      A really rather useful feel-better-all-round film. Whatever your pain, watch The Raid and feel your aches just melt away. Over the course of its 101 minutes, whichever part of your body is afflicted, you will see it punched, stabbed or kicked (maybe all three at once) so often, that you realise you have nothing to complain about.

      A new member of a SWAT team finds himself in a fifteen-floor block full of ruffians. He and his noble band of bobbies need to arrest the head ruffian, but wouldn’t you know it, the cad won’t come quietly. So everyone has to be killed. There are many hi-tech, high-powered weapons lying around, but why use them when fists and feet are so much more wholesome? So much more balletic? We prescribe this movie for tinnitus because the way Gareth Evans directs, each crunched skull and smashed spine is like a small explosion going off in your head. This has the pleasing effect of extinguishing the rather feeble ringing in your ears. And don’t worry about the dialogue. There’s barely five minutes’ worth (all in subtitled Indonesian), and who wants to talk (or indeed read) when there is another groin to kick?

      DISTRICT 9 (2009)

      Nothing pleases the ear more than the sound of an extra-terrestrial bug getting splattered. There’s something about the yuckyness of it all that leaves a fevered head calmed and reassured. And it’s a relief to know you aren’t a prawn from outer space.

      That might be hard on the prawns in Neill Blomkamp’s South African movie, as they turn out to be considerably brighter than many of their Uzi-waving tormentors, most of whom work for an outfit called Multi-National United. With a name like that, it’s not difficult to work out that these guys aren’t going to be on the side of motherhood and bobotie pie. And in their alien killer-in-chief Koobus, they have a man who is definitely on the side of DEATH AND FLAME THROWERS.

      Spaceships, disgusting eating habits (cat food, mainly) and a good old-fashioned shoot-out make this a feast of fabulous noise. An aural jacuzzi for your tired head.

      So we learn that The Tremeloes got it so wrong with their 1967 hit ‘Silence Is Golden’. Silence is not golden. For the tinnitari, silence is a nightmare. Go see a movie.

      DR DAVE NORRIS’S HEARING TEST

      Dr Mayo: Dr Dave Norris knows all about sound and vision at the movies – see p.110 for his guide to all things ‘aspect ratio’. Here he sets a quick quiz about how the speakers should work in a cinema.

      Dr Kermode: