Examined Family Movie Club
Sound of Metal edition
You guys, have you seen The Sound of Metal? It was nominated for best picture this year and you can watch it on Amazon Prime. It BLEW ME AWAY. Here’s the trailer:
I can’t stop thinking about it. The acting is excellent. The writing is super sparse and realistic. The dynamics around deafness and disability are important. But the thing that I can’t stop thinking about is ACCEPTANCE.
This movie is so deeply about acceptance, and I realize there isn’t enough art about that even though it is such a foundational part of our lives as humans in imperfect bodies and imperfect relationships on this imperfect planet.
Why don’t we make more art about this? I feel like the metaphorical Blockbuster of our human existence is filled with movies about transcendence, but the section on acceptance is tiny and in the back corner where nobody sees it.
If you have watched this movie, will you please tell me about what you noticed in the comments section? I’m so hungry to hear about how it impacted other people. If you haven’t seen this movie, will you watch it and then tell the rest of us?
And/or if you know about other great art on acceptance, will you also tell us about it?
I’m sorry to make you work so hard this week, but this is really what’s on my mind and I just can’t wait to hear from you.
I agree this film was beautiful. Like you said, for the pace, the sound, the acting, the minimalism... What was most powerful to me was its insistence on flipping the script on dis/ability. In general, if we are not a part of it directly or by extension, we have so little exposure to deafness and deaf culture. The ways that the pandemic has forced a lot more accessibility and exposure to access needs in our day to day has been important, but it's rare that people are thinking that an ASL interpreter is there for hearing folks (because we're the one's who don't know the language), you know? Part of the reason that deafness is such a rich culture is because of how much we've isolated deaf people, and I think about how so many who live long lives experience partial if not total deafness (it runs in my family, and my mother has profound hearing loss) but they don't get to benefit from that rich culture, their families don't adjust the way they communicate (or they just yell), and probably ASL rarely if ever comes into the picture. It is profoundly isolating for older adults when this happens. My mother has a Baja implant which is similar to a cochlear one, and this film helped me understand how distorted sounds must be for her, and how painful it is to be in large groups with background noise. There's so much to digest and think about re how we can better relate to deafness as a society. Thank you for highlighting it, Courtney!
I loved this remarkable film. It did such a good job conveying something of what it must feel like to lose your hearing, and Riz Ahmed's performance was superb.
As I child, I spent a lot of time with a deaf great-aunt. She lost her hearing in the influenza epidemic of 1918 when she was about a year old, so she never learned to speak. Her younger sisters and brothers all learned sign language and could communicate readily with her, but my grandmother, her eldest sister and guardian after their parents died, never learned to sign. Everyone in my immediate family communicated with Aunt Hazel in writing. We filled pages and pages of legal pads. The early scenes of the movie brought back those inadequate and frustrating efforts to communicate by writing everything out.
In her 60s, Hazel lost her eyesight due to glaucoma (this was the 1960s and 1970s when treatments for glaucoma were not terribly effective). At that point, she became truly isolated. She could cup her hand around the hand of a person who was finger-spelling and get the gist of a statement. She would also have you take her index finger and move it over the page as if it were a pen, and she would reply in writing that became increasingly impossible to read because she could not see the page. In these ways, she could carry on rudimentary conversations, but little with depth or nuance. She had a marvelous sense-of-humor, even in late life, but she also had a huge temper. I realize now the temper was the product of her constant frustration and anger, and she battled depression, also elements explored in the film.
She lived on her own with help from family and from a caregiver who came three times a week to clean, shop, and do some cooking, and she managed to function quite well day-to-day, but I realize now that she had to be terribly lonely and isolated. My grandmother made sure she learned to read Braille when her sight began to fail, and her only real entertainment/pastime at that point was reading Braille books. I don't know if you've ever seen them: each Braille edition is usually multi-volume and is embossed on big 11 x 17 pages. It's an ordeal just to hold the book.
You've made me think: did Hazel experience acceptance or resignation? Did this shift for her when she lost her sight? What did it mean to be almost completely locked inside her own head?