LEARNING TO LISTEN IN "SOUND OF METAL" - Laura Hope-Gill
The two great keys to suffering are craving and grasping. The former leads to the latter, then the latter leads to more of the former. And so we go. Sound of Metal, written by Darius and Abraham Marder and directed by Darius Marder, is a story of craving and grasping. Often, satisfaction from such stories comes in the form of achieving that which is craved, ownership of that for which the hero or heroine grasps: the boxing trophy, the gold medal, the girl, the guy. We expect that satisfaction. Blockbuster story structure relies entirely upon having, losing, and winning back. 2020, the year of pandemic and hate, was not the year for this third step, though. We had. We lost. And then we kept on losing. Even after the vaccine, we are still losing. Even after the trial of Derek Chauvin, we know we have a long road ahead. Along with its fellow nominees for Best Picture at the Oscars, Sound of Metal isn’t about winning back anything. Instead it is a film about adjusting to loss, specifically hearing loss. Deafness. It’s a story of craving, grasping, and all that we go through in the process of learning to let go.
As a deaf person, I watched the film as I watch all films: with the sound off and with subtitles on. During the scenes in which actors communicate in ASL, I experienced a jolt of sorrow when the cinematography cut out hand movements, the very speech of the Deaf. I live in the world the movie is describing. I have walked the path that the hero, Ruben, performed by non-deaf actor Riz Ahmed, walks, that of finding out one day that I am already partially deaf and that the deafness will progress. I have panicked just as Ruben does. That panic is the plot of the movie. If viewers can get over the specific cause of the panic, we will see that it is the plot of almost every film we see: the panic we feel when we lose something, and the lengths to which we will go to get it back. In the story of deafness, the way to get it back is to get a cochlear implant.
In the movie’s story-world, these devices, CI’s as we call them, are not paid for with insurance. In the world I inhabit, they are covered while hearing aids are not. This is one of the great injustices facing the deaf/Deaf/ HOH (hard of hearing) community: we are almost being driven toward CI’s when really we may only want HA’s (hearing aids), which cost more than $5000.00. (Fortunately new legislation will allow Bose and other sound-focused companies to manufacture HA’s, promising excellent products at more affordable prices.) In the real world, Ruben would still have had to sell off a considerable amount of music equipment to pay for Phonak or Resounds HA’s. It’s a better plot device though to withhold insurance payment for CI’s and make him sell off his entire livelihood to pay for the surgery.
This surgery is the Holy Grail for Riz Ahmed’s newly deafened Ruben. If he can get the surgery he won’t have to bother with this whole being deaf thing. As we know about those Grails, they’re usually not really thing we should be seeking, but that does not stop us from craving and grasping after them. Ruben goes all out for his CI’s while all around him, the Deaf community is thriving, enjoying, loving, caring, and embracing him. And all he can think about is getting out of it. He does not want to be deaf. He does not want to have to learn how to be deaf, as Paul Raci’s character tells him he needs to do. Ruben has been raised in a culture in which deafness or any disability is a disaster. Even though he is deafened, he hates deafness—in himself and in others.
Sound of Metal is on par with the 2004 British film It’s All Gone, Pete Tong. Each share musically oriented protagonists stricken at “the one sense they value above all others,” as Beethoven himself described the tragedy of his own deafness diagnosis. (Mr. Holland’s Opus also features deafness’ attack on a music lover; Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator focuses on the emotional hell its version of Howard Hughes endured after his diagnosis. Here, sadly, ends my list of movies about people going deaf, the third most common disability in the world.) Both Sound of Metal and It’s All Gone Pete Tong show the diagnosis freak-out, a cinematic dramatization of the Kübler-Ross stages of grief, with acceptance, that elusive golden bough, arriving, as it does, after the protagonist strives to run from the daunting idea of living in quiet. For Pete Tong, the escape hatch is drugs and alcohol. For Ruben, the escape hatch is technology that did not exist when It’s All Gone, Pete Tong, was made.
The CI in Sound of Metal functions almost like a trick on the hearing audience. Deaf people know more about the CI than hearing people do. Darius and Abraham Marder know more about the CI than other hearing people because their parents are Deaf. What we deaf people and people who live with Deaf/deaf people know is that CI’s aren’t the fix-all that hearing people like to think they are. I can’t tell you how many times people have sent me those videos of people getting CI’s and bursting into tears, presumably of joy. Yet do a search on Twitter for CI’s and you will see the controversy these devices stir. Also, when I tell people I’m deaf (I now own clothing that says this, and a ball cap), often the reply is “Will you get cochlear implants?” This is the solution that hearing people want to deafness. The film explores why it should not be. The Sound of Metal of the title only partially refers to the music Ruben and his girlfriend play.
Metal is the sound of CI’s. It is also the sound of HA’s when we first get them. Metal is the sound the world makes when its glorious noises are fed to us through wires and microchips programmed from a computer. Metal is the sound the world makes when we are not allowed to be deaf but must navigate a Audist world that could easily accommodate us but chooses not to. Metal is the sound of exclusion and isolation. Metal is the sound of loss. That is, until we can transmute loss into the higher state that always lies beyond it. In the case of deafness, that higher state is often referred to, in fact, as being truly golden. Gold as a grail. With a remarkable twist on Grail legends, in Sound of Metal, the very thing the hero runs from is the greatest gift anyone could ever seek. The gift that deafness brings.
It wouldn’t be a Grail story if the Grail weren’t held up in front of our hero’s eyes, paraded and surrounding amid other treasures. During the scenes in which Ruben lodges among a Deaf community and even develops skill with ASL, we experience a glimpse of life as it should be, defined by access and community. This is our hero’s voyage to a foreign land, one that he dreams of escaping when in reality it is the very place he belongs. The audience experiences Deaf Education provided by skilled Deaf instructors--enacted by Deaf actors. We see kindness, humor, and patience as Ruben learns how to communicate: how to make eye contact, how to look at someone when you speak to them, and then how to use our hands to communicate. Most importantly he attempts to learn to sit with his own quiet. It is perfectly metaphorical for any journey of transformation: Look. See. Sit. Our young Parsifal of course misses the whole thing, having found it too soon perhaps. We all know we must come across our treasures at the right time.
The world needs deafness narratives because in a way all of us are deaf. We are deaf to one another’s stories, one another’s needs. We shun silence with airpods and podcasts, determined to fill every space, terrified of emptiness. It is no wonder that when filmmakers have shown deafness in the past, it has been through a lens of tragedy or metaphor. Deafness terrifies anyone who isn’t actually deaf. It’s as though nothing possibly could occur without noise. Trust me: plenty occurs. The world needs deafness narratives because while it is a profound metaphor for not listening to the world in general, on a personal scale it is about learning to listen in new and effective, practical and realistic ways. Sound of Metal honors this and shows this. It invites us to consider why what the hearing world calls hearing loss, the deaf community calls Deaf Gain.
Laura Hope-Gill teaches Creative Writing at Lenoir-Rhyne’s Thomas Wolfe Center for Narrative in Asheville, where she directs Asheville Wordfest and raises an amazing person. Her poems and stories appear in Parabola, Cairn, Fugue, North Carolina Literary Review, and more.
