THAT WASN'T A CHALLENGE. THAT WAS LOVE. A LETTER ABOUT "CODA" - Laura Hope-Gill
A film review in the form of a letter to my own child of a deaf parent.
Dear Luna
I watched CODA on the Friday of our last weekend before you go to college. You were working your last shift at the pizzeria. Normally I wait to watch movies with you, but this one I couldn’t wait. Earlier in the day we checked out school supplies at Office Max. My hearing aids suddenly shifted into silent mode for no reason at all so I could not hear the cashier’s question. Automatically, I looked at you. You told me what he had said. I answered him. The transaction continued this way until complete. As we carried our bags to the car my hearing aids kicked on again, and I explained what had happened.
“That’s okay. I’m used to it,” you replied, referring to our eighteen years together, the last twelve or so of which have drawn you into the role of interpreter, of repeater of things to me that I don’t hear, of person whom I can lip-read easily. I have joked that you are my hearing-ear child, the deaf person’s human equivalent to Seeing-Eye Dog. We have joked about it. We have engaged in the process with barely any awareness that things could be any other way. Because I was diagnosed with sensorineural deafness the year before you were born, I taught you sign language as I learned it myself, from five books placed in different rooms of our house so I could look things up as we needed them. From these on-the-spot lessons, we developed our “home-sign,” which works in our dyad of deafness but probably not beyond. Your first sentence was in home-sign at 8 months. You scolded doctors who gave you inoculations by emphatically signing “DONE.” When funny things happened around us, we made up songs about them in sign, which we “sing” to each other now across crowded rooms. In the realm between speech and silence, we have built our story.
Viewing CODA, I saw the extra work you have put in just by being my kid. At every grocery store, at every airport check-in, at every event we have attended over eighteen years, at some point someone said something to me I didn’t understand, and I turned to you. Without a beat, you stepped in. Automatic. How alert you must have always been. How attentive. And at the end of the day, when we sat down to watch a movie, a moment when you were always ready to relax, you had one more step to do: ask me to turn up the volume on the remote because I always watched TV on silent. And in all of this, when the college application question invited you to tell about “a challenge you have overcome,” you declined my suggestion to write about being the child of a deaf single parent, saying, “That wasn’t a challenge. That was love.” Still I wonder about the burden this has placed on you. You reply, “The benefit outweighed the burden. I could play music as loud as I wanted and be loud with my friends on a sleepover, and you had no idea.” CODA, written and directed by Siân Heder, is a movie about you: the hearing child born into the role of bridge between deaf and hearing.
The film begins with the Rossi family—Ruby (Emilia Jones), Frank (Troy Kotsur), Jackie (Marlee Matlin), and Leo (Daniel Durant)—a family of professional fisher-people out at sea hauling in the days catch. Ruby, the CODA (Child of Deaf Adult), is singing boldly, and no one hears. Here at the story’s outset, the sea supports multiple meanings: the far-out-ness of the parents and brothers’ being deaf in a hearing (and audist) world and also Ruby’s isolation of being the sole hearing person among the Deaf. The dynamics of connection and complexity are here symbolically laid out for us: the family can remain at a metaphorical sea, unchanging, and keep their hearing child so enmeshed in their deafness that she loses her own voice, going down with them, or the family can integrate independently into the hearing world while maintaining its own culture and allowing the CODA to venture out on her own.
Heder’s is a retelling of the French film, La Famille Bélier, using Deaf actors to play (imagine this!) Deaf characters. Heder fought for that, and anyone who has seen native ASL and just-rehearsed-a-lot ASL knows what a difference this makes. The proverbial last word is even in ASL, which speaks to how closely Heder understands the value of this project. As you are ever on the watch for, any marginalized group is used to being spoken about more than being spoken to, even when someone is speaking to us. We are object. We are source of education about our [insert marginalized entity here-ness]. We are not person. I was on the watch for this mis-step in the storytelling. As you know, it’s so rare that I see Deaf or deaf people in films or on TV that when I do, we have incredibly high standards. We catch every stereotype, every misstep. This position in itself is a product of my own cloudy prejudice against myself: for me Deaf/deaf characters have to be something pre-defined even if I don’t even know that definition myself. It has to be right. What I am looking for becomes clear as Heder’s story unfolds. I am looking for humanity. I want flawed. I want real. I want true. Heder explains to me what I want by giving it to me. Soon, I am not judging anymore. I am enjoying a story told to two audiences at once: the hearing and the Deaf.
Closed captions underscore the inclusion by appearing for oral speech and signed speech, seamlessly along the bottom of the screen. (Not just on Apple TV but in theatres as well, hopefully forging a new normal for cinema—one can always wish). Song lyrics, too, fold into the conversation, allowing me full access to every word. I relax into this. I see the parents’ shortcomings as their own, but I also see my own shortcomings in them. I know that deafness can draw me out on its tide. I can isolate and enjoy the silence and resist connecting with the world. To me, this isn’t the tragedy of deafness but treasure of it. As with all treasures in the best stories it comes with a potential curse: I see the parents too comfortably situated in their Deaf world. They can stay there forever as long as Ruby is there to interpret. This status quo is mirrored by the devaluing of the day’s catch by the market dealer, the only path to commerce. The family can literally go bankrupt unless they change or come up with a new idea.
The change and new idea won’t come from the parents. It comes from the siblings: Ruby’s coming-of-age desire to pursue singing and Leo’s idea to create a co-op of fishermen, both ideas defined by people listening to the Rossi family, a family defined by Deafness. The family must pass through this paradox in order to survive as a business and as a system in which every member is honored and not silenced. The path is intricate. All can be lost. We feel that tension as it unfolds. We also feel the precariousness of disability—the lack of awareness of its challenges, the outright absence of accommodation, the hatred—these all make appearances while Heder keeps the focus on the universal themes, saving the film from being a PSA about discrimination or, worse, a pity party for the Deaf, or for hearing forced to help them. Heder’s dialogue stays firmly on the shore between Deaf and Hearing, aligned with both so neither becomes savior or saved. Roy, the father, rejects his son’s vision because it would involve hearing people having to communicate with them. Leo replies, “Let them figure out how to deal with Deaf people.” The statement is every Deaf person’s dream, every wish, in every interaction with the hearing world. But we know from experience too well that the world doesn’t, the world won’t except with care-born strategies. Heder takes this two-way path on just as she takes on Ruby’s precarious attempt to share a gift that ultimately belongs in the hearing world without turning her back entirely on her Deaf one. This isn’t the story of rebellious teens. This is a story of world-weavers.
Heder conveys the intricacies through often cataclysmically potent but never melodramatic dialogue. “Tinder is something we can do as a family,” says Jackie early on when Ruby expresses her love of singing. Inclusion and togetherness are the glue for this group, even if one of the few inclusive activities is a dating app. The risk of exclusion deepens throughout. A beautiful conversation between mother and daughter positions the camera POV’d to Jackie so we see the ASL from the signer’s perspective, the source and not the seer, and we see Ruby’s attentive listening to every sign. (I love how this moves the viewer to identify with the Deaf person!) The conversation faces the reverse of ableism as Jackie confesses that she had hoped Ruby would be Deaf as well, as this would alleviate the fear of failing to love her child as she needed to be loved. To this, Ruby simply signs, “You failed in lots of other ways but not that one.” The tension breaks with laughter, but the divide between Deafness and hearing has just been spoken with great gravity and without a sound. To the Deaf: Deafness is not a tragedy. To us, it is as real and vital a world as the hearing one. The moment also highlights the question of humanity itself: how do we love the other? How do we move beyond identifying with others as the grounds for loving and toward the more distant shore of loving from others’ perspective of what it is to be loved? Maybe this is not as difficult as we make it for ourselves. Heder supports this question as Roy, at first utterly distracted at Ruby’s choir recital, looks around the auditorium and sees the emotions on other people’s faces. He looks at Ruby, he looks at the audience’s faces, and he sees his daughter’s singing for the first time. Later, he asks her to sing for him on the tailgate of their truck. She sings into the night, and he places his hand on her throat to hear with vibrations of the vocal cords. In this way, this tangible, physical way, father hears daughter’s voice and allows it to change him in a profound way.
When I was about your age I watched Marlee Matlin in Children of a Lesser God. I found it terribly violent and upsetting. I did not know that deafness would be my own world one day. It was just horrifying to me how William Hurt yells and yells at her, demanding that she speak, all why supposedly loving her but demanding that she be something he can hear. That film greatly shaped my initial rejection of my deafness diagnosis. Why were deaf people always crying in movies? Why is Beethoven always shown as stern? In the last decade, starting with Matlin’s run on The L Word as a brilliant sculptor, and continuing with Switched at Birth, and arriving at The Sound of Metal earlier this year, deafness has enjoyed a great improvement in how writers and directors tell its stories. I still hesitate, afraid I’ll be thrown back into the Lesser God phase of Deaf storytelling. Watching CODA healed me and spoke to me as a deaf person, but more so it healed and spoke to me as a mom struggling myself with this moment of seeing my teenager go off to college. Whether Deaf or hearing, I think every parent who watches this movie will discover or be reminded that being a good parent, Deaf or hearing, means to listen, to listen and be changed by what we hear again and again. And I just hope that as you go to college that you feel I have listened to you.
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.
