But I don’t want the past to obscure the real progress being made, or the possibility of an inclusive future.įor today, I choose joy activism without it just isn’t sustainable. It’s easy to be frustrated at an industry that time and again has spoken over us, excluded us, and appropriated our language and culture. And allowing space for stories created by and centering deaf people is the only way to approach authentic depictions of a multifaceted and truly diverse community. Only a multitude of deaf stories can diminish both the pressures and expectations of representation, as well as the dangers misrepresentation can pose. If the film world seeks to be truly inclusive, there will be more deaf nominees there must be. One of Our Most Beloved Environmental Writers Has Taken a Surprising Turn How Netflix’s All Quiet on the Western Front Deviates From the Book-and WWI Historyīrian Kelly’s LSU Is the Future of College Football Requiring the deaf person to run multiple devices and feeds-if they even have the bandwidth and equipment-is not equity, but a reminder that most would rather not see reminders of us at all.Īn Ex-Scientologist Explains the Danny Masterson Trial-and How Scientology Got Desperate While I appreciate this as a first attempt and found the interpreters themselves to be great, these failings of accessibility are again the result of a hearing-centered understanding of what access actually means, and ultimately of the production and network being unwilling to go the full mile when it comes to inclusion. Sometimes the feed was ahead, sometimes it fell behind, depending on commercials and one’s internet speed for running various devices simultaneously. A phantom hand sometimes floated into the frame, obscuring and distracting from the interpretation. Deaf people deserve hot, soapy messes too! I like seeing deaf people, and my language, on the screen, and I want more of it.īut the ASL interpretation on the Oscars on YouTube was spotty many deaf people didn’t even know it existed, and because it was just an interpreter feed, and not an interpreter embedded atop the regular broadcast, it required two devices to actually watch the show. Even when its depiction of deafness didn’t ring true or was a little too saccharine for my general taste, I was fully invested in CODA, the same way I watched Sound of Metal to root for the deaf actors or devoured the hot, soapy mess that was Netflix’s reality series Deaf U. I laughed a lot at Kotsur’s performance as Frank Rossi, a poet of filth, and I appreciated that the Rossis were sexual beings rather than chaste or infantilized, as is often the case for disabled characters. It’s unfortunate that CODA, which at its heart is an intimate story about a single family, is expected to bear the weight of fully representing millions of people. The older brother of the family, Leo (Daniel Durant), actively pushes back against his parents’ reliance on his sister Ruby as family interpreter, and ultimately it’s his advocacy, not Ruby’s, that sets the family on a better path.įor me, CODA’s shortcomings are less an indictment of the film itself and more a reminder of how desperately we need more deaf representation on-screen and especially behind the scenes. It’s buoyed by the talent of a predominantly deaf cast. This is also a movie that is 40 percent in American Sign Language.
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