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Sound and Fury; or, Much Ado about Nothing? Cochlear Implants in Historical Perspective
R. A. R. Edwards
| The documentary Sound and Fury (2000), which was nominated for an Oscar, traces the impact of cochlear implants (CI) on one Long Island family, the Artinians. Two brothers—one Deaf, one hearing, one married to a Deaf woman, one married to a child of deaf adults (CODA)—face the question of whether to implant the device, which destroys part of the ear and replaces it with electrodes that provide direct, but hard to interpret, stimulation to the auditory nerves, in their deaf children.1 The hearing brother and his CODA wife decide in favor of surgery. The Deaf couple decide against it. The decision process, as captured by the director, Josh Aronson, nearly tears the extended family apart. The hearing parents of the two brothers accuse their Deaf son of child abuse for his refusal. The CODA wife, Mari, announces her decision to her Deaf parents and they promptly deem her "a lousy daughter" who, by rejecting deafness for her son, has also rejected them. The viewer can scarcely imagine more agonizing scenes. |
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Aronson tries to present both sides fairly, and many reviewers praised his evenhandedness.2 Yet problems remain. The film talks about Deaf culture but does not show much of it. The Deaf couple, Peter and Nita, passionately defend their cultural identity, but viewers are not provided much information about what it means to be Deaf. As a result, all their talk about Deafness could easily be misinterpreted by an innocent hearing audience as selfishness, cowardice, arrogance, and insecurity. Indeed, some of the film's reviewers reached exactly those conclusions.3 |
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Nonetheless, the film is well done and worth viewing. That it succeeds at all in complicating the central question—whether each couple should get a cochlear implant for their deaf child—is a testament to Aronson's filmmaking skills. The problem lies not so much in Aronson's depiction as in the cultural resources that shape the audience's reception. A largely hearing audience might not understand deafness as a cultural condition; instead, its members would most likely view deafness as a medical condition, one precisely in need of the medical intervention cochlear implants represent. |
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Cochlear implants are only the latest example of medical interventions promising to cure deafness. This new technology reiterates a well-developed cultural attitude toward deafness. Twentieth-century researchers have suggested that deafness must be cured, eliminated, even conquered.4 They have understood deafness squarely within the medical model, which presents deaf people as suffering from a medical problem, a pathology, requiring the intervention and expertise of a host of professionals, including doctors, audiologists, speech therapists, and now surgeons. The model reflects the view of most hearing people, who see deafness as the lack of an important sense and as an insurmountable barrier to communication with hearing people. Deaf people need to be restored to society; the preferred way to do so is to make them hearing, to make "them" more like "us." The medical model captures the hearing perspective on deafness. In a society inclined to equate technological breakthroughs with progress and to consider progress an obvious, unalloyed good, the appeal of the medical model's interpretation of deafness becomes even more pronounced and more likely to appear accurate and natural. |
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The apparent naturalness of the medical model makes the Artinians' opposition to cochlear implants difficult for viewers to comprehend. They seem to fly in the face of received wisdom. They assert that Deafness is both natural and cultural; it is not a medical condition, and therefore, they argue, medical interventions are not miraculous cures but acts of genocide. To make that case persuasive, in an eighty-minute documentary, to an audience inclined to view the Deaf perspective on deafness as inferior to the hearing one is difficult. What is needed is a better sense of where the Deaf perspective comes from. What is needed is some history.
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