NEWSLETTER

Society for the History of Children and Youth
No. 7
Winter 2006

Sound and Fury

Jennifer de Forest

Sound and Fury, Aronson Film Associates, Inc. and Public Policy Productions, Inc. in association with Thirteen/WNET New York and Channel 4 (UK), 2001.

The documentary film Sound and Fury chronicles an extended family as two sets of parents, one hearing and one deaf, struggle over whether to implant their deaf children with cochlear implants, devices that use a minicomputer to amplify speech.  Peter and Nita Artinian, who are deaf, decide to forego an implant for their daughter, Heather, while Peter's hearing brother, and his wife, Mary, choose the implant for their son.  To add to the complexity of the decisions for the Artinian family, Mary is hearing but her parents are both profoundly deaf and she is fluent in American Sign Language (ASL).  The various pairings anguishing over the future of the two children (hearing mother/deaf mother, hearing father/deaf son, deaf husband/deaf wife, etc.) intensely argue issues ranging from the nature of disability to the quality of deaf education in America.  Because the Artinians generously allow viewers to witness their painful deliberations over what is in the best interest of their children, Sound and Fury also provides an incisive look at parenting, and the role of shared language and culture in family.

Through the struggles of the Artinians, we can observe the powerful parental impulse to have a child who shares their language and culture.  The one thing everyone in the Artinian family can agree upon is that there is a deaf world and there is a hearing world, and that a chasm separates the two.  At a picnic for the deaf community a group gathers around Mary as she announces her decision to implant her infant son.  The group bemoans the loss of a member of their culture, fears that he will not learn ASL, and predicts that he will "migrate" to the hearing world.  When the boy emerges from surgery with the implant, his hearing grandmother is joyful, while his deaf grandmother weeps, dreading the boy willreject her as different from him.  In light of what we have learned from the film, a typical scene of the father coaxing his implanted son to imitate his baby talk takes on new meaning -- he wants his son to be like him.

The decision of the deaf parents, Peter and Nita, to not implant Heather is considerably more painful, and is revelatory of the pressure of the dominant culture on a minority group.  Peter and Nita are committed to acting in Heather's best interest, and consider that the cochlear implant will expand her options.  However, they are also repelled by the concomitant suggestion that being deaf is a disability, a point brought home by Nita in conversation with Mary.  Mary pushes Nita, asking her a version of the question she has heard countless times: "Don't you want to hear the rain hit the ground?"  Nita replies, explaining the obvious, that she is deaf and that hearing means nothing to her.  "It doesn't matter to me to hear it," she says. Despite his parents' intense pressure, her husband Peter goes further and asserts that if given a pill to make him hear he would throw it up.  For Peter and Nita, the solution to expanding Heather's option and for keeping their family intact is not an implant, but moving to Frederick, Maryland, which has a large deaf community and one of the nation's best schools for the deaf.

Viewers interested in further exploring the issues raised in Sound and Fury can explore the PBS website at http://www.pbs.org/wnet/soundandfury/.  I also suggest pairing the film with Douglas Bayton's Forbidden Signs: American Culture and the Campaign Against Sign Language (1996).  Bayton details the history of deaf education in America and traces the late nineteenth-century campaign to replace "manualism," or ASL, with "oralism," which forced children to learn to read lips and speak.  I do not mean to suggest that the two sides of the debate in Sound and Fury are identical to the positions of the manualists and oralists.  However, there are revelatory echoes of these groups' rhetoric in the Artinian family's deliberations.   In particular, Bayton traces the ways sign language was defended as a "natural language" by the manualists, while the oralists deplored it as not "normal." These terms pepper the arguments of the Artinian family.  Nita questions why Mary would implant "a beautiful natural deaf boy."  She is also overjoyed when her own daughter engages with a classroom full of deaf children, commenting that "communication was so natural for her." In contrast, Mary defends her choice by arguing that with the implant life for her son will be "more normal."  

Sound and Fury deserved its many film festival awards and its Academy Award nomination for best feature documentary.  Neither the filmmakers nor the Artinians find easy answers.  However, they leave the viewer satisfyingly puzzling over essential questions in new ways.  We are left wondering, what is normal?  What is natural?  And, what is the role of shared language and culture in family?

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© Society for the History of Children and Youth, 2006