Life during this pandemic has challenged us in many ways. It’s forced us to slow down their lives and remain in one place, which, for some of us, may be a welcome adjustment. For others, it’s forced us to confront the trivialities of our lives, the constant, whirring fluff we surround ourselves with. The emails we decided we had to answer and couldn’t wait. The extra trips to the store we had to make because we were too distracted the first time. The money we had to spend on subscriptions we forgot about. But being in lockdown challenges us to think about how we are now and how much we like the person we’re suddenly spending a lot of time with: ourselves. There aren’t as many distractions to hide behind. The true self is there, naked and out in the open.
Darius Marder’s Sound of Metal launches us into Ruben’s normal, as the drummer of a fictional two-piece band, Blackgammon. It’s loud and aggressive and very quickly things start to go awry. The tinnitus and ringing surfaces. Before long, Ruben’s lost 80% of his hearing. His entire creative life has been cratered in a way he cannot even begin to figure out how to climb out of. His pursuit of answers leads him to Joe (Paul Raci), who leads a recovery house for Deaf addicts. And it’s a struggle for Ruben from the very beginning because he’s so convinced – or at least he’s determined to convince himself – that he’ll return to something approaching normal. He’s decided he just needs to get these two cochlear implants and everything will be fine. Just an expensive, invasive ticket back to his Earth.
In an interview with the Observer, director and co-writer Darius Marder nailed just why his movie is perfect for 2020: we are, like Ruben (Riz Ahmad), desperate to return to a normal that may no longer exist. We keep dreaming of all the things we’ll do when life is the way it was before. But before may never come, at least not the way we remember it. We have to accept and adapt or risk being left behind, tumbling into a cycle of frustration and regret.
The Crack of Dishonesty
There’s a moment late in the film when Ruben (Riz Ahmad) has done the deed: he’s had the surgery for his cochlear implant yet hides his head. He’s conscious of the scars. He’s even more conscious of what the scars mean in his new home. But it’s not the surgery itself that’s truly the problem. There are many Deaf out there with the same implants and their own Deaf identity strong and intact. The line of demarcation, in this case, is not about choosing to gain some form of hearing. It’s about the dishonesty of it all. Ruben makes deals on the side and in the shadows, selling his RV and his recording equipment and anything he can get money for. The brilliance of the way Marder portrays this is we don’t quite know at first what Ruben is going to do with the money. He looks just as much like an addict desperate for another hit as he does a man desperate to return to his old normal as a hearing man.
When he returns, Joe is ready for him. Ruben knows he did this the dishonest way. He’s wearing a hood over his stitches the entire time. All his needs, he contends, is just to stay there three more weeks until his implants activate. That’s all. Just three weeks.
But Paul’s seen this before. The nervous energy. The shame. The pleading. The dealmaking.
Prior to the surgery, Joe had tasked Ruben with sitting in an empty room each morning with nothing but some paper, a pen, and a cup of coffee. He wanted Ruben to get it out. To write everything that came to mind. To give himself a chance to see his own thoughts and patterns and be more conscious. He wanted Ruben to come close to, if not touch, the feeling of stillness. For some of us, the idea of an empty, quiet room to write sounds wonderful. To feel unbound by time and responsibility and to have the freedom to just sit with ourselves? That can be pretty great. But for Ruben, there’s too much clawing at him from the inside out. For someone desperate to leave and return to normal, that empty room might as well be a prison cell. It’s as suffocating as it is bare.
“I wonder all these mornings you’ve been sitting in my study, sitting,” Joe says, “have you…had any…moments of …stillness? Because you’re right, Ruben. The world does keep moving and it can be a damn cruel place. But for me…those moments of stillness, that place, that’s the kingdom of God. And that place will never abandon you.”
What comes next physically pains Joe. Someone who once showed great promise has escaped his grasp. Stillness won’t be found with the walls of his program.
“As you know,” Joe continues, “everybody here shares in the belief that being deaf is not a handicap.“Not something to fix. It’s pretty important around here. All these kids…all of us, need to be reminded of it every day. And my house is a house built on that belief and built on that trust. And when that trust is violated, things happen. And I can’t have that.”
While some will (understandably) read this as Joe kicking out Ruben solely because he got a cochlear implant, I don’t think that’s the trust that’s broken. The trust is one of honesty. It’s something central to a recovering addict. It’s also central to building an identity. It’s not just the surgery for Ruben. It’s sneaking into Joe’s office to use his internet. It’s roping in fellow housemates to make deals for him. It’s spinning a web of deceit in which the central conflict is the inability to ever truly confront oneself. And in that avoidance, stillness is impossible. The internal noise is too much, too invasive and disruptive.
Building the Empathy Machine
Marder and his co-writing brother Abraham tie their main character and central predicament together like a taut, unforgiving rope. Ruben relies on his hearing entirely to do his job well. But Marder isn’t just interested in sound – he’s just as interested in finding peace. What makes Ruben the perfect character for this predicament is his status as a recovering addict. I would never claim to know the life of an addict, but I do know that stillness is something they constantly seek and struggle to find. There is always something gnawing at them, calling them and guiding them towards relief in the form of another drink or another dose. In the silence, you can hear all your demons.
There is a point where it looks like Ruben is on his way to a happy story. He’s finally learning to sign. He’s making connections with the Deaf members in the house and taken to showing off a bit to the Deaf teacher he’s worked alongside. We can see where he can truly find some kind of new identity. But that wouldn’t be honest to Ruben’s core. At least not yet.
When Ruben gets his cochlear implants activated, I recognized that look of fear. That look that says it can’t possibly be the thing you’ve dreamed for and expected. It just can’t. It sounds too weird and a few thousand miles too far away from what you once knew sound to be like. I remember getting my digital hearing aid for the first time. I could feel fear and anger and all kinds of things bubbling up within me. I wasn’t sure who to direct it at. So I just crumbled inward. I wasn’t going to be more hearing, like I was promised. The world was not going to make more sense, at least not initially. It wasn’t the hearing aid that was going to adjust, they told me – it was going to have to be me.
As someone who’s heard the cochlear implant debate for so long, and who’s grown exasperated at all the delusions the hundreds of activation videos online show, I deeply appreciate the way Marder and his sound designers show the reality. He doesn’t tell us what happens, but instead uses the film’s two biggest empathy machines in its sound design and in Riz Ahmed’s incredible, deeply-felt performance. We can just see it in his eyes. We see the panic set in. The dream he has so nervously reached for has now arrived and it’s absolutely nothing like he imagined. Even worse: for him, there’s no clear way out. He can’t just smash a coffee cup and storm out of an empty room. He can’t just reverse the surgery and get his money back. The door to the life before his loss has shut behind him and locked itself. He can only look behind through the window, but he’ll never return to normal. The only way is forward into the unknown.
Chasing Stillness
There’s a handful of subtle things this film does so well and with such intention – especially with the way it presents sound as it gets disrupted, pushed around, drowned, and laid out to dry. One of my favorites is the way the subtitles don’t kick on with the ASL onscreen until Ruben himself uses it. He doesn’t get to fully access the new world around him until he stops fighting it and just tries. Soon enough, he’s become a favorite, with his infectious personality and his deep-rooted energy. But we can tell by the way Joe offers him opportunities of stillness and he responds by smashing donuts and screaming into empty rooms. This isn’t a solution that’s going to last.
When people ask me what I appreciate the most about being Deaf, they often assume it’s the silence. “You can just take your hearing aid out,” they say, as I talk about the things around me that are loud and that shriek in ways that warp my brain. But it’s taken me over 30 years to realize it’s not silence I’m chasing: it’s stillness. When I can walk around the neighborhood without my hearing aid in the morning, there’s a stillness present in me that allows me to think about whatever comes to mind. The noise of the world has, if only temporarily, been removed. Deafness has taught me stillness. It’s made it a muscle I exercise. It’s how I can sit in a coffee shop full of people and focus on the writing at hand; it’s also how I can become so severely disrupted by just the slight tinkering of a person in the kitchen as I try to work. Silence isn’t always in stillness, and stillness is not in every moment of silence. Like the digital hearing aid or the cochlear implant, silence is a tool that pushes you towards the stillness you really crave. That’s when you, like Ruben at the end of the movie, can finally take a deep, unburdened breath.
