The Deaf Community In The Film Love Is Never Silent

A community is a group of people that share a common characteristic. The Deaf community is a diverse worldwide group. There are many Deaf communities including American Deaf, French Deaf, and German Deaf. Within these communities, there are even smaller local communities. Each nation has their own folktales and languages but they share the same sense of pride in the rich culture of their Deaf community. According to Deaf in America, “use the lowercase deaf when referring to the audiological condition of not hearing, and the uppercase Deaf when referring to a particular group of people who share a language- American Sign Language (ASL) –and a culture” (Padden 2). In Deaf culture, the label “hard of hearing” is frowned upon. The Deaf community …show more content…
Not only that, but hearing people weren’t always accepting of people unlike them. This was proven in the movie Love is Never Silent. Margaret, the main character who is a CODA, explained how her parents never trusted hearing people because one time they charged her parents too much for a car but her parents didn’t know the difference. At one point Margaret’s father asks her if the sun makes a noise as it hits the ground. This struck me because, although this seemed silly to Margaret who it hearing, it was a serious questions. Hearing people take this basic occurrence for granted. Margaret struggled with having a life on her own. She is the ears and voice in the world for her family, which is a large responsibility. When Margaret was a young girl, a deaf woman was sick at her mom’s job, and it was up to Margaret to translate for the doctor. This forced her to grow up very fast. Another CODA, Lara from the film Beyond Silence, had a similar struggle with her family, even though they were from Germany. Lara had to translate her mother’s television shows because at the time there were no captions and explain to her father what snow sounded like and that thunder makes the noise not lightning. Learning to read was difficult for Lara and her education was often put on hold to help her parents. Kai, Lara’s mother, would often show up outside her daughter’s school window to ask for …show more content…
While waiting on line, a Deaf woman and her husband had a brief conversation with me. They asked if I was there for a school event, what school I went to, who my professor was, if my professor was hearing or deaf, and what level I was in. Being able to understand and actually communicate with other people in the Deaf community is very important. After talking with me, the woman recognized about ten other Deaf people and had long conversations with them. Different aspects of Deaf life were presented in the play itself. For example, when the two main characters rang a doorbell, the performers used a blinking light to signify that the doorbell is ringing. When the characters in the play wanted to get attention, they would wave their hand or stomp on the floor causing a vibration. In the movie, the hearing actors would just raise their voice or scream if they had to get another character’s attention. Some ASL grammar that was used in the performance was: classifiers (when they were describing the winding road the two main characters were going down), reference hand (when showing directions to get to a different room), constructed action (one woman’s legs acted as windshield wipers, about 5 women standing together acted as a machine), and rhetorical questions (when the actor in the movie was describing Rocky, The ASL actor