I recently watched the movie CODA, for which Troy Kotsur, who is Deaf, won an Academy Award. Kudos to Kotsur! I liked the film, parts of it, but there were other parts that I objected to. Some of the American Sign Language (ASL) dialogue, for example, struck me as unrealistic and unnatural, like it had been written in English and then translated into ASL (and then back into English for the subtitles that accompanied all the signing). Which it probably was, since the writer/director, Sian Heder, is hearing and doesn’t sign fluently. But most people wouldn’t have noticed those translation problems because most people don’t sign. Nevertheless, interestingly, most of my CODA friends loved the movie.

I’m not a CODA myself, so I didn’t grow up around Deaf people. In fact, I never met a signing Deaf person until I was in my mid twenties, and that person was my first sign language teacher in the ASL class I took on a lark after graduating from college. I proceeded to immediately fall in love with the language, and then I fell in love with my second sign language teacher, and then I married her. So I became a SODA. And then my son was born and he is a CODA. And then my daughter was born and she is Deaf. And now I make my living as an ASL interpreter. So I have strong opinions about translation problems. And about Deaf people.

My kids are in their thirties now, all grown up and out and away, but I remember those early days when they were young and we all sat around the dinner table together (no TV!) and the dinner conversation was in sign language: our big hands and their little hands flying every which way, everyone talking with their mouths full, which was never a problem in sign language. I miss those days. And on the rare occasion when I see a Deaf family portrayed in a film I perk right up, hoping to see something familiar, recognizable, mine.

And I remember somewhere in my own childhood, a Saturday or a Sunday–or maybe a school day when I was sick and stayed home from school and was watching TV all day–getting up from the lime couch and turning the channels counterclockwise on our black-and-white Admiral television (long before there was such a thing as a remote) and looking for something to watch. I settled on James Cagney, who was playing Lon Chaney in Man of a Thousand Faces: The Lon Chaney Story. Lon Chaney was a famous actor and makeup artist on vaudeville and in silent films in the early 1900s. He was a CODA (long before the term CODA had been coined). I had never heard of him, though of course I’d seen his son, Lon Chaney, Jr., in his role as the Wolf Man, a movie I loved as a little kid because it scared the daylights out of me and I loved to have the daylights scared out of me, especially from the safe distance of the lime couch in front of our television. And I recognized James Cagney from his other roles as the tough guy in some of his other movies.

But here was Cagney in a very different sort of role: Lon Chaney Sr., the father and famous actor, (much more famous than the son), an actor whose face and body were infinitely expressive, an actor whose parents were Deaf, or “deaf-mutes” as they were called back then. What I remember most about that movie was the scene where Lon brings home his new wife Cleva to meet his parents for the first time. He hasn’t told her that his parents are Deaf. And I remember thinking he should have told her. And I remember thinking, when he and Cleva walk in the door and he starts signing with his parents, and Cleva reacts with horror and disgust and runs out the door–I remember thinking that the sign language was beautiful, and that Cleva’s reaction was ugly. That movie was made in 1957, the year before I was born, and though I don’t remember how old I was exactly when I first saw it, it’s very likely that those actors were the first signing Deaf people I had ever seen in my life.

Except that they weren’t Deaf. They were hearing actors playing Deaf characters. I know this
because I went back and watched the movie again not long ago, precisely because I wanted to know if those actors were Deaf. To anyone who knows ASL, it’s obvious those actors were not Deaf. Nevertheless, they were believable, at least to me as a young child on the lime couch in front of our television. And they made a big impression on me. To me they were Deaf, even though they weren’t. They may even have been the germ, the spark, the catalyst that years later prompted me to sign up for that Intro to Sign Language class that ended up changing my life. But hearing actors playing Deaf characters is a very controversial issue these days. In fact, the movie CODA is actually a remake of the French 2014 film La Famille Belier, in which the Deaf characters were all played by hearing actors. To Marlee Matlin’s credit, when she was cast to play the role of the mother in CODA, she insisted that all the Deaf characters in the movie be played by Deaf actors. “Hire Deaf actors, or I’m out,” was the ultimatum she gave the producers, who initially balked at casting Deaf actors in the other lead roles, including Kotsur’s role.

There are plenty of talented Deaf actors out there looking for work. The National Association of the Deaf has strenuously objected to the practice of hiring hearing actors to play Deaf characters. Still, sometimes CODAs are hired to play Deaf characters because they can sign fluently and are good at impersonating Deaf people. For example, the actor Paul Raci, who is a CODA, played the Deaf addiction/recovery counselor “Joe” in the 2019 movie Sound of Metal (which won Best Sound, was nominated for Best Picture, and Raci was nominated for Best Supporting Actor), and there was quite a kerfuffle in the Deaf community about Raci getting that part. And also about Riz Ahmed (who is hearing) playing the lead character Ruben, a drummer who has lost his hearing.

It is actually a misdemeanor in the state of Minnesota to impersonate a Deaf person (MN Statute 329-095). And though I have never set foot in the state of Minnesota, I have been guilty of pretending to be Deaf now and again. For example, on more than one occasion when our family was waiting to board an airplane and they made the announcement that any passengers with disabilities may board at this time, my wife signed to me LET’S GO, PRETEND DEAF YOU, and I stood behind her and the kids, saying nothing, as she pointed to her ears and gestured to the flight attendant that “we” were Deaf, which allowed us to board early. DEAF PRIVILEGE TAKE-ADVANTAGE YOU she signed to me, smiling as we took our seats together in the mostly empty airplane before the other passengers began to file in. And on other occasions, when accosted by a person on the street asking for money and launching into a story about a lost train ticket or being clean and sober for X number of days, I have looked them in the eye and lied to them in sign language: SORRY DEAF-ME NOT UNDERSTAND-YOU, and left them at a loss as I silently walked on. I never feel good about these impersonations, but I’m grateful for the times when they come in handy. No pun intended.

Lon Chaney was known as “the man of a thousand faces” because of his skill in doing his own makeup art for the myriad, often grotesque characters he played in silent films, using cotton and collodion, fish skin, mortician’s wax, and other materials that he tested, explored, and pioneered before there were any professional makeup artists in Hollywood. But even without the makeup, he still had a thousand faces, which he learned from his Deaf parents, because ASL is a language of faces: most of the meaning is in the face, not in the hands. In fact, if you focus on the hands of a Deaf person signing you will miss the meaning entirely. You must watch the face and take the hands in peripherally. And if you want to know if the person who is signing is Deaf (in front of you in person, or in character on the screen), the answer is in the face. Because hearing signers–even most CODAs–do not use the “thousand faces” that Deaf signers use. And those faces are very subtle, often just a head-tilt, eye-gaze, eye-squint, eyes-wide, chin- or shoulder-turn or mouth-movement that modifies the meaning of the sentence. And the sentences themselves are not the strictly ordered, lumbering, concatenated subject-verb-object corteges of English sentences ponderously plodding along like a line of elephants. No, in ASL the sentences are freer, more nimble, more versatile, more embodied. Most hearing signers simply do not make use of the 20 or so craniofacial muscles that we all possess but which only a really fluent Deaf signer regularly and effortlessly exploits for their chromatic range. All of my Deaf sign language teachers gave me the same feedback: YOU ASL IMPROVE++ BUT NEED MORE FACIAL EXPRESSION. Even the one I married ended up giving me just a B minus because, she said, I needed to work on my facial expression.

And it’s not just more facial expression. It’s grammatically correct and appropriate facial expression. There’s nothing more annoying than watching a hearing person trying to “sign more deaf” by using exaggerated facial expressions that are in fact distracting and ungrammatical. It’s painful to watch–the visual equivalent of nails on a chalkboard. Stop trying so hard, I want to tell them. Either you have it or you don’t. And you don’t. So just be yourself.

But though hearing people are lousy at impersonating Deaf people, Deaf people are really good at impersonating hearing people. I’ve never laughed so hard as when I’ve watched certain Deaf people doing impersonations of certain clueless hearing people, showing us just how wooden we are, how impassive and poker-faced, how all-thumbs, and especially how blind. According to Deaf people, hearing people are blind. Because we don’t see the things that Deaf people see. Like when they’re waving at us to get our attention and we stare dumbly ahead as if we didn’t have two eyes in our heads.

The character that elevated Lon Chaney to full star status in Hollywood was Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923). Quasimodo is deaf and half-blind–he has two eyes in his head but one of them, the right eye, is exophthalmic (bulging), grotesque and unseeing. Chaney also devised a 20-pound plaster hump held on by a leather harness to temporarily deform his posture. And I can’t help wondering what his Deaf parents thought of Quasimodo and the other spurned characters that Lon played in those silent films. How proud they must have been of his meteoric rise to stardom. How ashamed they must have been when his young bride took one look at them and ran out the door in fear and disgust. How could they not have blamed themselves? For Deaf people in their day were spurned by the public, their language derided as grotesque, animalistic, a primitive system of gestures, not a legitimate language with its own structure, grammar, morphology. Today, of course, ASL is “in,” is offered to high school and college students around the country as a foreign language (though ASL is as domestic and American as it gets). Deaf rights are protected by law, and ASL interpreters are ubiquitous and required by law. But back then Deaf people were often ashamed to be seen signing in public. They were often the objects of ridicule and scorn, not unlike Quasimodo himself, which most certainly must have occurred to Lon Chaney, and perhaps also to his Deaf parents, the ones who taught “the man of a thousand faces” their language of faces, a beautiful and complex language that is today the third most commonly used language in the United States. But in spite of its popularity, ASL still remains embattled, bullied by English, by oralists, and by well-meaning and some not-so well-meaning hearing people at every turn. And signing Deaf people are still seen as “other,” as somehow “less than,” and they are just as embattled as their language of faces, for they face discrimination on all sides–in employment, in education, in healthcare–and especially from the people supposedly on their side, their own parents. 90+ percent of Deaf people are born to parents who are hearing, parents who had never met a Deaf person in their lives before giving birth to one. Most of these parents have no desire to parent a Deaf child or to learn the complexities and nuances of sign language. So they turn to the doctors, the surgeons, the “experts” with their interventions and invasive implants, their genocidal good intentions, their complete lack of understanding of anyone Deaf or anything Deaf at all. And the doctors are all too happy to try and “fix” these Deaf children, who don’t need fixing–they need defending. And even as ASL grows more popular in some quarters, even as Deaf actors are winning Academy awards in Hollywood, there’s a war going on out there–in the hospitals, in the classrooms, at the dinner tables at home and abroad–over Deaf children. And Deaf children are losing.