Children of a Lesser God: Between Sound and Silence

Loyal readers may remember last month when I talked about Sidney Poitier and Elizabeth Hartman in A Patch of Blue and how I casually alluded to the larger framework of disability within film and promised to talk about it one day. Well, this isn’t like with my Disney Princess series where I teased the project for years before finally getting to it. I’m making good on that promise here today. You’re welcome. 

Now, when I say “disability within film,” that’s a really large slice of the pie. The discussion of disability in Hollywood is a vast and complex field of study. There’s obviously overlap across the broader discussion, but people of different disabilities experience ableism differently, similar to how members of different ethnic identities experience racism differently, and it’s a machine that has to be dismantled on multiple fronts. 

But with this piece, I’m not so interested in airing all the ways the industry has let down members of these communities. Today, I’d mostly like to elevate breakthroughs, moments of getting it right. And today that moment is March 30, 1987, when Marlee Matlin became the first deaf actor to receive an Academy Award for her performance in Children of a Lesser God.

Randa Haines’ 1986 film centers on the romance between a hearing man and a deaf woman and the challenges they face. This was a major shift in how the deaf community was represented onscreen. Paul Attanasio wrote in the Washington Post, 

“This is romance the way Hollywood used to make it, with both conflict and tenderness, at times capturing the texture of the day-to-day, at times finding the lyrical moments when two lovers find that time stops.

“And almost incidentally, one of the lovers is deaf.”

I'm attracted to this movie for its general filmmaking proficiency as well as its candid look at the interaction between the deaf and hearing community. This is a group that isn't always included in modern discussions on leveling the playing field, and so I'd like to take this opportunity to contextualize this film in prominent depictions of deafness and trace out its this movie's larger thesis on finding that space between sound and silence.

Today’s piece canvasses the larger topic of disabled representation but will mostly focus on deafness specifically. The term "disability" is also admittedly a little loaded since many within the deaf community do not identify with this label, feeling it discounts how they actually have their own vibrant culture and means of communication. In the interest of accessing a wider framework, I am choosing to discuss deaf issues parallel to disability issues, but I want to lay down that caveat upfront. And as a hearing author, I of course own up to a certain bias within my own writing, but I still hope that this piece still honestly reflects the general intentions of the deaf community.

A Brief History of Disability in Hollywood

    Film has a long and complex history with disability, but disabled individuals have appeared in stories in one form or another since the days of classical antiquity.

    As with a lot of marginalized groups, these characters were typically othered within said stories, either by being demonized or embellished with some mystical properties. You also have something like the Tiny Tim archetype in which the disabled character is hoisted up as a sort of inspirational figurehead for the encouragement of their abled peers. This is a much more sympathetic portrayal, but still a little dehumanizing in a different way—these characters aren’t really fleshed out as complex psychological individuals, just reflecting glasses for the able-bodied protagonists.

Early examples might include something like Quasimodo from Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Modern viewers tend to know the sensitive and brave Quasimodo from contemporary adaptations like the 1939 RKO version with Charles Laughton or the 1996 Disney version with Tom Hulce, but while these benevolent traits are present in Hugo's original text, it was later adaptations that really championed Quasimodo as a hero, not just an entity who deserved our pity. (Quasimodo was also explicitly deaf in Hugo's writing, which later adaptations did not always acknowledge, and I suppose there's a conversation to be had there also.)

    Early film admittedly took its notes from these slanted portrayals. 1927’s The Unknown saw Lon Chaney playing a criminal hiding from the law under the guise of an armless circus performer. There’s a love triangle where said criminal vies for the attention of a beautiful circus performer, and in order to maintain this illusion, he has his arms surgically removed, only for the girl to choose another man. His rage spurs him to arrange an accident wherein the other guy is horribly disfigured so she’ll have no choice but to come back to him. So, it starts out as a story where a criminal is wearing the mask of disability in order to steal sympathy, and it later morphs into a story where the union of the able-bodied class is threatened by the vile machinations of this horrible disabled creature … nice.

    The 20th century brought about a couple of developments that are worth remarking upon. In the early 1900s, you had individuals like Helen Keller who were key in getting disabled voices out into the public space. Following the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, you also saw members of the disabled community take similar stands in demanding recognition from the culture and government they occupied. Then came The Rehabilitation Act of 1973, prohibiting discrimination against individuals with physical or mental disabilities, marking the first time members of the disability community were guaranteed rights under law. 

    Particularly relevant to the deaf community and this specific film was the movement in the 1950s to legitimize ASL as a valid form of language. The initial expectation was for deaf people to learn how to lip read and verbalize in order to be accepted in larger society. A key figure in changing that attitude of William Stokoe, who saw the benefits of ASL and pioneered the widespread teaching of ASL to help empower deaf people with their own language. Remarking on how deaf people thrived under ASL, Stokoe shared in 1956, 

“I just knew that when these deaf people were together and communicating with each other, what they were communicating with was a language, not somebody else’s language; since it wasn’t English, it must have been their own language. There was nothing 'broken' or 'inadequate' about it; they got on splendidly with it.”

    As larger culture started to change, film found more nuanced ways to represent this segment of the population. A tentpole film in this discussion, as it relates to both deafness and disability, was 1962’s The Miracle Worker, a biographical film following Helen Keller, played by Patty Duke, and the woman who taught her how to communicate, Anne Sullivan, played by Anne Bancroft.

    The Helen that we see at the start of the film is functionally a baby, incapable of expressing herself or maintaining any self-control, but this is meant to be seen more as a reflection of how her family does not know how to raise a child with such specific needs. Sullivan here becomes the first person to believe Helen can be capable of leading a complex, fulfilling life and sets down the boundaries necessary to make that happen. Once Sullivan is able to break that barrier, Helen is shown to have that capacity for discernment, insight, and love. The film was a financial success and a critical darling, scoring five Academy nominations, including wins for both Bancroft and Duke. 

Following the success of The Miracle Worker, Hollywood started to show more interest in the subject of disability. Films like The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1968) and Butterflies are Free (1972) both featured disabled protagonists (deaf and blind, respectively) and accrued Oscar attention. A Patch of Blue would also come out during this time. These stories often showcased how members of these communities led rich interior lives which were not generally recognized by the world in which they inhabited, and as the audience got to spend time with them, they proved to the audience that they still had stories to tell. 

But there remained residual limitations.  It’s worth noting that this movement almost always spotlighted disabled stories as presented through able-bodied actors. It didn’t appear to cross the minds of Hollywood studio heads to elevate this demographic by placing disabled individuals in the pilot seat of these stories and granting this community access to work that they qualified for. An able-bodied person may be able to wear the clothes of disability for a spell and then go home, but people who live with disability seldom experience that same fluidity: it’s much harder for a deaf actor to take on the role of a hearing character. Hence, members of disabled communities are very protective of the already limited roles offered to them and rightfully upset when they are squandered on performers with more options on the table.

These sorts of things were on the mind of Mark Medoff, when he penned the original stage play Children of a Lesser God in 1980.

Children of a Lesser God

The Broadway production saw deaf-actress Phyllis Frelich playing opposite John Rubinstein, the story for which was inspired by her own relationship with her hearing husband, Robert Steinberg, who played opposite her in the 1979 Los Angeles Production. The New York Times reported in Frelich’s obituary in 2014, 

“A member of the National Theater of the Deaf, [Frelich] told him that there were no substantive roles for deaf actresses. Captivated by the possibilities, he promised to write one. Sign language, he thought, was inherently theatrical, and the struggles of the deaf to make themselves understood would be a poignant example of the complexities of all human communication.” 

In Medoff’s words, 

“She was so animated and vivid, she made me immediately want to be able to converse with her. I was swept away. Within 20 minutes I told her I was going to write her a play.” 

The play would run on Broadway for about 700 performances, with development on a feature-film adaptation following shortly after. I haven’t been able to track down the exact reasons for why the movie chose not to carry over the stage cast, but we know that sometimes filmmakers just want fresh talent carved specially for the big screen. This would have led them to Willaim Hurt, who’d enjoyed a steady line of work through the 80s with films like The Big Chill (1983) and Kiss of the Spiderwoman (1985), for which he had just won an Oscar. He certainly would have felt like a natural choice for the role of James, but that left the role of Sarah up in the air.

Attention fell on newcomer Marlee Matlin, a deaf actress whose performance credits had up until then had remained with ICODA (International Center on Deafness and the Arts). In her memoir, Matlin shared her experience participating in a school play and the first time she remembered realizing she wanted to act,

“I remember standing on stage, signing as the others sang, feeling the vibrations of the music rumbling up through the floor under my feet and up through my body as I moved to the beat. I remember the audience, the faces smiling at me, watching, the hands applauding. I loved it. I felt at home and knew I wanted to have this feeling again. I was hooked.”

    She would be discovered by TV icon, Henry Winkler, putting her in position for Children of a Lesser God and what would become a landmark moment in deaf representation. Richard Schickel of Time magazine wrote in his review for the film, " [Matlin] has an unusual talent for concentrating her emotions -- and an audience's -- in her signing. But there is something more here, an ironic intelligence, a fierce but not distancing wit, that the movies, with their famous ability to photograph thought, discover in very few performances.” 

Children of a Lesser God opened at number five at the box office, but it managed to stay in the top 10 for eight weeks, accumulating a respectable worldwide gross of just over 100 million. Come Oscar season, the film would nab five nominations including one for best picture. (Fun fact, this was also the first movie directed by a woman to be nominated for this award.) The centerpiece of this, of course, was Marlee Matlin making history as the first deaf woman to be recognized at the Oscars, eventually winning the award at the ceremony. David Kurs, artistic director of Deaf West, wrote for the LA Times in 2019, 

“My heart soared upon seeing Marlee win the Oscar because I finally understood then that it was possible to work in the arts as a deaf person. Even back then, it was inconceivable that our story was worth telling.” 

Matlin herself has spoken many times about that landmark win. Describing the moment when she realized she had won, 

"I remember watching [William Hurt], and he opened the envelope, he looked right at me, and I wasn't sure why he was looking at me, and then he signed my name. For a split second, I thought he was teasing me, that he was playing a joke. But then I thought, 'Well, no. He can't be playing a joke on live television in front of millions of people watching the show. So, I guess I won!'” 

Worlds Apart

Children of a Lesser God sees James Leeds, a new hearing teacher at a school for the deaf, helping the students learn how to participate in larger society by speaking. His attention quickly falls to the vibrant and ferocious Sarah Norman, a former student at the school who now works as a janitor and is instantly drawn to her. Learning that Sarah is deaf but not mute, James offers to help her learn how to speak. She rejects this offer but concedes his invitation to go out to dinner with him, and they begin a relationship. 

They form an indelible bond, but the hearing barrier threatens to keep them apart. James’s curiosity to hear her speak grows into a desperation, an insistence that as long as she stays silent, she is holding back in their relationship. But Sarah guards this part of herself fiercely, insisting that she should not have to play by the rules of the world and that he should not ask this of her. As both demand of one another the impossible thing, their relationship reaches a fracture point. They have a heated argument in which Sarah verbally screams at James–the only time in the film we hear Sarah’s voice–before storming out of the house.

    Both James and Sarah do some private reflecting, and James finds Sarah again at the school’s prom. They have come to see the truth in what the other was telling them, and they resolve to find a space where they can meet, not in sound, not in silence, but together.

“Lovers from opposite worlds” is a common ancestor of many romantic stories, and this film is certainly that. The movie opens with James being ferried over to … the other side of the bay, I think, but the imagery evokes that of an island, this isolated body of land that he must cross in order to access this world in which he comes across Sarah.

Water ends up becoming a recurring motif within the film itself. James and Sarah have their first moment of intimacy underwater, in this one space where James can almost enter her non-hearing world. There’s even a moment early on where we see Sarah perched on an outcropping of rock out in the water in a way that to me evokes the “little mermaid” statue in Copenhagen, commemorating the voiceless heroine who crosses worlds to find love in Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy-tale.

The conversations between James and Sarah have him speaking her signing out loud, as though he is verbally translating for some unseen third party-member, rather than embedding subtitles. This is likely inherited from the stage play, where projecting subtitles for the theater audience may not have been feasible at the time. Roger Ebert thought the film was well-made, but he felt it betrayed the spirit of the story that the entire film was depicted in sound or to have all of the deaf character’s words relayed out loud, locking us in the perspective of the hearing character. This opens up a lot of questions: mostly, through whose eyes are we entering this world? Whose story is it really? 

James and Sarah are both lead characters within this work, both with prominent screentime and complex psychologies acted out within the story, yet if that story leans one way, I’d say it favors James ever so slightly. We see Sarah during the opening titles briefly, but James is the first character the audience really gets to know. The story begins with him crossing the ferry into this world. The first time we get a proper look at Sarah, it is from his vantage point. Even as Sarah’s whole personhood reveals itself, it is revealing itself to James.

I’m not one to say whether that counts as a point against the movie. This arrangement becomes an opportunity for the hearing audience (personified through James) to sit and listen to the problems facing the deaf population as explained by a deaf representative (personified through Sarah). The way that the film sets up James as the audience-insert also leaves Sarah as the character who gets a more fleshed out backstory. We know little about James beyond what he lists on his resume in that initial interview scene. Meanwhile, Sarah comes with all this intricate backstory with her mother, her childhood, her history with the school, etc., which aligns with the film's larger ambition of fleshing out the complexities within Sarah's non-hearing world.

    In practice, this carves out a space where the hearing population is forced to reckon with the demands and grievances of the deaf community, maybe for the first time, and I think there is a lot of use to that. Though, I concurrently think it is worth it to consider what it would look like for a story to be told squarely through the perspective of a deaf character, and what it would take for that to happen. 

The deciding factor for whether they will survive as a couple comes down to whether they can find a middle ground between their two worlds. As one example, James finds that playing music in their house, even with Sarah’s “permission,” just isn’t enjoyable for him. This leads to Sarah playing the music and asking James to “show her the music.” This leads to him trying to visually pantomime the piece, which he is not able to do. This ends with Sarah assuring James, “Don’t be sad for me.” 

But it’s not just the specific rituals that stand in their way. Both James and Sarah have to navigate their own internal contradictions and half-truths in order to come together. In the words of director, Randa Haines, 

“There was a lot that connected them and a lot that kept them from getting together in their own characters having nothing to do with deafness—deafness was just the metaphor for all the blocks that everyone has that prevent them from ‘meshing’ with another person.”  

This is part of the paradox of authentically representing historically marginalized groups. On the one hand, said groups face unique challenges that ought to be given airtime. That is how you get a culture to reckon with its obligations to a group with underserved needs. On the other hand, members of these communities lead complex lives that are not bound exclusively to said challenges, and fixating on those specific aspects of their lives can risk further othering them. 

In the case of James and Sarah, you have a pretty big cultural divide between the two of them—one of them can hear, the other one cannot. But that specific attribute is not the definitive attribute of their relationship or their individual lives. Yes, they stumble trying to navigate hearing and silent spaces together, but that’s not really what’s keeping them apart. The actual tension in their romance has more to do with expectations, vulnerability, and compromise—things that all couples go through.

    In this way, we could imagine James and Sarah along the lines of Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn in The African Queen. Said film sees two characters from different worlds who must learn to see the artifice behind their divide if they are to survive the ordeal they have been thrown into, and also reach their full potential as a romantic couple. Children of a Lesser God follows the tracks of films like these, allowing the individual histories and beliefs of the characters as fuel to the conflict.

At the same time, that conflict demonstrates some of the unique challenges faced by members of the deaf community—like the widely held expectation that disabled individuals should just mold their lives to conform with everyone else. And it is through the intricacies of the characters’ personalities, especially Sarah, that the film’s real breakthroughs in representation shine.

James and Sarah

    James is mild-mannered, yet good-humored. The kind of person who will joke about broadcasting radio in sign language, whether or not anyone else finds it funny. We see upfront that James is kind of an unorthodox teacher—he gives at least part of his first lesson while performing a handstand. Eventually, he coaches the kids in his class to perform a musical number for Parents’ Day. I think it’s also important to note that James himself isn’t terribly arrogant. He treats the students in his charge like fully formed humans who are capable of way more than the world would have them believe. He appears genuine in his desire to help people. 

That said, James’ latent savior complex does kind of hang over the film, and over his relationship with Sarah. A major turning point for them comes when Sarah sees James leading his students in their song-and-dance performance for Parents’ Day. Sarah sees this and we infer she is bothered by the thought that maybe she is just another song-and-dance routine that James can show-off to his colleagues. “I’m such a teaching wizard—I not only got this girl to speak, I made her fall in love with me.” Now, James appears to genuinely respect her and see her as a whole being. He does not condescend to her or try to limit her autonomy when they are together. James trying to help her live in the hearing world is, at least mostly, born out of a belief that she is capable and deserving of a full life. 

Even so, James can’t really escape this certain dynamic: his relationship with Sarah—his effort to discover her—is almost like another one of his projects, a problem he can solve through application and ingenuity. This silence that she protects so fiercely is a threshold he wants to cross to prove that he can. These two things can and do coexist within James, his sincerity and his ego.

Even though Sarah isn’t super tall in stature, she gives off heavy bird-of-prey vibes, and this feels very deliberate. In order for the audience to trust this relationship, the audience has to see Sarah as having that skepticism, that fire to assert herself when the situation calls for it. We need to believe that she wouldn’t just fall for the first hearing guy to tell her she’s pretty. Moreover, it just says a lot about who she is upfront. Sarah is not a Tiny Tim, neither is she a blind prophet. She’s a human being with her own code. 

There’s a scene on James and Sarah’s first date where Sarah asks that they go to the dance floor and we see her dancing alongside the other restaurant patrons. Everyone around her has this very vibrant, fast-paced motion to them. Sarah, meanwhile, is moving tracing out these long elaborate movements, reflecting the music as she experiences it within her own mind, regardless of the performances of everyone else. We see that Sarah is determined to follow her own rhythm in all things, and that makes her dance more captivating.

    A part of this aggressive independence comes from Sarah resenting the way the hearing world has attempted to crush her underfoot, trying to force her to conform. “They could never be bothered to learn my language. I was always expected to speak.” This can easily be read as an echo of the deaf community's efforts to have sign language recognized as a valid method of communication, a movement that went down only some thirty years prior. Though from what I have researched, this is also a common sentiment expressed by a lot of disabled people forced to comply to an able-bodied world, including when it comes to dating.  Akilah Cadet, Founder of Change Cadet, wrote for Well+Good that,

“I felt incredibly irritated about the notion of having to change my way of thinking about dating, largely because the societal view paints me as someone who doesn’t have sex or deserve a romantic relationship. It didn’t feel fair that I was investing time and energy into changing my attitude when I wasn’t the problem.”

Sarah has also been repeatedly rejected and punished by a world that did not value her. A part of this has to do with her upbringing with her mother, played by Piper Laurie, who was not sensitive to Sarah's needs, which crippled their relationship. Another part of this included being taken advantage of by other boys. Her exact language is vague, but there is a hanging suggestion of sexual violence. 

    

    And so Sarah isolating herself on deaf island and refusing to learn how to speak becomes her means of asserting her autonomy, flexing to the world that she does not need fixing and will not comply with the world just because it tells her to. The question lingers to what extent Sarah is honest in her determination to keep silent—honest to herself and to the world. Is she actually happy cleaning up her old high school, or does she have other reasons for choosing to turn away from the larger world?

What James closes in on is that it isn’t just a matter of principle that keeps Sarah from speaking. Part of it is also pride. Refusing to participate in the world is how she gets back at it for punishing her. She is effectively holding this part of her hostage as a means of exerting control, and in that way, she is holding back in this relationship. Another part of it is also that this woman, this human fireball who throws around pots and pans when she’s angry, is also scared. She doesn’t want to expose herself and risk being hurt or rejected–by the world, and by James. 

Just like James’ belief that his motivation is purely altruistic is only a part-truth, Sarah’s insistence that she doesn’t wish to participate in this hearing world is only half the story. Together, they force each other to confront these internal contradictions. That is partially why this union has so much volatility, and it’s also why they both have so much to offer the other.

In the end, Sarah concedes that her self-imposed isolation is impeding her ability to get the most out of not only her relationship with James, but also life as a whole, and we see her taking new steps to expand her horizons like taking a job at a salon. James, meanwhile, recognizes that her silence is hers to keep and that he doesn’t need to “hear” her in order to love her, and he becomes comfortable allowing Sarah to exist in whatever space she feels safe.  

"Inside My Silence"

This movie ranks pretty high on my list of favorite films that are at least partially ruined by their real-world context. William Hurt and Marlee Matlin became a couple following their involvement in the film, but it did not have a happy ending. Matlin later revealed that Hurt became very alcoholic during their relationship and was abusive on at least one occasion. Hurt’s response to this was,

“My own recollection is that we both apologized and both did a great deal to heal our lives. Of course, I did and do apologize for any pain I caused. And I know we both have grown. I wish Marlee and her family nothing but good.”

As far as I’ve observed, Matlin has not publicly commented on Hurt’s response, and I’m going to respect that choice by leaving the conversation there. Though, in the wake of his passing in 2022, she did share,

“We lost a really great actor and working with him on set in ‘Children of a Lesser God’ will always be something I remember very fondly. He taught me a great deal as an actor and he was one-of-a-kind.”

Matlin has made activism a lifelong mission, continuing to work in shows like The West Wing and Switched at Birth. And you can see how these efforts have yielded larger results within the wider filmscape.

Beyond Matlin’s direct involvement, you have high-profile projects like John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place movies, which feature a deaf lead in Regan, who is able to recast her disability into a superpower not through any supernatural intercession, but through her own resolve and ingenuity. The first season of Only Murders in the Building has an episode seen through the eyes of a deaf character, featuring only a single line of dialogue in the entire episode. Systems like the MCU have also started to recognize the value of something like deaf superheroes, as seen with casting deaf actors like Maya Lopez and Lauren Ridloff (who coincidentally played the role of Sarah in the 2018 Broadway revival of the stage show).

The big watershed moment of this movement being, of course, Sian Hader’s CODA, also featuring Marlee Matlin, which won the Oscar for Best Picture in 2022 and best supporting actor for deaf actor Troy Katsur. Said film tells the story of a hearing girl living in a deaf family as she faces a crossroads in her future, and it marked the first time a movie with substantial disabled representation secured the main trophy.

    From what I’ve researched, CODA was appreciated within the deaf community for representing its deaf characters as whole human beings—especially for demonstrating that deaf people are allowed to have sex too. The deaf characters in this film are obviously shaped by this specific component of their lives, but they also feel like whole individuals within a larger network of living. The family runs a specialized business, they have distinct personality traits, they don’t just spend the whole film doing deaf things, thinking deaf thoughts. 

At the same time, the film earned some ire for falling back on the notion that the only time deaf stories are allowed to be told are in situations where we all get together and groan about how not being able to hear is just so sad. In the words of disability scholar Lennard J. Davis, “this genre of films is glued to a different reality: it is as if birds were obsessed with making movies in which humans were miserable about their inability to fly.” 

But while CODA may be incomplete, it does represent a world that shows more curiosity for disabled communities and experiences, and I think that’s a trajectory we can be grateful for and build upon. Reflecting on the connecting line between “Children” and “CODA,” Matlin said, 

“It was a timeless love story, unlike anything that ever came before it, and set the stage for what we see today in CODA.”

            --The Professor