"CODA:" How To Do Social Issues True Justice

Bucking cliche is the name of the game in this touching family drama.

May 1, 2022

On May 1, 2003, 18 million people watched as Christy Smith, reality TV’s first deaf contestant, got voted off Survivor: The Amazon. She had disclosed her deafness on the first day of the game and got met with a mixed reaction. It was the start of a bumpy ride for Christy.

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Her all-female tribe did little to assist her. They did not make a point of setting out a lantern or actively include Christy in fireside discussions. As such, she could not build relationships past sundown. It was not until two weeks into the game when the tribes swapped that she found herself among people willing to take her impairment seriously.

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It would be dishonest to say her deafness was the only cause of her ouster. She was indecisive, moody, temperamental, hypocritical, and often failed to follow through. In the end, no matter how much her being deaf affected her, who she was independent of her deafness is what truly lost her the game.

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CBS did little to reflect this. Considering her role on the show, they had to walk on eggshells regarding her in-game perception. At no point was Christy a threat to win and was more a number for savvier players than a player in her own right. The two people she hated most were a swimsuit model and a gym teacher with blonde hair and a large bust. A network bent on making Christy the nice girl had easy scapegoats.

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In retrospect, we know now this was the wrong course. People are multidimensional, and while they can get somewhat defined by how they experience the world, they are not simply products of the things that cause them to do so in a specific way. Beethoven was a master composer who wrote six symphonies as he went deaf. It does not mean he was not a flawed man. We can get set apart by things we cannot control without getting built by them entirely.

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How a movie reflects this is a scientific art: they must find the exact social means of reflecting truth while still making a product worthy of watching. It was not long ago that anyone different was a stereotype, and the only means through which we accessed them was through those differences. Action movies always had a cameo from a loud, outraged Black person bellowing about an inconvenience. Romantic comedies always had the gay best friend who, if not traditionally flamboyant, always had that hint of femininity to make him less threatening to heterosexual audiences. Any film made for a specific group was so much of that group it almost didn’t feel real, as though the very thing they wanted people to accept as part of a larger whole was, in fact, the whole.

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Now, we are better equipped, and CODA is the latest entry to show what we can do with the socially aware weapons in our ever-expanding arsenal. It is the story of Ruby Rossi. As the title explains, she is the child of deaf adults and is the only hearing person in her immediate family. Although she has a passion for singing, childhood trauma has made her lock her gift inside. With the help of a passionate teacher and the love of a handsome boy at school, she finds it within herself to let her voice soar. Unfortunately, family obligation comes into play, and Ruby must decide between duty and destiny.

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Its narrative initially gets built on clichés, and in a vacuum this is fine. We can always find comfort in familiarity, and challenges are most successful when the confrontation seems more like an invitation than an indictment. We are most malleable when we get told to come into a house, explore its contents, and scope out the remodeled kitchen where the homemade cookies are sitting on the counter. We have more trepidation when we see the quirks, idiosyncrasies, or differences that would make us feel inadequate for not embracing them sooner, or at the very least, contest what we deem acceptable. In a film intent on normalizing deaf people, showing how despite our archaic assumptions and all the questions whose answers seem simple but that we have never bothered to ask, cliché has its place. Inside CODA could be a commentary on how obviously deaf people are like us: they appreciate all of life’s fruits and hurdle its obstacles regardless of their disability. If bashed over the head with tropes, we must look inward to understand how low we have descended.

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But CODA does not initially do this: it instead settles for ripping off low-hanging fruit. We have the corporate lackeys who decide to fight the power. We have a talented girl who runs (literally) from her gift, a treasure of which her family disapproves. She has dreams but feels compelled by familial pressure to stay. We have the sexually promiscuous friend who beds the brother. We have the sassy Latina arts teacher. We have a teenage boy who’s the apple of our heroine’s eye, who slips up in a way that’s relatively innocuous only to have everything get repaired so they can chart their course on the lake of love. We have sexually liberated parents whose physical affections cause turmoil for their teenage daughter.

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Every moment is one we’ve seen before and done better. It is so desperate to convince us deaf people are like everyone else that it forgets to make them like everyone else. We are concepts to a degree. It is not as though we are unique in a world with billions of people and even more in the ground. Many like us have come before and will arrive after we have gone. If you are witty, pragmatic, intuitive, reactive, mild-mannered, good-natured, ill-tempered, wise, goofy, edgy, cynical, optimistic, or even some combination of everything, you have been seen before and will be seen again. But despite the traits that comprise us, we are also the perceptions that define us. Internal perception is a product of cultural shifts as much as external perceptions.

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Gay men ravaged by the AIDS crisis, victimized by a social conservatism that saw two landslide victories for a man who did nothing to further their cause or save their lives, will view themselves differently than gay men today. We have far to go, but that does not mean we have not come far. We have seen the world grow: those metropolitan areas become more friendly even if the backwoods world has not. Without the self-awareness to know that these clichés could serve a thematic purpose, that good head-bashing that enlightens us, CODA is just a movie with a heart but no true soul.

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It is not until it bucks clichés in small ways that it finds that soul, building upon those minor deviations to gain substance. The boy always hurts the girl he likes, and every time he chases her down, begging to explain himself, she says there can be neither explanation nor forgiveness and darts to her dingy apartment to weep into a pint of Chunky Monkey. Not here. CODA lets the boy explain. It knows Ruby has gotten teased so often that trusting someone isn’t like everyone else is hard. It may take more for her to understand not everyone is the enemy, but part of her journey isn’t realizing that: the relationship born from accepting it is.

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The best friend always dates the brother, defying convention by scurrying around to hide the illicit relationship. When the truth comes out, drama ensues. Not here. Ruby is initially put off by Gertie's interest in Leo, but true to form, she accepts it when she learns of it.

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Ruby is not a universal talent. She has a feel for singing and a good enough voice to justify a few solid indie records, but she’s no Whitney Houston. It doesn’t matter. She may never sell out the O2 or an NBA arena, but she has the soul to bring something to a classic song we cannot find in the original. Her music teacher may be sassy or demanding in all the ways we’ve seen before, but he frees her from her restraints naturally. The movie does not let her be that quaint indie singer who mistakes breathless whispering for singing and strumming a guitar in a quirky outfit for individuality. Ruby has more to offer than the shy female vocalists of movies past, and CODA demands she bring it to the surface.

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The more CODA lets itself experience life, letting its characters feel like more than their concept, and thus allow them to access each other in a way more theirs than ours, it becomes worthwhile. It’s funny, between all the silly dog breathing and the awkward sex talk after horny parents break up singing practice with an obnoxious romp in the sack, but it doesn’t rest on its humor. It needs to lighten itself from time to time, and so it does, but it eventually finds the light within its story.

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Movies with a humanizing message work best when the trends get subverted enough to make us realize our power. We don’t have to live life like a movie, never letting people explain, forbidding relationships we have no right to prohibit, or keeping our gift inside only until the big day when we have to sing for our future. We can sail those seas without charting the same course, and so in movies, we can find those differences and hear them sing.

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Even though you know what’s coming, CODA feels authentic. It makes us hear a mother who feared never understanding her daughter and the daughter who wondered if her mother resents her not being the same as her family. It makes us sympathize with a brother who resents his hearing sister as much as he loves her, wanting her to pursue her passions despite carrying anger over how much more necessary she seems than he. It lets a father accept his daughter before she strikes out on her own.

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It never challenges its characters to resolve conflicts. It hangs disagreements in the air before snatching them and filing them away. It rarely resolves itself so new developments and conflicts can develop, allowing for an organic progression rather than a manufactured one.

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But in understanding how to work within what limitations it sets for itself, how to make the minor details build and resonate, CODA does something it would have accomplished even if the central idea of deafness and its struggles was absent entirely: it matters. It matters because it doesn’t make toxicity and unity go hand in hand with family. It matters because it makes differences tangible things that cannot get erased by kind words and big dreams. It matters because it, even if by accident, shows that everyone we say is different is different, just not in any way that matters.

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Being deaf is not a death sentence, but it does not make doing certain things less impressive. It does not make figuring out how to survive in a world increasingly demanding of hearing any less of a feat. It was quite something for Beethoven to compose those symphonies and for Christy to make it 33 days in the Amazon. We cannot ignore who people are or with what they are afflicted. We cannot pretend someone is not Black or gay or mute or deaf. We cannot behave as though everyone that gets set apart is just like everyone else. We can acknowledge that they are different and that they see and experience the world in a way we never will, but in that is something we do understand: much like Ruby’s gift, being different is nothing to run from.