The Sound of Metal
Have you ever thought about roads. How dumb they are. Cars are heralded as a technological achievement connecting our world in a way that was never possible before. However, what is less talked about are roads. Can your Tesla drive through forest? Mountains? Tundra? No. Sure there are some off road cars, but let’s be honest despite all the fancy advertising claiming otherwise, they can’t go far. Cars need roads: without roads cars would not work. So isn’t the victory sort of hollow? Sure cars can get us from point A to B faster, but only if every inch from point A to B is cleared and coated with a specific chemical as to not hurt our cars. The better the coating the better the car performance.
The point is, our world is custom built to our specifications. The other day I walked into the library with some air pods on and as I walked through the book detector (like the stuff they have in malls) my air pods picked up a ringing sound. Turns out the book detector was sending interference that my air pods picked up. Our phones, our houses, all of it are built to cater to a specific height, set sensory skills, you name it. We tout our technology as “progress” when it only serves to specifically cater to us. In doing so, technology creates an anthropocentric lens to view the world. Want to see the world? The only way to do that is by using a camera to capture an image. Want to communicate? The only way to do that is by calling and speaking to someone. Change one small thing even something as small as the temperature outside or your posture walking, suddenly it all collapses on itself.
So what happens then when you don’t fit the bill? What if you are too short? Too tall? Or in The Sound of Metal, what if you don’t have hearing? For the main protagonist Ruben this is exactly what happens to him. A recovering addict, Ruben plays in a heavy metal band with his girlfriend Lou only to find himself going deaf. The movie does a good job at depicting the progress, artfully using the audio to juxtapose what we take for granted verses the new world that Ruben finds himself in. Ruben is understandably upset (upset is an understatement). With his previous addiction to heroin hanging over him, Lou convinces him to get help at a deaf community that caters to recovering addicts who are also deaf.
The point is, society tells Ruben his life is over. Constantly reminds him that he is some sort of “other.” But what Ruben has yet to realize is that just as his lack of hearing is “odd”, our ability to “hear” is just as odd. Again we built our world around the assumption that we can hear in a very specific decibel range. When someone doesn’t fill that bill suddenly they are odd. Suddenly they are “disabled.” “Handicapped”? “Disabled”? Relative to what? What we think is “normal”? What is “normal”?
The deaf community that Ruben becomes a part of is not full of people unable to function in society. It is not full of “backward” people. No, it is filled with humans like you and me living in a normal community doing the same things as we do, just without the burden of depending on sound to communicate, instead evolving new behaviors that work just as well as what we have. There’s a school just for deaf people full of young kids getting up to all sort of childish mischief. Ruben finds a small family of deaf recovering addicts and tattoos a naked woman on the back of one of his friends. Normal human stuff. We could have just have easily evolved with no ears, no mouth, and still have been fine.
The climax of the film is when Ruben finally gets it, gets a hearing aid. Even then he can’t hear exactly perfectly with the world appearing to him as a barely decipherable garble of metallic noises. Sure he can “hear” now, but knowing what hearing was before this substitute only serves to remind him of what he has lost and not what he could gain. Upon realizing Ruben got the surgery, the community head, Joe, asks him to leave because the deaf community is for people who believe being deaf is not something to be fixed but rather embraced.
In a pivotal scene, as Ruben explains to Joe how he needs some money and his reasoning for getting the aid, Joe tells Ruben his demeanor is that of an addict. At first Ruben scoffs at this, saying he is definitely not using. But as I thought more about it, maybe Ruben wasn’t addicted to Heroin, but rather, addicted to the old, to the “normal” world he’s been conditioned to believe was “right”. When seeing the emails from Lou, seeing the outside world, he fell back into that addiction, believing what he was not was not right, the community he lived in was fake as opposed to some “real world” that he had to get back to.
At the end of the movie, after an emotional goodbye with his girlfriend Lou, Ruben takes off the aid and enters the world of silence yet again. Suddenly the church steeple with the banging bells, the kids fighting, the police sirens, all of it, silent. And with this there’s a sudden calm and stillness in the world. A new world. Not an abnormal word. Not a “wrong” or “handicapped” world. Just a different world. Ruben realizes his life hasn’t ended, it has just begun.
In this way The Sound of Metal explores a community that is often not touched by movies. When deaf people are shown in movies, they are almost always shown in the periphery as “handicapped” others, never the main focus of a story. The Sound of Metal opens the door to exposing audiences to different ways of living and gives audiences a space to question their own assumptions about those society deems as the “other.” I hope to see more films like this. Bravo.
