Sound and Fury

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Sound and Fury is a documentary film released in 2000 about two American families with young deaf children and their conflict over whether or not to give their children cochlear implants, surgically implanted devices that may improve their ability to hear but may threaten their deaf identity. The film was nominated for several awards, including an Academy Award.

[edit] Synopsis

The film follows an extended family with deafness through three generations over a year and a half, focussing on two brothers — Peter, who is deaf and Chris, who has normal hearing — and their wives and children. Peter and Nita Artinian (who is also deaf) have a deaf child aged 5, Heather, who tells her parents that she would like to get a cochlear implant. Nita and Peter, who are happy and proud to be deaf, are worried that Heather will lose her positive deaf identity and adopt hearing culture's values about what is normal, and lose her connection to American Sign Language and deaf culture. Peter is especially wary due to his own painful and unsuccessful experience of an oral education. The family conflict escalates when Chris and his wife (who is also hearing) learn that their newborn child is deaf and decide to implant him, and the two families struggle with dramatically different choices about how to raise their deaf children.

[edit] 6 years later

In 6 Years later, Heather is now 12 years old, and herself, her 2 deaf siblings, her mother and members of her extended deaf family have all opted for the implant device. The article summarizing the documentary's events describes her as having clear speech, living in a 'mainstreamed' world, interacting with hearing people, and possessing high grades in school. These are goals lauded by the oralist movement. The girl appears to have achieved success by the oralist movement's definition in spite of living in an environment oralist educators strive to avoid as best as possible: her family is all deaf, she attended deaf schools and interacted primarily in the deaf culture, and had little to no intelligible speech in the first documentary. She was able to possess a deaf heritage, use ASL as a primary language, with little spoken language exposure or stimulation until she was implanted at 9, and still, she succeeded orally.

This partially challenges some of the requirements for implantation put forward by the cochlear implant industry, such as "the earlier implantation in the child's life would increase the chance of better language and speech development" and "use of sign language or gestures will limit or prevent the child's speech/language development". But of course, the success in this instance may simply be due to a better training and support, and are not applicable to all the cases.

The book Train Go Sorry by Leah Hager Cohen (a work on deaf culture that covers cochlear implants and oral education from the author's perspective of having been involved in an oral school transitioning to include sign language in its classrooms) presents views from both sides and places cochlear implants in the spectrum of deaf cultural.