John Krasinski's 'A Quiet Place' and the nature of disability

When I’m enjoying a communal cultural experience like an excellent horror movie in the theater, I don’t like it when something about my environment doesn’t suit my needs and preferences. I tried glaring sideways over the single empty seat between the whisperers and me, but it didn’t work.

Silent applause

I had another slightly uncomfortable moment in a theater recently when I arrived at a packed story slam hosted by the University of Pennsylvania at International House, featuring a roster of both deaf and hearing storytellers. The performance included simultaneous live audio/American Sign Language (ASL) translation for a mixed audience of deaf and hearing people.

An usher told me to take the single empty seat in a row marked as reserved for members of the deaf and hard-of-hearing community. I felt a little awkward as I realized those already seated might not be able to hear me say “Excuse me, can I sit there?” or “Thanks!”

I smiled and waved a little to catch their eyes, pointed to the empty seat, and lifted my palms. They immediately smiled back and stood up so I could join them.

Okay, so it wasn’t that uncomfortable. The story slam proved that good stories and boring, self-indulgent ones aren’t defined (or rescued) by spoken words or ASL, but I enjoyed the event and its range of intersecting cultural perspectives, including gender and sexuality, education and healthcare access, body size, race, language, and nationality.

I reconciled an enthusiastic audience with a quiet one — a weak smatter of audible applause met the end of each story, but that was just because a lot of people in the audience weren’t smacking their hands together to make noise. They were fluttering their raised palms toward the stage, and I quickly learned to applaud visually.

Dangerous ears

I thought about the experiences of deaf people again this weekend when I saw A Quiet Place. John Krasinski (whose loveably frowsy, eloquent stares kept us in the action at Dunder Mifflin) co-wrote, directed, and stars along with his real-life wife, Emily Blunt, in an alien-apocalypse vision of the near future.

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But this isn’t a city-toppling movie of outsize heroes and improbable aircraft: it’s a gorgeously tense, claustrophobic, ecstatically scary story about a mom, dad, and three children (one of whom is deaf) surviving an invasion of blind, predatory monsters by living without sound. (In a movie with little auditory dialogue, the characters go effortlessly unnamed until the credits roll.)

Horrible creatures have apparently made short work of human society, and the few remaining people in this family’s rural world limit their contact to brief signal fires at dusk. Those who survive exist in silence because the impenetrably armored, lightning-fast, bloodthirsty creatures in the woods hunt with pulsing, opalescent ears.

Given the low survival rate, this onscreen family’s deaf daughter (Millicent Simmonds, a deaf teenage actor) seems key to their success: long before sounds became a magnet for monsters, the family had a natural and effective rapport without speech. (Most of the movie’s scant but heart-cracking dialogue occurs in subtitled ASL.)

The individual’s problem?

A family’s perceived disadvantage in the real world turns into a lifesaving asset in this film, and that made me think about a recent episode of WHYY’s health and science radio show The Pulse that was dedicated to people with disabilities.

Teresa Blankmeyer Burke, a philosophy professor and bioethicist at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C. (the world’s only liberal arts college for deaf and hard-of-hearing students), asked, “Where do we put the locus of disability? Does it reside in the person or does it reside in the environment?”

She noted that hearing people who don’t know ASL often find themselves at a disadvantage if they need directions on Gallaudet’s campus. The Pulse asked whether disability is a “condition” or merely a difference.

“Disability is seen as the individual’s problem,” Burke said of the “medical model of disability,” in which we adapt technologies to aid individuals in a society that won’t accommodate them — an insufficient approach.

A Quiet Place, in which a family comfortable with nonvocal communication survives the apocalypse, offers an opportunity to consider the ways our environment, not individuals themselves, shapes the definition of disability.

Fair scares

Watching the movie, I caught some of the whisperers’ words. I realized that whenever subtitles or explanatory text appeared onscreen, the woman nearest me was reading the words to an elderly woman, who asked occasional questions about visual elements onscreen.

The older woman was visually impaired. But, thanks to her companion, she enjoyed the movie. At one point, when a character removes a mysterious wrapped object from a drawer, the older woman asked the same question everyone in the audience yearned to know: “What’s that?”

But her eyes hadn’t failed her. She had to wait with the rest of us to find out. I was glad she could enjoy the movie, too. I determined to focus on the movie and my annoyance evaporated.

I’m convinced it’s time for subtitles to be an onscreen standard at movies and on TV, along with easily available audio-transcription devices. Happenings that include people of different abilities shouldn’t be special events. When movies like A Quiet Place arrive, everyone should have an equal chance to be scared to death — together.