Last night we interrogated our own ableism through a watching of Sound and Fury, a 2000 documentary about a deaf couple wrestling with whether to give their five-year-old deaf daughter a cochlear implant. I'd read about the controversy at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., last year, so I knew how heated debates within the deaf community can get—but I was still surprised to see such hostile resistance to what from my naïve point of view looked like a miracle cure.

Ultimately the family chooses not to implant the device in their daughter, a decision that so upsets the hearing half of their extended family that they wind up moving to an all-deaf community in Maryland to escape endless, increasingly nasty arguments. (In a follow-up called Sound and Fury: Six Years Later, it turns out that they eventually relented and gave an implant to their daughter after all, as well as to the family's mother. Judging from the articles, it sounds like the decision worked out well.)

I can't say that I was ever convinced that a cochlear implant was the wrong choice for the child—perhaps ableism just runs too deep—but the movie does a very good job of establishing that there is a genuine ethical mindfield here, and I won't quickly forget the depths of hurt evinced by the deaf community at the possible disappearance of "the deaf world" which has filled their lives with meaning. It's a profound and, I think, impossible question.

The most interesting aspect of the film, from a cinematic standpoint, is surely the decision to dub American Sign Language rather than providing subtitles. I'm curious as to the motivation here, as it seems to me to be completely misguided—though given that the DVDs for this deaf-centric film were apparently pressed without closed captioning or subtitles, it may not have been all that well thought-out.