“Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other.” — Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (73)
The ability of 1970s American cinema to provoke meaningful debate today, four decades after its inception, lies chiefly in its blending of the personal and the political. The best films of Ashby, Lumet, Pakula and Scorsese tapped into the national zeitgeist on two principal levels: they challenged the conventions of classical film form at a time when real-world power structures were subjected to similar interrogation; and they repeatedly framed their gritty first-person character studies within this broader cultural consciousness. In hindsight, it’s remarkable that the likes of Dog Day Afternoon (1975), All the President’s Men (1976), Taxi Driver (1976), and Coming Home (1978) not only made money but were also nominated for the Best Picture Oscar.
A quick scan of the films that won or were nominated for Best Picture during the 1980s shows precisely what the formal daring and social commentary of the New Hollywood cinema was replaced by: the middlebrow prestige drama. Morally liberal, artistically conservative, and never less than tasteful, films such as Ordinary People (1980), Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980), On Golden Pond (1981), Terms of Endearment (1983), Places in the Heart (1984), Rain Man (1988), and The Accidental Tourist (1988) constitute a cinema that now feels strangely out of time. That’s not to say these films are bad, only that within them a different aesthetic is felt: a clear privileging of performance over authorship; an “invisible” directing style that betrays the screenplay’s frequent literary or theatrical origins; and, above all, scant critique of the social conditions behind these person-centered stories of love, grief, or domestic warfare. Catching the neo-conservative individualism of the Reagan era better than we once realized, the 1980s drama was so glossily self-contained in scale and focus that its place in cinema history has been all but erased.
William Hurt stars as James Leeds, a bright and energetic speech teacher who over the opening credits arrives at a New England school for the deaf. A born showman, James seeks to reach his ninth-graders through good intentions and playfully unorthodox methods: performing handstands in class, building lessons around pick-up games, and teaching rhythm through the vibrations of pop music. He becomes intrigued by the school’s custodian, Sarah Norman (Matlin), a beautiful and intelligent young deaf woman who graduated with flying colors but has since withdrawn into bitter silence. Sarah, who insists on using sign language, resists James’ staunch belief that she should read lips and learn speech phonetically. As their courtship deepens, the couple is overwhelmed by their mutual inability — or unwillingness — to find a meeting point “that’s not in silence and not in sound.”
Medoff’s play was overtly political, a deaf-rights tract that gave voice to deaf teenagers’ anger at being treated by the hearing world in the title manner. In adapting it for the screen with Hesper Anderson, Medoff softens the polemics into a boy-meets-girl romance problematized by the girl’s disability: a universal tearjerker structure that crosses elements of Love Story (1970) with The Miracle Worker (1962). On an informal level, we may speak of the narrative shift from stage to screen as moving from a political discourse to what literary theorist Roland Barthes calls a lover’s discourse. If the film lacks engagement with deaf-rights issues in regard to health care, employment, or access to alternative communication technologies, it’s partly because the focus of identification has shifted largely toward James. Barthes explains that the lover’s discourse is not the mutual exchange of passion between two people in love, but the wracked inner dialogue of a lover in pursuit of an unattainable other who is “by vocation, migrant, fugitive” (13). Children of a Lesser God is the story of a besotted outsider’s futile attempt to experience silence through the lover’s discourse, which for Barthes remains “severed not only from authority but also from the mechanisms of authority (science, techniques, arts)” (1). The film plays out as a set of situations where the hearing man, in his desire to possess a deaf other, is gradually awakened to the limitations of spoken language.
Also evocative of Barthes is the comfort and frequency with which James summons the most overused phrase in the lovers’ vernacular. Throughout the film he tells Sarah that he loves her. We never doubt his veracity, but there’s a sense in which he wields the phrase as the great equalizer from which all else must follow. For Barthes, “I love you” (or, as he terms it, “I-love-you”) is a passive-aggressive figure of rhetoric, a holophrase that’s emptied of meaning by both its grammatical circularity and its discursive function of suppressing “explanations, adjustments, degrees, scruples” (148) in the interpersonal realm. At its worst, “I-love-you” is a linguistic act of terrorism that leaves the other no breathing space or recourse to reason, a phrase that bares fangs and “affirms itself as force — against other forces . . . against language” (153). During a violent argument where she vows that nobody will ever speak for her again, Sarah reminds James that romantic love has no bearing on her need for independence. Infuriated by what he perceives as the last straw in her “great control game,” James finally affirms his love as force: “You wanna talk to me?” he yells. “Then you learn my language!”
Given the subject matter, Haines’ direction does not show a corresponding interest in the potential of film language. It’s not at the level of photographed theatre, but her preference for classical montage, delicate lighting, and medium close-ups that allow faces and hands to express emotion with minimal blocking all betray the fact that her primary directing experience — besides an Emmy nod for the TV movie Something About Amelia (1984) — had been on episodes of Knots Landing and Hill Street Blues. Standing in for New England, the New Brunswick locations provide a picture-postcard backdrop of windswept coastlines and bronze autumnal flora to complement Michael Convertino’s synthetic string score. It’s not all After School Special prettiness, though. The sound design, in particular, makes some evocative stabs at deaf subjectivity: the blue silence of the pool in which Sarah swims alone at night is registered with an ambient pulse that contrasts eerily with the chattering static of James’ world.
Despite its acclaim at the time, Children of a Lesser God has been unfairly neglected by history. In fact, its naked sentimentality and easy consistency of tone say as much about the state of American cinema in 1986 as the radical nightmare of Blue Velvet or the jingoistic bombast of Top Gun. And these qualities feel refreshing — almost exotic — in a current cinematic landscape steeped in postmodern aesthetics of irony, subversion, and self-referentiality. There’s something genuinely moving about James and Sarah’s struggle to find a place where they could, as Barthes says, “drop somewhere outside of language” (233). In this way, the film also reconciles the personal and the political better than it has been credited with: its humanist affirmations sharpen, rather than blunt, its commentary on the discursive limits of language.
Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1977.