Rough Deaf Representation

Hey everyone, here is my upcoming essay. This is only a partial draft that will expand into an even better draft for next week.

I plan on focusing on the deaf culture in the movie and trying to see if it meets up to par as to what is really happening in the real world.

Here are the scenes I plan on commenting on (some will be long, some will be short):

• The Deaf volleyball game - Deaf applause because the Deaf can't hear hands clapping

• Father driving her in the car to the restaurant - the conversation between them is a pretty common way of communication between a hearing parent and a deaf child (which in terms of this movie, is a teenager).

• The scene at the restaurant where she spots the guy - she's attracted to him, but is he attracted to her? He doesn't see her signing so he assumes that she's hearing.

• When the guy spots her and tries to get her attention - he tired to say hi to her behind her back while she was playing the game, but because she can't hear, he couldn't get her attention, so he resorted to tapping her on the shoulder. That is the typical way of getting attention of the Deaf person.

• She's rejected because she's Deaf - she's rejected because he doesn't want to bother with adjusting the way he speaks for her to understand, which is typical in the hearing world when the majority of hearing people find out a person is deaf. The common phrase "never mind" and walking away is pretty common after that.

• She takes off her underwear to get attention - she can't speak for herself and this is a way of acting out, which is in no way a good representation of a Deaf individual. Not all Deaf are rebels like she is in the movie. She's frustrated because she couldn't express herself to her dad so she uses sexual desires to get another man to pay attention to her.

• She hits on the dentist to get attention - same as the last one.

• The lip-reading/talking slow from the detective for her to understand - that's for some Deaf people, but this movie makes it seem like it's common for all Deaf to be able to do this. Not true because lip-reading is not successful as a lot of hearing people think it is. It's hard to do and it's best to use pen and paper.

• The drugs and drinking and partying - not all Deaf people party, drink, and use drugs. This is more of a global rebellious kind of thing instead of related to Deaf culture.

And as the overall method of communication, pen and paper. This is a huge representation of communication between a deaf person who signs and a hearing person who doesn't know how to sign. This way, they can communicate using the written system. However, writing skills need to be overlooked because the point is the message, not the grammar. 

For the most part, Deaf culture is shown well, but there were a few things in there that didn't seem right and I want to make it clear that not all Deaf do this. I feel like a lot of people who will watch this will think that this is what all Deaf are.

I'm working on how I could do this without making it seem like a flop. It's kinda hard. So I will appreciate any feedback I can get :)