Chrys Weedon | Entertainment Editor
In early April 2018, the box-office hit “A Quiet Place” premiered in theaters around the country. According to Forbes.com, the post-apocalyptic film made over $213 million dollars in less than a month.
Ushering in the end of 2018 was another movie about the end of the world along the same vein, “Birdbox.” Since its release on Dec. 23, “Birdbox” has been watched by 45 million Netflix accounts, according to Forbes.
Both films entertain the idea of an apocalypse in which humanity has to adapt to the “loss” of one of their senses; in “A Quiet Place” it’s hearing or sound.
“Many people in the deaf community (myself included) are cheering the film on…’” commented Pamela J. Kincheloe in her guest article on the Huffington Post website. While the movie is a refreshing take on horror, popular criticisms of the movie cite the fact that the film is catered only to hearing audiences.
“The scenes with ASL are captioned for the hearing audience, but the spoken scenes were not captioned for the deaf audience,” said blogger T. Frohock on his website tfrohock.com.
Another criticism of “A Quiet Place” centers on the closing scene of the film. In the end, mother Evelyn and her daughter Regan discover that the secret to killing the bloodthirsty aliens lies in Regan’s cochlear implant.
“It is the implant, not the signing deaf person, that is heroic,” said Kincheloe.
The biggest difference shown in “Birdbox” is that blindness, in the end, is seen as a true advantage in the new world. In this way, blindness isn’t portrayed as a disability, really. But where “Birdbox” improves upon “A Quiet Place” in certain arenas, it still falls flat in some ways.
“Instead of killing themselves in gratuitously gory ways… people with mental illnesses become literal agents of evil, obsessed with carrying out the monsters’ mission to destroy humanity,” commented writer Jess Joho in her Mashable article. So it seems that while “Birdbox” portrays one disability as a positive, it throws a whole other set under the bus.
While “A Quiet Place” and “Birdbox” are audience favorites, the way they portray disability leaves some wanting more.
Contact the author at howlentertainment@wou.edu
Photo courtesy of netflix.com (“Birdbox”), paramountmovies.com (“A Quiet Place”)
