Jocasta's Silence
review: CODA, or oedipal walls
Upon the revelation that he is the son of Laius and Jocasta, Oedipus blinded himself to shut off his perception of the world. While his self-inflicted disability is quite tragic, what specific canonical and diagnosable disabilities might Oedipus’s parents have had that led them to child abandonment?
Last spring as I was shooting over Atlantic clouds towards Europe, I watched the film CODA (2021) on the in-flight movie screens with my sisters. CODA is about a high school senior named Ruby whose family is deaf. Her family works on fishing boats on the northeast American coast, and relies on Ruby to hear warning sirens and to speak to others who don’t know sign language. As the narrative progresses, Ruby discovers her passion and gift for vocal music, which she pursues despite the tragedy that her family cannot hear her sing. Ruby’s passion pulls her away from her crucial role assisting her family for the sake of an art form that they cannot understand. The title is a cute pun on Ruby’s contradictory worlds, CODA being both an acronym for “child of deaf adults” and a musical term.
The thematic arc of CODA is remarkably similar to Disney direct-to-television movies I watched with my sisters over a decade ago High School Musical and Jump In!, or more traditional Disney cartoon princess story The Little Mermaid. All of these stories are about a child who struggles to choose a mystical artistic world they’re drawn towards because their parents want a different path for them. This is a very standard and cliched teenage feeling, “my parents can never understand me”, and it’s often tackled in media for younger audiences. It’s the universal oedipal story of child who wants something they believe their parents cannot understand that I want to talk about in the context of CODA, which executes the familiar narrative arc incredibly well.
Ruby is the only member of her family with the sense of hearing, but her difference from her family is made stronger by her sensitivity to art. Ruby listens to old music like Joni Mitchell and wants to go to art school. Her family is poor, which makes the possibility of college in any form seem remote. Her dad makes fart jokes and blasts gangster rap in his truck because he likes how the bass feels. Her brother has no ambition and sleeps with random girls, including one of Ruby’s friends. Deafness is used to accentuate boorishness when Ruby’s parents unknowingly have loud sex while Ruby’s friend is over to practice a duet.
In other versions of the “my parent’s can’t understand me” story, parents don’t understand the world their child desires because of their own shortsightedness. They miss the point of the art form, or they have a misguided desire for their child’s safety. CODA has that in the boorishness of the family, which defines the early conflict of the film. But as the film progresses, because her family’s disability creates a fundamental barrier to understanding Ruby’s world, they are unable to understand Ruby when they try.
The deaf community has been somewhat critical of CODA, and its french predecessor film La Famille Belier. That predecessor film didn’t cast deaf actors, which CODA did. But both films were criticized for the unnecessary hardship and dependence on a single individual that the narrative creates for its deaf characters. Being a deaf family isn’t as hard as CODA makes it look. This is a totally valid reaction, and a minority community being represented in a major film is allowed to have opinions on how they’re represented. But CODA isn’t really about the deaf experience in any way. The hardships caused by deafness exist to further the totally metaphorical oedipal desynchronization Ruby feels.
Most viewers of CODA do not have deaf families, yet the story of parents who cannot understand a teenage journey to individuality makes the film relatable. Most people lack a fundamental barrier between themselves and their parents like the one CODA puts up, but intrinsic repudiation of parents leads them to feel they do, and leads them to relate to art where that barrier is put up intentionally and insurmountably.
The intrinsic repudiation of parents is the oedipal part but as always I sympathize with the teens. It is sometimes difficult to take parents along on the journey towards individuality. Not for the artificial barrier of translation that CODA places at its center, but because of more banal and less-defined barriers of translation. It’s difficult because parents are at a different stage of their life, have already had emotional individualization moments that their children are yet to experience, and have their own world that they’re interested in. I don’t think the parents are wrong or the children are wrong, it’s just a very sad desynchronization that takes sincere work from all sides to resolve. And even with work from all sides, children may just be different from their parents, which is where CODA’s thematic arc lands.
I find my diary entry crossing streams into the media criticism when the plane lands in Europe and the in-flight movie is over. This was the first time anyone in my family had ever been on this continent. My family was fine going to European museums but would get bored after a few hours while I could have stayed and looked at the Winged Victory of Samothrace for the entirety of the time we spent at the Louvre. I tried to bridge the gap and explain what I was feeling, but sometimes explaining is ineffective, and I was still trying to put together my own words. I gently ran away from my family in museums a few times so I could look at things without their auras politely telling me to move on to the next area. I ran away more explicitly other times to meet people from Twitter, an artificially curated set of people across the world who share my exact interests. I love my family, and it’s a sad desynchronization none of us want, yet it exists.
To be clear, I think CODA is an excellent movie. Art is allowed moral failings like I’m allowed moral failings, and I’m not sure CODA even has moral failings. CODA takes the desynchronization to a strong thematic resolution. Ruby’s parents attend her concerts, unable to hear the music, but able to see the impact Ruby’s art has on others. They choose to let their daughter embrace the musical world to which she’s drawn knowing that they cannot understand it. At the emotional climax of the film, Ruby signs the words of a song she performed to her father and he shows his sensitivity to her art and cries.
In her audition for Berklee, Ruby performs Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now”, recontextualizing that song to be about the two worlds she inhabits, and as she sings she concurrently signs the words to her family in the crowd, showing her parents the text of the songs if not the art. I loved “Both Sides Now” before this, and I smiled when I heard it come on at such a central part of CODA. I listened to “Both Sides Now” a lot on that trip, trying to grasp the end of CODA’s thematic arc. I don’t think I always did but that’s the oedipal tragedy. I really don’t know life at all.
Does it matter that CODA finds a way to get over the massive oedipal wall it builds? I don’t know. Does it matter that in High School Musical Troy gets to both sing and play basketball? The conflict is eternal, and though art can be a powerful guide, in the end we have to face it ourselves.
*walks into wine cave* are ya winning mom? - Hamlet, Act 3 Scene 4