*A few spoilers.*
Still holding off on No Way Home (stupid Omicron,) so let’s look at some more Hawkeye!
Before we get into it, I’ll just repeat what I said in my review: Clint Barton, at this point in the MCU, is Deaf/hard-of-hearing. Jeremy Renner is not. This is a practice that continues very much unabated in Hollywood—I swear at least half the reviews I’ve posted in the last month have involved ablebodied actors playing characters with disabilities. Fortunately, the show does also have Alaqua Cox as Maya holding it down with actual Deaf/disability rep. I’m looking forward to seeing her head her own upcoming show, and I hope the series does work to give us the Deaf MCU protagonist Cox deserves to portray.
As my MCU-loving brother and I texted back and forth while Hawkeye was ongoing, he was taken out of the scene whenever there was fencing action. He fences, and his spidey senses always tingle when he sees people in movies/TV fencing incorrectly. I’m an interpreter, and I’m similarly alert to dubious depictions of people with hearing loss. The show’s handling of this aspect is a decidedly-mixed bag. We’ll start with Clint and work our way back to Maya.
Okay, so based on what we see in the show, Clint is mostly Deaf and uses a hearing aid in one ear. This tracks with what we see in episode 3, where Maya smashes his hearing aid and he’s left unable to hear nearly anything without it. He has a hard time understanding anything beyond the basics of what Kate is saying, and when his youngest son gives him a call, he needs Kate to scribble notes to him to know what his son is saying. Until his hearing aid gets fixed, he feels pretty vulnerable and isolated. As a late-deafened person who relies heavily on his auxiliary aid, that tracks.
However, he appears to have some kind of magic hearing aid. When it’s broken, he can barely hear anything, but when it’s working, he can hear everything. He never misunderstands someone or asks them to repeat themselves, he doesn’t need to look at someone when they’re speaking, and he uses a phone just fine. Again, he’s late-deafened, so he already has a good command of speech, which will help him out, but the show treats his hearing as pretty much all or nothing, which isn’t usually the case. If he has some kind of super-fancy tech that only exists in a world that had Tony Stark in it, okay, fine, but tell us that. The show doesn’t tell us his hearing aid is anything other than standard-issue while also treating it like a magic fix, and I take issue with that.
By the way, I certainly don’t expect Clint to be using a video phone and making calls through an interpreter or anything—from his interactions with Maya, it’s clear that his signing skills are nowhere near ready for that. But there are other phone aids that would help him out talking on the phone. He could use extra amplification, and there are apps that could connect him with a relay operator to provide live captioning for his calls (I’m now imagining the operator captioning the calls between Clint and Laura that are full of spy talk.) That said, I do understand why Clint doesn’t use a captioning app. Even though relay operators would follow strict confidentiality rules, I can imagine he’d be squirrelly about having a third person listening in when he’s discussing Avengers business. And apart from that, he still moves through the world very much as if he’s a hearing person, with his hearing aid as the one big concession to his Deafness. I could see him being stubborn and insisting on using a phone like he always has, without any accommodations (though again, I wish they’d shown him having a difficult time with it even when his hearing aid was working.)
Then we’ve got Maya. Woohoo! Aside from just being a cool, badass character who’s wrestling with some dark stuff, there are parts of her portrayal that I really appreciate. In her flashbacks, it warms my heart that her dad obviously learned ASL and signs regularly with her—it shouldn’t be so noteworthy for a parent to learn how to communicate in their child’s language, but it sadly is. I also love that the show does not follow the convention of people just speaking to the Deaf character and her magically understanding. I brought that up with Eternals, in which only a few of Makkari’s fellow Eternals sign to her, and then only sometimes. Kazi, a lieutenant in the Tracksuits and an old friend of Maya’s, interprets for her in most scenes. When the two of them communicate with each other, they do so in sign. And when Kazi isn’t around, people speak more slowly and use more gestures, and it’s obviously a clumsier process than talking through an interpreter.
Quick note: the actor playing Kazi signs decently enough as a non-fluent hearing person who isn’t a real interpreter but gets by okay. And since they’re in the mafia, I understand why they go the “hearing mafia member who signs” route rather than having an actual interpreter around!
Getting back to Maya’s backstory, I’m so confused about her schooling. Her dad tells her they don’t have the money to pay for a Deaf school. I’d have thought that would be federally funded through the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, but okay, I’ll go with that. But still—if she goes to a mainstreamed public school, why on earth doesn’t she have an interpreter in the classroom? Her dad signs to her, so he’s clearly on board with ASL being her primary language, and I don’t buy that he wouldn’t fight to get her the accommodations she needs in school. (Also, if she doesn’t have an interpreter, where does she learn sign in the first place?) Okay then, she’s being taught completely orally, and in that situation, it is unfortunately realistic for her teacher to regularly turn her back to write on the board as she’s talking, preventing Maya from having any hope of reading her lips. And even when the teacher’s looking at her, I like that the subtitles for the lipreading are incomplete and choppy, with Maya missing a lot. It’s totally understandable that she’d have a hard time following what she’s supposed to do in the classroom. But then, how is her reading and writing so strong as a small child? Does she get all her actual instruction during pull-out time with a D/HH teacher, is she bringing everything home to her lovely dad for him to teach it to her in ASL every night? What’s going on?
Finally, this last point isn’t about Maya’s storyline but about how she’s filmed in the series. Why are you giving this character so many close-up shots when her line deliveries on her hands?? I’m fluent in ASL but I still had to read the subtitles or listen to Kazi’s interpretations in Maya’s scenes because she was so frequently shot in such a way that I couldn’t clearly see her hands. It’s like the ASL equivalent of mixing the background noise so loudly that you struggle to hear what an actor is saying. Give the woman some medium shots, please! This is something I really hope they fix in Maya’s own show, because Hawkeye cuts off a major part of her performance.
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