Representation in Film
The first movie we saw after lockdown in Oslo was A Quiet Place: Part II. If you’re not familiar with the A Quiet Place films, they tell the story of a family hiding from sound-hunting aliens. One of the family’s children is deaf, which fortuitously prepared them to evade their extraterrestrial predators with sign language. Since our subtitles were all in Norwegian, the movie frequently required both our elementary norsk and long-unused signing!
This BBC article by Jack King talks about how the A Quiet Place franchise and a number of other new films (The Sound of Metal, Coda, Wonderstruck), are changing the way movies represent deafness and foreground deaf actors. King begins by pointing out the challenges that these films, and their deaf actors, have had to overcome:
Until very recently, deaf people were afforded measly characterisation in cinema; they seldom took centre stage, and nor did their lives, identities, or cultural idiosyncrasies. Often, they were framed as victims. "Historically, deaf characters and disabled characters more generally have often conformed to negative stereotypes," says Annie Roberts, advocacy officer for the UK's Royal National Institute for Deaf People (RNID). "Too many films ignore the wealth of deaf culture, the sense of belonging to a community, and often embark on the medical route where deafness is seen as something be cured. Often, a deaf character is just a token, used to tick a box, or is an object of ridicule."
In contrast, King cites how meaningful A Quiet Place’s heroine was to Charlotte Little, an acting consultant who is also deaf:
[Her deafness is] a source of strength, it empowers her … She’s the hero of that franchise. Not in this superficial ‘oooh, she’s a superhero,’ sense: [she is] just this genuine, resourceful young deaf girl who has struggles with her identity … I think about how, if I saw more films like that growing up … would I have had a different relationship with my deafness?
You can read the rest of the article here (but warning, there are spoilers!).
Vegan Dinnertime
My wife and I have been eating a vegan diet for almost a year now. We’ve found so many interesting recipes, and a lot of them tend to be modified Indian dishes. Last week I found this one—vegan saag paneer. It was sublime. The fried tofu and spinach had a spicy, buttery taste after simmering with the ginger, garlic, turmeric, and tandoori masala. I’ll just leave you with the link and the picture:
Superweeds or Super-Missed-Opportunities?
What is a weed? Crabgrass? Dandelions? Environmental scholars say weeds are unwanted plants. Nature doesn’t care about us. The weed is just living. When we call something a weed, that speech-act says much more about us and our society than the plant itself.
This New York Times article by H. Claire Brown walks a fine line with weeds. It’s about Palmer amaranth, a weed farmers are fighting. Listen to how Brown describes the plant:
If there’s a plant perfectly suited to outcompete the farmers, researchers and chemical companies that collectively define industrial American agriculture, it’s Palmer amaranth. This pigweed (a catchall term that includes some plants in the amaranth family) can re-root itself after being yanked from the ground. It can grow three inches a day. And it has evolved resistance to many of the most common weed killers, continuing to reproduce in what ought to be the worst of circumstances: A three-day-old, herbicide-injured seedling, for example, can expend its last bit of energy to produce seeds before it withers up and dies. Unchecked, Palmer amaranth can suppress soybean yields by nearly 80 percent and corn yields by about 90 percent.
She then goes on to note that agribusiness and pesticide companies like Monsanto are desperately trying to eradicate Palmer amaranth, but it keeps evolving amazing resistances.
It turns out that Palmer amaranth was perfectly adapted to evolve resistance and to do so quickly. The plant is native to the Southwest, and its leaves were once baked and eaten by people among the Cocopah and Pima tribes; the Navajo ground the seeds into meal. But as the pigweed spread eastward, the plants began competing with cotton in the South, emerging as a serious threat to the crops by the mid-1990s.
Full stop: we can eat it?! Buried near the end of the article, Brown cites a weed scientist who “jokingly” says:
Can Palmer amaranth take over? I mean, we’ll probably try to find a way to turn it into a crop or something … We have this plant that’s kicking our butt. How can we get it on our side? Of course, we’re going to try and grow it for a food crop — then it’s not going to grow.
I did a little digging. This plant was indeed eaten by many Native American peoples in the American Southwest. You can eat it steamed or baked, you can chew the seeds, you can grind it down into a flour of sorts. It’s heat and drought resistant. People have eaten this plant and its cousins for “thousands of years.” Given a choice between vulnerable soybean monocultures that largely feed factory farms and a highly resilient plant we could be eating directly, maybe we should reconsider which one we need in the warming future?
Farmers do face a dilemma when crops are threatened. Nevertheless, plants like palmer amaranth give us a choice: do we want an adversarial or cooperative relationship with nature?
Cornell West and Jesus
I have a soft spot for Cornell West. He’s so ornery, with fire in his belly and love in his heart. I found Emma Green’s Atlantic interview with West very refreshing. They talk about “Why the Left Needs Jesus,” political polarization, redemption, and life as an academic. Take these passages:
I’m with Augustine here, that we are forever in an endless battle of trying to become better Christians. Even as we convert, sin is still persisting. But we are making progress because the grace available to us is a gift that empowers us to try to make better choices. If somebody says, “You can’t love white folks these days,” then how are you going to love Arabs? How are you going to love the Palestinians? They have a low priority in a way that’s precisely the kind of witness we need. Anytime people tell you not to love others—don’t love gays, don’t love lesbians, so forth—that’s precisely, for Christians, a sign of the need to embrace.
When I was in Charlottesville, looking at these sick white brothers in neo-Nazi parties and the Klan spitting and cussing and carrying on, I could see the hounds of hell raging on the battlefield of their souls. But I also know that there’s greed in me. There’s hatred in me. People say, “Oh, you’re so qualitatively different than those gangsters.” I say, “No, I’ve got gangster in me. I was a gangster before I met Jesus. Now I’m a redeemed sinner with gangster proclivities.” It is a very different way of looking at things than many of my secular comrades.
Amen.
You can read the full interview here.
That’s it for this week.
Have a great weekend!
See you Thursday.
On Representation, Dinner, Weeds, and Cornell West
"...I'm a redeemed sinner with gangster proclivities" might be my favorite quote of all time lol