#millicentsimmonds

It’s not often that a horror movie manages to snag the top spot at the box office, and even rarer that it should reclaim first place in its third weekend, after having dropped down to number two. But that’s exactly what John Krasinki’s new film A Quiet Place pulled off, to the tune of a 50 million dollar opening, and over 200 million worldwide. What’s more remarkable, though, is that such a mainstream movie would commit so steadfastly to its premise — where any sound made can attract the attention of deadly monsters — and silently render almost every word of dialogue in American Sign Language (ASL). And as a result, actress Millicent Simmonds explains, the film winds up being especially significant for the deaf community.

Simmonds, who is deaf herself, actually spent time on set helping the other actors learn ASL, which generally goes underrepresented in mainstream cinema. And the importance of casting a deaf actor and using genuine sign language is something she’s been quick to underscore. “I think it’s important in the deaf community to advocate for and be a representative for this story,” she says, “a story that might inspire directors and other screenwriters to include more deaf talent and be more creative in the way you use deaf talent.” “What I hope is that I can show [my community] you can do anything,“ she goes on to explain, “not only become an actor, but a writer, a teacher, a pilot, anything you want to do is possible.”

And for those who’ve now seen the film, there’s yet another linguisticky easter egg to be found, around which the whole final act of the movie turns. So if you don’t want to be spoiled, be sure to stop reading right now, because principle plot points abound below the fold! ^_^

So, as the fast-paced story comes to its close, the characters discover that the sound-hunting monsters’ weakness is, fittingly, the very device that Simmonds’ character Regan uses to help her hear. But the detail that filmgoers seem to have missed is exactly what’s happening in those final few minutes before the credits. Many reviewers seem to have taken Regan to be wearing a conventional hearing aid, and have gone on to assume that the evil invaders induce a sound in it that both Regan and them found too painful to bear, giving our heroes some hope for the future. But you might have noticed that part of Regan’s equipment attaches to just behind her ear, as if by magnet. In fact, this is because she’s not using a standard hearing aid at all, but a cochlear implant, which doesn’t actually have the capacity to produce sound, seemingly opening up an enormous hole in the middle of the film’s plot!

Specifically, hearing aids contain both a microphone and a speaker, amplifying the sounds around a wearer and broadcasting them down the ear canal. But for those who have suffered severe damage to the cells inside the inner ear, which are responsible for processing that sound, amplification isn’t enough; the receiver simply isn’t operating, and no level of volume will do the trick. With a cochlear implant, electrical signals are transmitted directly into the cochlea instead, which contains a special membrane. And as I mentioned in another post about the inner workings of the ear, this membrane acts a tonotopic map, which means that different locations correspond to different frequencies. And so it follows that a direct electrical signal can cause a wearer to experience different sounds — at least, enough to perceive and understand speech.

But if cochlear implants don’t produce any audible sound, doesn’t the whole movie fall apart? Not quite, thanks to the filmmakers being clever enough to provide all we need to work out what’s really going on.

If you pay close enough attention, you might have noticed that every time the creatures come around, the lights flicker off and on. This strongly suggests they produce some kind of electrical field, maybe as a result of having electroreception, like a shark. In other words, they use their own electrical field, and its tendency to interact with the surroundings, to locate their prey in space (this would be on top of their remarkable hearing). This is made most obvious when one of them angrily attacks an old CRT monitor displaying static; as this handy explainer makes clear, the static we see is just the ambient electromagnetic radiation being translated into an image of a snowy mess. Which means the creature is reacting to its own body’s signal fed back to it. And if that same electrical field can induce a reaction in a cochlear implant, which goes on to generate its own electrical signal in response, the implant might be able to irritate the monster as much as the TV did. In other words, it isn’t really sound at all that ends up making the difference.

(One potential problem with this theory is that Regan seems to triumphantly dispatch the monster’s protective armour by holding the external part of her implant up to a microphone, apparently amplifying its sound — a sound that should’t even exist! But this becomes less of an issue when we remember that any device that’s capable of producing an electrical signal has the potential to interfere with audio equipment. For instance, just think about the interference you hear when your cell phone goes off near a set of speakers. And, so, it isn’t so much the sound that matters, but the creature’s own electrical signal being amplified back towards it.)

So the invaders’ Achilles’ heel isn’t so straightforward after all, which also probably helps explain why they took over so quickly. In the end, though, a healthy mix of physics, biology, and linguistics come together to save the day! :-O