When the deaf girl isn't wise or special

When you've watched enough movies, you come to expect certain character types to be portrayed in certain ways.

Characters with any sort of disability fall into this category. While the disability is outwardly a challenge for them, usually there's something about this unique way of interacting with the world that helps them solve a problem the other characters can't solve.

I would say this is particularly the case with characters who are missing one of their senses. Blind characters would top the list, as they will always have a form of "second sight" that makes them a sort of chosen one, instrumental to overcoming a key challenge in the narrative. But deaf characters, specifically deaf girls, are not far behind.

Why specifically deaf girls? If I'm already making generalizations, I'll say that making the character a girl tends to emphasize the sense of vulnerability you are already attributing to the character by making them deaf. A deaf girl is, broadly speaking, even more fragile than a deaf boy.

Fortunately, this is a good thing in most stories. The deaf girl is sure to be there at the exact right moment to accomplish some goal that would have otherwise eluded our protagonists. 

Well, not the deaf girl in the new Amazon Prime movie Pretty Lethal. 

That deaf girl is a dumbass.

I'll need to get into spoiler territory for us to continue, so SPOILER ALERT for Pretty Lethal.

So Vicky Jewson's movie deals with five American ballerinas who are traveling through Hungary toward a competition when their bus breaks down in a remote location. There's the tough street one (Maddie Zeigler), the princess (Lana Condor), the goofy devout one (Avantika), the nervous one (Iris Apatow) and the deaf one (Millicent Simmonds). 

Now, Simmonds is actually deaf. If you recognize her, it will be either from the Quiet Place movies or from Wonderstruck, though I didn't see the latter so it was only the former for me. And we all know her character had a special sort of advantage by being deaf in the Quiet Place movies. 

Not here. In fact, her deafness does not actually factor into the plot in any way, except apparently for making her totally oblivious to things she should have picked up on, perhaps especially because she's deaf.

Now I don't want to make any assumptions about the deaf, but I would suspect they spend a lot of their time on high alert. They don't get the audio cues of danger that the rest of us get. So especially when they're in an unfamiliar place, I would assume, they remain very attuned to the environmental details they can observe, needing other indications of when there might be some sort of shift in the dynamics that might put them in harm's way.

But let's consider what happens with Chloe, the deaf girl in Pretty Lethal, when her four fellow ballerinas and their instructor come across a mysterious Hungarian mansion where they need to shelter from the rain and wait for help to arrive. The place is a sort of hotel/bar, and is peopled with seedy Eurotrash types who have been looking at them with a blend of lust and menace since they've arrived -- which should be enough, by itself, to raise her defenses.

So she and the instructor go upstairs to the bathroom, and while Chloe is in the bathroom, her instructor walks off down the corridor, snooping a bit in an attempt to figure out what she might need to protect her girls from. Turns out it's a lot: There's someone getting tortured in one of the rooms. 

The instructor abandons her charge -- we must assume this is some sort of flight instinct -- to run back downstairs and try to gather up the girls so they can leave. It's not necessary to get into what happens down there.

Upstairs? Chloe gets out of the bathroom and sees a cute boy, at whom she immediately starts throwing herself. Hey, no one's saying the deaf girl can't be sex positive, but the deaf girl should, you would think, default to prudence in a situation like this. Instead, she doesn't seem to have any interest in where the woman who was just accompanying her has gone, and pretty soon she's making out with the cute boy. 

The story sort of abandons her for a while as the girls downstairs are dealing with a different problem. This alone is pretty much of a disconnect. Due to the urgency of their situation, they sort of forget her. Less explicably, she sort of forgets them, unaware that any of this is going on downstairs. 

Chloe might have eventually returned to her group, but she gets waylaid by some more Hungarians and taken off to stay in a room upstairs. I can't recall if this is by force or not, but let's just say Chloe is still going with it. She isn't concerned about what happened to Miss Davenport, her instructor, nor why she is being taken off to this other room rather than being reunited with her fellow ballerinas. 

Instead she watches TV in this other room, which is where the other ballerinas find her, after quite a lot more has transpired for them downstairs, leaving them spattered with blood, little of it theirs.

I'm not saying that Chloe is blind in addition to being deaf, but she also doesn't seem to notice that the other dancers are caked in blood. When they first find her, she is resistant to leave because she is waiting for the cute boy to return to give her a tattoo. Huh? It's befuddling enough that the hearing ballerinas ask what they should do, and ultimately decide it's the problem of Apatow's character because she's Chloe's sister.

I guess in the confusion, they have not told the girl what happened to Miss Davenport (spoiler alert, she's dead), and when they finally do tell her, she doesn't believe them. Even though they are caked in blood, freaked out, and in a strange remote location in the backwoods of Hungary, with men who have been looking at them sideways and one woman (Uma Thurman) who doesn't really seem to be a sympathetic host. 

At some point, Chloe does get on board and falls in line with the rest of the ballerinas, but she doesn't really contribute anything in terms of an especially high amount of courage, or any unique abilities, for the remainder of the narrative.

Although I've spent quite a few words here going off on these narrative choices, I should stipulate two things:

1) I liked Pretty Lethal. I see just about all of these genre movies, and this one stacks up favorably with them. It's not as good as the last movie like this I saw, They Will Kill You, only a week ago, but that it's even in the same discussion is pretty impressive.

2) Maybe Millicent Simmonds is tired of being the "special deaf girl" with supernatural wisdom or skills that belie her apparent limitations.

If you are a deaf actress, you know that you are going to be cast in a certain type of role, and that role will almost always reflect positively on you. It feels downright mean to take a deaf character and make her a dumbass. (And to be fair, I might be exaggerating Chloe's shortcomings just a little bit.)

But as thankful as you are to have an opportunity in this industry, you probably don't want to be typecast for the thing that makes you different. Just as Peter Dinklage no longer wants to play roles where the character is envisioned as short, maybe Simmonds doesn't always want to play a saint. She'll always have to play deaf -- that is, assuming she's appearing in any film grounded in realism -- but she doesn't always have to be a magical deaf girl who will save the day in the end.

Maybe sometimes, she just wants to play a dumbass. 

So we do call this the "28" franchise now?

I saw 28 Years Later last night. I'm not going to give you much in terms of my thoughts on it. Let's just say that I was really with it for the first half, and then some curious decisions in the second half caused me to retract some of my enthusiasm.

I do want to talk about how we should be referring to these movies.

When a movie has just one sequel, that could be a one-off and we don't have to come up with a convention for talking about those two movies. But as soon as you add a second sequel, well, it's arguable that it has become a media franchise at that point. And every media franchise needs a name.

But what name for 28 Days Later and its sequels, the bookends of which were directed by Danny Boyle, with him serving as executive producer on the middle one?

I'd say it's instructive to look at A Quiet Place as a similar property, albeit in a more compacted timeframe. We didn't necessarily think we'd be talking about it as a franchise, but as soon as the third came out, it became the "Quiet Place" franchise. Easy enough.

It's not so easy for these movies. 

There are two words common to each title in the series, but neither of them rolls off the tongue if you want to mention the franchise casually and have everyone know what you're talking about.

You can say "Oh I really like the Quiet Place movies," but can you say "Oh I really like the 28 movies?" 

"Which 28 movies?" your fellow conversant might ask. "Is there a franchise with 28 movies? I don't think even Bond has 28 movies."

But if you said "Oh I really like the Later movies," your fellow conversant might be like "What?"

"Later," in and of itself, means nothing. Instead of making you think of zombies -- er, sorry, people infected with the rage virus -- it makes you think of an abbreviation of a phrase some Alfred E. Neuman smartass might give you: "Smell you later!" (And yes, I realize there is a good chance many people reading this don't know who Alfred E. Neuman is. Okay, how about Nelson Muntz, who I think actually says "Smell you later.")

I suppose a better point of comparison than A Quiet Place might be Before Sunrise and its sequels, which also have a preposition in the title. (Technically speaking, the internet tells me that "later" is an adverb while "before" could be either an adverb or a preposition.) 

In the case of Richard Linklater's movies, calling them "the Before trilogy" or referring to them as "the Before movies" works, because a) you're likely already speaking to someone who would be familiar with these movies, and b) it's the first word in the title, so your mind keys into it straight away. "Later" doesn't work that way because it's the last word in the title, so your mind has more trouble parsing that.

The brevity of a single word might not work here, nor does it need to, as proof with the Quiet Place example. So maybe the solution is "28 Later."

It excises a middle word, which is a disadvantage over "Quiet Place" as a franchise name, but I do think it communicates what you're talking about right away:

"Oh I really like the 28 Later movies," you say.

"Oh yeah, they're sick," says your conversant. 

(You're talking with someone in their thirties, as I regularly do when I talk about movies with locals in Australia.)

The reason this discussion matters is that 28 Years Later does not have any sense of being the last movie in this series. So not only will we need a name to talk about it in the past tense, but we may be talking about it in the present tense in perpetuity.

Without going into specifics, I'll just say that some of the weird decisions in the second half seem geared toward leaving this open for more movies -- probably to follow in short order. Which gives you an idea what the financiers think about the likelihood that this is now a proper media franchise with identifiable markers, meaning it's here to stay.

The only trouble is that they would now have to deviate from the escalating chronological structure of the titles, unless they are talking about doing 28 Decades Later -- which is not what the end of this movie would suggest. 

Though I did find myself imagining, there in the theater, some really outside-the-box, almost arthouse interpretation of where to take the franchise, where eventually get 28 Centuries Later and 28 Millennia Later, at which point the rage-infected have evolved back into fully thinking humans capable of inventing things and creating new technology, such that eventually they are indistinguishable from human beings as we are now. Mind = blown, right?

Even if that's where they want to go, they've forced a sped up timeline if they want to do it. I bet they're now regretting skipping straight from 28 Weeks Later to 28 Years Later, blowing past 28 Months Later when they had a chance to do it in, I don't know, 2012.