Week 7: CODA

For this week, I wanted to look specifically at conflict that is actually, completely unavoidable. CODA is a movie that follows a girl named Ruby, who is a senior in high school from a deaf family. Because her whole family is deaf, they rely heavily on her. They are fishers off the coast of Massachusetts, and because she is the only one in her family who can hear, she fishes with them in the early morning, waking up at three a.m. to go fish with her father and brother. Then, when they get back on land, she immediately goes to school at an unidentified time. At school, she joins the choir because she loves singing. She’s actually really good at it, and her music teacher helps her apply, and eventually get into, Berklee College of Music. So throughout the movie, she is challenged by the question of whether she will go to college and leave her already financially struggling, deaf fisher family to pay for a sign language translator, or stay with her family and keep fishing.

But there is more conflict than just that, and it’s far more unavoidable. I looked at instances of when her deaf family can’t hear something, and a conflict is created out of that. For instance, she told her brother Leo to demand three dollars per pound of fish instead of the 2.75 the seller was asking for. The seller was only doing that because Leo couldn’t hear, and he thought Leo was exploitable. However, Leo got upset at Ruby because Leo felt Ruby thought he needed help because he is deaf. This is the perfect example of an interfamilial conflict stemming from Ruby wanting to help her brother.

I want to analyze how people react to conflicts like this because it’ll help me understand how to best approach conflicts rooted in misunderstanding, a lack of prior communication, and ones that are just completely unavoidable.