I can still remember being a little boy of 12 watching American Gladiator with my parents. I didn’t have a closed captioning machine back then, and the Americans with Disabilities Act was still in its earliest form and the FCC had yet to mandate captions on TV. My parents would always point her out to me – Siren, a beautiful blonde fighter. To my parents, it wasn’t the fighting that mattered, or even her beauty. It was the fact that she wore hearing aids, used at least some ASL, was clearly successful and powerful, and on television. To my parents, Shelley Beattie was a doorway to hope; if she could do something, then so could I.
I think Beattie was a doorway for many others, too. I wonder if she knew that.
I had the great fortune to be invited and given tickets to the world premiere of Siren: The Voices of Shelley Beattie as part of the DOC NYC festival in downtown New York City. I don’t usually cry because of films, but I cried several times during this one.
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| Film promo image, from DOC NYC. |
Siren is a biography of Beattie, and a comprehensive one. The framing hit very close to home for me – the incredible performer, Marlee Matlin, a pioneer for Deaf people in film but also for the Deaf community – discovers parallels between Shelley and herself, and begins to explore her life more deeply, interviewing partners, family members, and more. Matlin (Children of a Lesser God, Not Alone Anymore) does a bang-up job of opening the door into Beattie’s life, weaving Matlin’s own life experiences into the warp of a tapestry that lets us see the weft of Shelley’s, for lack of a better metaphor. While watching I thought: Matlin is putting her own life on the line in an attempt to reveal the story of this vital woman. It was a no-holds-barred journey of connection, and the very definition of what people mean when they say raw.
The film is directed by Irene Taylor (Hear and Now) who is the daughter of Deaf parents (in our community we use the term CODA, child of Deaf adults) and she uses her intimate understanding of the complexities of Deaf lives to take this extremely rich material and elevate it to an even higher level, weaving interviews, clips, photos, and even animations together. The result is a tour de force not often seen, both in a portrayal of a woman, a leader, a bisexual athlete, someone who suffered from mental illness and whose life ended in suicide – and the people she met on the journey. Beattie is given every possible facet, and the result is that we see a diamond.
Matlin and Taylor’s partnership shines a light on Shelley Beattie as someone who should never be forgotten, building that television character my mother and father saw as a successful hearing aid into a three dimensional human of power and grace, suffering and joy. Perhaps their greatest success with this film is making everyone in that audience – including me – leave feeling like they had suddenly gained, and lost, a friend. I couldn’t recommend this film more for anyone: deaf, hearing, athletic, or not. I’m not sure when this film will be publicly available, but HBO Max was present during the screening, and I hope that soon the film will be available for the world to see, and will update this post when more information is released.
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