Photo: Courtesy of TIFF
Life is unfair. It’s a reality we must come to terms with when our worlds shift completely out of balance. Yet, sometimes life regains its balance again, but it takes strength and determination to find it against life’s betrayals.
Sound of Metal (2019), shows us the unfair story of Ruben, a heavy metal drummer, who loses his hearing, making it nearly impossible to continue with the life he’s become used to.
The movie is directed by Darius Marder and stars Riz Ahmed, alongside Olivia Cooke and Paul Raci. Subtly, the film shows us the story of a man whose life is turned upside down and how he must rebuild and find peace amidst all the chaos.
Let’s begin with a brief synopsis of the film (Spoilers ahead!):
The movie begins by showing us Ruben’s (Ahmed) lifestyle. He and his girlfriend, Lou (Cooke), are touring musicians who live in an RV while traveling around the United States. They move from city to city performing thunderous music and selling merch and records. On one random night, Ruben stops hearing. After visiting a doctor and learning that his hearing is almost completely gone and will not come back, Ruben must face his new reality.
After much reluctance, Ruben enters a rural shelter for deaf recovering addicts. During his time there, Ruben sells all his belongings and gathers enough money to pay for a Cochlear Implant surgery, which leads him to run away from the rehab to get the procedure done. When he returns, he informs Joe (Raci), the man who runs the rehab, about his procedure and asks for money to get back on his feet. Joe, furious, kicks Ruben out of the rehab center. Later, Ruben gets his implants activated and can hear again, although muffled and rackety.
Afterwards, Ruben continues to piece his life back together and searches for Lou, who has been living in Paris with her father. After spending the night with her, they both realize things are not the same and they’re both now different people. Ruben sneaks out the next morning and reenters the noisy streets of Paris. He sits down on a bench and as loud bells ring, he takes off his hearing device.
The impossibility of being still when chaos abounds
Throughout the film, we learn about Ruben’s past. He’s lived an incredibly unstable life. He says he grew up all around the States. His mother was an army nurse and would move them around constantly. We also learn that Ruben was a heroin addict, a messy and chaotic disease that, based on what we see, only stopped when he met Lou.
We can also infer that Lou has had a rocky life. We see multiple scars on her wrists and later learn that she moved from France as a child to live with her suicidal mother and didn’t have much contact with her father.
Ruben and Lou, although constantly moving, seem to be really stable in their relationship. They live together in a cramped space and spend their days and nights together. They talk for hours, seemingly never getting tired of each other. Even though they perform raucous music, when in the intimacy of their RV, they listen and dance to old, classic, slow music and hold themselves in each other’s arms.
They’ve built a somewhat peaceful lifestyle, keeping themselves busy with their music and being content in each other’s company. However, it’s a lifestyle much like Ruben has always had: in constant motion, always chasing a thrill and always looking for the next step.
When Ruben’s hearing disappears, his life immediately changes. He can no longer continue doing his music and the touring lifestyle crumbles before his eyes. Their income, their purpose and their routine vanishes.
All of this loss terrifies Lou. Therefore, she leaves him and begs him to join the rehab center and get the help he needs. He accepts but only if she promises to wait for him. He believes life will and should wait for him while he’s in treatment.
Because of this belief, when Ruben is in the rehab center, he looks for ways to stay actively running from his reality. In the sign language classes he takes, he’s too embarrassed to do the actual signing like it’s something too strange for him.
Even though, with time and disposition, Ruben starts integrating with with his new surroundings, in the back of his head, fixing his hearing is still the goal. Even after Joe clearly told him on their first meeting that this is not a place that will fix his hearing, but will fix how he deals with it.
We can see how Ruben manifests this need to fix something when one day, he finds himself fixing the roof of the house, without being asked to do so. Joe calls him to his office where he reassures Ruben that there’s nothing he needs to fix. Then, he assigns Ruben a daily task: Every day he must wake up at 5:00a.m. and go to a private room where he just has to sit still. A pen and paper will be provided so that when he can’t sit still anymore he turns to writing, whatever it is, without any judgment or rules.
On his first day with his new assignment, Ruben shows up to the room and starts giggling as if he finds it completely silly and stupid to be asked to just sit in a room. He then starts aggressively crushing and smashing his breakfast donut and screaming angrily into the void.
He’s clearly uncomfortable with sitting in the present moment. Accepting what is and what isn’t, thinking about what he had and lost, causes him a great deal of pain that he’s not willing to confront just yet, so his natural instinct is to avoid it.
Despite the discomfort he feels, Ruben continues doing it every day and eventually he begins to write. He seems to be doing better, he’s learned sign language, he’s made some friends and he even teaches the kids in the school how to play the drums. Joe even offers him a job at the rehab center, to which Ruben replies he’ll think about it.
However, something in him isn’t fully synched with his new life. Without explanation, Ruben starts selling the stuff in his RV, little by little, until the RV is completely empty. Finally, he sells the RV but when he makes the deal with the buyer, he tells him he will only sell it if he can buy it back from him later on.
He wants to make this peculiar deal because the RV is representative of the life he’s left behind, and although the forces of life are obliging him to let go, he can’t. He’s holding on to the belief that when he gets out of the rehab he will go back to his old life, to Lou, to touring. This is just one step forward to go backwards.
When Ruben gathers enough money, he sneaks out of the rehab center to get the Cohclear Implant surgery: what he’s been secretly plotting all along. When he comes back, he tells Joe what he did. He had to do something to try to save his life because “if he just sat there, what was he gonna get? nothing”, he tells Joe.
Ruben feels an impossibility to be still amidst all the chaos he’s facing and no one can blame him, it’s all he knows to do. However, Joe’s response is to ask him if in any of the mornings where he sat in that room, he’s had any moments of stillness. He’s trying to make Ruben realize that all this time he’s been running towards something that might not exist anymore. He hasn’t taken the time to accept and reassemble.
Afterwards Joe explains to him that “being deaf is not a handicap, not something to fix” and kicks Ruben out of the program, a radical push that Ruben needed. His inability to sit still and his addiction to live in constant avoidance could only come to a close when reality hit him in the face.
However, it’s still not enough to make him move forward. Ruben gets his Cochlear Implant activated and discovers that his new hearing is all muffled, rackety and confusing. The disappointment on his face is evident as he struggles to come to terms with the fact that his race to the past has failed.
With his new hearing, Ruben meets with Lou. He finds a changed woman, with a new haircut, different clothes and a calmer yet lively attitude. He spends the evening at her father’s house where there’s a party. The ambient sounds of people laughing and conversing become metallic grating noises that make it difficult for Ruben to become accustomed to what he desired so badly.
At the party, Lou and her father start singing and playing the piano. As he watches, Ruben sees a completely different person to the one he left. She’s singing a piano ballad in the French language, as opposed to the chaotic screaming metal music she sang with him. He can barely make out what he hears, yet he knows things are different. It’s like a subtle acknowledgement that all this change has brought Lou the calm that she, like him, also needed in her life.
When they get a chance to be alone, things between them seem a bit awkward, like they’re trying to reconnect with the person they left behind. The conversation doesn’t flow as naturally as it did before but Ruben, still hoping to get back to what they were, starts saying that they need to get back to their touring life and that he’s going to get everything sorted out. She looks confused and just replies with a complying “yeah”. They sit in silence for a couple seconds and then recognize the effects they both had in each other’s lives. They saved each other from their darkness.
They spend what we can infer will be their last night together and in the morning Ruben heads out. Walking through the streets of Paris loud city noises make getting Cochlear Implants the real injustice. Ruben settles on a park bench where he sits and people-watches as loud church bells rumble in his ears. The sound intensifies and Ruben questions if he should keep the implants on as it makes hearing insufferable. After silent contemplation, Ruben takes the implants off. The world turns silent and Ruben is still.
As the credits roll, we conclude that acceptance is what remains and it has spread within Ruben. With the last string of his past life, Lou, gone, there is really nothing else he needs to hold onto but the pride and fear of losing everything and starting again. But it seems that now, with no strings attached and a newfound disposition to see things clearly, Ruben has finally accepted his new reality and will continue to build his life anew.
Finding reason in the stillness
Sound of Metal teaches us that humans are fallible creatures, sometimes unwilling to accept what life presents to them especially when it all seems extremely unfair. When uncertainty and chaos comes into our life, standing still seems like the last thing to do, but it can sometimes be our saving. In the stillness we find peace and we find clarity necessary to move forward.
When we move forward without having had any room for processing and contemplation, we are more likely to act impulsively and erroneously. With a stern determination to fix our lives we grasp at any opportunity we see, even when it can worsen our situation.
For Ruben, moving forward in the midst of chaos was all he knew. When Joe asks him for the first time explicitly to sit still, it confuses him. He doesn’t see the point of sitting when he could be doing something to fix his “problem”. He’s closed to reasoning or acceptance, yet it’s the only thing that can help Ruben find purpose again.
This stillness Joe tries to instill in Ruben is reverberated throughout the film. Many times the film shows us how life around us is calm, but we don’t really notice it. There are many shots of objects, places and people just being still, being quiet, existing. We see shots of the RV from outside as it sits still in an empty parking lot. We see trees and grass standing, only moved by gentle breezes, telling us how permanence and resilience thrive when we just are.
Existing is purpose enough and calm is the greatest gift we have in this crazy world. Modern life is extremely noisy and chaotic. Sometimes none of us can find the time or room to be still, but these moments of stillness are what helps us keep going. Within them, we remember who we are and what we want. We rebuild and we reconnect with our true purpose.
Sound of Metal juxtaposes chaos and stillness by showing us how this heavy metal drummer comes to find peace and stillness in a frenzied world. It invites us to listen more closely to what’s inside and what sings quietly within us. It reminds us that even when life seems unfair, the world keeps turning. Our only choice is to sit still and reassemble as life finds its balance again.
A Freckle For A Thought 