In the first three decades of Mark Utter’s life, most people who knew him assumed that his wordless auditory cues were either involuntary or meaningless. Lacking verbal speech or a written means of communication, Utter was labeled “nonverbal autistic,” a term he came to detest. His nightmarish social isolation gradually eased when the Vermont-based writer, who described himself as living with a “mind-body disconnect,” was introduced to supported typing, an assistive communication method in which a helper sits beside the computer user and provides steady physical contact, such as holding the shoulders or hands, to reduce involuntary movements like twitching or cramping.{1} Once a safe, trusted physical bond with a helper was established, Utter was able to type his thoughts and communicate using text-to-speech software until his death in 2024 at the age of fifty-nine.

Thanks to the guidance of local disability activists and educators, he wrote a script for a thirty-five-minute experimental hybrid film titled I am in Here: A View of My Daily Life with Good Suggestions for Improvement by my Intelligent Mind, in which he played himself. Produced by Utter through a creative collaboration with VSA Vermont Director of Cultural Access Emily Anderson, the film features Vermont locals, many of whom are people with disabilities. It was codirected in 2012 by Anderson and Jim Heltz, following a successful Kickstarter campaign to fund the production and pay for audio descriptions and subtitling. I am in Here is at once incredibly accessible—streaming for free on YouTube—and almost entirely inaccessible, being tucked away in the depths of an algorithmic system, accumulating less than a thousand views since it was uploaded in 2024. To say that this is a niche film would be an understatement. I first heard about it while listening to a Vermont-based podcast named Rumble Strip, and it remains a film that has yet to find its audience. 

I am in Here begins with a medium, black-and-white shot of Utter, while a voiceover narration in what sounds like a “neutral voice” (i.e., an anglophone, fluent, self-assured male voice) reads, “I am Mark Utter. I was born with some neurological differences that make it hard for me to be a participant in a world of spoken words. When I was young I was moored in an inaccessible sea. I was forever wishing people would realize that I was inside thinking and wanting them to know: I am in here.” Following a short animation, the film cuts to a scene where Utter is using a computer with the help of Pascal, “one of two men in Vermont trained in supported typing.”  

I AM IN HERE (Mark Utter, 2012).

By introducing supported typing, the film immediately challenges our understanding of the interface. It is no longer a human-machine interface, but rather a human-human-machine interface, where communication is only possible through touch, trust, and physical proximity. To speak, Utter requires both a human companion and the hardware and software to translate his inner world into written and, later, spoken language. Utter is not the first to employ an extended interface. In fact, people with disabilities have long used improvised tools and setups that challenge the idea of mass-produced, ready-to-use consumer technologies. These can include rigging personal computers, webcams, microphones, lights, or shades; using mouth sticks, haptic suits, or customized keyboards; or building a standing or bed-accustomed desk. Supported typing also draws on earlier attempts to reconfigure human-machine communication by extending the body of the user. For example, since the 1970s the organization Helping Hands has been training monkeys to help autistic children by holding their mouth sticks or performing simple tasks. 

Yet, under the ableist assumptions of what Pooja Rangan calls the “documentary audit,” such “supported” or expanded modes of communication by nonverbal individuals have rarely been seen onscreen. As Rangan contends, despite their pretense of inclusivity by “giving voice” to the marginalized, most documentarians shape subjects’ speech by imposing the conventions of “entitled listening” (89), or the social and cinematic expectations of linguistic fluency and legibility that have come to shape the documentary form since John Grierson and the General Post Office Film Unit pioneered “neutral voice” narration in the 1930s (36–44). Within the narrow confines of documentary listenership, sonic iterations like mumbling, stuttering, or nonlinguistic sounds are edited out to ease the burden of the viewer, who is assumed to be an able-bodied, hearing media consumer. 

Historically, this has been achieved by captioning any speech that is deemed incomprehensible: accented, disfluent, slurred, foreign, too slow, too fast. When a person like Utter requires multiple layers of translation and delay—from their supported hand to the keyboard, from the keyboard to a Word document, from the Word document to a piece of text-to-speech software—the assumption is that the audience, who is trained in “entitled listening,” might lose interest or grow frustrated. In short, the documentary audit leaves little room for the depiction or exploration of human-human-machine interfaces, which are imbued with frictions, dependencies, and latencies.  

While using a fluent, anglophone voiceover narration, I am in Here traverses the very conventions that Rangan critiques through a brilliant creative decision to personify Utter’s brain as a besuited alter ego played by an able-bodied actor. When Mark meets his program manager, for example, he laments her initial reaction to him, before the encounter is reenacted and reimagined through the “neutral voice” narrator and the actor who plays his brain throughout the film:

I AM IN HERE (Mark Utter, 2012).

On the surface, this scene quite literally invites us to stare; it features a poetic monologue, singing the praises of spoken language and the ease of verbal, unaccented communication. Yet it also invites us to ask what happens when the only possible path toward meaning is to train oneself in deep listening, or in what Rangan calls “sideways listening” (89–104). This collective and relational approach to both listening and voicing reveals the beauty of this scene: While quickly replacing Utter with his fluently spoken mind, it gently mocks the tyranny of auditory expectations on the part of both the program manager and the nondisabled audience. Here, the manager’s capacity is extremely limited due to her reliance on spoken language. Meanwhile, Utter can understand both spoken language and other modes of embodiment and affect. Employing what Rangan terms an “aesthetic of redundancy” (115), different scenes throughout the film are replayed two or three times: first as a clash of communication modes casting Utter as unworthy of attention or listening to, then as an imagined reenactment whereby verbal fluency is both a superpower and a missed opportunity to listen otherwise. Juxtaposing Utter and his mind simultaneously exposes and challenges the hierarchy between words and other auditory, visual, and embodied outputs. 

Rangan theorizes “sideways listening” as an access tool designed to deepen care and interdependency. As such, it is “less interested in precision or clarity than in how meaning grows thicker, slower, and stranger when it is mediated through the pathways of another person’s embodied particularity and access requirements, circuitous and time-consuming as this may be” (107). This can produce the kind of “access intimacy” that Mia Mingus describes as “the elusive, hard to describe feeling when someone ‘gets’ your access needs” (quoted in Rangan, 107). I am in Here provides a model of sideways listening and collaborative rethinking of the documentary form through animation, playfulness, voiceover narration, and an aesthetic of redundancy.  

This short film contributes to a small yet growing corpus of work by and about nonverbal people, such as Gerardine Wurzburg’s 2015 documentary Wretches & Jabberers, A. M. Baggs’s short experimental film In My Language, and parts of a 2025 documented performance titled Stages of Grief: Crip Hearts on Fire, by the multidisciplinary disability justice group Sins Invalid. These works expand the limits of the term nonverbal, while warning us not to collapse speaking into thinking. 

In a 2016 interview at a local TV station, Utter was asked whether he finds the term nonverbal useful. In response, he used supported typing to explain, “I detest that word with great passion as I have been labeled with it my whole life, and no one knows how many words wanted to flood out of my mind.”

Mark Utter asks Mark about the term “non-verbal” (Town Meeting TV, 2016).

Here, the framing seeks to hide as much as it reveals: Utter’s helper remains offscreen, existing only as an uncanny, disembodied hand and, for a moment, a lock of hair. His words are replaced by a computerized, sped-up voice. The audience is assumed to be impatient with him, much like the interviewer. Despite showing a genuine interest in Utter’s life, this segment shapes and controls his voice under the conditions of neutral listening, using compression, playback speed, and onscreen text to compensate for Utter’s unconventional communication patterns. As this emerging cinematic corpus teaches us, we all have words wanting to flood out of our minds. To open the floodgates, however, a different kind of listening is needed. And so much beauty awaits.

* Toward Reparative Listening, Jordan Lord
* My Accented Ear, Pavitra Sundar
* The Spatial Audit, Tory Jeffay
* Outlaw Communities of Care, LaCharles Ward