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So sorry your disability tragedy porn isn’t sad enough, Ian Buckwalter

So, meet Ian Buckwalter of The Atlantic. Ian has a bone to pick with the slew of feel-good films about disability that have come out this year in a naked grab for Oscars, and so do I, but the bones we’re picking are, uh, radically different. I’m concerned about the trope of the feel-good disability movie, in which disability-as-tragedy is used as a humbling object lesson for the viewer, all presented through the nondisabled lens and with the assumption that of course nondisabled people are the only ones doing the viewing. And I’m perennially angered by the use of cripface in Hollywood, where playing disabled gets you a fast track to an Oscar nomination while talented disabled actors go unemployed because, you know, what would they have to bring to roles as disabled characters.

Buckwalter, though, is mad because these movies don’t make him feel sad enough in the heartspace. You see, movies about disability intended to make nondisabled viewers feel great about how nondisabled they are, how lucky they are that they don’t experience disability, how great it is, really, to not be a cripple, ‘need to also make you feel bad.’ Because how can you really understand the tragedy, the misery, the pathos of disability unless you feel brought down low by the narrative?

How dare people make films about disability in which disability isn’t presented as an unrelenting tragedy? That’s apparently how Buckwalter views it, presenting disability with the most disabling language possible in his description of Amour:

Haneke’s film is a relentlessly bleak story about an elderly Parisian couple, one of whom becomes despondent and suicidal after losing control of half her body following a stroke, and then is rendered a near-invalid when a second stroke leaves her bed-ridden and barely able to communicate.

He points out that an analagous film, The Intouchables, has been a wild success, and it features the full array of the usual sappy depictions of disability, complete with touching relationship between nondisabled caregiver and disabled client. Under his argument that disability belongs firmly in the tragedy porn section of film, Amour is a better movie because it makes him feel bad about disability, while audiences in general prefer the upbeat The Intouchables because it doesn’t make them feel sad. It seems incomprehensible to him that they might prefer The Intouchables because this is the narrative of disability that has been fed to them by society; as an inspirational, heartwarming experience in which a disabled person has lessons to impart to a nondisabled person.

Apparently ‘despair’ is a key narrative device for disability film, which is a telling statement, suggesting that disability itself is something over which people should despair. Buckwalter, writing as a nondisabled critic, is also writing about movies produced primarily by and for nondisabled people; I’m curious to know how much time he’s spent at disability film festivals, and how much film produced within the disability community he’s actually viewed. It might give him a radically different take both on disability and what makes a ‘good’ disability film.

Alyssa Rosenberg sharply points out that Buckwalter has made a common and key mistake when it comes to looking at disability in pop culture. He seems convinced that if a film includes disability, it needs to be about disability (and, perforce, be tragic, because disability is, as we all know, a deep tragedy). Examining The Sessions, about which Buckwalter is so scathing, she says:

But I don’t think The Sessions is a movie about a man learning to cope with a disability—in fact, it’s a movie about a man who’s coped very well with the limitations in his mobility for years. The film explains those arrangements because it assumes that an able-bodied audience will be interested in how Mark gets around and makes a living. But it’s emphatically not about him coming to terms with the fact that he has to use an iron lung, or hire an aide, or even that in a power outage, Mark could be in considerable danger. Instead, The Sessions is a sex comedy with Mark’s experience with polio as the reason he never lost his virginity. It’s a more concrete explanation than The 40-Year-Old Virgin, and the tone is kinder and more emotionally attuned than that movie (Legit, which FX plans to put on its schedule at some point, has a pilot that is basically a glorious mashup of The Sessions and The 40-Year-Old Virgin). But it’s essentially a similar concept.

She’s hit the key point here: This is a sex comedy about someone who happens to be disabled. His disability plays a role in the film just like any other aspect of a character’s identity or personality, but it’s not what the film is about. And in fact, that makes The Sessions a rather radical film, something which puts it in the category of good movies about disability, precisely because it breaks out of traditional disability archetypes. The goal isn’t to hit viewers over the head with a tragic disability narrative, but rather to tell a story. A funny story about a man setting out to lose his virginity. Who, hey, happens to be disabled.

This is the kind of characterisation the disability community has been pushing for, instead of an endless stream of capital-D Disability movies which are really thinly-veiled after-school specials about the horrors of disability. Can disability be tragic? Absolutely, and exploring that in film is totally legitimate, as is specifically probing into the things that can make it tragic. It may surprise Buckwalter to learn that things like objectification, artificial barriers created by society, abuse, and discrimination can play a key role in making the lived experience of disability frustrating, depressing, and isolating, since he seems to think that disability alone is depressing enough.

The underlying assumptions of this piece are that disabled people don’t really seem to exist except in some kind of tragic fantasyland, we don’t make or participate in the production of films, we don’t watch movies, and apparently we don’t read mindnumbingly poor cultural analysis on The Atlantic. I hate to break it to you, Mr. Buckwalter, but all of these assumptions are false.

3 Comments

  1. Oz wrote:

    Mr Buckwalter seems to have missed the point a bit with two of these movies, or at least gone in (having pre-categorized them as tragedies) without having watched a trailer and received a nasty shock at the outcome. The write up from IMDB for “The Sessions” reads: “A man in an iron lung who wishes to lose his virginity contacts a professional sex surrogate with the help of his therapist and priest.” Does this sound like a tragedy? Virginity, sex surrogate and priest – that sounds at least odd with a potential for amusing.

    In the final paragraph of his rant, Mr Buckwalter claims that protagonists of successful Disability films must hit rock-bottom and then crawl all the way to the top so that we may be inspired. However, while a snappy montage of painful rehab may get your Oscar going, it overlooks the actual experience of being disabled – because that’s not glamourous enough for Disability Porn. After the film we don’t all go out and regrow our arms and legs and cure all diseases. We have friends and jobs and lives, none of which can be done while perpetually mourning our disabled bodies.

    Get your feel-good inspiration somewhere else, Mr Buckwalter. A Rocky movie sounds just your speed.

    Tuesday, November 27, 2012 at 9:11 am | Permalink
  2. Catherine wrote:

    Dear Mr Buckwalter,

    A few years ago I was temporarily disabled. From my through-a-glass-darkly view, I feel the need to clarify some tings for you.

    1) not being able to walk was not even close to my rock bottom experiences.

    2) I didn’t climb “all the way to the top”. I can however, keep up with the universe as well as my permanent injuries allow.

    3) strangely enough even though I did not hit either extreme (let alone both), I suspect a few people might find a bit of inspiration anyway. Sometimes you need a human-sized hero.

    4) this is fine, because I’m not in it for an Oscar. Most of us aren’t. I’m in it for the best quality of life I can manage. If a few of my clients work out that nasty knee surgery doesn’t get in the way off happiness, so much the better for us all. I think I can convey that without climbing Everest.

    Wednesday, November 28, 2012 at 10:46 pm | Permalink
  3. Nym wrote:

    But we only exist for two reasons:

    1. To be Supercrip and give cripspiration to those poor CABbies a boost when they’re down.

    2. To show CABbies how lucky they are/act as a moral lesson about ~taking things for granted~

    We can only exist as embittered, sobbing shut-ins in darkened rooms, or all-conquering ~survivors~. Regular people who eat, sleep, fuck, work and pay taxes? That’s unpossible!

    It’s a sign of how pathetic media portrayal of PWD is when bloody Family Guy of all things, has probably the best consistent portrayal of physical disability. Joe Swanson is a paraplegic active duty cop, a husband and father. He chases down criminals, goes hunting and fishing, and the only time his life was bad? When experimental surgery gave him working legs. By the end of that episode he’d returned to normal. Yeah Hollywood, NORMAL, #normalisrelative

    If that isn’t a sad indictment of entertainment media I don’t know what is.

    Saturday, December 1, 2012 at 11:17 am | Permalink