David Davis XVI, Part 2
On the cinema of ableism
In late November, Sia’s fatuous tweets defending her new movie drew the kind of hype-killing ire that PR people probably talk about in therapy. Music (2020) is about a young autistic woman (cartoonishly portrayed by an allistic actor) and her allistic caretaker as they learn that, sometimes, you really can overcome life’s obstacles . . . with a little help from your friends.
From her refusal to use the word “disabled,” as if it is an insult rather than an identity, to her insistence that it was impossible to cast an autistic actor instead of a face-pulling allistic dancer/starlet for Music’s starring role, Sia’s tweets made plain that she thinks the artistic value of her bad movie about how autistic people aren’t the freaks you thought they were outweighs any negative impact it could possibly have on real-life autistic people. The chandelier is truly on the floor.
Now, I don’t want to watch Sia’s bad movie, but I know that I might have to watch it because my older sister, a woman with autism, almost certainly will. We already know that movies about intellectually and developmentally disabled and neuroatypical people are few and far between, with those that cast disabled actors fewer and farther between, and that the ones that do get made tend to be “family friendly” or geared toward children; the ableist sensibility prefers to produce movies about disabled people that are simplistic, reductive, and saccharine, which means that while every so often you get a prestige drama where a disabled person suffers and dies for abled catharsis, more often than not you’ll have to settle for a made-for-TV flick about a cute white disabled kid with over-the-hill C-listers playing parents who weep their way through hospital rooms and asylums (with a cameo from a sassy, maternal Black woman who makes the kid feel like they’re normal and the parents feel like their sacrifice is being validated by an impartial yet non-threatening witness).
Which is a dreadfully long way of saying that if my sister wants to watch a movie about people like her, her options are basically inspiration porn. Thus, Music.
In a media landscape with little representation (a slippery sinuous bedeviling concept that I won’t be digging into here), I suppose we take what we can get. My well-meaning mom made sure my sisters and I watched every movie about disabled people that came out in the 80s and 90s, with characters like Forrest Gump, Arnie Grape, Rocky Dennis, Karl Childers, etc., to offer a reframing of what the world was constantly telling us about my sister: She isn’t abnormal, like they say. She’s special. Only now, with my sisters and I all in our thirties, have we begun to collectively address how this assimilationist approach dehumanized my older sister, making it that much harder for her to self-actualize and for us to advocate for her in a system designed to punish her for existing.
But without discounting the significant harm this did to my sister, I also find it hard to blame my mom for doing what she thought was best. (Maybe’s it’s more like: Can she be blamed? Sure. Could she have done better? I’m honestly not sure how she could have.) My sister was born three years before Rain Man came out in 1988, the year that also happened to mark the mid-point between autism’s first inclusion in the DSM-III and its expanded entry in the DSM-IV; the ADA, the American civil rights law that prohibited discrimination based on disability for large groups of disabled people, including those with autism, was passed two years later. Looking at my mom’s movie choices in context, I am reminded that even her problematic approach, which was, in its way, an attempt to accept and celebrate people like my sister, was a progressive (if not radical) one. At the time my sister was a toddler, even people in our family were wondering if it wouldn’t be better to institutionalize her—for her sake, you understand, it’s what would be best for her—to lock her up and throw away the key. (Another contemporaneous date of interest: Willowbrook State School, a torture zoo whose abuse of thousands of disabled people was brought to light by a Geraldo exposé in 1972, was shut down in 1987, when my sister was two years old.)
As the viewers of these inspiration pornos, we were encouraged to empathize with the protagonists’ caretakers as much as, if not more than, the protagonists themselves. I felt a profound connection to Tom Cruise in Rain Man and especially to Johnny Depp in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (1993). Both actors portray the brothers of disabled people who are considered impossible, broken, pitiable; who are frustrated and overwhelmed by the limitations their brothers’ needs impose on their lives; and who have to experience the singularly infuriating pain of watching, as both a sibling and as a kind of parent, the constant, ambient abuse of a vulnerable person that they love.
Rain Man, Gilbert Grape—despite appearances, these films were made for people like me, not for people like my sister. They are about caretakers, all of whom we are meant to sympathize with despite their abusive behavior. Johnny Depp hits Leonardo DiCaprio. Tom Cruise abducts, holds hostage, and exploits Dustin Hoffman’s prodigal mathematical ability to solve his financial problems at the blackjack table. Through the lens of these movies, this behavior is too bad but also understandable, in the same way that movies once told us it was too bad but understandable that a man might strike his wife in a moment of jealousy, or that a parent might beat their child when exhausted with the pressures of a world where we are often forced to choose between our emotional needs and short-term survival.
When I watch the What’s Eating Gilbert Grape scene where Depp assaults his little brother because he refuses to take his bath—because Leo won’t, for the umpteenth time, do the very simple thing that he needs to do so he can be happy and healthy and safe and clean—I feel sad and ashamed, because I have been in situations very, very similar to that one for my entire life. I can feel Depp’s fury and despair and frustration inside of my jaw, like gnashing a pebble between my teeth. How dare god do this to me? How dare he give me a person who needs to eat my whole life in order to live their own, and they can’t even take the fucking bath so they can be happy and healthy and safe and clean!
Adulthood has taught me that those feelings of fury and frustration are not permanent, or even always accurate. When I’m done with my moment of self-indulgence, I remember that the world’s sympathy has always been with me and Depp and all the other caretakers. I remember that if I wanted to, I really could beat or violate or deprive my beloved sister and that almost no one would stop me, because while they find her to be pitiable, it is only I who is eligible for their forgiveness. This melts my resentment, softens the pebble: I have the power here, and the responsibility. My sister’s life is as valuable as mine. Any narrative that tries to claim otherwise is genocidal.
I am still fascinated by the fact that we never really talked about these movies as a family. We simply watched them, as we simply watched racist movies and sexist movies, good and bad movies, high- and low-brow movies, without discussion about what they had to tell us, or why we were watching them, or how the issues they touched on might affect us as individuals. It never occurred to us to wonder how we were going to justify the lives of disabled people who couldn’t run all the way across America, or why almost every one we saw onscreen was a straight white man. (The first disability inspiration porno I saw featuring a character who wasn’t white was Radio [2003], starring Cuba Gooding Jr., a truly embarrassing film.)
Only in the last few years have my older sister and I begun to have conversations about disability, and what it means for her to be a disabled woman, and how she can own and explore her identity in community with people who share it. My instinct has been to try to teach her about the things I learned about in college and read about online, but the more she and I talk about it, the more I understand that I can no more bequeath consciousness to her than a straight person could bequeath consciousness to me.
Sure, I can support her, and make space for her. But I can’t replace her community, and I can’t intellectualize her lived experience. I can’t bring her to herself, and any effort to do is the vestige of a worldview in which my feelings, as a caretaker, are prioritized above hers—in which my feelings are real, and hers are not.
David tweets at @k8bushofficial.