If you’ve been paying attention to my posts, you’ll know I don’t exactly side with Movies when it comes to depicting disabled characters—unless those characters are Disney, such as Finding Nemo and the Hunchback of Notre Dame.
I’m not the only one. The blogger of Wheel Life Friends has pointed out four issues with many Hollywood movies that feature disabled characters.
But before I begin, I’m just going to add a trigger warning.
Suicide is mentioned, but not discussed in any length.
The issues that Wheel Life Friends point out include:
- Disabled Rich Character:
- Ones that come to mind for me are Me Before You (2016), and The Secret Garden (1993).
- There is only one carer:
- This time, neither of these movies enter into that category. Well, not directly. There’s one medical carer and one social carer in Me Before You. Finding Nemo (2003) has Marlin as the incapable carer of Nemo and Dory. Edward Scissorhand (1991) has Joyce as the primary carer.
- The disabled character is always in pain
- You see, this is why I hate Me Before You, it is wrong on so many levels. I can forgive The Secret Garden, it’s based on a victorian book. But Me Before is a modern book.
- The disabled character is depressed and needs to be watched for suicide.
- Thank you, again, Me Before You.
You can read what Wheel Life Friends had to say about these issues by visiting their blog.
Everyone enjoys going to the movies. When we watch a movie we are expected to spend our disbelief to make it easier to get wrapped up in the story. When it comes to disability however there are a few things that are constantly being exaggerated and misrepresented.
Things Hollywood gets Wrong about Disability — Wheel Life Friends
More issues commonly seen in Hollywood Movies
Alright, I picked on three movies here, but there will be many more that I didn’t name. Those four issues are a good place to start. They’re not the only problems with movies’ portrayal of disabled characters. There are many more. You’ll have seen me talk about some of these in my essays, and I’ll keep talking about them because… well… things need to change.
The Cure
Hollywood movies always make it seem like we’re desperate to be cured. Most of them centre around this fact. Edward Scissorhands was so excited to be given hands, he accidently killed his father. Collin Craven practiced walking because he believed that would bring his father home… and it did. Will Trainer believes life is nothing if he cannot walk.
Because of this representation, I FREQUENTLY get asked if I would take a cure.
Here’s the thing. I wouldn’t change who I am. It’s made me resilient in ways I wouldn’t be without it. Alright, sometimes I wish there was something that would take my anxiety away—out of all my disabilities, that is the one that bothers me most.
Occasionally, I may wish that I could use two hands so I can do more, or that my legs worked better so I could go places for longer. I may, on occasion, curse myself for not knowing how to spell a word due to the phonetic challenge of it. Camelflage and Shoparound are the ones that get me the most, because if I don’t google the correct spelling, they turn out as above, and not… camouflage and chaperone… which is what I meant.
But these feelings, they’re rare, and they’re my bad days. I speak to a lot of disabled people and most of them feel the same. For me, if I took a cure, it would be a new form of disability. I would have to learn to use two hands and two legs. But like everything, the novelty would wear off, and I would most likely be less aware of disability as time goes on.
I would hate that. Not being aware of disability, not understanding it.
How this affects disabled people
The constant, constant, constant question of: IF there was a cure…
DISABILITY IS NOT AN ILLNESS. Cures are for illnesses. I’m not sick. The world is full of diverse people, animals and things. So why the obsession over a cure?
I do think the movies industry does have some blame for this, but not all of it.
Another one I absolutely hate are those that say something along the lines of:
- If you just let Jesus into your heart,
- If you do this and this exercise,
- have you tried doing this and this.
I will not let some 2000 year old demi-god into my heart to cure something that doesn’t need curing. Exercise may help, sure, but it won’t cure me. And why do I need to try your homemade recipe you got from great great aunt Bertha?
Child-mind or genius disabled characters in movies
In movies about disability, the character is either mentally younger than they are, or they are a genius. Ha! Imagine if half the disabled population were Stephen Hawking or Albert Einstein. Alright, we do have a few famous people to back Hollywood up, including Steve Jobs, who had dyslexia.
Then there’s the other extreme. Lennie from Of Mice and Men (1992), Edward Scissorhands , Charly (1968), Forrest Gump (1994). They all feature a mentally challenged male protagonist who is treated like a child.
Edward is like a child to Joyce. Her sixteen-year-old daughter is all grown up. Edward, who looks to be a similar age, is a replacement in some way for her—even though I’m sure she has a young son…
Lennie is also treated like a child, right up until he accidentally kills someone because he doesn’t understand what is happening and how to behave.
Charly is actually both child-like and a genius throughout different parts of the movie.
I’m not sure how easy it would have been to change the adapations from the novels. It certainly wouldn’t be easy to make massive changes in Flowers For Algernon. And you know, that’s fine, because out of all of them, Charly is happy not being cured. AND THAT’S RARE.
Edward could certainly have been given some intelligence. Naive, yes. But if he was quick to learn due to his intelligence, but also not be a genius, that would have been interesting.
None of these movies are bad. I love Charly and Edward Scissorhands, but the majority of us are not geniuses. We range in the same way as a neurotypical, able-bodied person does. So it would be nice to see a range of average intelligence in movies about disabled characters too.
How this affects disabled people
I know I am not the only person who has had people treat them like a child once they learn I’m disabled. The worst case I had was a “disability specialist” who came to visit me when I was sixteen to see what activities I could join that would be disability inclusive. She did not speak to me once, not even to say hello; she visited me three times.
During those three times, she’d sit on the chair that would show me her back, (I sat on the settee where she had plenty of room to join). Each visit, she would say: I forgot to record Shannon’s academic grades, what are they again, and would act astonished that I was achieving grades between A and C.
Each time, she’d ask my mom what I liked to do, rather than ask me myself. I let this go on for those three visits, I wanted to see how it panned out. By the time she turned to leave on third one, with the idea of coming back on the fourth, I turned to her and said something along the lines of: I am amazed that you haven’t spoken to me once during these visits.
Her jaw physically dropped. I think she thought I was mute. She never did come back for the fourth visit.
I have witnessed similar too. When my friend Sophie and I went out somewhere together—in the days that you could—people wouldn’t speak to her, but me. It isn’t obvious I’m disabled at first glance. Sometimes I will say nothing, sometimes I’ll move slightly away so that they can’t know for sure if we’re together, and other times I’ll say that she’s before me.
It’s nice when this doesn’t happen but annoying when it does.
The Beast Within
Another common trope in Hollywood is to dehumanise people with disability. Nemo is a fish. Edward Scissorhands is a construct from flesh and metal. Frankenstein’s Creature is rotting flesh sewn together. Lennie is treated like an animal to the point that he is shot like a dog.
But… erm… Hollywood… I’m human. I wasn’t made from flesh and metal. And I don’t need to be put down like I am a wild animal… so why are disabilities show to be that?
It’s depicting “the other”.
The Other is an individual who is perceived by the group as not belonging, as being different in some fundamental way.
Academic Home Page
As the human race we HATE differences. We always have. We find reasons to hate on one another, whether that is the colour of our skin, where we are from, or whether we are able bodied or not.
Nemo is the only one I understand why they didn’t show him as human, which I discuss in the essay. But Frankenstein’s creature, Lennie and Edward all have humanoid features and are all shown to be monsters that do not belong.
By the end of Edward Scissorhands, a simple mistake sends him packing back to isolation. The only reason he doesn’t die is because his friend, Kim, tricks the village into thinking he is dead.
Then there is Lennie. Lennie is depicted as mentally challenged and strong. Strong enough to kill a person and not even know what he did. It is this act, the act that he didn’t know or understand, that makes his brother shoot him as if killing an out of control animal.
How does this affect Disabled People
I’m not one of these people that say the media is always to blame for influence on others, but it certainly doesn’t help if it doesn’t challenge the stereotypes.
Disabled people have been called scroungers. Over the last decade, both in Britain and in the USA, disabled people have had to fight for every ounce of support they get, whether that is PIP or something else.
In a climate of fear and suspicion around so-called welfare, the government is choosing to put its disabled citizens through this ordeal because it fits the narrative it helped to create. This is what it’s come to: orchestrating widespread benefit testing that feeds the myth of disabled people as scroungers, out to milk the system.
The Guardian
Those who are likely to listen to Trump, or read certain news papers (and we know by the riots that is a lot of them) are most likely not going to be on our side or come to our aide. They’ll believe that being assessed for a disability that will NEVER change every three years is right and “we need the money for those who really need it.”
Dehumanisation in the media may actually help the general public dehumilialise use in real life.
What kind of disability themed movie would I like to see ?
To be honest, some do exist, it’s rare but they do. It is one of the reasons why I love The Hunchback of Notre Dame, because it reverses all of this.
Frollo is the one to be dehumanised. He is the one that needs to be cured or suffer death, and he is the one that doesn’t have enough intelligence to see the diversity in the world. It just goes to show that it is possible to reverse it on it’s head.
Although Finding Nemo and Finding Dory do have a few of these issues, they try their best to challenge them.
What we need is more movies like these three, where it isn’t necessarily about the disabled character. Yes the disability comes into it—it shows their resilience—but the story is learning more about love, friendship, and other universal issues we see in able-bodied movies.
Thanks for Reading
Wheel Life Friends had some great points in their post. I’ve added some issues I’ve seen, and I really didn’t expect to go so deep into this, so thanks for sticking with it.
None of the troops are bad on their own, it’s how they’re doubt with. Take Finding Nemo. Marlin treats both Dory and Nemo as a child; well, Nemo is one. But in the end, it is Marlin who learns the most.
In Charly, they tried to cure him of his impaired cognitive ability that it took him to the other extreme and once again wasn’t accepted. The cure ended up keeping him as an outcast, but this time he was miserable. When he reverts back, he is happy.
What I think is the biggest issue is that we don’t see many movies about disability that do challenge the troops this way. It gets tiring, it’s the same old story over and over again.
One of the reasons I cannot stand Me Before You is because it has these tropes. It has the rich guy. The dehumanisation by making him unempathetic and mean. It even touches upon the genius when you compare his knowledge to Emilia and it doesn’t challenge these. Not only that, but the story is ONLY about his disability, with love thrown into the middle.
A story should be about challenging what we know. It should be about change. Theses are the stories we want to be told.
What other issues have you noticed in movies that have disabled characters?
