Episode 2 : When Tiny Tim meets the Magical Negro
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Episode 2: When Tiny Tim meets the Magical NegroKristin has been a freelance film critic for almost a decade. She predominantly writes for Awards Circuit, and is in charge of both their classic film and book columns. She is also the owner and operator of the premiere classic film site, Journeys in Classic Film. She has Osteogenesis Imperfecta, a rare disorder that is characterized by fragile bones that break easily. She lives in Sacramento and has two dogs. Listen in as we discuss a myriad of topics, but most importantly, we talk about horror films and how they intersect with disability culture.
[Transcript is available below the audio.] |
POWER NOT PITY
A podcast for disabled people everywhere...
Welcome to POWER NOT PITY, where we explore the lives of disabled people everywhere. Through storytelling, commentary and analysis, the podcast aims to amplify the lived experiences and perspectives of disabled people.
We’ll delve into all sorts of topics from education to entertainment, even sex... and we'll break down race, gender and dismantle ableism. And then we'll ask: “What’s your disabled power?” |
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“When Tiny Tim meets the Magical Negro”
feat. Kristen Lopez
[enter suspenseful music and the theme chant]
Hello listeners, welcome to Power Not Pity, a podcast for disabled people everywhere. We’ve got a fall-flavored episode for you! Starring Kristen Lopez, we’re going to be talking about disability in the horror genre and how those two concepts intersect. Then we ask her: “what’s your disabled power?” I’m your host, Bri M., Let’s get started!
Kristin has been a freelance film critic for almost a decade. She predominantly writes for Awards Circuit, and is in charge of both their classic film and book columns. She is also the owner and operator of the premiere classic film site, Journeys in Classic Film.
She has Osteogenesis Imperfecta, a rare disorder that is characterized by fragile bones that break easily. She lives in Sacramento and has two dogs.
B : How did you get into film critiquing?
K : So, I’ve always been a big movie fan, and was usually smarter than most of the people I went to school with about movies, cuz I pretty much consumed everything. My mom thought it was strange that I wanted to see American Beauty for some reason at the age of 8, I can’t tell you why I wanted to see it but I did.
So I was a big movie fan, I didn’t really think it was anything that could turn into anything where I could make money. So in high school, at my senior prom of all places, they had seen an ad on CraigsList for movie critics and I was thinking, well I have nothing but time… so I’ll check it out and I ended up getting a job with a small company that actually paid, and I did that for about ten years, up until last year when they unceremoniously fired me. It ended up being for the best because by that point I had been writing, I had created a blog covering film events and other things so I finally decided that I had to supplement my income. I actually found that I had been grossly underpaid by the site for ten years, so it was kind of really beneficial.
It was kind of a job I fell into really. But it consumes so much of my time, so I’m one of those where I have a day job but I’d love to be able to write full time. Unfortunately, the writing game is really unwieldy financially, it’s one of those things where I have to juggle it all at one time, but I love it, so it is what it is!
B : I definitely feel you on that, this podcast is a labor of love!
K : Oh yeah! All podcasting is… I do a podcast as well...
B : You do?
K : Yeah! I run a classic film based podcast and then I do a regular film podcast with a group of ladies talking about film, and you know I realized, Look I’m making money, I can pay someone to do the things I don’t want to do with this podcast. So yeah I found a lovable chump, I say that with love cuz they get paid, a lovable chump who edits my podcast for me. I feel a little bit better but I’m telling ya outsource, its the best thing!
K : It took me a while to actually think, like do I really want to pay someone to do something that I’m actually to lazy to do myself? I could do it…
B : Editing is hard! It takes a lot of work!
K : Right! When we all become millionaires, the first thing everyone should do is hire someone to edit your podcast.
B : Noted! I was wondering, if you could tell the people about those blogs that you have?
K : So I write pretty much everywhere. I write for a bunch of different places, I’ve been published on Crooked Marquee, I’ve been published on Paste, Film School Rejects, Shondaland. I am a one woman hustle! About 5 years ago, I decided, because I was writing so much about contemporary film, I really loved classical films, pre-1980’s stuff and so I figured well, I’ll start a blog. I started, Journeysinclassicfilms.com and I feel terrible as it’s one of the things that have fallen by the wayside in writing and doing more in terms of my writing career but people love it, and I love old Hollywood films, so I’m hoping I can come back to it with a vengeance, because it’s kind of been my calling card for so long.
B : It’s a really interesting website! I think that the juxtaposition of classic films to now is something people need to see because it is really telling of how society has changed.
K : You really can’t enjoy film now, unless you know where it started. So much of cinema is repetition and repeating the same things at certain times. One of the things that I love writing about is showing how movies play into the political context because the politics influences the culture, which influences the movies… it’s a dialectic. So, it’s one of the things I love to deconstruct, and I usually get a lot of comments from people telling me I don’t know what I’m talking about.. (laughs)
B : Well, they’re wrong because I believe what you have to say is really really relevant and significant. So one thing, that I’d like to start out with, is if you could tell us a little bit more about the tropes that you find within movies that have disabled characters in them?
K : Writing about disability in film is something I kind of fell into. Most people that know me know, and I say this to everyone I’m with, I say I’m probably the only disabled film critic that you know, but I didn’t write about it because I just figured, you know, I want to write about other stuff. Not stuff related to me, why would anybody want to read that stuff? Of course not with people I love, and if that’s the case then I’ll share that with everybody. So I decided to write about disability in cinema, as I’ve gotten older, and I’ve had to deal with how disabled people are treated in the world, specifically from a governmental standpoint. I realized that people are grossly misinformed about disabilities because of movies. Movies are a great thing, but if you’re trying to learn about anything, whether it’s from disability, sex and crime, all of that… Movies are a bad place to start!
So when it comes to disability in cinema, there’s a couple big things that I really hate. And really at this point we all expect regular actors to play disabled people. That’s just something that I’ve kind of put on the back burner because I think there are other things at work that are worse than that.
So one of the big tropes I hate is that it’s always based on a true story. If you look at cinema and disability in cinema, most movies about disabled people are based on true stories. About how a character, nine times out of ten is a white male, overcame this adversity and how he persevered. And I say that a lot of that is very methodical in what Hollywood greenlights. Because it’s easy to tell a true story, you not going to critique somebody’s experience. You can critique it when it becomes common. You know, if everybody’s experience was based on a true story, you begin to wonder why that is. Why are all of these movies about white males who are disabled, why are there no movies about disabled women? Or disabled people of color? Why is it always a white male?
Another thing that I really really, this is more of a personal irritant than anything else, you can really tell which screenwriters have done their research and which ones haven’t, predominantly looking at wheelchairs. If you see a character who’s wandering around in a big bulky hospital wheelchair, that’s probably because the director or screenwriter doesn’t know anything about custom wheelchairs. Because sitting in a hospital wheelchair is not your primary mode of moving around your house, it’s inconvenient and uncomfortable. You are not going to want to sit in that 24/7. So that’s just me critiquing… everybody’s like, well I’m not going to notice that. But you should notice that because that’s not what disabled people wander around in. So there’s little things that I nitpick but really it’s just the grand concept of wanting audiences and critics to ask why are we telling the same story, and what are the studios thinking that you are going to buy. Because unfortunately when it comes to disabled cinema, or movies about disabled people, they’re marketed towards able-bodied people who are not disabled. They’re not marketed to me, they’re marketed to the 99% of people who they assume are going to be in that theater.
They assume that able-bodied people are stupid, by that same token. They think that you’re going to watch this and be so overcome with emotion, the intention of these movies is to remind you normal person, you Jack normal person in the audience, to appreciate your able-bodiedness. Because all this could be taken away from you could end up in a wheelchair and the only thing, the only option you have is to kill yourself. 9 times out of ten, most disabled movies, the only agency we have is choosing when we’re gonna die. The whole concept is so insidious.
B : It’s a little morbid isn’t it? The thought that the only agency disabled people have is in choosing their death. Definitely, I feel you on that. They don’t show people who are born disabled, they don’t show people who are developmentally disabled, there’s no nuance.
K : It’s always irritated me, I was born disabled and yet you always see movies about some, again, average white guy who’s just living his life and it is super awesome, and he gets mowed down in the prime of his life. And he ends up in a wheelchair usually or loses a limb or whatever, and my whole concept with that is I’ve sort of coined a term about it, my friends have started to use it and notice it in movies. It’s called the Able-bodied Buffer, which is the concept that studios assume that the audience is not going to be able to relate to somebody who was born disabled. How are you going to relate to someone who was born this way? Apparently, it’s a mystery… We’re aliens I guess!
So we have to show that this person is the able-bodied person in the audience, That this person is just like you, and has been struck down by this thing, and that’s why I think we don’t get movies about people disabled from birth. The studios think that that’s not a relatable thing. And I think that’s like saying, no one’s gonna relate to them because they are gay, or because they’re not white. Relatability is something that’s not just limited to a normal ,able-bodied white male. We relate to things all the time, that aren’t in our experience, but we still relate to them.
B : So could we talk about “Get Out”? I really enjoyed your article about the film and how race relations overlap with disability in the film. Most people recognize “Get Out” as a deeply intense psychological horror film about race relations, right? How does it fill the intersections of race and disability?
K : So when I saw Get Out, I thought it was really intriguing that the white character is blind. And his whole intention is, his whole goal is to appropriate the main character’s body. Because he wants “his eye” quote unquote. By that, I love what Jordan Peele does with the use of words in this movie because the assumption is that this person is going to both be able to see and also going to have this uncanny talent that is specific to the main character. And if you look at the history of cinema, when it looked at both about African-Americans and disability, they kind of have the same interlap.
If anyone’s seen ABC’s “Speechless”, they have a great discussion about the Mythical Negro trope and what I call the Tiny Tim character, where both characters are seen as saintly, simple-minded, magical figures that provide nothing but inspiration and happiness and then die. So that regular people will learn to appreciate their lives. You see it in the Tiny Tim character. To have a disabled character and an African-American character in “Get Out”, but Jordan Peele doesn’t shy away from the fact that even in that situation, there is a power dynamic. It is still different if the disabled person is White vs. if he was Black.
Having been on Twitter and talked to all the activists who are for the disabled community who are of color, It is definitely… I am very fortunate as a disabled woman to be, there’s definitely privilege for me there. I love how “Get Out” can talk about, even as a White disabled character, this guy can still be an ass, he still wants to appropriate something, because he assumes that there is an advantage. He’s not seeing an advantage in being disabled, he’s seeing an advantage in being this guy. Which is so ironic and interesting! The concept that both of these characters have to fight it out
for dominance, even though they’re both incredibly marginalized in cinema and presented as very stereotypical characters, in the cinematic history. They’re allowed to have this back and forth. Which is great and I don’t know if Jordan Peele even noticed that, I’d like to think that he did, because that would just mean he’s more receptive to disability than the average screenwriter or director is cuz I think he does a lot in saying that we as disabled people can still be flawed. We still have privilege, as race can come into a factor. But at the same time, we still exist. I mean Jordan Peele didn’t do everything right but… This is a character that able to see for a long time and then lost his sight, he comes into the film as a regular sighted person who is disabled. So it’s not 100 percent perfect, but it’s still something. You know, the horror genre is doing disability a lot better than other genres right now.
B : Wow, I mean that’s a surprise to hear, because when I think about disability in horror, I still see those tropes happening. Could you tell me a little bit more?
K : No movie, when people ask me you know, what’s the best representation of disability in cinema, well I say none of them really. Nothing is perfect at this point. But what I love that what the horror genre is doing right now, is actually taking disabled characters and doing something with them. So I think of like, the movie Hush, which came out a year or two ago. About a deaf woman, yes the actress is not deaf herself so it’s not perfect, but if you are watching a movie with a woman alone in the woods, you kind of that this woman has a victim on her head whether or not she is able to hear. And yet this is a character that is able to persevere. We watch her adapt to her environment, we see her doing mundane things like cooking, and having to explain to people about why certain things are the way they are, she showing adaption. Little things like that I think are really good. The one series that I’m really surprised with is the Chucky series, which is what I was talking about on Twitter the other day. If you;ve seen, Curse of Chucky, or Cult of Chucky, again, the actress is not disabled, she is able-bodied. But the series is about a disabled female main character. She is disabled from birth, she is paralyzed and uses a wheelchair. She is actually like, the center of her world and able to make decisions, I think in the most recent movie that came out, I think it was Cult of Chucky, she’s allowed to have sex! And have sex with a regular guy! And allowed to be a sexual figure. If you look at the history of the few films that have disabled women, there are not many, these women aren’t seen as sexual beings. Again. The white male studio character rears its ugly head.
B ; I wouldn’t think of the Chucky series as being…
K : Progressive! (laughs)
B : Yes that’s the word. (laughs)
K : There’s a great documentary called Cinemability, which looks at because it looks at the history of disability in film. They actually interview William H. Macy, and he’s writing a script for a movie and he’s never written a disabled character. Not because he doesn’t like them, but because he never thought to write one. And that’s what I always find interesting. We only ever, screenwriters, only ever think of disability if it’s a true story about a white guy. They’re just not thinking in the right way right now. And that’s what I love about the horror genre right now, because they’re thinking, sitting down and thinking of somebody like that. That’s what I want. I want more screenwriters to actually think like, Am I actually thinking about the same old… something like me? I know Writing 101 is “write what you know” but screenwriters should start writing about maybe someone they’ve always wanted to see but they haven’t done it. They have power there, they should think outside the box!
B : Right, You’re so right. And in 2017, I mean it’s not that difficult is it?
K : No, exactly! There are enough disabled people out and about in the world. Even if you look at post-WWII film history, you’ve got a lot of disabled characters. And I say a lot, I can only think about 3 or 4. You got more than you get now coming out of WWII, But you get original stories about disabled characters. Things like that, the ideal is that you wouldn’t think of disabled people. You see in like the 40’s, disabled people were not out and about like now. Now you can see a disabled person on a street corner. There should be no reason why we’re limited to prestige fare. I’m hoping we’re moving away from that, just a little bit.
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Forrest Gump
B : I’m thinking about my own stereotypes about the horror genre and how it’s not very nuanced. Sometimes I think that one of the stereotypes that people have of horror is that it’s very blunt and over the head.
K : A lot of movies do that. Audiences don’t like to think anymore, whether that’s because of our current political climate or just desensitization, We really don’t like thinking at the movies as much. And for me it's watching some films about the disabled people. I call it the disabled genre. It has become a genre in its own right for better or worse. And watching so many of them at this point, we’re getting hit over the head. We’re slowly moving from one genre into this over encompassing place,,, We have to dumb it down for you. A great place to start is what I just saw a couple of days ago, It’s called Breathe, which is a movie where the main character suffering from polio and I just sat there, if you look at my tweets online you’ll see that I naturally go into these films very irritated, because A. I’m usually past going to review them as the one disabled critic for a lot of the sites that I contribute to. They usually want, “You know. You know. Go see it and tell us what you think.’ And I’m like,”i’ll go but I’m gonna be mad!”
So I went and I saw it. I think we’ve come to the point, let’s hit the audience over the head with sentiments, and hokiness, and loveliness. So get a film like Breathe where beautiful people are getting shot beautifully. But you’re watching a very reductive view of disability. He’s the magical person who was able to escape the polio ward, he was able to travel. You see a couple things he’s missing, but it was never financial. What’s your love story? How does this beautiful woman live with a man who can’t be a full man to her? It’s crappy storytelling.
B : I was wondering if we could go back a little bit and maybe talk, I know for a lot of people horror is one of those things they saw as kids, and don’t really revisit again. But I was wondering if there was a film that you watched as a kid and maybe you saw a disabled representation there. How do you think things have changed?
K : I think that the horror genre specifically, we’ve only gotten better in terms of portrayals for women, minorities, and disability. The horror movie that left me with the lasting impact, that scared me the most, is often one that I don’t think a lot of people really understand why it frightens me to no end. That’s Pet Sematary. From the early 80’s, the Stephen King adaptation. I saw Pet Sematary when I was probably too young to see it.
If anybody’s seen Pet Sematary, there's a character named Zelda, who is the sister of the main female in the film, she has spinal meningitis. The movie, got a man to dress up as Zelda. Very emaciated, and the way she films it, the way the characters sound, it’s still terrifying. I am almost 30 years old and still I will not watch it by myself. I actually wrote about watching Pet Sematary as a kid and watching it as an adult, trying to figure out why it scares me so much. Why does this particular character scare me so much? I think it’s because it’s the first time I ever thought that being disabled was going to be terrifying. And I was very fortunate, my parents were like, “You know what you’re in a wheelchair, we will treat you the same way as we treat your brothers. You can’t ride a horse, but other than that we’re not going to give you any special privileges.”
It never really bothered me, other than the times I would get hurt and end up in the hospital. Being disabled is more of a inconvenience than anything else. When I watch Pet Sematary now, and I've read stories about people who have disability who have issues with their spine and bones, with severe deformities, I think it plays into that, that my inner fear that I never thought was gonna bother me, is like, the concept ‘maybe that’s what I’m going to look like one day’.
As a small child, you walk a certain space. Well I’m not like this certain person, I’m not like this other person. I’m not a normal person, I’m healthy but I have this disability, you know maybe that’s gonna be me. Maybe that’s what I have to look forward to in the next 10, 20 years. I think on an elemental level, it really just bothers me, and sticks with me. Even now, I’ve kind of developed a hypochondriac personality. I think that plays into it. Pet Sematary I think ruined me. (laughs)
B : I read that article that you wrote about your disability being on display in the movie Unbreakable. You were basically talking about how the movie didn’t leave you as angry as someone else might have expected?
K ; I remember when Unbreakable came out, and everybody, if anybody’s seen Unbreakable, M. Night Shyamalan is using Osteogenesis Imperfecta, which is brittle bone disorder, which is what I have. For the Samuel Jackson character, Mr. Glass, it just makes me roll my eyes because that’s what we get labelled as. We’re “children of glass”, so when the movie came out, I had no interest in seeing it. But for the whole year after this movie was out and I would tell people what I have, they would say, Oh like Unbreakable. I had avoided it up until last year when I decided to see it. It's not one of those where I get really mad, because M. Night Shyamalan is reliant on the basic trope of my disability. He’s kind of blending facts, so the Jackson character has elements of one level of my disability. He has elements of other levels, I think there are six or seven levels to [osteogenesis imperfecta]. He’s playing with medical facts.He’s not making really gross generalizations. He has a scene where he falls down a flight of stairs and having hurt myself in numerous ways, that just terrified me on an elemental level, cuz I just felt every single thing. So it didn’t bother me. I think what bothered me the most is people’s response. That’s why I continue to write about disability. I think so many people learn about disability from watching movies. And they assume that that’s the code of conduct. Like this is how you talk to a disabled person, or they watch a movie like Unbreakable and then they think they know everything about me. I kind of write about movies and how disability is negative or positive in them in the hopes that people will be more open minded and less likely to say something stupid when they are talking to a disabled person.
B : (laughs) You know that’s exactly what I want to do with this show!
K : That’s why we need more… I go to film festivals and people, organizers tend to fall over themselves because they don’t anticipate a film critic being disabled. I’ve interviewed filmmakers, and we’ve met at places where the tables are elevated and they’ll freak out. They’ll say “oh we’ll move you over here!” You don’t have to freak out! YOu just have to be more openminded that the person you’re going to meet might not look like you.
B : Suddenly, you become this object…
K : Exactly! You become this totem, like I've never seen this alien being and I must figure out how to deal with it (laughs). Nobody wants to be offensive but you know, by not preparing, its why when I meet somebody I don’t ever have a picture of them in my mind, because it’s probably gonna be completely different. I wish more able bodied people would think oh well this person I might be meeting might not be able bodied. It happens! (laughs)
B : Part of the reason why people don’t consider adaptation is because again, we don’t see nuanced portrayals of ourselves, and it's unfortunate that people consider that entertainment. I just was wondering, if you could talk a little bit more about, you were trying to go to a film festival. Is that right?
K : I’ve covered film festivals before, I’m currently getting ready for AFI Fest in L.A. in about two weeks. I’ve slowly gotten into traveling more. (laughs)
B : One thing I like to ask people at the end is, what’s your disabled power? What’s the thing that gives you the most energy and maybe what gives you agency?
K : Doing what I’ve been doing, which is writing. I think it’s the concept of having a voice that people seem to like. Which usually with my podcast I try to mitigate that because I know I have the voice of a chipmunk (laughs). People who read my words and find something new in them, whether they disagree with it or not. I've gotten many a person who disagrees with what I'm saying. Having a 1000 people say that I'm an idiot and I don’t know what I'm talking about, makes that one person… I've been fortunate to have people reach out and say “I’ve never thought about cinema that way until you brought up how disabled people are represented.” or “I've never thought of becoming a film writer until I realized that you were doing all these things and you are in a wheelchair and you are able to do it”. I usually hate when people say “My life is better because I know you exist”, but in this case, if I can make people learn something new about movies and disability, hopefully there’s a disabled person out there who wants to be a film writer and they don’t think they can, hopefully in this instance would be happy to be a source of inspiration.
K : In case anyone wants to follow me:
I’m on Twitter: @Journeys_Film
You can find all my writing at multiple places, Twitter is where its at.
I’m also raising money to go to AFI Fest. It’s all on Twitter. I promote it endlessly.
feat. Kristen Lopez
[enter suspenseful music and the theme chant]
Hello listeners, welcome to Power Not Pity, a podcast for disabled people everywhere. We’ve got a fall-flavored episode for you! Starring Kristen Lopez, we’re going to be talking about disability in the horror genre and how those two concepts intersect. Then we ask her: “what’s your disabled power?” I’m your host, Bri M., Let’s get started!
Kristin has been a freelance film critic for almost a decade. She predominantly writes for Awards Circuit, and is in charge of both their classic film and book columns. She is also the owner and operator of the premiere classic film site, Journeys in Classic Film.
She has Osteogenesis Imperfecta, a rare disorder that is characterized by fragile bones that break easily. She lives in Sacramento and has two dogs.
B : How did you get into film critiquing?
K : So, I’ve always been a big movie fan, and was usually smarter than most of the people I went to school with about movies, cuz I pretty much consumed everything. My mom thought it was strange that I wanted to see American Beauty for some reason at the age of 8, I can’t tell you why I wanted to see it but I did.
So I was a big movie fan, I didn’t really think it was anything that could turn into anything where I could make money. So in high school, at my senior prom of all places, they had seen an ad on CraigsList for movie critics and I was thinking, well I have nothing but time… so I’ll check it out and I ended up getting a job with a small company that actually paid, and I did that for about ten years, up until last year when they unceremoniously fired me. It ended up being for the best because by that point I had been writing, I had created a blog covering film events and other things so I finally decided that I had to supplement my income. I actually found that I had been grossly underpaid by the site for ten years, so it was kind of really beneficial.
It was kind of a job I fell into really. But it consumes so much of my time, so I’m one of those where I have a day job but I’d love to be able to write full time. Unfortunately, the writing game is really unwieldy financially, it’s one of those things where I have to juggle it all at one time, but I love it, so it is what it is!
B : I definitely feel you on that, this podcast is a labor of love!
K : Oh yeah! All podcasting is… I do a podcast as well...
B : You do?
K : Yeah! I run a classic film based podcast and then I do a regular film podcast with a group of ladies talking about film, and you know I realized, Look I’m making money, I can pay someone to do the things I don’t want to do with this podcast. So yeah I found a lovable chump, I say that with love cuz they get paid, a lovable chump who edits my podcast for me. I feel a little bit better but I’m telling ya outsource, its the best thing!
K : It took me a while to actually think, like do I really want to pay someone to do something that I’m actually to lazy to do myself? I could do it…
B : Editing is hard! It takes a lot of work!
K : Right! When we all become millionaires, the first thing everyone should do is hire someone to edit your podcast.
B : Noted! I was wondering, if you could tell the people about those blogs that you have?
K : So I write pretty much everywhere. I write for a bunch of different places, I’ve been published on Crooked Marquee, I’ve been published on Paste, Film School Rejects, Shondaland. I am a one woman hustle! About 5 years ago, I decided, because I was writing so much about contemporary film, I really loved classical films, pre-1980’s stuff and so I figured well, I’ll start a blog. I started, Journeysinclassicfilms.com and I feel terrible as it’s one of the things that have fallen by the wayside in writing and doing more in terms of my writing career but people love it, and I love old Hollywood films, so I’m hoping I can come back to it with a vengeance, because it’s kind of been my calling card for so long.
B : It’s a really interesting website! I think that the juxtaposition of classic films to now is something people need to see because it is really telling of how society has changed.
K : You really can’t enjoy film now, unless you know where it started. So much of cinema is repetition and repeating the same things at certain times. One of the things that I love writing about is showing how movies play into the political context because the politics influences the culture, which influences the movies… it’s a dialectic. So, it’s one of the things I love to deconstruct, and I usually get a lot of comments from people telling me I don’t know what I’m talking about.. (laughs)
B : Well, they’re wrong because I believe what you have to say is really really relevant and significant. So one thing, that I’d like to start out with, is if you could tell us a little bit more about the tropes that you find within movies that have disabled characters in them?
K : Writing about disability in film is something I kind of fell into. Most people that know me know, and I say this to everyone I’m with, I say I’m probably the only disabled film critic that you know, but I didn’t write about it because I just figured, you know, I want to write about other stuff. Not stuff related to me, why would anybody want to read that stuff? Of course not with people I love, and if that’s the case then I’ll share that with everybody. So I decided to write about disability in cinema, as I’ve gotten older, and I’ve had to deal with how disabled people are treated in the world, specifically from a governmental standpoint. I realized that people are grossly misinformed about disabilities because of movies. Movies are a great thing, but if you’re trying to learn about anything, whether it’s from disability, sex and crime, all of that… Movies are a bad place to start!
So when it comes to disability in cinema, there’s a couple big things that I really hate. And really at this point we all expect regular actors to play disabled people. That’s just something that I’ve kind of put on the back burner because I think there are other things at work that are worse than that.
So one of the big tropes I hate is that it’s always based on a true story. If you look at cinema and disability in cinema, most movies about disabled people are based on true stories. About how a character, nine times out of ten is a white male, overcame this adversity and how he persevered. And I say that a lot of that is very methodical in what Hollywood greenlights. Because it’s easy to tell a true story, you not going to critique somebody’s experience. You can critique it when it becomes common. You know, if everybody’s experience was based on a true story, you begin to wonder why that is. Why are all of these movies about white males who are disabled, why are there no movies about disabled women? Or disabled people of color? Why is it always a white male?
Another thing that I really really, this is more of a personal irritant than anything else, you can really tell which screenwriters have done their research and which ones haven’t, predominantly looking at wheelchairs. If you see a character who’s wandering around in a big bulky hospital wheelchair, that’s probably because the director or screenwriter doesn’t know anything about custom wheelchairs. Because sitting in a hospital wheelchair is not your primary mode of moving around your house, it’s inconvenient and uncomfortable. You are not going to want to sit in that 24/7. So that’s just me critiquing… everybody’s like, well I’m not going to notice that. But you should notice that because that’s not what disabled people wander around in. So there’s little things that I nitpick but really it’s just the grand concept of wanting audiences and critics to ask why are we telling the same story, and what are the studios thinking that you are going to buy. Because unfortunately when it comes to disabled cinema, or movies about disabled people, they’re marketed towards able-bodied people who are not disabled. They’re not marketed to me, they’re marketed to the 99% of people who they assume are going to be in that theater.
They assume that able-bodied people are stupid, by that same token. They think that you’re going to watch this and be so overcome with emotion, the intention of these movies is to remind you normal person, you Jack normal person in the audience, to appreciate your able-bodiedness. Because all this could be taken away from you could end up in a wheelchair and the only thing, the only option you have is to kill yourself. 9 times out of ten, most disabled movies, the only agency we have is choosing when we’re gonna die. The whole concept is so insidious.
B : It’s a little morbid isn’t it? The thought that the only agency disabled people have is in choosing their death. Definitely, I feel you on that. They don’t show people who are born disabled, they don’t show people who are developmentally disabled, there’s no nuance.
K : It’s always irritated me, I was born disabled and yet you always see movies about some, again, average white guy who’s just living his life and it is super awesome, and he gets mowed down in the prime of his life. And he ends up in a wheelchair usually or loses a limb or whatever, and my whole concept with that is I’ve sort of coined a term about it, my friends have started to use it and notice it in movies. It’s called the Able-bodied Buffer, which is the concept that studios assume that the audience is not going to be able to relate to somebody who was born disabled. How are you going to relate to someone who was born this way? Apparently, it’s a mystery… We’re aliens I guess!
So we have to show that this person is the able-bodied person in the audience, That this person is just like you, and has been struck down by this thing, and that’s why I think we don’t get movies about people disabled from birth. The studios think that that’s not a relatable thing. And I think that’s like saying, no one’s gonna relate to them because they are gay, or because they’re not white. Relatability is something that’s not just limited to a normal ,able-bodied white male. We relate to things all the time, that aren’t in our experience, but we still relate to them.
B : So could we talk about “Get Out”? I really enjoyed your article about the film and how race relations overlap with disability in the film. Most people recognize “Get Out” as a deeply intense psychological horror film about race relations, right? How does it fill the intersections of race and disability?
K : So when I saw Get Out, I thought it was really intriguing that the white character is blind. And his whole intention is, his whole goal is to appropriate the main character’s body. Because he wants “his eye” quote unquote. By that, I love what Jordan Peele does with the use of words in this movie because the assumption is that this person is going to both be able to see and also going to have this uncanny talent that is specific to the main character. And if you look at the history of cinema, when it looked at both about African-Americans and disability, they kind of have the same interlap.
If anyone’s seen ABC’s “Speechless”, they have a great discussion about the Mythical Negro trope and what I call the Tiny Tim character, where both characters are seen as saintly, simple-minded, magical figures that provide nothing but inspiration and happiness and then die. So that regular people will learn to appreciate their lives. You see it in the Tiny Tim character. To have a disabled character and an African-American character in “Get Out”, but Jordan Peele doesn’t shy away from the fact that even in that situation, there is a power dynamic. It is still different if the disabled person is White vs. if he was Black.
Having been on Twitter and talked to all the activists who are for the disabled community who are of color, It is definitely… I am very fortunate as a disabled woman to be, there’s definitely privilege for me there. I love how “Get Out” can talk about, even as a White disabled character, this guy can still be an ass, he still wants to appropriate something, because he assumes that there is an advantage. He’s not seeing an advantage in being disabled, he’s seeing an advantage in being this guy. Which is so ironic and interesting! The concept that both of these characters have to fight it out
for dominance, even though they’re both incredibly marginalized in cinema and presented as very stereotypical characters, in the cinematic history. They’re allowed to have this back and forth. Which is great and I don’t know if Jordan Peele even noticed that, I’d like to think that he did, because that would just mean he’s more receptive to disability than the average screenwriter or director is cuz I think he does a lot in saying that we as disabled people can still be flawed. We still have privilege, as race can come into a factor. But at the same time, we still exist. I mean Jordan Peele didn’t do everything right but… This is a character that able to see for a long time and then lost his sight, he comes into the film as a regular sighted person who is disabled. So it’s not 100 percent perfect, but it’s still something. You know, the horror genre is doing disability a lot better than other genres right now.
B : Wow, I mean that’s a surprise to hear, because when I think about disability in horror, I still see those tropes happening. Could you tell me a little bit more?
K : No movie, when people ask me you know, what’s the best representation of disability in cinema, well I say none of them really. Nothing is perfect at this point. But what I love that what the horror genre is doing right now, is actually taking disabled characters and doing something with them. So I think of like, the movie Hush, which came out a year or two ago. About a deaf woman, yes the actress is not deaf herself so it’s not perfect, but if you are watching a movie with a woman alone in the woods, you kind of that this woman has a victim on her head whether or not she is able to hear. And yet this is a character that is able to persevere. We watch her adapt to her environment, we see her doing mundane things like cooking, and having to explain to people about why certain things are the way they are, she showing adaption. Little things like that I think are really good. The one series that I’m really surprised with is the Chucky series, which is what I was talking about on Twitter the other day. If you;ve seen, Curse of Chucky, or Cult of Chucky, again, the actress is not disabled, she is able-bodied. But the series is about a disabled female main character. She is disabled from birth, she is paralyzed and uses a wheelchair. She is actually like, the center of her world and able to make decisions, I think in the most recent movie that came out, I think it was Cult of Chucky, she’s allowed to have sex! And have sex with a regular guy! And allowed to be a sexual figure. If you look at the history of the few films that have disabled women, there are not many, these women aren’t seen as sexual beings. Again. The white male studio character rears its ugly head.
B ; I wouldn’t think of the Chucky series as being…
K : Progressive! (laughs)
B : Yes that’s the word. (laughs)
K : There’s a great documentary called Cinemability, which looks at because it looks at the history of disability in film. They actually interview William H. Macy, and he’s writing a script for a movie and he’s never written a disabled character. Not because he doesn’t like them, but because he never thought to write one. And that’s what I always find interesting. We only ever, screenwriters, only ever think of disability if it’s a true story about a white guy. They’re just not thinking in the right way right now. And that’s what I love about the horror genre right now, because they’re thinking, sitting down and thinking of somebody like that. That’s what I want. I want more screenwriters to actually think like, Am I actually thinking about the same old… something like me? I know Writing 101 is “write what you know” but screenwriters should start writing about maybe someone they’ve always wanted to see but they haven’t done it. They have power there, they should think outside the box!
B : Right, You’re so right. And in 2017, I mean it’s not that difficult is it?
K : No, exactly! There are enough disabled people out and about in the world. Even if you look at post-WWII film history, you’ve got a lot of disabled characters. And I say a lot, I can only think about 3 or 4. You got more than you get now coming out of WWII, But you get original stories about disabled characters. Things like that, the ideal is that you wouldn’t think of disabled people. You see in like the 40’s, disabled people were not out and about like now. Now you can see a disabled person on a street corner. There should be no reason why we’re limited to prestige fare. I’m hoping we’re moving away from that, just a little bit.
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Forrest Gump
B : I’m thinking about my own stereotypes about the horror genre and how it’s not very nuanced. Sometimes I think that one of the stereotypes that people have of horror is that it’s very blunt and over the head.
K : A lot of movies do that. Audiences don’t like to think anymore, whether that’s because of our current political climate or just desensitization, We really don’t like thinking at the movies as much. And for me it's watching some films about the disabled people. I call it the disabled genre. It has become a genre in its own right for better or worse. And watching so many of them at this point, we’re getting hit over the head. We’re slowly moving from one genre into this over encompassing place,,, We have to dumb it down for you. A great place to start is what I just saw a couple of days ago, It’s called Breathe, which is a movie where the main character suffering from polio and I just sat there, if you look at my tweets online you’ll see that I naturally go into these films very irritated, because A. I’m usually past going to review them as the one disabled critic for a lot of the sites that I contribute to. They usually want, “You know. You know. Go see it and tell us what you think.’ And I’m like,”i’ll go but I’m gonna be mad!”
So I went and I saw it. I think we’ve come to the point, let’s hit the audience over the head with sentiments, and hokiness, and loveliness. So get a film like Breathe where beautiful people are getting shot beautifully. But you’re watching a very reductive view of disability. He’s the magical person who was able to escape the polio ward, he was able to travel. You see a couple things he’s missing, but it was never financial. What’s your love story? How does this beautiful woman live with a man who can’t be a full man to her? It’s crappy storytelling.
B : I was wondering if we could go back a little bit and maybe talk, I know for a lot of people horror is one of those things they saw as kids, and don’t really revisit again. But I was wondering if there was a film that you watched as a kid and maybe you saw a disabled representation there. How do you think things have changed?
K : I think that the horror genre specifically, we’ve only gotten better in terms of portrayals for women, minorities, and disability. The horror movie that left me with the lasting impact, that scared me the most, is often one that I don’t think a lot of people really understand why it frightens me to no end. That’s Pet Sematary. From the early 80’s, the Stephen King adaptation. I saw Pet Sematary when I was probably too young to see it.
If anybody’s seen Pet Sematary, there's a character named Zelda, who is the sister of the main female in the film, she has spinal meningitis. The movie, got a man to dress up as Zelda. Very emaciated, and the way she films it, the way the characters sound, it’s still terrifying. I am almost 30 years old and still I will not watch it by myself. I actually wrote about watching Pet Sematary as a kid and watching it as an adult, trying to figure out why it scares me so much. Why does this particular character scare me so much? I think it’s because it’s the first time I ever thought that being disabled was going to be terrifying. And I was very fortunate, my parents were like, “You know what you’re in a wheelchair, we will treat you the same way as we treat your brothers. You can’t ride a horse, but other than that we’re not going to give you any special privileges.”
It never really bothered me, other than the times I would get hurt and end up in the hospital. Being disabled is more of a inconvenience than anything else. When I watch Pet Sematary now, and I've read stories about people who have disability who have issues with their spine and bones, with severe deformities, I think it plays into that, that my inner fear that I never thought was gonna bother me, is like, the concept ‘maybe that’s what I’m going to look like one day’.
As a small child, you walk a certain space. Well I’m not like this certain person, I’m not like this other person. I’m not a normal person, I’m healthy but I have this disability, you know maybe that’s gonna be me. Maybe that’s what I have to look forward to in the next 10, 20 years. I think on an elemental level, it really just bothers me, and sticks with me. Even now, I’ve kind of developed a hypochondriac personality. I think that plays into it. Pet Sematary I think ruined me. (laughs)
B : I read that article that you wrote about your disability being on display in the movie Unbreakable. You were basically talking about how the movie didn’t leave you as angry as someone else might have expected?
K ; I remember when Unbreakable came out, and everybody, if anybody’s seen Unbreakable, M. Night Shyamalan is using Osteogenesis Imperfecta, which is brittle bone disorder, which is what I have. For the Samuel Jackson character, Mr. Glass, it just makes me roll my eyes because that’s what we get labelled as. We’re “children of glass”, so when the movie came out, I had no interest in seeing it. But for the whole year after this movie was out and I would tell people what I have, they would say, Oh like Unbreakable. I had avoided it up until last year when I decided to see it. It's not one of those where I get really mad, because M. Night Shyamalan is reliant on the basic trope of my disability. He’s kind of blending facts, so the Jackson character has elements of one level of my disability. He has elements of other levels, I think there are six or seven levels to [osteogenesis imperfecta]. He’s playing with medical facts.He’s not making really gross generalizations. He has a scene where he falls down a flight of stairs and having hurt myself in numerous ways, that just terrified me on an elemental level, cuz I just felt every single thing. So it didn’t bother me. I think what bothered me the most is people’s response. That’s why I continue to write about disability. I think so many people learn about disability from watching movies. And they assume that that’s the code of conduct. Like this is how you talk to a disabled person, or they watch a movie like Unbreakable and then they think they know everything about me. I kind of write about movies and how disability is negative or positive in them in the hopes that people will be more open minded and less likely to say something stupid when they are talking to a disabled person.
B : (laughs) You know that’s exactly what I want to do with this show!
K : That’s why we need more… I go to film festivals and people, organizers tend to fall over themselves because they don’t anticipate a film critic being disabled. I’ve interviewed filmmakers, and we’ve met at places where the tables are elevated and they’ll freak out. They’ll say “oh we’ll move you over here!” You don’t have to freak out! YOu just have to be more openminded that the person you’re going to meet might not look like you.
B : Suddenly, you become this object…
K : Exactly! You become this totem, like I've never seen this alien being and I must figure out how to deal with it (laughs). Nobody wants to be offensive but you know, by not preparing, its why when I meet somebody I don’t ever have a picture of them in my mind, because it’s probably gonna be completely different. I wish more able bodied people would think oh well this person I might be meeting might not be able bodied. It happens! (laughs)
B : Part of the reason why people don’t consider adaptation is because again, we don’t see nuanced portrayals of ourselves, and it's unfortunate that people consider that entertainment. I just was wondering, if you could talk a little bit more about, you were trying to go to a film festival. Is that right?
K : I’ve covered film festivals before, I’m currently getting ready for AFI Fest in L.A. in about two weeks. I’ve slowly gotten into traveling more. (laughs)
B : One thing I like to ask people at the end is, what’s your disabled power? What’s the thing that gives you the most energy and maybe what gives you agency?
K : Doing what I’ve been doing, which is writing. I think it’s the concept of having a voice that people seem to like. Which usually with my podcast I try to mitigate that because I know I have the voice of a chipmunk (laughs). People who read my words and find something new in them, whether they disagree with it or not. I've gotten many a person who disagrees with what I'm saying. Having a 1000 people say that I'm an idiot and I don’t know what I'm talking about, makes that one person… I've been fortunate to have people reach out and say “I’ve never thought about cinema that way until you brought up how disabled people are represented.” or “I've never thought of becoming a film writer until I realized that you were doing all these things and you are in a wheelchair and you are able to do it”. I usually hate when people say “My life is better because I know you exist”, but in this case, if I can make people learn something new about movies and disability, hopefully there’s a disabled person out there who wants to be a film writer and they don’t think they can, hopefully in this instance would be happy to be a source of inspiration.
K : In case anyone wants to follow me:
I’m on Twitter: @Journeys_Film
You can find all my writing at multiple places, Twitter is where its at.
I’m also raising money to go to AFI Fest. It’s all on Twitter. I promote it endlessly.