Incidental Disability

[dwgism]

The discussion of transexuality in film was a spur to some thoughts I was already having about the portrayal of disability in film. There are at least three aspects to the way film deals with disability that we need the media industry to make progress on if we are ever to consider ourselves to be getting equal treatment. Those three points are

Comments

[elettaria]

The West Wing would get to the second of those, as the President (MS) and Joey Lucas (deaf) do talk to one another, but it's about how he should come out as having MS. Bear in mind that this is a 7-year TV series rather than a single film.

Doing a direct translation of the Bechdel test seems a little harsh, since women are 50% of the population, but it's an interesting exercise to see if anything at all passes all three stages. I'd guess the best bet would be films which focus directly on disability, not that anything is leaping to mind right now, and even so there is likely to be difficulty with the third stage. Oh, hang on, I've got one. Regeneration, based on the novels by Pat Barker about soldiers with PTSD in WW1. PTSD is the biggie there, of course, with symptoms including mutism, acquired stammering and hysterical paralysis, but you also get medical problems such as developmental stammering and asthma. Naturally there is a lot of talk about PTSD, as it's set in a psychiatric hospital where they've all been shipped for treatment, but you also get, for instance, Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen working on poetry together.

Moving to the novels, it's only the first book in the trilogy which is set in the hospital, so if you look at the second and third you get quite a bit more non-disability-oriented interaction between shell-shocked soldiers, from working together as colleagues to sex. And of course, homosexuality was illegal and considered a medical disorder back then, there's talk of electric shock treatment for it at one point (psychiatrist aware of what could happen to his queer patients), and there was a big homophobic witch-hunt going on in 1917. Including, I kid you not, a newspaper article entitled "The Cult of the Clitoris".

[dwgism]

>> Doing a direct translation of the Bechdel test seems a little harsh, since women are 50% of the population, <<

True, but we're a fairly sizable chunk of the population ourselves, comparable in size to many of the ethnic and religious minorities, and I can certainly imagine applying a variant of the Bechdel test to the representation of ethnic or religious minorities in film, say looking for non-stereotyped interactions.

And we can also think about it mathematically. If women are 50% of the population, then 1 in 4 random pairings of people are both women. If disabled people are 1 in 5 of the population, then 1 in 25 random pairings will be both disabled. So all other things being equal, there should be roughly one fifth as many (actually 4/25) films that pass the disability-Bechdel test as there are films that pass the normal Bechdel test. That doesn't add up to many, but it should add up to some.

[dwgism]

I've just been thinking about Jed Bartlett. He doesn't meet the Incidental Disability test within the overall story arc of West Wing, because his MS is very much a major part of the plot -- looking back now it's hard not to draw comparisons with Roosevelt's efforts to conceal his disability that I probably didn't know enough to make at the time.

But, and this is a luxury that an extended series has that a film doesn't, they could have individual episodes in which his MS was incidental to the episodes' plot. Not that I can actually think of any good examples.

And because it was relapsing remitting MS, they could ignore its existence for weeks at a time, which is a nice little luxury for the screenwriters, though not perhaps so good for us.