I wasn’t quite sure how to start this post, I didn’t want to sugarcoat things, but also didn’t want to be harsh, or possibly offensive. I sat at my computer with a blank word document staring back at me. Then naturally, I wandered to YouTube to watch the trailer for the new Jennifer Lawrence movie Joy. Next, I watched interviews with Jennifer Lawrence, and that lead me to interviews with Emma Stone, and all of the other badass female idols of mine— who I secretly want to be. Eventually Viola Davis’ Emmy speech came up. I watched for the fifteenth time, and there it was. The sentence that summed up what I want to say in this piece: “You cannot win an Emmy for roles that are simply not there.” Okay, well maybe I wasn’t going to talk about winning an Emmy, but I was going to speak about opportunity or the lack there of. Opportunities for people who despite living in our every day society, are invisible to the film world. I’m specifically talking about opportunities for people with disabilities.
I went to see the movie I Believe in Unicorns earlier this year, which is actually how I discovered Ms. in The Biz, funny how things workout. The movie is a stunning look at a young girl as she discovers the darker side of young love. It’s now available on Netflix, so go watch it. In the film, the young girl lives with her mother, a disabled wheelchair-bound woman played by director Leah Meyerhoff’s mother. Her disability is never discussed, and that simple choice stuck with me. I believe that Meyerhoff made that choice intentionally. She makes no judgments about the mother’s situation. As in life, she was who she was!
Meyerhoff, fortunately, is not the only one to show people with disabilities on film. There has been a big push recently in the TV community to represent people with disabilities. Ryan Murphy, in my opinion, has been one of the biggest activists with actors like Jamie Brewer in American Horror Story and Lauren Potter in Glee. Jamie has been a huge role model for actors with Down’s syndrome but has done so much more. She served on the Arc’s Governmental Affairs Committee in Texas to improve rights for disabled people. She became the first model with Down’s syndrome to walk at New York Fashion Week and her list of achievements goes on. I greatly admire all she’s done. She is a beautiful talented young woman and when the world saw that, and not just someone with disabilities, she took it as an opportunity to inspire young girls everywhere who maybe see themselves as a bit different!
RJ Mitte, Breaking Bad’s Walter White Jr., was diagnosed with cerebral palsy at the age of three. Much like the character, who also has cerebral palsy, this fact does not define him as a person. He inspires people with and without disabilities, and that is through his hard work. SAG named him as the spokesman for actors with disabilities, and he is the representative of “Inclusion in the Arts and Media of Performers with “, which employs artists with disabilities. “We try to get people more aware of the importance of having disabled characters on television, and changing the mind-set of how you see disability” Mitte said. He has been quoted saying that he wants to continue acting, but also branch out into producing and directing. It is that hard work and drive that should define him. I applaud the writers and casting directors of Breaking Bad for casting a person who actually has CP in the Walter White Jr. role. But I also expect nothing less from today’s industry. These are all talented human beings who deserve to be represented in our film industry.
All of this means so much to me because my older sister has autism. It has, maybe, on some greater level affected my life. However, I didn’t often comment on it growing up. I went through a period of not understanding, denial around the age when all us girls are not people you want to spend much time with. TV and movies in the mid nineties were certainly not the best at representing people who were different in anyway. This left me feeling quite alone in my experience of having a sister with autism, but time goes on. Look how far we’ve come. The film industry is slowly realizing that people from different backgrounds or different ways of thinking, are a blessing, and often have the most interesting stories to tell. They’re starting to see people with disabilities as just people, just as I see my sister as my sister. She is who she is and I am who I am. We get excited to see each other and maybe complain about our parents sometimes, or talk about how silly our animals are. We are sisters and that is all. She is my big sister, who is crazy intelligent, has a brilliant sense of humor, and has already read more books than I ever will in my life time. That’s what I want to see in the movies. I don’t want to see the differences people with disabilities have holding them back, but how they lift them and the people around them up.
Surely if an actor has lived through some kind of pain or joy, they might be able to relate to a character who is also experiencing those same emotions. Why are people with disabilities any different? Why not cast them in roles that required their specific talent or view on life? They may see things about a character other actors just wouldn’t understand. I struggled with the idea of categorizing this under my Ms. In The Biz articles’ over arching theme, that is the flaws that make us fabulous because I do not in anyway see disabled people as flawed. I wanted to focus on the fabulous people who have changed the way the industry looks at people with disabilities. These people might see the world in ways the rest of us cannot. If that doesn’t make someone fabulous I’m not sure what does.