"This chair is my white cane. Where's yours?"

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Tonight’s #FilmDis discussion on Twitter (9 PM Eastern) will be about disability on television. That got me thinking about whether I have a favorite disability on TV scene. I think the Ironside scene above might be the one for me. It’s from Season 1, Episode 11, Light At The End Of The Journey. Chief Ironside works with a blind woman to identify and catch a murderer, while fending off her over-protective fiancé.

I could do without the syrupy musical score, but the scene itself is amazingly complex and sophisticated, especially for 1967. For one thing, it is a very rare example of peer-to-peer mentoring. Usually, TV and movies tell us that it takes a non-disabled person to snap a disabled person out of their self-pitying funks. Ironside is tough and confrontational here, but he’s got credibility from his own disability. It’s also remarkable for a mainstream TV cop show to draw such a smooth connection between the experiences of blindness and physical disability.

The bonus is how Ironside pinpoints the sexism involved, too. He even violates the man to man code and focuses on Norma, showing first disapproval, then open hostility towards her fiancé when he becomes aggressively controlling.

If you watch other episodes of the original Ironside, you’ll see that while Ironside’s disability is always there, never hidden, it rarely plays this big a role in the story. That also helps make this scene, and this episode, more powerful.

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Facebook

No Glee

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Promotional poster for Glee
Glee ended last night, and I didn’t watch it. I haven’t watched Glee consistently since the end of Season One. I adored the Pilot episode, but like Vox.com’s Todd VanDerWerf, I found that my crush faded quickly after that first date.

Mostly, I loved the music, (glee club covers of pop hits and classics), but another thing that drew me to Glee was the inclusion of a main character who was a wheelchair user … Artie Abrams, played by the (non-disabled) actor Kevin McHale. When Glee started in 2009, just seeing a character with a disability on a TV show seemed like progress to me. Later on, I started to notice inaccuracies and troubling themes in Artie’s character. You could tell he wasn’t really a paraplegic. It’s not just that I knew it for a fact, I could see it and feel it, which isn’t good when you’re trying to make the audience feel that you are your character and not just an actor in a costume. Artie had his interesting moments, but tended to fall back on cliché, like the dream sequence when he got out of his wheelchair to dance.

Then there was Becky Jackson played by Lauren Potter, an actor who actually does have Down Syndrome. At first it was refreshing to see a disabled actor playing a disabled character, and a cognitively impaired character not presented as a sweet little angel. But, Glee took it too far too many times. Becky’s crudeness and weird “alliance” with the evil Sue Sylvester came to seem like a nasty gimmick instead of mold-breaking.

There’s more I could say. Cheryl Green and I did say more in our Disability.TV Podcast conversation about Glee. Click and listen. You will notice that our dislike of the disability portrayals on Glee is more intense exactly because we both sort of loved Glee. Or rather, we loved the start of Glee, and the idea of Glee. The show had a lot going for it, including a terrific setup to examine disability, along with other ways people can be socially marginalized, then empowered through friendship and teamwork. Instead, Glee went for cheap, easy laughs, leaned on clichés, and indulged in the same stigmas it supposedly fought.

Sometimes that works. Some shows manage to satirize and criticize prejudices while playing on them, but it takes care and control. Part of what made Glee exciting at first was it’s volatility. It seemed like it could veer out of control at any moment. Often it did. Maybe it’s a Ryan Murphy thing. American Horror Story has a similar problem. It’s wild enthusiasm tends to overwhelm any sense of control or care. Both series have great moments … even great disability moments … but they seem almost accidental. And in the next scene, old stigmas take center stage again, because, you know, why not?

I guess what Glee taught me about disability portrayals is that it’s not enough to just throw disabled characters into the mix and have them do a few surprising things. You have to pay attention to what you’re doing and how you’re doing it. You don’t have to be dull and “politically correct”, but you do have to give a damn, and focus.

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Facebook

Disability Blogger Link-Up

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The word Blog surrounded by word cloud

All ready for another Disability Blogger Link-Up?

Use the doohickey below to post a blog post or article on something related to disability 

…

 something you want others to read.

To make the articles easier to browse, in the “Your name

” blank, type the title of the article. 

In the "Your URL" blank, paste the whole website address of the thing you are posting.

Then click the "Enter" button. That's it!

Note: If your post doesn't appear immediately, try "refreshing" the page a few times. Sometimes it takes a little while to show up. Also, feel free to post more than one item. Finally, you might want to add a comment at the bottom of this post, to identify yourself or add an explanation or comment about the items you are posting.

Have fun posting and reading! This Link-Up will close at Midnight Eastern on Sunday. Look for the next Link-Up Friday, April 3, 2015.

REALLY!?!

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Photo of Amy Pohler and Seth Meyers on the Weekend Update set, with the word "REALLY!?!" superimposed
Ableism is complex, if you want to dig into it, but maybe our response to it shouldn't be. Instead of tweeting and blogging at length about the roots and subtleties of othering and objectification, maybe we should take a tip from Seth Meyers and Amy Pohler's SNL Weekend Update bit, and just say, “REALLY!?!"

Try it!
We can't afford to put in a ramp. We hardly ever see handicapped people around here anyway. REALLY!?!
I'm sorry, we didn’t have time to make large print copies. REALLY!?!
What will she have to drink? REALLY!?!
I don't think of you as disabled! REALLY!?! 
Complete stranger says, "I just wanted to tell you that you won't be like this when you're in heaven." REALLY!?! 
If I ever become that disabled, I want ‘em to just pull the plug! REALLY!?! 
We should go back to putting people in institutions. It’ll be fine. We’ll make them nicer. REALLY!?!
Note on your windshield: "Hey handicap! … You want pity go to a one leg support group!" REALLY!?!
Complete stranger takes photos of a group of disabled people in a mall food court. REALLY!?!
Seriously, I like this because one of the key questions about ableism is whether or not people know they’re being ableist. Conventional wisdom says that most of the time, people don’t know. I have come to think the opposite. I think most people know on some level that what they are saying is wrong. They may not know exactly how, but they know it.

So “REALLY!?!” can be a powerful wakeup call prompting a moment of self-reflection. When spoken by a disabled person, it also signals, “I noticed,” which is another important thing. People say and do ableist things because they think nobody will notice. At the very least, we should make it clear that we are paying attention, we do notice, and it’s not okay.

Best of all, “REALLY!?!” isn’t so much outraged as baffled. Instead of saying, “You really wounded me”, it says, “Did you actually say that? Ha, ha, ha, ha!”

They’re the ones who should feel embarrassed, not us.

Thinking About The Apple Watch, Drooling Just A Bit

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Timothy B. Lee, Vox.com - March 10, 2015

Francie Diep, Pacific Standard - March 10, 2015

I won’t be buying an Apple Watch anytime soon. A new iPhone might be in my future, but not an Apple Watch, though I have to admit, it looks pretty cool. Apple products always at least look good.

It does look like the Apple Watch might have a couple of advantages for disabled people over other “smart” devices:

1. You wear it on your wrist, so it’s probably easy to get to and hard to lose. You can also probably mount it in a dozen other creative ways ... strapped to a wheelchair armrest, hung on a chain around your neck, wrapped around a cane.

2. It's got those sensors on the back that can detect your heart rate, and motion sensors that can tell when you are standing, sitting, walking, running, etc. This suggests could monitor some chronic health conditions. If those sensors are possible, others might be not far off, like sensors for blood sugar (diabetes), oxygen levels (asthma), or maybe even mood.

An iPhone could be made that would accomplish these things pretty easily. Apple could add diagnostic sensors to the back. Third-party companies could sell all sorts of add-on straps and holders to secure the phone in a wide variety of situations and orientations. Still, the watch’s size and convenience may offer advantages no phone or tablet can match.

I doubt the Apple Watch as currently conceived and marketed will revolutionize life for disabled people, but it does seem like the kind of multipurpose gadget that creative minds could adapt and put to use in ways Apple might never have thought about.

For example:

Voice Output … It would be great to be able to record and store lots of phrases for daily use by people with speech impairment, easily retrieved and then played on the watch. It may already be able to do this in a rough sort of way, using the watch's speech to text feature. Note: There seems to be some ambiguity about whether VoiceOver will work on the Apple Watch. VoiceOver is a feature built into all current Apple devices that audibly “reads” whatever is on the screen, mainly for the benefit of visually impaired users. It seems to me very unlikely that VoiceOver wouldn’t work on the Apple Watch, but we’ll have to wait and see.

Voice Input … Siri comes standard with the Apple Watch, same as the iPhone, and you can control all of these devices with your voice, using Siri. A few tweaks here and there to Siri and maybe other apps, should easily make the Apple Watch fully voice operable. This could be extra helpful for people who can’t use their hands, or have difficulty working with really small displays and icons.

Environmental Controls … The Apple Watch will have a built-in app that turns it into a remote control for your TV and music devices. Could it be that difficult for someone to design an app that controls automatic devices … such as door and window openers, lights, thermostats, even an adjustable bed ... throughout a house or apartment? Environmental controls for disabled people have been around for years, but tend to be expensive and tied to very specialized and exclusive control systems. A wrist-based controller that adjusts to multiple systems seems like a natural.

Identification … The health app on the iPhone already has a feature that stores your personal medical information for emergency retrieval. A similar app could be easily designed to store information and helpful instructions for people with disabilities that sometimes impair communication and require help from random strangers, not just EMT and ER doctors.

Personal Emergency Response … Personal Emergency Response Systems already use pendants and watch-like controllers, so again, creating apps for these services should be easy. It may even have the basic capability of direct two-way verbal communication. At minimum, it seems capable already of sending a verbally dictated text message to anyone with a receiving app.

The Apple Watch is going to be expensive, and I’m not even thinking about the $10,000 gold “Edition” edition. But iPhones are expensive, too. The thing is these devices do more than one thing, which makes their higher prices a reasonable value, even for people without a lot of money. If programs like private health insurance, Vocational Rehabilitation, and Medicaid were to see the adaptive value of such devices, they might come within reach of people with even the highest adaptive needs, and lowest incomes.

Of course, there are also going to be features of the Apple Watch that are basically already fully available through other devices, either existing iOS apps, or websites any Apple device … or any computer device at all … can access. Once you see the thing as a platform more than a purpose-built device, the possibilities do seem endless.

So, I’m not buying an Apple Watch yet, but I know better than to say “never”.

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TV Notes

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Photo of an old-style TV set with the wheelchair symbol on the screen
I’m behind in my TV-watching.

I’m supposed to be watching as many bits and pieces of disability-relevant Reality TV Shows as I can get my hands on, to beef up my scope of experience for my podcast discussion with Emily Ladau. We are scheduled to talk by Skype on Friday. I hope to post the podcast episode on Monday, March 23.

What I’ve actually been doing is watching the first 5 seasons of M*A*S*H on Netflix. It’s not a complete waste of time though. I have found a bit of a disability story, about a college football running back who has his wounded leg amputated at the 4077th. Season 5, Episode 18 “End Run.” There’s nothing very interesting in the portrayal of disability, but that, in itself is kind of interesting. It isn’t as horrible as one might imagine, but the story does lean heavily on an extremely familiar trope of disability on TV … the angry cripple who needs a kind but tough non-disabled person to persuade them that life is worth living after all. It’s fairly subtle at the end, more so than most mid-‘70s sitcoms usually managed, but the great insight struck me as pretty by-the-numbers and simplistic to me. Plus, the solution was completely metaphorical stuff about “trying”.  Nobody mentioned a single specific idea for what this BLACK GUY might DO in the 1950s, without a football career and missing a leg.

My watch list for future episodes of Disability.TV is also extensive. For instance:

- The last 2 seasons of Parenthood.

- Season 3 of Call The Midwife, and then the Season 4 about to start, both of which apparently have appearances by actors with disabilities playing disabled characters (see below).

- Checking out new series Empire and Switched At Birth, which I have heard include disabled characters and / or disability themes.

- At some point, I need to watch Deadwood, for it’s own sake and to see veteran disabled actor Jeri Jewel being awesome.

- I also really want to watch Carnivale, partly to see how it compares with the similarly-set American Horror Story: Freak Show.

- I hope to do a discussion soon about disability on Downton Abbey, but for better or worse, I’ve got that whole damned series pretty much memorized, so that’s something.

Fortunately, future podcasts should be easier to do and less scattered to listen to using a new 5-star rating system, introduced in Disability.TV Episode 20. Each TV show will either gain or lose a star for each of the following criteria:

Authenticity …Getting the details of disability right.
Characters … Are disabled characters fully developed, and not cliché.
Messages … What the show says about disability.
Representation … Are disabled characters played by disabled actors?
Watchability … Is the show any good?

Try these criteria on the disability shows and movies you see. It’s fun!

Now there’s something I need to grouse about.

I have been participating off and on with the #FilmDis Twitter discussions that happen every Saturday evening at 9 PM Eastern. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in disability on film or TV. One thing I really appreciate about the group is that it has raised my consciousness about the artistic pitfalls and above all the injustice of non-disabled actors playing disabled characters, sometimes called "Cripface", but probably better termed "Cripping Up." Most of the rare disability roles written are cast this way. Meanwhile, actual actors with disabilities can’t get work. It’s an important issue that colors the entire topic of disability in popular culture.

However, this poses an added dilemma for me. I remain fascinated by the themes, messages, and ideas expressed when disability is depicted in popular culture, especially on TV. I find it equally fascinating regardless of who plays the parts. Maybe it’s because I am just more attuned to writing than I am to acting, but while I find “cripping up” offensive and unjust, I also find that it doesn’t much affect my interest in what the show says about disability. For better or worse, content is really my thing, and whether or not disabled actors play disabled characters in a piece is only one part of how I judge a work overall (see above). Maybe six months or a year from now “cripping up” will be more of a deal-breaker for me, as it is for a lot of disabled people. At the moment, for me, it isn’t. I’m not sure I know how to feel about that.

And now, back to our show ...

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That Wheelchair

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Victoria Dawson, Smithsonian.com - March 13, 2015

It’s hard to believe Ed Roberts died 20 years ago. I never met him, but by creating the Independent Living movement, he was one of the most influential people in my life. Ed Roberts was inspirational, in the best, least sentimental, most literal sense. His example libertates disabled people, and his ideas give structure to our struggle for equality and freedom:
“ … a man who defied—and encouraged others to defy—the once-undisputed view that severely disabled people belonged in institutions and that the able-bodied best knew what the disabled needed."
I guess if you have to boil Independent Living … and all of Disability Culture for that matter … into two points, those are good ones.

As for the wheelchair, I love how used, personalized, and “lived in” it looks. I also appreciate what Simi Linton says about wheelchairs in a quote in the Smithsonian article:
"'It isn’t a device that binds us or limits us: it is an ally, an accommodation,' says Simi Linton, a consultant on disability and the arts, the author of My Body Politic, and herself a wheelchair user. 'It shows a disabled person’s authority over the terms of mobility. It expands our horizons.'"
Ed Roberts and the birth of Independent Living are both part of history. Yet, the issues today are basically the same as they have been from the start. We still struggle to help disabled people live on their own terms. Disabled voices still have to fight to be heard and listened to. And people still view disabled people and their accessories with as sort of low-grade dread.

There’s still a lot of work to do. Even thought some of the surface issues have changed, and even though expectations for disabled people are, thankfully, somewhat higher than they used to be, the goals and battles are basically same.
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