Empathy without sentiment

Here’s the dream: a theater full of people seeing themselves in a protagonist from the intellectual/developmental disability (IDD) community: a community that has been disregarded, ridiculed, and warehoused since the dawn of time, comprised of humans who still have to justify their humanity.

Hollywood rarely includes characters with disabilities. It depicts characters with IDD even less often. When it does, it’s from a position of superiority: either through sympathy, pity, or ridicule. When the character is depicted with empathy, chances are the depiction is gushing with sentimentality. And even when it’s not, the character is either a sidekick to the main character, or there is a safe, “normal” off-ramp character for audiences to run to as the avatar that makes them comfortable: a character played by an A-lister who reflects the “normalcy” with which the viewer presumably wants to relate.

We can do better. Viewers are ready to see themselves in characters with IDD, and that’s what I challenge viewers to do: not to see people with IDD as cute or “inspiring” just because they exist, but to relate to them eye to eye as peers, as fellow human beings with meaningful things to contribute to an interdependent society of co-equals.

That’s what my comrades and I are doing with Counselor (see script excerpt above), College Girl, Toxic, Princess, Buttons, Love Land, and Guest Room. And in the physical disability context, that’s what we’re doing with Catching Up and Title. But we can’t do it alone. We need collaborators and contributors and conversation-havers to keep the party going.

So please join us. Shoot me an email and let’s talk.

Video: Let Me Tell My Story, Directed by Olly Riley-Smith and Produced by Zack Siddiqui & me for Disability Cinema Coalition. Featuring Jamie Brewer (American Horror Story, Amy and the Orphans), Lauren Potter (Glee), RJ Mitte (Breaking Bad), Blair Williamson (Turnover, Music), and Members of LA GOAL.