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31 Chapter Three Disability in the Media or, Why Don’t Disabled Actors Play Disabled Roles? Perhaps every theory has to contradict itself. if i’ve been saying that dismodernism allows for a flexible and malleable sense of identity in relationship to disability, then when i think about the notion of actors playing disabled characters, it would seem i would be open to any kind of actor playing any kind of part. isn’t identity what you make of it, rather than an absolute and essential category? you would think so, but in this essay i’m going to be arguing that only disabled actors should play disabled roles. it’s not like we don’t see a lot of people with disabilities in film. in some sense, disability is one of the subspecialties of the visual media. from Lon chaney Jr. playing the hunchback of notre dame to daniel day Lewis’s portrayal of christy brown in My Left Foot to sam Worthington playing Jake sully in Avatar, from the wheelchair-using dancer on Glee to the son with cerebral palsy on Breaking Bad, media loves disability. People with disabilities are portrayed in the media as present, in the sense of ubiquitous, always marked as different and yet rarely if ever played by actors with disabilities . Why is that? cinema and television use popular and knowable narratives and then tweak them a bit here and there. disabilities are part of that narrative. Physical disabilities appear in the popular imagination in a variety of ways, notably as challenges or tragedies, and affective while cognitive disorders have a somewhat different role. intellectual disabilities, most particularly in the case of people with down syndrome, and autism tend to function in the media as states of existence designed to evoke the compassion of 32 • THE END OF NORMAL the viewer. Most commonly, audiences are called upon to produce a limited range of responses from sympathy or pity to some kind of beneficent granting of limited personhood to such characters. The more lovable and understandable the characters become, the more likely the film or television show will succeed. and the ultimate point about the function of such narratives is that they end up making the audience feel good about itself and its own “normality.” affective and anxiety disorders seem to provoke a different audience involvement than do intellectual and cognitive disabilities. if the affective disorder falls into the realm of anxiety, depression, delusion, or schizophrenia, the film or television special (never a series) will revolve around that character “going mad.” The madness, in turn, will then symbolize the response we might all have to a dehumanizing, stressful, disabling, and demeaning society. The character becomes a tragic stand-in for any viewer facing the human condition. some movies, like A Beautiful Mind, The Soloist, and The Fisher King, follow the descent of the character into madness while trying to offer some kind of cure, control, or redemption at the end. Silver Linings Playbook offers us, well, silver linings about affective disorders. obsessive-compulsive disorder seems to straddle the divide between tragedy and redemption, as well as between tragedy and comedy. The standard representation of ocd in film and other narrative forms is to see the obsessive behavior as a combination of amusing and debilitating. one scenario turns the person with ocd into a kind of lovable nut, or what i like to call a disability “mascot.” The mascotization of disabilities produces warm, cuddly, lovable representations. The television show Monk mainly does this, while also showing how disability can itself be ability. Monk is a detective whose holmes-like skills are aided by his obsessive behavior. Monk can notice things that others can’t and like sherlock holmes has a kind of autistic intensity that aids his detective work but hinders his life. Monk “suffers” from his disability and can’t function without a personal assistant who hands him sanitizing wipes and coaxes him through his fears. yet in this case, cure is not an option. in one episode, for example, he decides to go on meds, and although he is personally happier as his symptoms diminish, he becomes a terrible detective. so he eventually renounces the meds, goes back to his tortured but amusing self, and returns to supersleuthing . shows like The Big Bang Theory group conditions like asperger’s syndrome with ocd in loveable and amusing characters like sheldon. reality Tv shows have even gotten into the affective disorder act. Obsessed is a series...

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