Not Sure If I Loved "Why Do You Love Me?"

 

It took me a while to decide whether I really liked “Why Do You Love Me?” because, despite the frisky premise about three twentysomething  Indonesian disabled guys crossing the country in search of a brothel for their first sexual experience. I was sad that it wasn’t just a fun sex comedy(and not only because they arrive for the brothel in the middle of a government crackdown) but if it had been that fun and light, I might have despised it for mocking our, often difficult, lived experience.(On that note if wheelchair access is really that good in Indonesia, American exceptionalists should be deeply shamed. ) Maybe they just filmed in a few flat/wide places, though and used them over and over.

Many disability stories start under a shadow—as does much of our life, probably. For Bas, there are two: His abled school friend’s impending marriage and learning that one of his little crew has had health news that took a turn for the worst.   This makes them have to take a less-protected trip than the one they ask their parents to go on—instead of the fully-accessible van and highly-trained caregiver  they initially try to hire, they get his female cousin and a rickety orange bus.(The attendant really comes through in the end, in more than one way for one of the young men, though she has her own tough history to get past, as well as the guys’ initial distrust. I think I liked it, though, and, yes, all three guys did lose their virginities, though we don’t see a romp or anything like that.

In some ways, both as a writer and a middle-aged crip, it makes more sense than ever why there is so much mortality in disability-themed, if not necessarily  #ownvoices art.  I think people just can’t conceive of the fight without end which disability life can be, even at its best.  Also, some people do have a more delicate hold on life in a literal sense.
But, hell, even abled Americans really  don’t *know* do they? And they still get to duck their deeper issues for a while watching cupcake bakers find love or whatnot.   The suburban teen that I used to be would kind of love to see a fully-triumphant disability movie, even as I think dealing with tough realities is one of our subcultural strengths.

More Questions Than Answers...

 

The hardest part of watching “Tell Them You Love Me,” is that there is no clear villain in the way that watching eight million hours of Law and Order might have conditioned me to expect.  Especially in a documentary with a trial with disability, sex(including  a sexual abuse conviction)and race. A disability advocate such as myself  might feel inclined to point some kind of finger at Derrick’s family, just because there appears to be some kind of historical tension between adults with disabilities—especially among those of us on an activist path—and parents, a lot of times. But I definitely thought the Johnsons had spent most of Derrick’s life trying to cope with the huge blow that an accident at birth had dropped into their life. I liked them a lot and felt that they cared for their son and brother, respectively.

If I really wanted to boo and hiss someone,turn this tasteful and probing doc into intellectual pro wrestling, I guess that would make Anna Stubblefield a grifting con artist with a kink for non-verbal people. But she felt too familiar for that, and not only because we have the same short, layered haircut, and, I’d imagine, maybe the same well-thumbed copies of novels—I’d bet fifty dollars on “The Bluest Eye” figuring prominently, for instance—on our shelves.  I wondered if I’d seen some other coverage of the case or something.  At one point in my life, it might have been a fair bet, but I’ve moved on a bit from trial coverage.  So it wasn’t Anna herself that I knew, so much as her type.  That painful eagerness to know what disabled people called ourselves, the bright and eager “please love me,” eyes.  She could be one of a lot of teachers, therapists, or social workers I’ve seen over what sometimes feels like more than a lifetime of being disabled who didn’t seem to know where they stopped and I began. Even the groovy parents who sort of made imperfection into the family business felt familiar, too.  Maybe I kind of liked her in spite of those things, especially when her friend in charge of Disability Studies, who took so long to speak, praised her as a listener. She is hardly the first girl or woman to produce a whole relationship with someone out of her own head, based on very little contact.  Although I will admit, if it happened as prosecutors allege, that would be one of the sicker exponents of that old story. Even if they communicated as much as Anna said, though, a world that she was one of his only windows on would still seem ripe for exploitation.
Is facilitated communication real? It gets discredited a lot, but maybe still could help a few people. On that basis, as well as the sense that I have been the beneficiary of a lot of “There are more things in heaven and earth than could be dreamt of by your philosophy” in my own life, I hesitate to completely call bullshit.  I wonder about the scandals, though, the teachers and paraprofessionals who claim to get reports of sex abuse…are they reporting fathers because they wish someone had reported theirs when they were young, for instance?(Not that it would have to get that deep, I suppose.  Maybe they just didn’t like the guys or thought they ‘looked shifty” when the teacher asked about weekend plans. But there is a lot of under-reported sex abuse out there.)

It's Probably Weird....

 that I might not have foundKeith Robinson's comedy if he hadn't had to struggle back from two strokes, the last one more severe and during the peak of the pandemic.   Sometimes it feels like I owe so much entertainment, to say nothing of interpersonal relationships, to the fact that so much that's awful happens to us all.

 "Different Strokes" a good special, and it's good to know that "never missing a beat" is not just something they award us with to leave us out.   For my taste, the best bit was about talking with a stroke at the Popeye's chicken drive-through. Nice to see some rep from a black perspective...we don't see that enough.(Even if that is its own challenge to what passes for disability group unity.  I'm bad at that, anyway, bring it on.

Also..

 A woman with a disability in a biopic or anywhere else who didn't always say Please and Thank you would be vilified forever.

Covering my Beat With "My Left Foot"--

 

“My Left Foot” is, I think, one of a thousand movies I must have gone to with my father during visitation, so we didn’t have to talk about how strange it had become between us.  Although I think movies really are among the rare things we both like. In this case, of course, the thing we didn’t talk about went further back than the thought that they both had started new lives that were different from the one that started my brother and me. Because I have cerebral palsy, too, though not like the one author and artist Christy Brown had.  I don’t see many, okay, maybe any, bodies that match mine…my best guess for why is that,although humans classify things to have them make sense, but that maybe, each muscle’s response to trauma, and the call from the brain that mostly never comes, is highly specific.(Even now, though, since we are writing of my high school years as The Exception, I write this while fighting off the urge to tell my readers how much better off my family and my body were than that. About being top of the middle of my class at least and how much I made the staff of literary magazine laugh. I went to two parties in four years.  It was different, but not mind-blowingly so.)  Disabled people still spend a lot of time on the outside looking in.

Maybe my dad picked this movie to show me how good he thought I had it.  Or maybe it was kind of a boyish wonder at how much  Daniel Day Lewis was able to appear like a disabled person—a talent we’re not supposed to admire anymore on representational and authenticity grounds, but Day Lewis was able to make me think he was one of us, so much so that I felt guilty about my disappointment when he made another movie and it was clear that he was not.(In another, sweeter movie, with us in it, of course, my father picked that movie to send me a message about our past and our future and stuff, but it did not work out as the viewer guides might have predicted.) I searched my memory, but I think that viewing only gave me the dubious “opportunity” to say what people still want me to say: That I’m lucky, and that it’s good for me to find someone “worse off” than I to measure myself against. Although you can’t always tell who is struggling most by looking, actually, I think it’s better not to make extending compassion some kind of misery Olympics.

Now that I’m older and we’re in a caregiving shortage that an informal arrangement is helping us forestall, I am a bit envious of Christy’s crowded house and neighborhood, if not the mess, poverty, and drunk das.  No stranger to having an indomitable mother myself(and maybe the same age as Oscar-winner Brenda Fricker by the end of the movie) I find myself wondering how Bridget Brown kept her spiritual tank filled.  My mother did not get *many* breaks when I was young, but she had some friends to hang with or sometimes a little retail therapy.

Why was Dr. Cole so confused by Christy’s crush? We are built with the same emotional parts other people have, and it looked like she smelled like perfume and quoted poetry to him—it’s like infatuation generation.