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.)
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