Lateral Ableism, Part Two...More on Wildflower

 

In the end, the movie was… fine.

Even kind of messy-cute and replete with sitcom legends(Which usually earns a lot of goodwill from me, but maybe I’m not in the mood to settle back and be a good audience right now, for reasons that might not have anything to do with this movie in its own right.)

It’s a weird feeling when a movie shows you something that it thinks is a ton of struggle and you think “Wow, I wish it could be that easy,” specifically the wacky family that circles the wagons and the smart, savvy-seeming social worker that doesn’t make Bea’s problems about her in any way whatever—they’re out there, but diplomatically? “Results not typical.”

(Can we all stop equating college with the Promised Land? I can’t be the only one who’s had that myth mess with her head for decades…being disabled, fiftyish, and Expelled From Eden is…kind of a lot.)

That sort of animatronic quality I’ve noticed in Kiernan Shipka since we saw her rub one out on “Mad Men” makes her perfect as someone who grew up too fast.(Maybe she grew up too fast?)

Also, where does the money come from? Living on disability, at least to an extent, means  that money casts a shadow over everything. Whether you literally don't have it and are broke or because there is a gap between your life and what's on the ever-present forms that haunt you like patchouli in the seventies.

The Case Of The Lateral Ableism, Part One...

 

I didn’t want to write about or even watch “Wildflower” all that much, at first. I really do think my first response was somewhere between “Ugh,” and “Ew,”(Which is one thing considering that algorththmic “instincts” are not infallible—I get shown things because I once liked a british actor with big teeth, and I can see why the machines thought sitcom legends+disability themes in a gentle perfect word and thought “Hey, Chica, we got you.”)
And maybe they will.  But at least part of my disgust is brought on by

Lateral ableism

https://meryl.net/ableism-microaggressions/

(I don’t say that because I think I’m a jerk, I mean, sometimes, sure. But I think we’re taught from the beginning that There Can Only Be One more than we’re not, despite the wider culture tending to think we all live in the same(impoverished) bucket.  The long and short of it is though—for me to be quick, maybe somebody else has to be slow—and that’s, you know, really bad.  We may all have crumbs but it’s really important that I’m better at cataloging them and whatnot(and it’s okay that I’m proud of my quick thinking as long as I don’t have to look down on someone to feel it.) So, I’m giving “Wildflower” another look today and posting this, as well as a sort of challenge to myself and to try to keep the blog honest. There are parts of the disability experience that aren’t that cute, I’m sorry to say.