This is not my blog post, it belongs to Rob Icame across it in my blog searching an thought
it was well worth sharing. Great job rob!!!! Kudos
August 9, 2011
Just a Word: The Change-Up Edition
Well. Let it never be said that the entertainment
world isn't committed to providing material to blog
about.
From "The Change-Up", from Universal Pictures
Mitch Planko (Ryan Reynolds), about his friend's twin
babies: "Why aren't they talking? Are they retarded?
This one looks a little Downsy."
Let's dispense, for the moment, with the usual debate
about freedom of speech or how comedy supposedly works
or whether or not anyone needs to lighten up or pull a
stick out of their butt. Instead, let's write a story.
We can even pretend it's fiction.
Imagine a parent with a child who has Down syndrome.
I actually have one in mind, a strong and positive
writer whom I've become friends with over the past
few years. But you probably have your own friends
or acquaintances you can imagine.
So let's say it's a mom, one who spends her days,
her years, taking care of a child, a very special
child in every sense of the word. She loves this
child the way most special needs parents love our
children, which is to say, with equal parts gentleness
and ferocity. She understands what the lesser of her
fellow citizens of this rough world thinks of her kid
when they see the evidence of disability stamped on a
child's face but don't bother to look beyond. Perhaps
she knows better than most how this attitude diminishes
the shallow observer, not her child. Maybe she's found
that peace.
Let's imagine that this mom likes comedies, and not just
polite ones, either. Like most special needs parents, she
probably engages in quite a bit of dark humor herself, the
jokes and remarks made to her spouse or other special needs
parents and no one else. She appreciates edgy humor, and she
liked The Hangover, so when a new movie by the same writer
comes out, she decides to take a few hours out of her weekend
and go see it.
Perhaps her husband watches her child for her while she's at the
movie theater. It would be nice if they could go together, but
that's a luxury that's not afforded to every special needs family.
If she's single (as so many special needs parents are; about 75% get
divorced, according to a recent study), she's had to find a babysitter.
This simple act for a typical family is one fraught with anxiety for
the special needs parent. Qualified babysitters are hard to find;
trust is even more difficult to build. Perhaps a member of her family
will watch her child, but that's not a given, either. Many special
needs parents have family members who don't get it, who have declined
to watch our kids or who have made statements that we'd expect from
fussy old ladies at the grocery store. (For me, it's always the old
ladies, and it's always at the store.) So a family babysitter isn't
a given, either.
But however it happens, our imaginary mom finds a way to go see
The Change-Up. She's there, sitting in the dark, laughing at the movie,
enjoying herself and pushing down the guilt, that feeling of abandonment
that we feel when we dare to spend time doing something for ourselves.
Perfectly reasonable, this time away, yet it's hard not to feel as if
we've left our child unprotected somehow.
That feeling of leaving her child undefended suddenly swells when
she hears it. "This one looks a little Downsy." Our imaginary mom
is suddenly confronted with a room full of people, laughing right along
with famous faces on the screen, in a multi-million dollar production
worked on by thousands of people, approved by studio executives, writers,
actors. All those cinema professionals, and none of them, NOT ONE,
ever said "You know, we're making fun of purely innocent, absolutely
blameless people here. We're making a shitty joke about people with
disabilities, people who are brothers and sisters and sons and daughters
of the moviegoers who are going to pay money to see this film. That
strikes me as a dick move. Maybe we shouldn't do this."
Because this simple recognition of the absence of basic human dignity
has not occurred to any of the decision-makers of this giant Hollywood
production, our imagined mother sits alone in the dark, and she understands
all over again, as if she could ever really forget, that a large segment
of society, of the people she walks with and works with and attends church
with right alongside her child, this chunk of society finds humor in her
child's disability. They think her family's pain is appropriate as a
punchline. This mom was right here with them, and does that make her
complicit? She thinks maybe it does. Maybe she gets up and leaves the
theater in the middle of the movie. Maybe she goes home to her child,
feeling more than ever that her place is here, not out there with this
great invisible THEM, the ones who will always place her and her child
and her family apart.
But if people laughed, I suppose it works out okay when you do the
studio executive math.
Again, I'm not asking you not to engage in this kind of humor. It's your
soul, after all. You're the one who has to figure out what you're willing
to do for a laugh, to fit in with the cool kids, and still sleep at night.
But here's what I would like for you to do, if you're asking, which you're
probably not.
If I ask you to close your eyes and imagine the kind of person who would
casually use the word "nigger" to describe another human being, there might
be some variation of the character that any one of you would build in your
imagination, but I seriously doubt it would be someone you'd admire.
I don't think you'd create the mental image of a person you'd trust your
kids with, and I certainly don't think you'd imagine yourself.
When the greater part of society reaches the point where that exercise of
the imagination would have the same result with the word "retard", we'll
be on our way. That's what I'd like. It really is exactly that simple.
And "downsy"? That's vile. If you laughed at that, please go live in a
hut somewhere, far far away from actual human people.
by Rob Rummel-Hudson at 12:57 AM
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