catching signals that sound in the dark

Like most people, I love the Hensel twins, and have since I was little. I remember my dad bringing home the Life magazine cover for me. I just spent a lot of time looking at videos and pictures of them online. It's awesome to watch the way they move around. But it's also awesome to watch them asking questions in class and joking around with their friends, because this isn't a life that would have been available for them a hundred years ago.

One of the most obtuse passages I've ever read comes from the Wikipedia page for Schlitzie, my favorite circus freak:

Under the care of Surtees, Schlitzie continued performing the sideshow circuit until Surtees' death in the early 1960s, after which Surtees' daughter, who was not in show business, committed Schlitzie to a Los Angeles county hospital.

Schlitzie remained hospitalized for some time until he was recognized by sword swallower Bill Unks, who happened to be working at the hospital during the off-season. According to Unks, Schlitzie seemed to miss the carnival dearly, and being away from the public eye had made him very sad and depressed. Hospital authorities determined that the best care for Schlitzie would be to make him a ward of Unks' employer, showman Sam Kortes, and return him to the sideshow.

Okay, dude--I really like Schlitzie and would like to think that he lived a happy life. And from the way he comes across in Freaks, he seems like a sweet person who liked attention, so I'll totally buy that he was into being a sideshow performer, and that he felt sad when he stopped doing it.

BUT DON'T YOU THINK HE WAS ALSO SAD BECAUSE HE WAS LIVING IN A HOSPITAL? I mean, if I was living in a hospital for no reason, and someone encountered me there, I'd think it was really fucking weird if they were like, "Amanda seems really sad, she must want to be a sideshow performer." Maybe he just didn't like living in an institutional setting. You know, like almost every person who ever lived.

I am really into the show Carnivale, and one of my favorite things is a very minor aspect of the show. Ben's crush, Ruthie, is a middle-aged woman with an adult son, Gabriel, who is a pretty minor character. But we know that Gabe is intellectually disabled and performs in the carnival as a strongman, as well as helping set up rides and tents with the other young guys in the carnival. Ruthie used to be a snake charmer when she was younger, but now she's mostly the "barker" for Gabe's act. Since I am interested in the history of disabled people (especially intellectually disabled people) who worked as a sideshow performers, Ruthie and Gabe's story seems especially moving to me. I imagine Ruthie realizing that her child was intellectually disabled, and that he didn't have a disability that affected his appearance and could therefore be the basis of his act. I imagine her thinking about Gabe's options outside of the hospital--probably being locked away somewhere. But in the carnival, he could travel and be part of a community. As he got older, he turned out to be really big, and that turned into an act, which was great. And Ruthie doesn't have to worry about what will happen to Gabe when she dies, because he has things he's good at, and he's surrounded by people who have known him his whole life.

But obviously not every carnival was as friendly as the one portrayed in Carnivale. The only good thing that happened in the class I dropped was that we read a piece by Eli Clare, who is a queer trans guy with cerebral palsy. Part of the piece was about his interest in particular historical figures--disabled sideshow performers, and XX people who lived as men. But he admits that he doesn't know exactly why certain XX people lived as men, and that it isn't necessarily accurate for him to claim them as trans. And he admits that some of the sideshow performers may have been manipulated and abused, and felt that they had no choice but to be "freaks." I am interested in the same two groups of people, although I'm a lesbian instead of a trans guy, which proves how hard it is to identify who inverts "belong" to. The Well of Loneliness seems to me to be a story about deviant sexuality, but in the 1940s Michael Dillon, a trans man, identified Stephen Gordon as someone like him.

But I'm getting off topic. I was thinking about Amanda Palmer, who has been criticized at FWD/Forward for starting a band with her friend where they pretend to be a pair of conjoined twins. I don't think Amanda Palmer is coming from a typical ableist perspective, even though she is being ableist. I think she thinks of the idea of conjoined twins as just another part of the whole circus/carnival genre that she's always drawn from. I'm not super offended by Evelyn Evelyn, I don't think, but it does make me kind of uncomfortable. It just seems stupid (although I generally love AFP, don't freak out). However, I feel like if I think that this is really bad, then I have to think Neutral Milk Hotel is really bad, too. Although Jeff Mangum didn't pretend to be conjoined twins, he just wrote a song about them.

I mean, is it ever okay to view people with certain physical conditions as part of a genre? I don't think it's okay to go as far as Palmer has gone but is it okay to be into conjoined twins and make art about them when you aren't actually conjoined and don't know any people who are?

eta: I just deleted a little bit about whether ASD people are circus freaks in modern society, and whether Jeff Mangum can be considered a circus freak because of his mental illness and nonstandard body language--I need more time to write that than I have, because I was too brief and it came off like I was saying "Jeff Mangum and I can have circus freaks but Amanda Palmer can't" or something equally oversimplified and self-serving.

Quid Pro Quo

"OMG CONNOR LOOKS LIKE HE'S GOING TO SHIT HIMSELF LIKE HE JUST SAW A PYLEAN OR SOME SHIT OMG"
--ontdmadmen "Shut the Door, Have a Seat" thread

This quote is actually not related to my post which is about another boy I have a crush on, Nick Stahl!



I am just being lazy and using a picture I already uploaded to Photobucket in July when I was obsessed with Carnivale. Nick Stahl has this facial expression in almost every minute of every episode of that show. But in the movie Quid Pro Quo, which I watched last night, it turns out that he can make other expressions, too.

Quid Pro Quo is a movie about a guy who works for a euphemism for NPR. He wants to do a story about able-bodied people who would prefer to be paralyzed or amputees. (In real life this is called Body Integrity Identity Disorder.) He meets with a woman who claims to know someone who has BIID, but she's really talking about herself, duh. He has paraplegia from a car accident when he was a kid, so the woman kind of has a crush on him and asks him for advice about how to use a wheelchair and stuff. Also he has a crush on her too? And they have sex? And he finds this pair of shoes that un-paralyze him when he puts them on, and he starts walking with braces and then a cane. And the woman is more and more mysterious and depressed and tells him that she wants him to help her become a paraplegic.

Yeah. The very end of this movie has a twist that really annoyed me because I thought it was cheap and just not necessary and unbelievable. I think the thing about the movie is that because it's kind of a genre film--magic realism/noir/ish--the disabilities become thematic elements, if that makes sense.

It's hard to explain what I mean by this but basically, if you have read Fingersmith or Affinity by Sarah Waters, or seen the movies, they're both gothic thrillers centered on lesbian relationships. Because of the genre, and the way that lesbianism has historically been used in that genre, I think the lesbianism comes off as kind of creepy and gothic itself in both stories; it comes off as something that adds to the theme. And I can see how some people would think this is offensive, because you could say that lesbianism is being used as a trope or a symbol. But personally, I really like it, because when lesbianism is being used a genre thing, it means that you get more interesting lesbian stories, and you get lesbian stories that aren't issue stories about coming out or something. Another example of what I'm talking about is Mullholland Drive.

Anyway, in Quid Pro Quo I feel like Isaac fits better as a noir hero because he looks different from other people when he's going down the street, and because he's experienced discrimination. And then later, disability moves around in a dreamlike way--as Isaac becomes physically better, Fiona becomes mentally worse--general art movie stuff, not trying to do a realistic portrayal of bodies and brains, but kind of messing around with bodies and brains to say something about the human condition, or just create a strange story that's aesthetically pleasing. Quid pro quo, this in exchange for that; the idea that there's some kind of cosmic bargain, or some symmetry, where people like Isaac wish they could walk and people like Fiona wish they couldn't, and it's possible to tap into that pattern, somehow. This is how I would like to think of the movie, and although I know some people just 100% wouldn't like the fact that disability is used as an aesthetic thing or a metaphor, and I understand why--well, I think it's a more interesting story about disability than the straight issue movies that usually get made. And also Isaac is just a cool character because he's basically nice and competent without being boring or "inspirational," and he's allowed to complain about ableism without being an "angry" character.

But okay, would you like to hear the end? SPOILER:

Isaac figures out that Fiona is the person who paralyzed him and killed his parents, because she tried to run away from home and was driving her mom's car when she was like ten years old and she crashed into Isaac's family's car. Also, he always remembered seeing her, but he blocked out the memory? Whatever. I'm not sure that this is a realistic reason for someone to develop BIID, but okay, the ridiculous part is: Isaac confronts Fiona and she tells him that he's not actually a paraplegic and he just has a hysterical condition because he felt guilty that his parents died. Isaac gets really mad and tries to jump out of his chair and attack her, and falls down because he's not used to walking, but as he's lying on the ground Fiona sees his legs moving, and the movie ends with Isaac (presumably now ambulatory) on fake-NPR telling the story and saying how he never saw Fiona again.

This bothers me, because I think I can only accept the disability-as-metaphor thing (instead of finding it weird and offensive when Isaac is "cured" by the shoes) if the movie is not supposed to be realistic. If the shoes are actually magic, then I think the story can be a fairy tale or a parable or something. I think it would be cool if the movie ended with Isaac paralyzing Fiona and then being able to walk without a cane. That kind of thing.

But instead, the surprise ending is that it's actually not magic. First of all this just bothers me because it means that in a movie that uses paraplegia as a symbol and a theme, there are no paraplegic main characters. I don't like this because I think that if you're going to use a minority group like lesbians or paraplegics to enhance your genre movie, you should acknowledge that we/they actually exist outside of genre. Does that make sense? I feel like the movie is offensive if Isaac isn't actually paraplegic because it's acting like paraplegia is just a distant theoretical thing.

And also, I just thought it cheapened the story and was a Big Surprise Ending that wasn't really supported by any previous events or by anything we knew about Isaac.

So, in conclusion, there are some reasons to think that this movie is offensive and/or dumb, but I am glad that Nick Stahl is so good-looking because I probably wouldn't have watched it otherwise and I mostly enjoyed it, and thought it was more interesting than most movies about people with disabilities.

I was just thinking about Carnivale

because I love it so much and everything, and I always seem to briefly mention it in posts where I'm complaining about Glee. Although other people might disagree, I think Carnivale is an example of a show with disabled characters made by someone who actually respects people with disabilities.

The show is sort of hard to explain; it's ridiculous and I love it. It's a really slow-moving soap opera about a traveling carnival in the 1930s, and by the way two of the main characters are superpowered beings who are fated to enact a battle between God and the devil. Dan Knauf, the creator of the show, described the idea as, "What if you wake up in the morning and you're the Antichrist?" IT'S HARD TO EXPLAIN OKAY? I just think it's neat because it takes all this supernatural stuff and puts in a painfully ordinary context. The "hero" of the show, Ben, is a monosyllabic, spacey guy who's embarrassed by his powers and tries to stay awake as much as possible so he doesn't have prophetic dreams. And so on. The period stuff is also astonishingly good, as far as I can tell.

Now that I actually run through the characters in my head, I'm not sure what I was thinking saying that most of the disabled characters are played by disabled actors. A blind character, a paralyzed character, an intellectually disabled character, and a character with a limp are all played by nondisabled actors--there are plot reasons for most of these casting choices, although the scenes where they appear without their disabilities are brief. Also, understandably I think because it's hard to find Siamese twins, the Siamese twins and some other minor circus freak characters are played by actors who don't have those conditions. And the character with a limp is presented as being really torn up about it. And there are a few heartswelling moments where Ben cures physically disabled people by laying on of hands. Wow, what the fuck am I talking about? Why do I think this show is so great on disability stuff?

Well, if I recall correctly, there are several episodes where guest actors with actual "circus freak" conditions were cast. And that's something. There's also a physically disabled actor who plays an important role in several episodes (to say more would be a massive spoiler). But the main thing is MICHAEL J. ANDERSON, an actor with dwarfism who plays one of the main characters on the show! Now that I'm thinking about the show really critically, I guess I can see how Anderson's character, Samson, might be a "magical disabled person" character; he's quirky, wise, doesn't have much of a backstory, and delivers the exposition-y speeches at the beginning of the episodes just because it looks cool (in the context of the show, Samson doesn't know the information he says in the speeches). However, I think that it would be unfair to frame the character as simply "magical" because many other Carnivale characters have "magical" qualities. Also, as I think I mentioned when I was talking about Kurt on Glee, I think that what's important is not whether characters are stereotypical, but whether they come off as real humans. Samson is given tons of screentime and lines and does, to me, come off as a real human. He isn't the protagonist of the show, and there is a particular role that he usually plays in the plots, but he sometimes makes decisions that reveal surprising aspects of his character. He's just really cool.

And also, I just can't understate the importance of casting a really talented actor with a disability as a regular in the show and making him one of the major characters (the show has a lot of regulars, some of whom aren't featured very much). Actors with dwarfism often appear in movies and TV shows, but don't often get to stick around once the novelty has worn off. Michael J. Anderson was really given a chance to show how awesome he is for a long period of time, instead of being used as a tool to show how surreal and wacky something is.

And then, the coolest thing! This woman, Bree Walker, has fingers and toes that are fused together. She is (was?) a news anchor who, after wearing prosthetic hands for several years, decided to openly display her real hands. She now appears in movies and television shows playing people with her genetic condition; she also has a reality show, I think. She contacted the makers of Carnivale, pointing out that a lot of people with her condition used to be circus freaks, and telling them her ideas for a recurring character she could play on the show.

And yeah. She got it. She was on three episodes of the show playing Samson's ex-wife who joins the carnival with her new husband. The makers of the show actually thought it was legitimate for someone with a disability to be like "hey, I have this condition, and there's no one with my condition on the show, and I'm a good actor, so can I be on it?" They didn't think their vision of what the show should be like was so massively important that they couldn't listen to a disabled person's point of view, and accept her suggestion. Cool!

Dan Knauf has said that his interest in circus freaks stemmed from watching his father, a wheelchair user, be discriminated against when Knauf was growing up. Now that I've written this whole rundown of the show, I can see that there are potentially problematic elements, but I can't bring myself to be too bothered by them; I think, overall, Knauf's respect for disabled people is very obvious in the decisions he made with the show.

Glee: possibly an elaborate satire of tokenism, but probably not

I saw my second person with green hair in the UK (the first was yesterday). It makes me really happy but I get shy and stare at nothing, although I guess that's what I do most of the time.

I'm continuing to watch Glee, despite my reservations. I was pleasantly surprised by the third episode because the Sassy Minority Characters were actually treated like human beings. The heavy black girl complained about not having had a relationship, and the stereotypically gay boy comforted her. Then, through some dumb catalysts, the HBG somehow thought that the SGB was interested in her romantically, then thought that he was in love with the main female character on the show, then broke his car window and sang a song about it in a fantasy sequence. When she apologized, he explained that he is in fact gay. She responded positively, encouraging him to be more open about it to other students, to which he replied, "I'm not that confident."

This was really nice. I always disliked both characters before because they didn't seem real; they were just in the show for fake diversity and comic relief, as far as I could tell. But in this episode, Mercedes was by turns cynical, realistic, kind, and naive. She seemed like a regular dorky kid, not a Sass Machine, and I found her rather sweet. Despite being assumed to be gay by pretty much everyone, Kurt had trouble saying the words; he looked uncomfortable and almost started to cry. After he rejected Mercedes's suggestion that he publicly come out, Kurt sashayed away, begging the question of whether his "fabulous" persona is a natural expression of his homosexuality, or a front he puts up to distract from what he's really going through.

Some viewers have suggested that Glee is actually going to be this elaborate deconstruction of tokenism, where the minority characters are tropey comic relief in the first few episodes, and then the stereotypes are pulled out from under us. Well, that would be cool, I guess. It seems like giving them too much credit, but I guess we'll see how the next episode goes.

The other two minority characters are Artie, who uses a wheelchair, and Tina, an Asian girl who stutters (and is maybe a lesbian?). Artie and Tina never say ANYTHING. Artie's finest hour involved the main male character, Finn, proving how awesome he is by saving Artie from being bullied. Go Artie! In the first episode he was singing "Sit Down You're Rocking the Boat", but the main female character, Rachel, said he shouldn't be singing that because he was already sitting down. By the end of the episode Finn had become the lead male singer in the glee club, and Artie sat on the side playing guitar. I mean, it was more than Tina gets to do, but still. Also, they accidentally cast a really good singer as Artie, and a really average singer as Finn, making this even more awkward than it already was. Being able to walk is apparently a more important qualification for "lead singer" than actually being talented.

This blog points out that Artie almost never pushes his own wheelchair, and is just pushed around by other characters, often for comedic effect as he crashes into other people and walls. I liked the physical comedy at first, because it challenges the idea that including a wheelchair user makes a performance less visually interesting. The wheelchair makes all those scenes more fun to watch, not less. But as the linked blog points out, it gets to a point where Artie is treated like a prop. When Jane Lynch calls Artie half a person, and a bully says it's okay to endanger him because he's already disabled, we're supposed to see that those lines are offensive and the characters saying them are villainous. But it seems like that's what the writers of the show actually think about Artie, given that he has few lines and not much personality.

I've been writing this post for more than an hour, I guess because this show has so much potential to be unique and is doing such a good job squashing it, but I wanted to add that it was really douchey to cast an ambulatory actor as Artie. There are not a lot of parts for disabled actors, especially in musicals. The guy who plays Artie used to be in a boy band and is apparently a really great dancer; he has expressed in interviews how he keeps accidentally moving his legs during musical numbers, and has to tense them up. You know what would be a great way to avoid this kind of problem? Wait, can you guess what I'm going to say? No, you probably can't, because when I criticized Artie's casting on IMDB, I got the following responses:

"Why couldn't they have found a real person with OCD to play Emma? Or a real professional cheer coach to play Sue?" (Carries on in this vein for a while, apparently missing the point that this isn't taking away jobs from OCD people and cheerleading coaches who want to act.) "...And honestly it might have been difficult to find a professional actor who was disabled and had a good singing voice. Not impossible of course, but harder to find than someone else." (Because disabled singer/actors are occupied with all the parts for disabled people in musicals!)

"Honestly, it doesn't makes more sense to have a non-disabled person to play a person in a wheelchair especially since this is a tv show that utilizes 'dream sequences,' if that makes sense. Artie is not completely restricted to a wheelchair now." (Mercedes isn't being played by a thin actor in a fat suit so she can be thin in her dream sequences.) "Also, disabled people often have other health issues that could potentially slow down production of the show." (Yeah. And people with serious health issues would totally audition for a TV show, and wouldn't be weeded out by the fact that they probably wouldn't be good belters.)

This is my favorite:

"The purpose of choosing a cast for a TV series is not to accomplish anyone's idea of social justice. And I'm not too sure a young wheelchair-bound actor would be all that happy to think that the only reason he was considered at all only because he was in a wheelchair."

Because (as has already been hinted at above) wheelchairs users just don't have the talent, health, or energy to be on this show, so if the casting director only considered actors in wheelchairs, then he would by definition be considering people who don't really deserve to be cast, which is actually insulting to disabled people because offering disabled people a job is treating them as objects of pity because they don't really deserve to have a job and treating them equally would mean not giving them a job, something they would probably be really grateful for, and which would give disabled kids the message that disabled people shouldn't be cast in TV shows, because it's ableist.

(Did I mention how much I love Carnivale for by and large casting actors with the conditions their characters were supposed to have? Because I really, really do.)

Geek Love by Katherine Dunn

I need to read more, and now that this ordeal of a novel is over, I'm sure I will. I've been reading it since mid-July and it's been hard to get anywhere with it.

John told me he read the first two-thirds and cut his losses. He said, "It's a bad book." I disagree. It's well-composed. It's just that the author's whole intention in writing the book seems to be create something massively disgusting and depressing, and as a result I never wanted to pick it up.

It's probably my fault; I can't remember the last time I read a book without checking ahead to see how it ended. And Geek Love ends horribly. Actually, horrible things are happening from pretty much the first page; if I remember correctly, the book starts with the main character's parents explaining how they intentionally caused their kids to be born with birth defects so they could be sideshows in the family carnival. And this is the most pleasant scene in the novel, since the parents and all their deformed kids are still getting along.

I like carnivals. I like Carnivale. I like Freaks. But the people in Carnivale are regular people, and the people in Freaks are better than regular people. The people in Geek Love all have screwed-up morals, and some of them are downright evil. The most evil character is Arty, who is brilliant and charismatic and has no limbs. He starts a cult based on the idea that having your limbs removed will make you happier. The main character, Oly, is in love with Arty (even though he's evil and her brother). The story is mostly about how Arty destroyed the family, but this is a flashback from the present when Oly is observing the daughter she was forced to give up. Oly's daughter has a tail and Oly will do anything to keep her daughter from getting the tail removed and becoming a "norm," including befriending and murdering the person who's offered to arrange the operation. But it's hard to go undercover when you're an albino hunchback dwarf!

If that sounds like a good book, well, good for you, I guess. Maybe it sounded like a good book to me, at some point--I mean, I like stories about outsiders, the nature of abnormality, and weird love. But I guess I want those stories to have a moral core like Carnivale and Freaks do. Most of the people in Geek Love are the farthest thing from moral, and their motivations are so hard to relate to that it kept me from caring most of the time.

Also, I can't help but be bothered by the way Dunn equates physical disability and difference with evil and repulsiveness. It's all the same to her--luxuriously gross passages about characters' hanging breasts and mildew-infested balls; murder and necrophilia; people who don't have any pigment in their skin or can't walk. Using albinos and people with phocomelia as a metaphor for the darker side of human nature is problematic because disabled people aren't unicorns. It's wrong to write disabled characters for shock value, because real people have to deal with the attitudes you're contributing to.