"examples of ableism in the movie precious"
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Showing posts with label precious. Show all posts
Showing posts with label precious. Show all posts
04 February, 2010
The harder fallacy
I keep thinking about something my friend said after we watched Precious and I was talking about how the portrayal of the child with Down Syndrome was offensive. (I'm going to refer to the character as Quishay, which is the name of the little girl who played her.) My friend kept saying, "Well, it IS harder to raise a kid with Down Syndrome." I said "Do you actually know any people with Down Syndrome, because if you did, I think you'd feel differently." My friend was like, "What do you mean, do you think I wouldn't think it's harder to have Down Syndrome? It's a DISABILITY. It's not a good thing. Are you saying it's not harder?"
I'm probably caricaturing this in my mind because it was a while ago and also it made me really mad. When I quote people who made me mad I tend to repeat the things they say in this particular voice that's both monotonous and overdramatic. I know this is a problem. I should be mature enough to disagree with people without being shitty about it. But it's really hard not to be shitty about it! Plus I hate the "it's harder" strawman even more than I hate the "but bad things will happen to you if you don't pass!!" strawman (#3 in the linked post).
So, I will just say what I wanted to say to my friend, but couldn't get out very clearly. Here are two facts about disability:
1. For whatever reason, nondisabled people tend to get grossed out or uncomfortable around disabled people.
2. By definition, all things being equal, it is harder to be disabled than it is to be nondisabled. Also, it's harder to be the guardian of a kid who is disabled because it often costs more money and the kid might have to live at home longer, or forever. Also, it's sometimes harder to be close to a disabled person (as a friend/significant other, as part of your job, or as a family member) because you are used to relating to people in a particular way that doesn't work with this person, or because you had built them up in your head as a person without a disability.
Some parts of #2 are not inherent aspects of disability. For example it isn't fair that it costs more money to raise a kid with a disability. That shouldn't be the case. But the fact that it's not inherent doesn't make it less real for the people for whom it's real. If a person is spending all their money so that their disabled kid can go to school, because public school does not do what the kid needs, it IS harder for them. So, yes. I'm saying it is harder to raise a disabled child.
But that's not the only thing in the world that is hard. And hard is not the same thing as repulsive or tragic.
In Precious, Precious has two kids. She is a young teenager. Her kids are the product of nonconsensual incest. Having kids as a young teenager is really hard. Getting raped by your father isn't just "hard," it is horrible, evil, and tragic. There aren't enough words to describe what it is. It's a lot worse than having a kid with Down Syndrome or any disability.
Now I guess it sounds like I'm on a track of saying Down Syndrome is okay because being raped by your father is worse. That's not my intent. What I'm saying is, Precious has two kids. The second kid she has, who has no disabilities, changes her life. She loves him tremendously, right away, and her love for him gives her the strength to fight back against her abusive mother and seek help. There are other factors that give Precious this motivation; it's not just the baby, it's that she has gotten support from her teacher and classmates. But still, this thing that is very difficult--a baby born to a single teenage mother--ends up being AMAZING. This exact thing happens to girls in real life, sometimes. Situations that are objectively really hard are experienced as wonderful and joyful.
So, harder doesn't equal bad or gross. And I would say that the portrayal of Precious's older child is as something bad and gross. It is totally unrealistic for Precious to have a baby with Down Syndrome. Down Syndrome isn't an inherited condition, it's a genetic mutation, so incest doesn't increase its likelihood. An older mother increases its likelihood, and Precious is very young. I believe that this plot development, which belongs in a sci-fi movie, is just meant to add to the atmosphere of tragedy and gloom around Precious's life so far. She's physically abused! She's sexually abused! She can't read! She's poor! She had a baby and is pregnant again...AND, her kid has DOWN SYNDROME. WORST THING EVER. Quishay is not shown smiling or interacting with Precious and is not filmed in the loving way that her second child, Abdul, is filmed. (It's true that Quishay doesn't live with Precious for most of the movie, but number one, no one forced the writers to write the story that way; and, number two, we could have had shots emphasizing Quishay's cuteness and lovability when Precious gets her back at the end of the movie.)
The movie Precious is hateful to people with Down Syndrome because it uses Down Syndrome as a shortcut to say "Precious's life is horrible." At the beginning of this post I listed two facts about disability. This movie exploits fact #1, nondisabled people's discomfort and revulsion about disability. That is an immoral thing to do. It is incredibly disingenuous to claim that the portrayal of Quishay is somehow legitimate because "it's harder to raise a kid with Down Syndrome." This isn't about difficulty, it's about prejudice and using a disabled child as a horror-movie monster.
I am so tired of this. I call it "the harder fallacy." It sucks because when you're trying to point out that someone is being prejudiced, you get totally knocked off balance by a bogus argument about whether the victim of the prejudice, or their parents, has a hard time. But it's not about that. They're two totally different things.
eta: I'm pretty bad at science, I apologize. Apparently it's not as unlikely as I thought for a teenager to have a baby with Down Syndrome. However, my points about the portrayal of Quishay still stand, and would stand no matter what disability she had.
I'm probably caricaturing this in my mind because it was a while ago and also it made me really mad. When I quote people who made me mad I tend to repeat the things they say in this particular voice that's both monotonous and overdramatic. I know this is a problem. I should be mature enough to disagree with people without being shitty about it. But it's really hard not to be shitty about it! Plus I hate the "it's harder" strawman even more than I hate the "but bad things will happen to you if you don't pass!!" strawman (#3 in the linked post).
So, I will just say what I wanted to say to my friend, but couldn't get out very clearly. Here are two facts about disability:
1. For whatever reason, nondisabled people tend to get grossed out or uncomfortable around disabled people.
2. By definition, all things being equal, it is harder to be disabled than it is to be nondisabled. Also, it's harder to be the guardian of a kid who is disabled because it often costs more money and the kid might have to live at home longer, or forever. Also, it's sometimes harder to be close to a disabled person (as a friend/significant other, as part of your job, or as a family member) because you are used to relating to people in a particular way that doesn't work with this person, or because you had built them up in your head as a person without a disability.
Some parts of #2 are not inherent aspects of disability. For example it isn't fair that it costs more money to raise a kid with a disability. That shouldn't be the case. But the fact that it's not inherent doesn't make it less real for the people for whom it's real. If a person is spending all their money so that their disabled kid can go to school, because public school does not do what the kid needs, it IS harder for them. So, yes. I'm saying it is harder to raise a disabled child.
But that's not the only thing in the world that is hard. And hard is not the same thing as repulsive or tragic.
In Precious, Precious has two kids. She is a young teenager. Her kids are the product of nonconsensual incest. Having kids as a young teenager is really hard. Getting raped by your father isn't just "hard," it is horrible, evil, and tragic. There aren't enough words to describe what it is. It's a lot worse than having a kid with Down Syndrome or any disability.
Now I guess it sounds like I'm on a track of saying Down Syndrome is okay because being raped by your father is worse. That's not my intent. What I'm saying is, Precious has two kids. The second kid she has, who has no disabilities, changes her life. She loves him tremendously, right away, and her love for him gives her the strength to fight back against her abusive mother and seek help. There are other factors that give Precious this motivation; it's not just the baby, it's that she has gotten support from her teacher and classmates. But still, this thing that is very difficult--a baby born to a single teenage mother--ends up being AMAZING. This exact thing happens to girls in real life, sometimes. Situations that are objectively really hard are experienced as wonderful and joyful.
So, harder doesn't equal bad or gross. And I would say that the portrayal of Precious's older child is as something bad and gross. It is totally unrealistic for Precious to have a baby with Down Syndrome. Down Syndrome isn't an inherited condition, it's a genetic mutation, so incest doesn't increase its likelihood. An older mother increases its likelihood, and Precious is very young. I believe that this plot development, which belongs in a sci-fi movie, is just meant to add to the atmosphere of tragedy and gloom around Precious's life so far. She's physically abused! She's sexually abused! She can't read! She's poor! She had a baby and is pregnant again...AND, her kid has DOWN SYNDROME. WORST THING EVER. Quishay is not shown smiling or interacting with Precious and is not filmed in the loving way that her second child, Abdul, is filmed. (It's true that Quishay doesn't live with Precious for most of the movie, but number one, no one forced the writers to write the story that way; and, number two, we could have had shots emphasizing Quishay's cuteness and lovability when Precious gets her back at the end of the movie.)
The movie Precious is hateful to people with Down Syndrome because it uses Down Syndrome as a shortcut to say "Precious's life is horrible." At the beginning of this post I listed two facts about disability. This movie exploits fact #1, nondisabled people's discomfort and revulsion about disability. That is an immoral thing to do. It is incredibly disingenuous to claim that the portrayal of Quishay is somehow legitimate because "it's harder to raise a kid with Down Syndrome." This isn't about difficulty, it's about prejudice and using a disabled child as a horror-movie monster.
I am so tired of this. I call it "the harder fallacy." It sucks because when you're trying to point out that someone is being prejudiced, you get totally knocked off balance by a bogus argument about whether the victim of the prejudice, or their parents, has a hard time. But it's not about that. They're two totally different things.
eta: I'm pretty bad at science, I apologize. Apparently it's not as unlikely as I thought for a teenager to have a baby with Down Syndrome. However, my points about the portrayal of Quishay still stand, and would stand no matter what disability she had.
01 January, 2010
Precious
I feel like art is bad art if it portrays horrific events in a way that dulls the audience's reactions. I felt this way about the book Love Does Not Make Me Gentle or Kind by Chavisa Woods, which contains several stories in which underdeveloped female characters are violently abused and murdered. According to comments I've read of hers, almost every event described in the book happened to two women who Chavisa Woods knows. However, because of the way some of the stories are written, the abuse stops seeming real because the characters don't feel real; they seem to exist only as the objects of abuse. I'm not trying to write a review of Love Does Not Make Me Gentle or Kind--for the record, it has some stories I really like--but I'm just saying that I don't think it matters if the events of a piece of art are literally true, I think it's still legit to say that they come off as over-the-top or dulling.
Anyway, I sort of expected to have this reaction to Precious--i.e. I thought it would be so horrifying that I wouldn't be able to actually engage with it. I do feel like Precious's mom is so one-dimensionally evil that it's hard to relate to what's going on, but it turned out that the movie wasn't just a one-way trip to The Worst Life Ever, so that ended up being a smaller aspect of the story than I thought it would be. I don't feel qualified to comment on whether the movie is racist and/or damaging, except to say that Precious was a likable and interesting character and not just a one-dimensional victim, which is cool.
I might as well talk about what I actually feel qualified to talk about: the portrayal of Precious's young daughter with Down Syndrome. I was sort of biased because I had read Dave Hingsburger's post where he criticized the movie because the child was called "Mongo" and never given another name. It's not like I think the creators of the movie are saying that's a good thing to do, so I feel a bit like I can't criticize the movie for that.
However, when I really thought about it, I realized that it's incredibly unrealistic for a teenage girl to have a baby with Down Syndrome because most people who have babies with Down Syndrome are middle-aged. I said this to my friend, and she said that it's not unrealistic at all because the baby was a product of incest. But then when we actually looked this up, we found this article saying that there is no correlation between incest and Down Syndrome. So now I feel like they only made the baby have Down Syndrome because it's supposed to be just another shocking horrible thing about Precious's life. And that's really fucked up.
When Precious has her second baby, her love and devotion for him changes her life. She is capable of this love and devotion partly because her life circumstances have already begun to change, because her teacher and classmates care about her. It makes logical sense that when she had her first baby, she didn't react in the same way. But it still bothers me that they created a narrative where her disabled child is just another problem, while her nondisabled child improves her life.
My friend said that it is bad to have a kid with Down Syndrome because it makes your life harder. I don't think that disabilities being hard is a reason to use a person with a disability as a plot device to show how awful their parent's life is.
It's not a huge aspect of the movie. It's not even a small aspect, I guess. I think they just didn't think about it but that almost upsets me more, that it just made perfect sense to them to use Down Syndrome as a shorthand for awfulness.
Anyway, I sort of expected to have this reaction to Precious--i.e. I thought it would be so horrifying that I wouldn't be able to actually engage with it. I do feel like Precious's mom is so one-dimensionally evil that it's hard to relate to what's going on, but it turned out that the movie wasn't just a one-way trip to The Worst Life Ever, so that ended up being a smaller aspect of the story than I thought it would be. I don't feel qualified to comment on whether the movie is racist and/or damaging, except to say that Precious was a likable and interesting character and not just a one-dimensional victim, which is cool.
I might as well talk about what I actually feel qualified to talk about: the portrayal of Precious's young daughter with Down Syndrome. I was sort of biased because I had read Dave Hingsburger's post where he criticized the movie because the child was called "Mongo" and never given another name. It's not like I think the creators of the movie are saying that's a good thing to do, so I feel a bit like I can't criticize the movie for that.
However, when I really thought about it, I realized that it's incredibly unrealistic for a teenage girl to have a baby with Down Syndrome because most people who have babies with Down Syndrome are middle-aged. I said this to my friend, and she said that it's not unrealistic at all because the baby was a product of incest. But then when we actually looked this up, we found this article saying that there is no correlation between incest and Down Syndrome. So now I feel like they only made the baby have Down Syndrome because it's supposed to be just another shocking horrible thing about Precious's life. And that's really fucked up.
When Precious has her second baby, her love and devotion for him changes her life. She is capable of this love and devotion partly because her life circumstances have already begun to change, because her teacher and classmates care about her. It makes logical sense that when she had her first baby, she didn't react in the same way. But it still bothers me that they created a narrative where her disabled child is just another problem, while her nondisabled child improves her life.
My friend said that it is bad to have a kid with Down Syndrome because it makes your life harder. I don't think that disabilities being hard is a reason to use a person with a disability as a plot device to show how awful their parent's life is.
It's not a huge aspect of the movie. It's not even a small aspect, I guess. I think they just didn't think about it but that almost upsets me more, that it just made perfect sense to them to use Down Syndrome as a shorthand for awfulness.
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