A few months ago I made a post saying that most physically disabled characters in mainstream media have acquired disabilities and that I thought this was because audiences couldn't identify with characters who identified as disabled, and weren't miserable about being disabled. Disability has to be a relatively new thing that you can do montages about, like on House. Or it has to come out of a tragedy like on Glee (Artie was of course in a car accident that killed his mom when he was a kid).
I wandered in while my mom was watching Covert Affairs and I was like, "That guy is bad at pretending to be blind," and my mom was like, "Oh, he just became blind in an accident." Surprise surprise. Doesn't that make things easy for Christopher Gorham?
Anyway, in my previous post I didn't address non-physical disabilities at all. But I was thinking maybe the reason ASD tends to suck in fiction is sort of another version of the same thing. Writers cannot imagine what it's like to have lived your whole life with a disability, so they write about ASD as though it's something that just happened to the character last week. That's why characters with ASD suck at everything. (To be specific, I'm referring to characters who are verbal and whose problems are portrayed as being mainly social.)
This is something that always makes me really mad. My mom was trying to get me to watch the movie Snow Cake, which I've heard is very good and everything, but just the idea of watching an Autism Movie makes me feel ashamed and sick. I know that like most people I can be selfish and stupid, but in Autism Movies these are portrayed as defining traits for someone like me and it just sucks to know that people are watching movies and thinking that's what ASD people are like.
Lots of people with ASD have anxiety and anger problems as a result of social failure, but this is often not portrayed in fiction because to acknowledge that someone can have anxiety and anger problems, you have to acknowledge that they can have awareness of their social failure, which in turn means acknowledging that they have lived with a disability their whole life. The really oversimplified "oh I just got autism yesterday" ASD characters in the mainstream media are insulting because their portrayal implies that ASD people don't have common sense or the ability to learn from mistakes and cope with impairment.
Seriously even coping badly is okay with me. I am so in love with Mad Men 3x01 when Pete thinks he's about to be fired so he starts making an awkward speech about how he should have socialized with Lane Pryce more. Because it shows that Pete knows people don't like him. A lot of Pete's behavior in early seasons comes out of his (sometimes buried) knowledge that people don't like him, and that's one reason I enjoy him as much as I do. He is someone who has lived with whatever-he-has for 26 years when the show starts, and this hasn't been a good thing, but it has made him complicated. What really frustrates me about intentional portrayals of ASD is that the characters are incredibly uncomplicated. They have not responded or reacted to anything in their lives.
There's also the fact, of course, that these characters don't just suck on TV, but they make non-disabled people suck in real life because they think that ASD is uncomplicated, and think they're qualified to diagnose or misdiagnose people based on brief interactions. Good times for everyone.
Showing posts with label glee. Show all posts
Showing posts with label glee. Show all posts
22 August, 2010
20 April, 2010
Zoe decided to win at life
Why Glee Makes Me Want to Kill Someone
other recommended reading while I'm at it:
Just Stop It (really old Dave Hingsburger post about trying to get ID people to act "age-appropriate")
I am not responsible for your discomfort (another really old post, by the person who wrote the "Growing Up With Sky" post that I linked in a previous recommended reading)
(I know I need to do a "mental age" tag and maybe do some more in-depth posts about mental age etc. I have a lot to say about it.)
oh wait, edited to add: A Five-Year-Old's Explanation of Autism
AWWWWW
(This is the best day of the year because it's the day that everyone else thinks and talks like me.)
other recommended reading while I'm at it:
Just Stop It (really old Dave Hingsburger post about trying to get ID people to act "age-appropriate")
I am not responsible for your discomfort (another really old post, by the person who wrote the "Growing Up With Sky" post that I linked in a previous recommended reading)
(I know I need to do a "mental age" tag and maybe do some more in-depth posts about mental age etc. I have a lot to say about it.)
oh wait, edited to add: A Five-Year-Old's Explanation of Autism
AWWWWW
(This is the best day of the year because it's the day that everyone else thinks and talks like me.)
19 February, 2010
Passing As Ethics is a World
Or, the Only Useful Thing Glee Ever Did
Disability Blog Carnival #63--Relationships
(due tomorrow, you should write something!)
Autism is not all about being bad with people, even though that's what most people think (once you can talk). A lot of people are bad with people in different ways, but they only want to talk about us. How they can make us better. What they don't know is that being a person who was once bad with people is its own punishment. That is, it's a whole new way of being bad.
I suffer from a syndrome. It's called Passing As Ethics. I made it up, though, so I can call it whatever I want. Sometimes I call it Us vs. Them or Them vs. Me. None of these names do a good job explaining the whole thing, just parts of it. It consists of a collection of false beliefs. Or, exaggerations. Conclusions badly reached.
Fact: Autism Spectrum Disorder people look sort of weird to normal people, and some things are harder for them. To a Passing As Ethics sufferer, this means: the way ASD people do things is worse than the way other people do them--->ASD people should feel guilty if other people can tell there's something weird about them--->ASD people should feel guilty for stimming--->if a normal person isn't interested in something an ASD person says it's because the ASD person is monologuing--->if an ASD person isn't interested in something a normal person says it's because they have no empathy--->a friendship where one person talks most of the time is not a real friendship--->if a normal person doesn't like something an ASD person does, the ASD person should stop--->the opposite is definitely not true--->well, I think you get the idea.
All kinds of people can suffer from Passing As Ethics. A mother who brings her extremely sound-sensitive kid into a grocery store, then gets angry at him for crying, is a PAE sufferer. A teacher who tries to behavior-modify kids out of stimming or using big words, because it's "weird," is a PAE sufferer. And an ASD person who is unable to speak up when her classmates are saying things about ASD people that aren't true, because she doesn't think she can explain in less than four sentences, and she's interested in ASD rights, so if she talks a lot about something she's interested in, that would be monologuing, and that would be wrong--well, I prefer to say I have PAE, it doesn't have me. Who the fuck am I kidding, yeah it does. It has me really bad.
This post isn't about PAE in general, though. It is about how my disability affects my relationships. I think that talking about PAE in vague terms would be confusing, so I will just use specific examples instead.
Like most people who are writers, I like to talk about things I'm writing and things that have happened to me, especially if something is a good story. In a writing workshop, I met a boy named Noah who thought I was a very good writer, and I felt the same way about him. Noah and I haltingly came together out of mutual admiration, and began spending a lot of time together. We told each other about things we had written and interesting things that had happened to us. Although, I guess I talked more.
The semester came to an end and Noah didn't apply for another workshop. He said that he didn't feel ready to be in a workshop again. Early in the next semester, Noah decided that even though he wanted to be a writer, workshops made him feel self-conscious, and he was going to major in Psychology instead of Creative Writing. I bugged Noah about this, both because I wanted to be in more classes with him, and because I felt like it was what I was supposed to do. I always worry that I'm not as interested in other people as I should be, so I felt good about myself for being such a fan of Noah's writing. I made an effort to express this as much as possible; for example, I would introduce Noah to people by telling them that he was a good writer.
I started sleeping in Noah's room because my roommate and I were proving not to be compatible. Noah went to bed early and got up very early. When he got up, he would write for a while on his computer. When I asked to look at what he wrote, he said no. One night when Noah was asleep, I opened his computer and read his stories. A few days later I said, "Hey, Noah, would you be mad at me if I went on your computer and read your stories? Because I did and they were really good."
Noah felt very uncomfortable about what had happened. He told me that I couldn't stay in his room anymore, and for a while we didn't see each other very much. I was very upset of course, but I was also stunned. I hadn't imagined that Noah would be so upset that I had read his stories--and if you insist on reading this as a typical ASD lack of empathy, then I can't stop you. But the reason I was stunned was that I had a conviction that showing interest in another person was morally right. I had been worried about my friendship with Noah because I thought that I talked too much about my writing, my life, and my interests, and Noah mostly listened. I thought that I needed to make the friendship more balanced by learning more about Noah.
Well, I guess this does show a lack of empathy, but it's the PAE kind. The same lack of empathy that a mom shows when she takes her sound-sensitive child to the grocery store is what I showed to Noah. I expected Noah to react like my idea of a normal person, to react positively because I'd done something normal. This expectation was horrible because it showed no understanding of the person Noah actually was--a person who was self-conscious about his writing, and furthermore had actually said he didn't want me to read it.
This is one of the shittiest things I've ever done to another person, and is probably my best PAE story. However, lots of little PAE events occur when I interact with my roommate, Laura. I say things to her, and she doesn't answer me. When this happens, I think that Laura hasn't answered me because I was monologuing or saying something weird, and she thought it was boring or annoying. This makes me feel guilty and embarrassed. Then I feel annoyed at Laura for making me feel that way. I think that she's lording it over me because she's a normal person and I'm a freakish ASD person who doesn't know how to say the normal thing. Sometimes I just feel bad inside my head, but other times, if Laura expresses surprise about something I already told her about, I snap, "I already told you; if you didn't want to listen, that's your problem."
In my nonfiction workshop, they say you can't worry about making yourself look bad. Here goes: Laura is actually deaf in her left ear. I've lived with her for ten cumulative months in freshman and junior year, and I've known about her deafness since probably the first week. Yeah, that's right--I get mad at someone for not listening to me, even though if I actually thought about it, I would know it's because she can't hear me. I feel like there's some Normal Person vs. Freakish Disabled Person conflict going on, even though the lack of communication is actually caused by the normal person having a disability, and not even knowing that communication is being attempted.
I never thought of Laura as having a disability until I saw a person like her being insulted in an episode of Glee, a show that basically exists to insult disabled people. It turned my head around. The sheer irony and ridiculousness of me being embarrassed and angry about being disabled when Laura doesn't answer me because she's disabled is starting to make me realize how bad my PAE is, and how much I want it to stop. Well, I've been working hard at not noticing whether I'm normal or not, and Noah is helping out, too. "If I have something to tell you, I'll tell you" and "If I want you to leave, I'll tell you" are now staples he uses when talking to me. The other day I told him about ASD stuff, for hours. Apparently this is interesting. The whole time I was waiting for the other shoe to drop, but it never did.
Passing As Ethics doesn't just affect the sufferer. If you have PAE, all your friends have PAE too. But there is hope--with the right support, individuals with Passing As Ethics can improve and actually treat people like humans instead of Normal People to fear and resent.
I am trapped in my world of Passing As Ethics. But my friends are trying their hardest to pull me out.
Disability Blog Carnival #63--Relationships
(due tomorrow, you should write something!)
Autism is not all about being bad with people, even though that's what most people think (once you can talk). A lot of people are bad with people in different ways, but they only want to talk about us. How they can make us better. What they don't know is that being a person who was once bad with people is its own punishment. That is, it's a whole new way of being bad.
I suffer from a syndrome. It's called Passing As Ethics. I made it up, though, so I can call it whatever I want. Sometimes I call it Us vs. Them or Them vs. Me. None of these names do a good job explaining the whole thing, just parts of it. It consists of a collection of false beliefs. Or, exaggerations. Conclusions badly reached.
Fact: Autism Spectrum Disorder people look sort of weird to normal people, and some things are harder for them. To a Passing As Ethics sufferer, this means: the way ASD people do things is worse than the way other people do them--->ASD people should feel guilty if other people can tell there's something weird about them--->ASD people should feel guilty for stimming--->if a normal person isn't interested in something an ASD person says it's because the ASD person is monologuing--->if an ASD person isn't interested in something a normal person says it's because they have no empathy--->a friendship where one person talks most of the time is not a real friendship--->if a normal person doesn't like something an ASD person does, the ASD person should stop--->the opposite is definitely not true--->well, I think you get the idea.
All kinds of people can suffer from Passing As Ethics. A mother who brings her extremely sound-sensitive kid into a grocery store, then gets angry at him for crying, is a PAE sufferer. A teacher who tries to behavior-modify kids out of stimming or using big words, because it's "weird," is a PAE sufferer. And an ASD person who is unable to speak up when her classmates are saying things about ASD people that aren't true, because she doesn't think she can explain in less than four sentences, and she's interested in ASD rights, so if she talks a lot about something she's interested in, that would be monologuing, and that would be wrong--well, I prefer to say I have PAE, it doesn't have me. Who the fuck am I kidding, yeah it does. It has me really bad.
This post isn't about PAE in general, though. It is about how my disability affects my relationships. I think that talking about PAE in vague terms would be confusing, so I will just use specific examples instead.
Like most people who are writers, I like to talk about things I'm writing and things that have happened to me, especially if something is a good story. In a writing workshop, I met a boy named Noah who thought I was a very good writer, and I felt the same way about him. Noah and I haltingly came together out of mutual admiration, and began spending a lot of time together. We told each other about things we had written and interesting things that had happened to us. Although, I guess I talked more.
The semester came to an end and Noah didn't apply for another workshop. He said that he didn't feel ready to be in a workshop again. Early in the next semester, Noah decided that even though he wanted to be a writer, workshops made him feel self-conscious, and he was going to major in Psychology instead of Creative Writing. I bugged Noah about this, both because I wanted to be in more classes with him, and because I felt like it was what I was supposed to do. I always worry that I'm not as interested in other people as I should be, so I felt good about myself for being such a fan of Noah's writing. I made an effort to express this as much as possible; for example, I would introduce Noah to people by telling them that he was a good writer.
I started sleeping in Noah's room because my roommate and I were proving not to be compatible. Noah went to bed early and got up very early. When he got up, he would write for a while on his computer. When I asked to look at what he wrote, he said no. One night when Noah was asleep, I opened his computer and read his stories. A few days later I said, "Hey, Noah, would you be mad at me if I went on your computer and read your stories? Because I did and they were really good."
Noah felt very uncomfortable about what had happened. He told me that I couldn't stay in his room anymore, and for a while we didn't see each other very much. I was very upset of course, but I was also stunned. I hadn't imagined that Noah would be so upset that I had read his stories--and if you insist on reading this as a typical ASD lack of empathy, then I can't stop you. But the reason I was stunned was that I had a conviction that showing interest in another person was morally right. I had been worried about my friendship with Noah because I thought that I talked too much about my writing, my life, and my interests, and Noah mostly listened. I thought that I needed to make the friendship more balanced by learning more about Noah.
Well, I guess this does show a lack of empathy, but it's the PAE kind. The same lack of empathy that a mom shows when she takes her sound-sensitive child to the grocery store is what I showed to Noah. I expected Noah to react like my idea of a normal person, to react positively because I'd done something normal. This expectation was horrible because it showed no understanding of the person Noah actually was--a person who was self-conscious about his writing, and furthermore had actually said he didn't want me to read it.
This is one of the shittiest things I've ever done to another person, and is probably my best PAE story. However, lots of little PAE events occur when I interact with my roommate, Laura. I say things to her, and she doesn't answer me. When this happens, I think that Laura hasn't answered me because I was monologuing or saying something weird, and she thought it was boring or annoying. This makes me feel guilty and embarrassed. Then I feel annoyed at Laura for making me feel that way. I think that she's lording it over me because she's a normal person and I'm a freakish ASD person who doesn't know how to say the normal thing. Sometimes I just feel bad inside my head, but other times, if Laura expresses surprise about something I already told her about, I snap, "I already told you; if you didn't want to listen, that's your problem."
In my nonfiction workshop, they say you can't worry about making yourself look bad. Here goes: Laura is actually deaf in her left ear. I've lived with her for ten cumulative months in freshman and junior year, and I've known about her deafness since probably the first week. Yeah, that's right--I get mad at someone for not listening to me, even though if I actually thought about it, I would know it's because she can't hear me. I feel like there's some Normal Person vs. Freakish Disabled Person conflict going on, even though the lack of communication is actually caused by the normal person having a disability, and not even knowing that communication is being attempted.
I never thought of Laura as having a disability until I saw a person like her being insulted in an episode of Glee, a show that basically exists to insult disabled people. It turned my head around. The sheer irony and ridiculousness of me being embarrassed and angry about being disabled when Laura doesn't answer me because she's disabled is starting to make me realize how bad my PAE is, and how much I want it to stop. Well, I've been working hard at not noticing whether I'm normal or not, and Noah is helping out, too. "If I have something to tell you, I'll tell you" and "If I want you to leave, I'll tell you" are now staples he uses when talking to me. The other day I told him about ASD stuff, for hours. Apparently this is interesting. The whole time I was waiting for the other shoe to drop, but it never did.
Passing As Ethics doesn't just affect the sufferer. If you have PAE, all your friends have PAE too. But there is hope--with the right support, individuals with Passing As Ethics can improve and actually treat people like humans instead of Normal People to fear and resent.
I am trapped in my world of Passing As Ethics. But my friends are trying their hardest to pull me out.
26 January, 2010
Summer Heights High
One time I read about this TV show that was like a mockumentary and the review I read mentioned a scene where a teacher was talking in a really patronizing way to a student who was intellectually disabled, and you're supposed to laugh at the teacher. I just remembered this today because I realized that I started watching Glee because I thought it was that show. You can imagine what a disappointment that was and soon I got caught up in the disappointment and forgot about the other show. But this is a real show, right? Is it? I want to find it. Does anyone know what it is?
Okay I just noodled around on Wikipedia and I think it might be Summer Heights High. I guess I'll watch it and post about whether it sucks or not.
If it wasn't two years old I'd think this was a parody of Glee; as it is, it makes me laugh a lot:
Mr G is a thirty-six year old drama teacher at Summer Heights High. Mr G not only believes that he is an incredibly talented and well-liked teacher, but that his students also share his intense passion for drama and performance...He is hostile to the disabled students being involved, under the belief that they will damage the quality of his musical.
HA HA HA, whoever wrote this show is clearly psychic
two scenes from Episode 1:
Ja'mie: I think my teachers like me because I'm, like, the smartest non-Asian, and I can do sports and all the stuff that Asians can't do.
(Toby, a boy with Down Syndrome, comes up to Mr. G. and hugs him)
Mr. G: This is Toby, one of our specials from the special education center...it's a separate part of the school, down at the bottom, but we allow them to play with the normal kids at recess and lunch and that sort of thing...(hugging Toby with his hand on Toby's back) Normally you're not allowed to touch students like this, 'cause there are child protection laws, but we normally turn a blind eye with these ones. This sort of thing: fine. (moves his hand lower) Not fine. (moving his hand up and down) Fine. Not fine.
<---so, those are examples of how you do ironic racism and ableism. Racism and ableism are slightly heightened to reach a stylized, and therefore funny, level: Ja'mie matter-of-factly stating that Asians can't play sports, and Mr. G. referring to disabled kids as "specials" and saying that teachers can behave inappropriately with them (this might not be funny to everyone but stylization always gets me really hard--the word "specials," in particular, kills me). Ja'mie and Mr. G. are over-the-top characters and their statements serve to show how awful they are; they don't seem like something the audience is expected to take seriously. We're not presented with an Asian character, played straight, whose only dialogue is about schoolwork. That wouldn't be ironic, it would just be stereotypical and boring.
Yeah, so this show is just incredibly stunning in terms of actually being funny in all the ways that people claim Glee is funny. I'm not going to post more unless something really interesting happens that's related to disability. But if you currently put yourself through the agony of watching Glee, know that you should be watching this instead.
Okay I just noodled around on Wikipedia and I think it might be Summer Heights High. I guess I'll watch it and post about whether it sucks or not.
If it wasn't two years old I'd think this was a parody of Glee; as it is, it makes me laugh a lot:
Mr G is a thirty-six year old drama teacher at Summer Heights High. Mr G not only believes that he is an incredibly talented and well-liked teacher, but that his students also share his intense passion for drama and performance...He is hostile to the disabled students being involved, under the belief that they will damage the quality of his musical.
HA HA HA, whoever wrote this show is clearly psychic
two scenes from Episode 1:
Ja'mie: I think my teachers like me because I'm, like, the smartest non-Asian, and I can do sports and all the stuff that Asians can't do.
(Toby, a boy with Down Syndrome, comes up to Mr. G. and hugs him)
Mr. G: This is Toby, one of our specials from the special education center...it's a separate part of the school, down at the bottom, but we allow them to play with the normal kids at recess and lunch and that sort of thing...(hugging Toby with his hand on Toby's back) Normally you're not allowed to touch students like this, 'cause there are child protection laws, but we normally turn a blind eye with these ones. This sort of thing: fine. (moves his hand lower) Not fine. (moving his hand up and down) Fine. Not fine.
<---so, those are examples of how you do ironic racism and ableism. Racism and ableism are slightly heightened to reach a stylized, and therefore funny, level: Ja'mie matter-of-factly stating that Asians can't play sports, and Mr. G. referring to disabled kids as "specials" and saying that teachers can behave inappropriately with them (this might not be funny to everyone but stylization always gets me really hard--the word "specials," in particular, kills me). Ja'mie and Mr. G. are over-the-top characters and their statements serve to show how awful they are; they don't seem like something the audience is expected to take seriously. We're not presented with an Asian character, played straight, whose only dialogue is about schoolwork. That wouldn't be ironic, it would just be stereotypical and boring.
Yeah, so this show is just incredibly stunning in terms of actually being funny in all the ways that people claim Glee is funny. I'm not going to post more unless something really interesting happens that's related to disability. But if you currently put yourself through the agony of watching Glee, know that you should be watching this instead.
03 January, 2010
Everyone has it
I'm rewatching United States of Tara which was the light of my Winter Term last year. (This year it's not starting until March, so I guess I'll have to find happiness in hanging out with my friends, or reading, or something like that.) I don't know enough about DID to know if it is an accurate portrayal and I'm sure that it might be offensive to me if I had more experience with DID. However, I just wanted to share THE BEST SCENE:
Annoying lady: Oh, I kind of feel like everyone has it, you know? A little. I mean, how many different women do we all have to be in one day?
Awesome. I think this happens with every disability there is. Oh, buddy, your real life is such a poignant metaphor for my tribulations! ADORABLE!
Additionally, Tara's son Marshall is by far my favorite gay TV character. He's not some sort of overcompensatory football player like the guy on Dawson's Creek, but he's not like Kurt from Glee either. He is kind of stereotypically gay, but it's in his own way--he wears suits to school, is obsessed with old movies, and bakes. He's weird and unique in a girly way, not just straight-up girly in the most obvious way possible, like Kurt.
Plus, he's completely comfortable with his homosexuality at the age of fourteen, and so are his sister and parents. This doesn't mean that it never causes him problems, but just that everyone is used to the fact that he's gay and it's just another thing he has to deal with. This is kind of the way the family acts about Tara's DID, too--they're just trying to live with it. Which may be completely unrealistic, I have no idea, but it seems kind of positive, maybe?
Annoying lady: Oh, I kind of feel like everyone has it, you know? A little. I mean, how many different women do we all have to be in one day?
Awesome. I think this happens with every disability there is. Oh, buddy, your real life is such a poignant metaphor for my tribulations! ADORABLE!
Additionally, Tara's son Marshall is by far my favorite gay TV character. He's not some sort of overcompensatory football player like the guy on Dawson's Creek, but he's not like Kurt from Glee either. He is kind of stereotypically gay, but it's in his own way--he wears suits to school, is obsessed with old movies, and bakes. He's weird and unique in a girly way, not just straight-up girly in the most obvious way possible, like Kurt.
Plus, he's completely comfortable with his homosexuality at the age of fourteen, and so are his sister and parents. This doesn't mean that it never causes him problems, but just that everyone is used to the fact that he's gay and it's just another thing he has to deal with. This is kind of the way the family acts about Tara's DID, too--they're just trying to live with it. Which may be completely unrealistic, I have no idea, but it seems kind of positive, maybe?
11 December, 2009
A bit more on Glee
Seriously I think this is what Ryan Murphy knows about intellectually disabled people: they're inspirational or something! But they're not good at anything and they live in hospitals waiting for us to come and read to them! But we have to pretend that they're good at things to make them feel better, but then we'll yell at them for being bad at those things, because we don't want to discriminate!
I could write a million essays on how weird the portrayal of characters with Down Syndrome was. For example, the joke about Brittany cheating off Becky's math test. Obviously the joke is, Brittany's so ditzy she thinks people with Down Syndrome are good at math, or else, Brittany's so bad at math that a person with Down Syndrome is better at math than she is. I don't necessarily mind this, because people with Down Syndrome usually aren't good at math; I can imagine a show making fun of disabled people's impairments in a blunt, dark-humor kind of way, that I wouldn't find offensive.* But this particular joke is just so weaselly, you can even pretend that it isn't a joke about Becky's disability if you want. In a previous episode Terri said she didn't want a baby who was a "Mongoloid," and obviously this was supposed to be shocking-funny, but I bet that no character would be shown using that word to describe Becky. And I think that's because the writers of the show aren't willing to face the fact that they are insulting actual people when they use words like Mongoloid.
They want to be seen as shocking and offensive in a daring and funny way but they're not willing to own it. And that's what really annoys the hell out of me about that episode, and the show in general. And also the show's fans who claim that offensive elements of the show are "satire." If it was satire, it would be funny. Mercedes's constant complaints about the music are not supposed to be quotable one-liners, nor are they supposed to be a parody of stereotypical black characters. She's just a badly written character whose creators rely heavily on stereotypes when they write her dialogue.
*I'm not especially fond of the Retarded Policeman videos on YouTube, but at least they're not weaselly; most of the offensive material is performed by an actor with Down Syndrome. The videos make fun of intellectually disabled people, but in the end I think it must positively affect viewers to see an intellectually disabled actor who is talented and funny. When Glee makes fun of deaf people they're not as brutal as the Retarded Policeman videos are about intellectually disabled people--but they imply that deaf people exploit their deafness for personal gain and can only be successful because of others' pity. The makers of the Retarded Policeman videos actually know that intellectually disabled people can be talented, which makes them automatically better than the creators of Glee.
eta: okay this one is kind of good
but I still think How's Your News? is a million times better (actually, it's a million times better than just about anything):
this is my favorite:
I could write a million essays on how weird the portrayal of characters with Down Syndrome was. For example, the joke about Brittany cheating off Becky's math test. Obviously the joke is, Brittany's so ditzy she thinks people with Down Syndrome are good at math, or else, Brittany's so bad at math that a person with Down Syndrome is better at math than she is. I don't necessarily mind this, because people with Down Syndrome usually aren't good at math; I can imagine a show making fun of disabled people's impairments in a blunt, dark-humor kind of way, that I wouldn't find offensive.* But this particular joke is just so weaselly, you can even pretend that it isn't a joke about Becky's disability if you want. In a previous episode Terri said she didn't want a baby who was a "Mongoloid," and obviously this was supposed to be shocking-funny, but I bet that no character would be shown using that word to describe Becky. And I think that's because the writers of the show aren't willing to face the fact that they are insulting actual people when they use words like Mongoloid.
They want to be seen as shocking and offensive in a daring and funny way but they're not willing to own it. And that's what really annoys the hell out of me about that episode, and the show in general. And also the show's fans who claim that offensive elements of the show are "satire." If it was satire, it would be funny. Mercedes's constant complaints about the music are not supposed to be quotable one-liners, nor are they supposed to be a parody of stereotypical black characters. She's just a badly written character whose creators rely heavily on stereotypes when they write her dialogue.
*I'm not especially fond of the Retarded Policeman videos on YouTube, but at least they're not weaselly; most of the offensive material is performed by an actor with Down Syndrome. The videos make fun of intellectually disabled people, but in the end I think it must positively affect viewers to see an intellectually disabled actor who is talented and funny. When Glee makes fun of deaf people they're not as brutal as the Retarded Policeman videos are about intellectually disabled people--but they imply that deaf people exploit their deafness for personal gain and can only be successful because of others' pity. The makers of the Retarded Policeman videos actually know that intellectually disabled people can be talented, which makes them automatically better than the creators of Glee.
eta: okay this one is kind of good
but I still think How's Your News? is a million times better (actually, it's a million times better than just about anything):
this is my favorite:
1x13 Sectionals
So, Thursday morning before my exam I was like, do I want to watch Glee, and then I was, like, no, that's hardly going to get me in the mood to take my exam. For the next day and a half I would occasionally think, hey, do I want to watch Glee now? It's so super annoying. It's not even worth hate-watching.
But I finally started the last episode of the year, and I guess it will be my last ever because once I'm back in America I won't need to distract myself all the time anymore, so I am writing about it as I watch it.
This episode started with all the characters who are actually likable--Artie, Tina, Mercedes, and Kurt. The whole sequence before the title card was A+. Also, I think it's really dumb that gay people are shitting themselves over the Brittany/Santana thing. It was obviously supposed to be a joke about how dumb Brittany is.
I can't believe they would have Mercedes sing "And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going." I actually can't. Is it weird for me to feel like that? It's a good song but she's such an one-note character it's astonishing.
The Finn thing was okay, blah blah blah, Artie ramming himself into the wall.
Oh no, I'm absolutely sure that Finn is going to inspirationally change his mind and there's going to be a romantic-comedy-esque scramble to get him to sectionals. I'm going to throw up. WHY DOES THIS HAVE TO HAPPEN?
Why are they saying Rachel is better than Mercedes? She's not. This makes me so mad.
I'm really biased because basically the most important thing to me in pop music is that the person not have a "singing accent" where they pronounce words differently when they're singing than when they're talking. I would rather someone be off-key than do the accent. So because of that, I'm bound to like Amber Riley's singing better than Lea Michele's. But I'm pretty sure, when I try really hard not to think about the accent thing, that they're objectively equal, right? They both have super good lung capacity or whatever is considered important by mainstream society. And unlike some of the other actors, Amber Riley has never intentionally messed up notes or sung badly, so I don't think it makes sense to say that the character Mercedes is a worse singer than the character Rachel. Regardless of it being racist or whatever, it's just annoying as hell to watch every character on the show accept as fact that Rachel is a better singer, when she obviously isn't.
SARAH NEWLIN I LOVE YOU SO MUCH
HOW DID YOU END UP ON THIS TERRIBLE SHOW?
But I finally started the last episode of the year, and I guess it will be my last ever because once I'm back in America I won't need to distract myself all the time anymore, so I am writing about it as I watch it.
This episode started with all the characters who are actually likable--Artie, Tina, Mercedes, and Kurt. The whole sequence before the title card was A+. Also, I think it's really dumb that gay people are shitting themselves over the Brittany/Santana thing. It was obviously supposed to be a joke about how dumb Brittany is.
I can't believe they would have Mercedes sing "And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going." I actually can't. Is it weird for me to feel like that? It's a good song but she's such an one-note character it's astonishing.
The Finn thing was okay, blah blah blah, Artie ramming himself into the wall.
Oh no, I'm absolutely sure that Finn is going to inspirationally change his mind and there's going to be a romantic-comedy-esque scramble to get him to sectionals. I'm going to throw up. WHY DOES THIS HAVE TO HAPPEN?
Why are they saying Rachel is better than Mercedes? She's not. This makes me so mad.
I'm really biased because basically the most important thing to me in pop music is that the person not have a "singing accent" where they pronounce words differently when they're singing than when they're talking. I would rather someone be off-key than do the accent. So because of that, I'm bound to like Amber Riley's singing better than Lea Michele's. But I'm pretty sure, when I try really hard not to think about the accent thing, that they're objectively equal, right? They both have super good lung capacity or whatever is considered important by mainstream society. And unlike some of the other actors, Amber Riley has never intentionally messed up notes or sung badly, so I don't think it makes sense to say that the character Mercedes is a worse singer than the character Rachel. Regardless of it being racist or whatever, it's just annoying as hell to watch every character on the show accept as fact that Rachel is a better singer, when she obviously isn't.
SARAH NEWLIN I LOVE YOU SO MUCH
HOW DID YOU END UP ON THIS TERRIBLE SHOW?
07 December, 2009
Some reasons I love Mad Men
by AWV, age 8
(Also, I just want to apologize for this blog. What a mess. First I was just writing it because I thought I should write a blog, and then it started being about Disability Things and I was so excited and felt like I was writing something that was actually worthwhile unlike most of the things I write to distract myself, and I just feel bad because I've been posting about such dumb things lately. I think the approximately four people who read/were reading the blog were probably reading it because of my previous posts that were actually interesting and about things that matter. So I am sorry. On the plus side, I'm going home on December 15, and once I'm home I won't need to distract myself, so I will probably only post here when I actually have something to say.)
Anyway, here are some reasons I love Mad Men, by AWV, age 8.
1. PETE. Except, my reason isn't actually Pete. I think that Pete is just the best example of my favorite thing about the show, which is the fact that no one is used as a device and every character is developed as a real person. People (including me) are always complaining about how offensive Glee is, but in addition to being offensive, it's offensively lazy. There are a few characters the writers actually care about and treat in a realistic way, but a lot of them are just devices. The way Terri acts doesn't make sense. The way Mercedes acts doesn't make sense. But worse, they're boring because you can see that they aren't being written with love.
Every major character on Mad Men is written with love. Pete is not a nice person and in the first season he is the antagonist to the "heroes," Don and Peggy. But he is written with so much love that he could never be just a villain. He's funny, sad, mean, tender, devious, and inappropriately genuine. People love this character.
Because I can't stop at just one example, I give you Sal. A fun fact about offensively lazy writing is that it is often the regular kind of offensive, too. Using gay men as devices is a trope with a long history, and at first Sal seems like yet another example of a gay character who exists to provide comic relief--in this case, he is funny both because of his campy snarkiness and because he doesn't know he's gay, but we can totally tell, and we can see him trying to pretend he's not gay, but it doesn't work on us, because we're so smart!
"Except," says Mad Men, "if you were gay, and you didn't know you were gay, or you did know but you were afraid to act on it because everyone you knew hated gay people, and you knew you could be fired or even arrested--well, that actually wouldn't be funny, would it?"
Well, no.
2. PETE AGAIN. And Paul. And some other people. This reason is about how the show is super funny without being a comedy. Because it's funny in a diegetic way. Pete and Paul are characters you can laugh at in a mean way. And you can laugh with almost all the characters, because they're witty people. Diegetic humor is super rad because it means you can enjoy the humor on a deeper level than you can in a comedy. My relationship with the characters is serious at the base, so when they are funny, I feel so warm towards them, like I do when my friends are funny. It makes everything funnier.
3. Peggy. Peggy is the actual reason and not the microcosm. She is a girl who doesn't do girl stuff! She seriously didn't understand that she wasn't supposed to be genuinely interested in being a copywriter. I guess this also ties into #1 about all the characters being real people. Even the woman characters are real people! I know!
4. The period stuff is (as far as a baby like myself can tell) really good, and it's used as a setting rather than a plot. For some reason it seems more like science fiction than historical fiction, maybe because it doesn't feel educational. It's a world where things are really different, in an interesting way. Pete and Trudy get married for no apparent reason, and never seriously consider getting divorced even though they make each other miserable for the first few years. Joan thinks she wants to be a housewife even though she obviously doesn't. The way the characters think takes the plot in directions that would never happen on a show set in the modern day, because it just wouldn't make sense.
Are those all the reasons? I guess. I feel a little bad that because the show has such an obvious hook ("it takes place in the 60s!") it is kind of reduced to that, when the realism and love are really more important, and are the main reasons I like it so much.
ETA: I'm not 100% sure, but I think that this article borrowed a phrase from one of my Wikipedia edits. Which is SO COOL. Another cool thing is when you're really obsessed with a band, and they play a song live, and you listen to a video of that song 400 times and try to type out the lyrics as accurately as possible and put them on songmeanings.net, and then when you search for the lyrics a few years later, all the lyrics sites are using a version that is obviously yours, because you were the first to post lyrics for that song on the Internet.
(Also, I just want to apologize for this blog. What a mess. First I was just writing it because I thought I should write a blog, and then it started being about Disability Things and I was so excited and felt like I was writing something that was actually worthwhile unlike most of the things I write to distract myself, and I just feel bad because I've been posting about such dumb things lately. I think the approximately four people who read/were reading the blog were probably reading it because of my previous posts that were actually interesting and about things that matter. So I am sorry. On the plus side, I'm going home on December 15, and once I'm home I won't need to distract myself, so I will probably only post here when I actually have something to say.)
Anyway, here are some reasons I love Mad Men, by AWV, age 8.
1. PETE. Except, my reason isn't actually Pete. I think that Pete is just the best example of my favorite thing about the show, which is the fact that no one is used as a device and every character is developed as a real person. People (including me) are always complaining about how offensive Glee is, but in addition to being offensive, it's offensively lazy. There are a few characters the writers actually care about and treat in a realistic way, but a lot of them are just devices. The way Terri acts doesn't make sense. The way Mercedes acts doesn't make sense. But worse, they're boring because you can see that they aren't being written with love.
Every major character on Mad Men is written with love. Pete is not a nice person and in the first season he is the antagonist to the "heroes," Don and Peggy. But he is written with so much love that he could never be just a villain. He's funny, sad, mean, tender, devious, and inappropriately genuine. People love this character.
Because I can't stop at just one example, I give you Sal. A fun fact about offensively lazy writing is that it is often the regular kind of offensive, too. Using gay men as devices is a trope with a long history, and at first Sal seems like yet another example of a gay character who exists to provide comic relief--in this case, he is funny both because of his campy snarkiness and because he doesn't know he's gay, but we can totally tell, and we can see him trying to pretend he's not gay, but it doesn't work on us, because we're so smart!
"Except," says Mad Men, "if you were gay, and you didn't know you were gay, or you did know but you were afraid to act on it because everyone you knew hated gay people, and you knew you could be fired or even arrested--well, that actually wouldn't be funny, would it?"
Well, no.
2. PETE AGAIN. And Paul. And some other people. This reason is about how the show is super funny without being a comedy. Because it's funny in a diegetic way. Pete and Paul are characters you can laugh at in a mean way. And you can laugh with almost all the characters, because they're witty people. Diegetic humor is super rad because it means you can enjoy the humor on a deeper level than you can in a comedy. My relationship with the characters is serious at the base, so when they are funny, I feel so warm towards them, like I do when my friends are funny. It makes everything funnier.
3. Peggy. Peggy is the actual reason and not the microcosm. She is a girl who doesn't do girl stuff! She seriously didn't understand that she wasn't supposed to be genuinely interested in being a copywriter. I guess this also ties into #1 about all the characters being real people. Even the woman characters are real people! I know!
4. The period stuff is (as far as a baby like myself can tell) really good, and it's used as a setting rather than a plot. For some reason it seems more like science fiction than historical fiction, maybe because it doesn't feel educational. It's a world where things are really different, in an interesting way. Pete and Trudy get married for no apparent reason, and never seriously consider getting divorced even though they make each other miserable for the first few years. Joan thinks she wants to be a housewife even though she obviously doesn't. The way the characters think takes the plot in directions that would never happen on a show set in the modern day, because it just wouldn't make sense.
Are those all the reasons? I guess. I feel a little bad that because the show has such an obvious hook ("it takes place in the 60s!") it is kind of reduced to that, when the realism and love are really more important, and are the main reasons I like it so much.
ETA: I'm not 100% sure, but I think that this article borrowed a phrase from one of my Wikipedia edits. Which is SO COOL. Another cool thing is when you're really obsessed with a band, and they play a song live, and you listen to a video of that song 400 times and try to type out the lyrics as accurately as possible and put them on songmeanings.net, and then when you search for the lyrics a few years later, all the lyrics sites are using a version that is obviously yours, because you were the first to post lyrics for that song on the Internet.
28 November, 2009
Hairography
wow I'm watching Glee and I can't even believe what a douche Mercedes is (oh, and everyone else, apparently). THANKS FOR HELPING OUT THOSE DEAF PEOPLE WITH YOUR AWESOME SINGING!!
I enjoy Kurt's scheming, but that's about it. Why would someone ever think it's a good idea to make a TV show like this? Even the good parts are just a bad version of Spring Awakening.
(By the way my friend is deaf in one ear and having a conversation with her is exactly like having a conversation with a person who isn't deaf, unless her hearing ear is facing away from you. Which would not be the case when you're sitting face to face with someone. Although, isn't that guy from some Joss Whedon thing or other? It's nice to see him.)
I enjoy Kurt's scheming, but that's about it. Why would someone ever think it's a good idea to make a TV show like this? Even the good parts are just a bad version of Spring Awakening.
(By the way my friend is deaf in one ear and having a conversation with her is exactly like having a conversation with a person who isn't deaf, unless her hearing ear is facing away from you. Which would not be the case when you're sitting face to face with someone. Although, isn't that guy from some Joss Whedon thing or other? It's nice to see him.)
12 November, 2009
Okay Glee, you have redeemed yourself a little
This morning's episode of Glee was some parts good, one part terrible, and one part better than I would ever have expected.
First off, I want to explain what my problem with the show was in the first place. It definitely wasn't any one line or event. It was just that certain characters were not written morally. And when I talk about writing morally, I don't mean the characters need to be nice; I mean the writer needs to think about the characters the way people should think about other people in real life. Realizing that everyone is complicated, everyone has reasons for what they do, no one thinks of themselves as a villain or comic relief. The thing about writing morally is that it's the same thing as writing well. So for me, when Glee is offensive and when it's a low-quality show, it's both of those things at the same time.
The opposite goes for Mad Men. It's a really high-quality show and it also never offends me. Characters do offensive things, but I never get the impression that this reflects the writers' ignorance. And more importantly, characters who in lesser shows might be reduced to villains or comic relief, or something else less than human, are treated with respect. While we might sometimes see them as funny or villainous, we also see that they take themselves seriously and are doing what they think they have to do.
Anyway. Aspects of Glee from worst to best:
1. Sue Sylvester lets a girl with Down's Syndrome on the Cheerios and is mean to her. Will thinks Sue is being mean, but Sue says she's treating the girl like everyone else. Will wonders why Sue would do something so un-Sue-ish. Then we find out that Sue has a sister with Down's Syndrome who she's very close with.
This was a pretty good example of how the people who write Glee decide to take on issues that they have absolutely no knowledge of and aren't interested in learning about. The characters with Down's Syndrome behave like four-year-olds; Becky, the teenager, walks around holding hands with her friend and is manipulated into buying a cupcake. (Why couldn't Becky just decide to buy a cupcake because it's a nice thing to do?) Sue's sister, a middle-aged woman, enjoys having Sue read Little Red Riding Hood to her. Also, she apparently spends all her time in bed at a place that I think is a hospital, and this is portrayed as normal. If Sue's sister has a significant disability, which I guess she does, I would expect her to live in a group home with other disabled people--not just lie in bed waiting for her sister.
Becky is a perfect example of a character being used as a device instead of being human. Becky has almost no lines and we know nothing about her except that she wants to be a cheerleader. Also, the actress who plays her is terrible (at least I'm pretty sure she is; she has so little to do that it's hard to figure out what she should be doing). There's also the fact that she is in no way qualified to be a cheerleader. Why couldn't Becky have been a good, or even decent, cheerleader? Why did she have to be so clumsy that Sue's letting her on the squad must be interpreted as an act of pity?
I was actually excited when I found out that someone with Down's Syndrome was going to be on the show, but this ended up being by far the worst aspect of the episode.
2. Rachel is told she will get to sing "Defying Gravity," but Kurt wants to sing it instead. He complains to his dad, who is very macho and doesn't understand Kurt's interests, but is supportive of him nonetheless. His dad threatens the school, saying it's homophobic and sexist to not give Kurt a chance to sing the song. So Kurt and Rachel each get to perform the song, and the glee club will vote on who sings it better. Kurt can sing just as high as Rachel, but at the last minute he intentionally screws up, because someone called his dad and said "your son's a fag." Kurt explains to his dad that he is used to homophobia, but his dad isn't, and he doesn't want to be so visibly gay that his dad will have to experience harassment.
This was really good; I like Kurt. He's very stereotypical, but it doesn't bother me because he is human. I feel the same way about Tara from True Blood (maybe I'll post about her another time). I liked that we saw how being gay affects Kurt, and how even though he's really feminine, he can actually be stronger than a masculine guy like his dad.
3. ARTIE!!! This was fantastic. Will says they should have a bake sale to afford an accessible bus, but all the other people in glee club say that Artie doesn't mind being driven to things by his dad. In fact, Artie does mind, but doesn't want to make a fuss. Will sees how hurt Artie feels, and inexplicably has enough money to buy wheelchairs for the whole glee club which he makes them use for three hours every day. He also makes them dance in the wheelchairs. When the other kids have to deal with how inaccessible the school is, how people don't look at them, and how hard it is to dance in a wheelchair, they respect Artie more and work hard on the bake sale. When they end up raising the money, Artie says they should use it to make the school accessible instead, because that will help future disabled students, instead of just helping him.
Also, Artie and Tina obviously have a crush on each other, and two or three times during the episode, Tina tells Artie how much she admires him. Each time, Artie replies, "Oh, well, you have a stutter, so you understand having to overcome something." The last time this happens (after they've just kissed for the first time), Tina tells Artie that she doesn't really have a stutter, and has just been faking it for years because she's shy and it makes people leave her alone. She says that now she's become more confident and wants to stop pretending to stutter. Artie gets really mad at her for faking, and says something like, "You get to be normal now but I'm stuck in this chair for the rest of my life."
I loved, loved, loved this. Artie has never been developed at all, but now that they've finally developed him, they did a really good job. He's very kind and mature for his age, but also justifiably angry about the way people treat him. I think it's common sometimes for people who are minorities to go with the flow and appear unruffled by things, but actually be really angry on another level that they don't show to most people because it's not practical. This is probably especially the case for people who have disabilities that require support; we don't want to offend anyone in case we end up having to ask that person for help. Artie saw Tina as being on another level from other people, someone who could understand, and I think it's because of that that he feels so betrayed and expresses really negative emotions about being in a wheelchair, which I'm not sure he would express to most other people.
Maybe some people would find Artie's negativity offensive, but I didn't. I was actually pleasantly surprised by how social-model the show was about the whole thing. When I heard that the episode would involve the kids using wheelchairs to "see what it's like for Artie," I thought it would be all about how soul-crushingly miserable it is not to be able to walk, but really, we were shown a montage of the kids getting hit in the face by people who didn't see them, having to deal with things that were too high up to reach, etc. And when Artie expressed bitterness at the end, it seemed to be more about looking weird and being cut off from other people.
I just really love Kevin McHale. Even though I think a disabled actor should have been cast, he is really adorable, talented, and great. The best scene in the episode was when Tina kissed him and he put his face in his hands like he was too happy to look her in the eye. He was on True Blood by the way! He was the coroner's assistant who gets blown up.
First off, I want to explain what my problem with the show was in the first place. It definitely wasn't any one line or event. It was just that certain characters were not written morally. And when I talk about writing morally, I don't mean the characters need to be nice; I mean the writer needs to think about the characters the way people should think about other people in real life. Realizing that everyone is complicated, everyone has reasons for what they do, no one thinks of themselves as a villain or comic relief. The thing about writing morally is that it's the same thing as writing well. So for me, when Glee is offensive and when it's a low-quality show, it's both of those things at the same time.
The opposite goes for Mad Men. It's a really high-quality show and it also never offends me. Characters do offensive things, but I never get the impression that this reflects the writers' ignorance. And more importantly, characters who in lesser shows might be reduced to villains or comic relief, or something else less than human, are treated with respect. While we might sometimes see them as funny or villainous, we also see that they take themselves seriously and are doing what they think they have to do.
Anyway. Aspects of Glee from worst to best:
1. Sue Sylvester lets a girl with Down's Syndrome on the Cheerios and is mean to her. Will thinks Sue is being mean, but Sue says she's treating the girl like everyone else. Will wonders why Sue would do something so un-Sue-ish. Then we find out that Sue has a sister with Down's Syndrome who she's very close with.
This was a pretty good example of how the people who write Glee decide to take on issues that they have absolutely no knowledge of and aren't interested in learning about. The characters with Down's Syndrome behave like four-year-olds; Becky, the teenager, walks around holding hands with her friend and is manipulated into buying a cupcake. (Why couldn't Becky just decide to buy a cupcake because it's a nice thing to do?) Sue's sister, a middle-aged woman, enjoys having Sue read Little Red Riding Hood to her. Also, she apparently spends all her time in bed at a place that I think is a hospital, and this is portrayed as normal. If Sue's sister has a significant disability, which I guess she does, I would expect her to live in a group home with other disabled people--not just lie in bed waiting for her sister.
Becky is a perfect example of a character being used as a device instead of being human. Becky has almost no lines and we know nothing about her except that she wants to be a cheerleader. Also, the actress who plays her is terrible (at least I'm pretty sure she is; she has so little to do that it's hard to figure out what she should be doing). There's also the fact that she is in no way qualified to be a cheerleader. Why couldn't Becky have been a good, or even decent, cheerleader? Why did she have to be so clumsy that Sue's letting her on the squad must be interpreted as an act of pity?
I was actually excited when I found out that someone with Down's Syndrome was going to be on the show, but this ended up being by far the worst aspect of the episode.
2. Rachel is told she will get to sing "Defying Gravity," but Kurt wants to sing it instead. He complains to his dad, who is very macho and doesn't understand Kurt's interests, but is supportive of him nonetheless. His dad threatens the school, saying it's homophobic and sexist to not give Kurt a chance to sing the song. So Kurt and Rachel each get to perform the song, and the glee club will vote on who sings it better. Kurt can sing just as high as Rachel, but at the last minute he intentionally screws up, because someone called his dad and said "your son's a fag." Kurt explains to his dad that he is used to homophobia, but his dad isn't, and he doesn't want to be so visibly gay that his dad will have to experience harassment.
This was really good; I like Kurt. He's very stereotypical, but it doesn't bother me because he is human. I feel the same way about Tara from True Blood (maybe I'll post about her another time). I liked that we saw how being gay affects Kurt, and how even though he's really feminine, he can actually be stronger than a masculine guy like his dad.
3. ARTIE!!! This was fantastic. Will says they should have a bake sale to afford an accessible bus, but all the other people in glee club say that Artie doesn't mind being driven to things by his dad. In fact, Artie does mind, but doesn't want to make a fuss. Will sees how hurt Artie feels, and inexplicably has enough money to buy wheelchairs for the whole glee club which he makes them use for three hours every day. He also makes them dance in the wheelchairs. When the other kids have to deal with how inaccessible the school is, how people don't look at them, and how hard it is to dance in a wheelchair, they respect Artie more and work hard on the bake sale. When they end up raising the money, Artie says they should use it to make the school accessible instead, because that will help future disabled students, instead of just helping him.
Also, Artie and Tina obviously have a crush on each other, and two or three times during the episode, Tina tells Artie how much she admires him. Each time, Artie replies, "Oh, well, you have a stutter, so you understand having to overcome something." The last time this happens (after they've just kissed for the first time), Tina tells Artie that she doesn't really have a stutter, and has just been faking it for years because she's shy and it makes people leave her alone. She says that now she's become more confident and wants to stop pretending to stutter. Artie gets really mad at her for faking, and says something like, "You get to be normal now but I'm stuck in this chair for the rest of my life."
I loved, loved, loved this. Artie has never been developed at all, but now that they've finally developed him, they did a really good job. He's very kind and mature for his age, but also justifiably angry about the way people treat him. I think it's common sometimes for people who are minorities to go with the flow and appear unruffled by things, but actually be really angry on another level that they don't show to most people because it's not practical. This is probably especially the case for people who have disabilities that require support; we don't want to offend anyone in case we end up having to ask that person for help. Artie saw Tina as being on another level from other people, someone who could understand, and I think it's because of that that he feels so betrayed and expresses really negative emotions about being in a wheelchair, which I'm not sure he would express to most other people.
Maybe some people would find Artie's negativity offensive, but I didn't. I was actually pleasantly surprised by how social-model the show was about the whole thing. When I heard that the episode would involve the kids using wheelchairs to "see what it's like for Artie," I thought it would be all about how soul-crushingly miserable it is not to be able to walk, but really, we were shown a montage of the kids getting hit in the face by people who didn't see them, having to deal with things that were too high up to reach, etc. And when Artie expressed bitterness at the end, it seemed to be more about looking weird and being cut off from other people.
I just really love Kevin McHale. Even though I think a disabled actor should have been cast, he is really adorable, talented, and great. The best scene in the episode was when Tina kissed him and he put his face in his hands like he was too happy to look her in the eye. He was on True Blood by the way! He was the coroner's assistant who gets blown up.
15 October, 2009
Glee was dull as usual this morning
I was glad when Mercedes got to sing. And Sue is always wonderful, of course. But they had a lot of nerve with the whole minorities storyline. Whatever. The show is just barely entertaining enough to keep watching, but it's not worth writing about. I guess it must have become slightly less offensive to get to that point. They didn't say Mongoloid or talk about how deaf people suck at everything. Hooray.
I've been going through kind of a rough time. Yesterday I felt pretty close to having a meltdown in public, and had some violent thoughts. It can only go up from here, I guess. I need to feel more on track in terms of academics, but the fact that I'm not on track yet shouldn't keep me from doing writing and music--because as it is, I haven't really been doing anything. I did this yesterday, though:
I've been going through kind of a rough time. Yesterday I felt pretty close to having a meltdown in public, and had some violent thoughts. It can only go up from here, I guess. I need to feel more on track in terms of academics, but the fact that I'm not on track yet shouldn't keep me from doing writing and music--because as it is, I haven't really been doing anything. I did this yesterday, though:
01 October, 2009
They just used the word "Mongoloid" on Glee. I'm going to keep watching this show because I'm a masochist, but I think it just showed how much of its ableism is calculated and how much is that the writers just don't understand that disabled people have feelings.
(For the record, Rachel is absolutely the worst Sally Bowles ever. I agree with Sandy. Couldn't they think of a better part for her to leave the club for?)
(For the record, Rachel is absolutely the worst Sally Bowles ever. I agree with Sandy. Couldn't they think of a better part for her to leave the club for?)
20 September, 2009
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.)
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.)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
