Asymmetrical Information

Hollywood wants to sell tickets. The disabled are often tremendously courageous but imho the depiction of their daily struggles would be both depressing and boring. Sometimes Hollywood sells a fairy tale like Gump, sometimes they do something a little more balanced like Rain Man. Bone Collector wasn't bad. Sling Blade was pretty good too.

I think you might like to read some Carlos Costanza(spelling?), I think The Teachings of Don Juan might amuse.

So Fabulous,

Could you be any shallower? I'm sure you won't have to try very hard.

I had the great misfortune of having to work with the real live woman that Andie McDowell's character is based on. She is snobby, egotistical and self-centered. And I have read her writing; i don't think she's particularly talented. But she got a movie deal and I trapped here in my cube.

I thought the movie "Kalifornia" did a pretty good job.

How about a movie with a retarded serial killer?

There is a pretty good multi-dimensional portrayal of a man in a wheelchair on the series "Committed".

I imagine Hollywood's developmentally disabled are portrayed that way for the same reason, say, that a plain and homely girl (if she is in a lead position) is invariably portrayed by a stunning girl with ugly glasses and an uncomplimentary hair arrangement. Better sales.

Or, viewed another way -- since most movie material is designed as some sort of escapist fantasy, would you typically pay $7-8 for a show that spent two hours showing you an ordinary perspective on the ordinary world that you could have walked around in for free?

Where would we be without a mention of Corky from "Life Goes on"? The first week of working as a counselor at a camp for disabled children was such a culture shock because I expected Down's syndrome kids to be like Corky. Uh -- was I in for a surprise. Don't get me wrong -- they're loads of fun. But they're stubborn, hyper and in the case of tween Down's kids, they're beginning to learn about sexuality. Nothing, nothing like anything you see on TV.

(I would also suggest that getting the DD to act may be more difficult than folks would be willing to deal with during the making of a movie -- that, and it's as Althouse said, it would cut out possible award-winning roles for actors.)

In like manner, Hollywood often portrays insanity with characters who are eccentric, but lovable. It is quite understandable, because the reality is something that you would not want to see for free, much less pay $7 to see.

You know, reading this post, I was thinking how the Farrelly brothers, of all people, are better about portraying disabled characters realistically than a lot of filmmakers. I'm thinking of Walt in "Shallow Hal" and the guy in the wheelchair in "There's Something About Mary" in the scene where Ben Stiller's character was helping him move, but there are other examples that aren't coming to me right now.

They also sometimes have disabled characters played by actual disabled actors, which isn't very common.

I read the WaPo article and this bothered me. "The frequency of this and other congenital disorders rises sharply in babies born to women older than 35."

The statement is inaccurate. There is an exponetial curve for Down's and maternal age. It accellerates through the 30's, but if you can say it ever "rises sharply," it's at and above 40. Even at 45, the chance of Down's is at about 3%, so 97% chance of not having a baby with Down's.

So what's the magic about 35? By maternal age of 35, the chances of a defect that can be detected by amnio are about the same as the chance of the amnio causing a miscarriage -- about 1 in 200. Therefore, amnio is not routinely offered to women under 35.

I'm pretty sensitive to this common misstatement right now, being 37 and pregnant for the first time. (The only testing I've had done is a 20-week ultrasound, and that looks good, but is of course not definitive.) My doctor told me several years ago, "Don't let 35 scare you." It's good advice.

The article also talks about doctors who discover chromosomal defects dwelling on the negative. I think this is an unfortunate effect of the need for doctors to cover themselves against malpractice claims. From their standpoint, nobody is going to abort and then sue; however, they might have the baby, then sue if they were not fully informed of the difficulty and costs of raising a child with Down's.

Denise,

My wife is expecting, and at 37, we are at a slight risk (1:180). Her AFP test came back high (or low, I can't remember), and were told that the risk increased to 1:110. I still like those odds. An ultra-sound did not reveal any obvious signs of down syndrome, so the risk is less, but it was a little stressful.
But still, at 1:110, I like those odds.

Meagan,

Developmentally disabled folk tend to be more ego-centric, which is frustrating at times. Movies have addressed this, like "What's eating Gilbert Grape?" (Di Caprio got an Oscar nomination for his role as an autistic kid who's difficult at the best of times). But Hollywood doesn't do many movies about delaying your gratification to help people who are intellectually beneath you.

People, can you be any more blind to the rules of genre? Movies, like fiction in general, use a small set of recognizable plots: Cinderella (ugly/awkward/poor girl turning into a princess); David v Goliath (small man beating big man/corporation/government); rugs-to-riches (dramatic rise of a poor man, a male version of the Cinderella story); ever-lasting love (two characters separated by evil people/adverse events, but find each other at the end), and so forth. The world culture revolves around these plots. The Hollywood's "glorified retard" is just a part of our cultural tradition, combining Cinderella with David and other recognizable characters. You really shouldn't take these characters literally, divorced from the cultural framework in which they operate.

I understand the "easy formula movie" approach to the retarded. So what? Isn't it possible that a film could be made interesting while showing real lives with retarded adults?

In our family of 13 kids, two of my brothers are retarded. The rest of us loved "Drop Dead Gorgeous" for showing the irritating retarded man Hank and his brother. It hit waaaay too close to home, that one; obviously written by one who knows.

This touches on one of the greatest dilemmas of modern society.

Nations are still in competition with one another, and nations that allocate their resources too inefficiently are doomed to fall behind. Accomodation of a developmentally disabled person is, taken as an isolated transaction, an inefficient allocation of resources, a "luxury". The cost of conceiving and bringing to term a new healthy baby is dwarfed by the additional costs and reduced output associated with keeping a Down's Syndrome baby instead. However, this is a luxury we accept because in reality the transaction is not isolated -- there are negative side effects on popular morality that would result if abortion/infanticide was forced. The EV of allowing parents to keep Down's babies around may be positive after all.

The dilemma is, when do we continue to spend resources on ideals like this when the EV has become negative? If we never do, we have arguably lost our humanity. But how do we make the actual yes/no decisions?

Treating with dignity those incapable from birth of contributing back to society is a small-fry instance of this dilemma. A far, far larger scale instance is the demographic problem faced by Japan and parts of Europe due to an evolutionarily doomed strain of the female empowerment ideal.

I don't know why you think my comments are shallow Joe B. I think some here have confused disabled with the stereotypical hollywood misanthropic anti hero and larger then life psychopaths. I quite like characters like Tyler Durdon from Fight Club or B Del Torro's lawyer from Fear and Loathing. It seems a disability type noone here has made mention of are the extremely ugly. Hollywood did pretty well with Mask and the Elephant Man. I really identify with the Matt Damon Good Will Hunting. I think sometimes people are to interested with covering up flaws, it's the peculiarities and excesses that most make a character interesting imo.

And the great Holocaust movie of our time is about a thousand or so Jews who survived the war with the heroic help of a good German...

Mentally disabled people and a society that preaches capitalism/survival of the fittest do not mix. I don't have kids, but in today's society, where the talented get rich and get all the money, and the ordinary, family-and-friends oriented people get laid off with no health insurance, I shudder to think of the kind of life I'm setting up a disabled person for.

Life is uncertain enough in our winner-take-all society for an ordinary, average-ability person -- unless you're a capitalist star, you have no security, and supposedly don't deserve any. I'm not interested in bringing a disabled kid into that kind of brutal world.

I do not wish any person I know to have a diasbled child. So I think, reffering to the WaPo story, that physicians are correct in giving a full and unembellished description of what to expect with a Down-syndrome child. They must prepare the prospective parents for the worst case.

Hollywood, and how it portrays things is an issue that pales in importance. They have never been good at portraying accurately anything. You go to movies for fun not education, and if you can't tell a movie from the real world you have a problem.

I think Fabulous your statement that it won't sell tickets is right on. We rarely see movies that don't have some kind of fanastical element. Or if they are real life movies we usually say that you couldn't make that kind of stuff up. Movies are made to escape real life...and to make money for those making them.

Rosie's new role seems to be an interesting mix: typecasting as far as the "mentally challenged" part--a legendary feat of acting if she can pull it off the "endearing" part.

The only sort of movie that could realistically depict life with a severely developmentally disabled person would have to be a comedy - a sort of sardonic comedy. Anything else and people would be running from the theater slashing their wrists.

When you are truly entrusted with the day-to-day care of a developmentally disabled person, you are dealing with someone who does not understand anything, but is capable of practically everything.

To me, the most realistic movie about life with a DD person is "Honey, I Blew Up The Kid." A stupid movie, but it points out the reality of what happens when a toddler mind is in a grown-up body (or grown-up size, same diff).

Think about a six-foot-tall person with the mental capacity of a toddler. Think of the heroic effort needed to give such a person anything approaching a good quality of life. You have to have a group of people (sometimes called a "family) who dedicate large amounts of their time and energy into creating a pleasant environment in which this person can function and be safe.

Pretty much the only reward is the knowledge that you are doing the right thing, and the occasional hilarious incident that is only funny if you know what is going on and is usually too convoluted to explain the joke to anyone else.

Go to more movies.

Start with Sling Blade. Try Rainman. Go on to What's Eating Gilbert Grape.

And then find some other reason to bash "hollywood". Or find something less lazy than the pundits' equivalent of cripple-bashing.

I'm so glad I found this blog.

In addition to addressing developmentally disabled people, 'What's Eating Gilbert Grape' also deals with the morbidly obese, all in one maximally-dysfunctional family. A bona fide two-fer of the nonglamorous.

Howard Stern called them "Retard Movies." He postulated that AMPAS should be prohibited from tendering a Best Actor or Best Supporting Actor Oscar nod to any actor playing a mentally challenged character. These, according to Stern, are simple, noteworthy, scenery-chewing roles that hammy actors take to curry favor with the Academy.

All the archvillains in Batman and the like seem to be handicapped in some way. Their twisted bodies become twisted minds. All in all, the handicapped are pretty evil down deep. See also Richard III and Captain Hook.

"Or movies like this apparent Rosie O'Donnell gem"

Doesn't any movie that has Rosie O'Donnell in it qualify as a "developmentally disabled" movie?

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