On Feb 27, 2005, at 8:33 AM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> alessandro coricelli acoricelli at mac.com, Sat Feb 26 22:46:00 PST
> 2005:
>> Anyhow, I don't understand Kelly's taken of the movie [Million Dollar
>> Baby] as well (maybe I do, but I disagree). Disability cannot be
>> considered as a condition that forgets the intrinsic fact that it
>> deals with singularities not just groups, categories of people.
>
> For representation of disability to become representation of diverse
> singular disabled persons rather than types, there would have to be
> hundreds of portrayals of disabled persons -- especially as major
> characters -- on film. If there were hundreds of major disabled
> characters on the film, we could take the character played by Hillary
> Swank in _Million Dollar Baby_ as a singular individual, just one
> disabled person who makes a uniquely tragic choice unlike all other
> disabled characters. More likely than not, though, the Swank
> character is the only major disabled character most American
> movie-goers have and will see in many years. So the character becomes
> a type that represents a category of people -- the disabled -- in such
> movie-goers' cinematic memory, because they have not and will not see
> any other memorable disabled character for a long time.
That's reasonable, but in my opinion insufficient. By the way, there are two characters, not one, representing disabled persons in Million Dollar Baby. So maybe it is true that the movie wants to tell us something about the issue of disability. Even if I'm still convinced that the central theme is a sort of "sentimental education" of his main character as narrated by his oldest "pupil." More than waiting for an industry/art that will be, one day, entitled to represent a *fact* (the singularity of disability as a condition, and, reciprocally, the fact that we're all disabled), let's put our attention in the perspective of the disabled persons as part of a movement for (their) human rights (among which, I would agree, there is a much needed "voice" about its representation). The history of people with disabilities, while building a new civil rights movement, confirms the inevitability of a phase of autonomy. Of a phase, more properly, in which autonomy is only possible through the establishment of its own identity. In that phase, no doubt about it, also the (outside) perception plays a role (in a way it "represents") as a measure of the constitution of a (counter) power. Now, when I read opinions like Kelly's, I feel that some people are forever trapped in that phase and can't see nothing else. Autonomy and identity don't occur in a vacuum, and that's the reason why they have been an inevitable phase of any movement. Your and Kelly's pessimism of the reason, though, do not take into account the achievements of that movement and the general changes as well. Those achievements and the general situation are much more "mature" than what you think they are. I will try to use a pertinent analogy. Years ago there was this debate about cochlear implants. The opposition to the procedure (and to its " false hopes") of the Deaf Culture was fierce, and, at least partially, rightly so. The Deaf Culture was convinced that cochlear implants (again, the climate that that less than perfect procedure would have determined) would have undermined its conquered status (arguably the highest example of the autonomy, as a group, of a movement). However, the opposition to individual choices of deaf people who wanted to try that procedure wasn't equally uplifting, imho. During this academic year, apparently, the fastest growing foreign language of choice of college students is ASL.
What I mean, in conclusion, is that the passage from from the "one" to the "many" has already occurred. So that the "many" have become, at last, "singularities".
ciao, alessandro