1210 Debate Thunderdome: Disability on the Screen

1210 Debate Thunderdome: Disability on the Screen

In order to prepare for the debate, you are required to read an overview of the issue as well as two position essays.

These essays will provide you with some context, background, and possible direction for your claims; however, I encourage you to move beyond the ideas offered by Harris and Hilton and brainstorm some other related issues/concerns that you could incorporate into this argument.

Response 5:After reading each of the articles and thinking about each position, you need to compose 1-2 page(s) of organized notes/ideas that you will use to develop your arguments and counterarguments during the debate.

You will want to write extensive notes/ideas pertaining to position #1 AND position #2.

Because you will not be assigned a team the day of the debate, it is important that you explore both sides of the issue and come up with valid arguments for either position. In order for you to get credit for the debate, you must complete these requirements and come to class prepared.

Overview of the Issue

“Should able-bodied actors play disabled characters?”

Jan 15, 2015

The Guardian

Eddie Redmayne won a Golden Globe for his portrayal of Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything and has today been nominated for an Oscar to boot – but his casting has raised questions about who should play marginalised roles on screen.

Writing in The Guardian, Frances Ryan points out that while "blacking up" is greeted with outrage, "cripping up" is still greeted with awards.

In both cases, actors mimic someone from a minority group, take a job from an actor who genuinely has that characteristic and perpetuate that group's under-representation in the industry, she says.

Ryan accepts that, on a practical level, Redmayne needed to portray Hawking before he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease. But she says for many disabled people in the audience, watching an able-bodied actor play such a role is like "watching another person fake their identity".

Others have argued in the past that this is the very point of an actor's job.

"The essential art of acting consists in being that which one is not: the shy man pretends to be debonair; the arrogant man feigns humility," writes theologian Adrian Hilton. "The Greek word for actor is ὑποκριτής ('hupokrités', from which we derive 'hypocrite'), meaning dissembler or pretender."

Previous films have prompted similar debates. Untouchable, The Sessions and Rust and Bone all won praise for their sensitive portrayals of the disabled protagonists. But critics, including Victoria Wright, said it was a "pity they forgot to hire disabled actors to play the leads".

Writing in The Independent, Wright argues that real-life disabilities, far from a detraction, give performances an edge that no CGI could replicate.

"Disabled actors could save Hollywood studios millions of dollars because they wouldn't need to CGI* us," she says. "For we have been CGI'd by GOD!" *computer generated imagery*

The debate is not limited to disabilities either. Jared Leto's role as a transgender woman in Dallas Buyers Club won him an Oscar nomination, but many people argued that the part should have been played by a trans actor.

"Hollywood has a fetish for letting privileged people attempt to portray marginalised people," says Prodigal, a trans woman blogger for Jezebel, who condemns Leto's character as a "veritable Mighty Morphin Power Rangers Megazord of obnoxious stereotypes".

In The Independent, Paris Lees tells Hollywood "for truly accurate portrayals of trans people, cast trans actors". She points to the trans character of Sophia in Orange is the New Black played by trans actor Laverne Cox. "She can act too," says Lees. "And the more audiences see Laverne and other trans actors – Harmony Santana and Jamie Clayton, for example – the less impressed they'll be with transgender pretenders such as Leto."

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Position 1: The roles of disabled characters should only be played by disabled actors/performers.

“Able-Bodied Actors and Disability Drag: Why Disabled Roles are Only for Disabled Performers” byScott Jordan Harris

March 7, 2014

Able-bodied actors should not play disabled characters. That they so often do should be a scandal. But it is not a scandal because we do not grant people with disabilities the same right to self-representation onscreen that we demand for members of other groups who struggle for social equality.

Consider "Glee", a TV show unmistakably self-satisfied with its inclusiveness. Its makers would never have considered having Rachel, the female lead, played by a man in drag. They would not have considered having Mercedes, the most prominent black character, played by a white actress in blackface. But when they cast Artie, the main disabled character, they chose an able-bodied actor and had him sit in a wheelchair and ape the appearance of a disabled person.

These comparisons with blackface and drag may seem inflammatory or outlandish but those of us who make them (such as the actors who protested the casting of the recent "Ironside" remake) do not do so lightly or in order to bring cheap attention to our cause. We do it because the analogy is exact. To argue that it isn't is to argue that disabled people are less equal than others.

Women were once prohibited from performing onstage. The female characters in Shakespeare's plays were, in their first incarnations, played by boys doing their best impressions of women—and continued to be until society deemed this offensive, self-defeating and absurd.

Black and Asian characters were once often played by white actors. In "Tea House of the August Moon", Marlon Brando plays a Japanese man, with his eyes pulled tight across his face and his skin colored yellow. Laurence Olivier was nominated for an Oscar for playing Othello in blackface. And Alec Guinness painted himself brown to play Prince Faisal in "Lawrence of Arabia".

Those actors observed black people and Asian people, and they tried to walk like them and talk like them. They used make-up and prosthetics to imitate their physical characteristics, and took roles that would have been better played by black or Asian actors, two groups for which opportunities were already disproportionately limited. Today, just the idea of this is distasteful to us.

But able-bodied actors do all these things in efforts to imitate disabled people, and we do not protest. We are conditioned to be outraged when we see race being exploited onscreen. When we see disability being exploited onscreen, we are conditioned to applaud.

Just as non-white roles were once prized by white actors looking to show off their range, disabled roles are similarly prized by able-bodied actors today. A hundred articles and a thousand jokes have been written about how pretending to be disabled is a shortcut to an Oscar. For Hollywood stars, imitating disabled people in an effort to make able-bodied audiences think "Wow! I really believed he was one of them!" is a route to legitimacy as a serious actor.

The able-bodied narrative on this topic focuses on how "convincing" the performances of able-bodied actors are when they play disabled characters. To many in the disabled community, whether an able-bodied actor is convincing to other able-bodied people when playing a disabled person is immaterial. The ugly spectacle of it is fundamentally offensive.

When I see an able-bodied actor, even one as superb Daniel Day-Lewis, playing a great figure in the struggle for disability rights, such as Christy Brown in "My Left Foot", I feel the same way many black people would feel watching Day-Lewis play Malcolm X.

It wouldn't matter how great an actor Day-Lewis was, how expertly his black make-up was applied or how much he behaved like a white audience's idea of a black man. That he was onscreen in that role (and preventing a black actor from playing it) would provoke outrage. No-one would even begin to discuss whether he was "convincing".

The portrayals of disabled people that are considered the best, those that win Oscars for able-bodied actors, are often described as being "sympathetic" to disabled people. This supposes both that sympathy is what disabled people are seeking from the able-bodied and that it is the best we can hope to get from a filmed depiction of our lives. We do not want sympathy. We want equality.

The idea of able-bodied actors giving performances that are "sympathetic" to disabled people also implies that the disabled community is not able to speak for itself, through our own actors, but must instead send out able-bodied envoys to speak to the world on our behalf via the cinema screen. There was perhaps a time when this was true, when using able-bodied actors in disability drag was the only way to get disabled characters onscreen. But that time was decades ago.

Now there are many disabled stars. RJ Mitte has cerebral palsy and brilliantly played Walter White Jr., a character with the same condition, on "Breaking Bad". Marlee Matlin's abilities are so prodigious she is the youngest person to win an Academy Award for best performance in a leading role, despite the disadvantages of being deaf and the roadblocks the film industry erects in the career paths of those with disabilities. Peter Dinklage won an Emmy and a Golden Globe for his work on "Game of Thrones" and stands out among its cast not because of his restricted growth but because of his expansive talent. There are many fine disabled actors. And there would be many more if young disabled people grew up feeling they had a fair chance to work in film.

The insurmountable irony of the focus on whether able-bodied actors are "convincing" in disabled roles is that, if we were truly concerned with convincing performances, no able-bodied actor would ever have been cast as a disabled character. When a hearing actress is cast to play a deaf woman, the majority of her performance is devoted to asking herself a stream of questions about deaf life in an effort to pass as a deaf person. When Marlee Matlin is cast as a deaf woman, those questions do not need to be asked. No viewer needs to be convinced Marlee Matlin is deaf. Her performance is automatically authentic.

Today, we find the sight of white actors portraying non-white roles in old films shocking. It often makes those movies unwatchably embarrassing. Years from now, films in which able-bodied actors play disabled characters will seem similarly misguided. They will be relics of a less equal age.

But the most important reason for casting disabled actors as disabled characters does not concern how films will be viewed in the future. It concerns how they are made now. Every time an able-bodied actor plays a disabled character it makes it harder for disabled actors to work.

Indeed, if we are okay with disabled roles being played by able-bodied actors, we are okay with disabled actors being prevented from acting at all. Able-bodied actors can play able-bodied roles. Disabled actors cannot. If disabled actors cannot play disabled roles, they cannot play any roles at all—and they are excluded from film altogether.

Articles are often written protesting, rightly, that there are too few roles in Hollywood for women in certain age ranges or performers from certain ethnic groups. For disabled actors the situation is even worse. Not only are there too few roles for disabled people but also, when those rare roles become available, they are generally taken by people who are not disabled at all. It's like casting the parts played by Meryl Streep not with Streep, or an actress like her, but with Harrison Ford in drag.

I know that last image seems ridiculous. It is ridiculous. It's ridiculous because women have a right to be represented onscreen by women. Just as people of color have a right to represented onscreen by people of color. And just as people with disabilities have a right to be represented onscreen by people with disabilities.

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Position 2: Able-bodied actors should be allowed to play the roles of disabled characters.

(a response to Harris)

“All Actors Should be Allowed to Play Disabled Roles” by Adrian Hilton

April 10, 2014

“Able-bodied actors should not play disabled characters,” says film critic Scott Jordan Harris, writing on the website of the late Roger Ebert. “That they so often do should be a scandal,” Harris submits.

He develops his argument from the anti-discriminatory moral perspective of social equality, advancing that the modern world should no more entertain the able-bodied playing a disabled character than we would a white man playing the Moor of Venice or a chap in Ptolemaic drag prancing around the stage as Egypt’s Cleopatra. Indeed, audiences would most likely find justifiable grievance in a pale actor donning “the Thick-lips” of Othello, or having to watch “Some squeaking Cleopatra boy (her) greatness / I’ th’ posture of a whore”. Nowadays black people play black characters and women play Shakespearean heroines, so there is a certain logic in the belief that disabled roles should be reserved for disabled thespians: in Harris’s terminology, the “performance is automatically authentic”.

I agree with him that acting opportunities are disproportionately limited for the disabled, just as they are for women, especially in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. I grant that it is abhorrent that (say) a deaf actor might be summarily discounted for a part where their impairment may present no barrier at all to the essential art of dramatic characterisation. And I recognise that more could and should be done to encourage casting directors and theatre/film producers to employ disabled actors.

But Harris – who himself suffers chronically with ME and so knows infinitely more about living with disability than I or any able-bodied person – is wrong on a number of artistic, social and moral levels. And, curiously, he chose to make his case on Rogerebert.com, when Ebert himself repudiated the “emasculation of political correctness” which, he said, constitutes an “artistic straitjacket” that exiles minorities “to a benevolent limbo”. The objective must be the creation of great art: any socio-ethical responsibility towards a specific community must be subsumed to that primary vocation.

You may argue that Ebert is talking about innate ethnicity while Harris is concerned with disability – which may or may not be congenital – and so we are dealing with very different aspects of minority identity. But this is the parallel which Harris himself draws. For him, the only “convincing” Othello is a black man, and so the only “convincing” portrayal of disability can come from the disabled. This is an egoist assertion of the dominant rights agenda: the sacrosanct belief that disabled actors somehow have a right to be cast in all disabled roles because they are undeniably better suited, whatever the detriment to communal artistic morality.

I saw King Lear at the National a few weeks ago. The title role was played by Simon Russell Beale, who is 53 years old. Lear tells us that he is “a very foolish fond old man, / Fourscore years and upward”, but there’s not a senile pensioner or even a compos-mentis 80-year-old with the mental agility and physical stamina to cope with just the storm scene, let alone scale the entire magnum opus eight times a week. And last Saturday I saw a superb production of Julian Mitchell’s 1930s public-school masterpiece Another Country at the Trafalgar Studios, which explores the themes of institutional coercion, social constriction, power abuse and homosexuality. Should the role of Guy Bennett be reserved exclusively for gay actors?

I don’t wish to conflate homosexuality with notions of disorder or disability. But if the matter before us is the “scandal” of how disabled roles are cast, we must surely consider all minorities equally. Gay actors obviously don’t suffer discrimination in theatre like the disabled, but they certainly have done and many still do in the predominantly hetero-normative world of movie-making. Why should inner psycho-sexual complexity be treated any differently from outer skin-colour or physical disability? Or is the concern only with the depthless injustices of phony Hollywood appearances?

The essential art of acting consists in being that which one is not: the shy man pretends to be debonair; the arrogant man feigns humility. The Greek word for actor is ὑποκριτής (‘hupokrités’, from which we derive ‘hypocrite’), meaning dissembler or pretender. It is to be figuratively two-faced; someone whose profession does not match their practice; those who say one thing but do another. It follows that the truer one is being to oneself, the less hypocritical one is being. And the less hypocritical one is being, the less one is pretending to be that which one is not. Emotional authenticity, psychological truthfulness and physical accuracy combine to create great acting.