Curate The Hate

Living with Spina Bifida and movie-love are the most prominent parts of my identity. The experience of the former has informed the experience of the latter insofar as my many years on the planet have created an ideology of suffering and relief the movies have shaped. I love rescue narratives, body horror, slapstick, and Spike Lee for largely the same reason: these movies tend to express something about how we live with pain — physically, spiritually, socially. Or don’t.

I will watch anything, and although I am dying to get back in a theatre, streaming movies has been my salvation in these dark times.

I have been a fervent supporter, in particular, of the Criterion Collection, a boutique DVD and streaming company that, for years, has released some of the most essential films in history from around the world, all packaged with thoughtful extras and beautiful essays and artwork. Criterion is the high watermark for home viewing of everything from “8 1/2” to “The Rock” to “The Tree of Life”. The curators always find a take on obscure and popular movies that no one else comes close to doing, blurring the lines between low and high art.

I have spent years and hundreds, if not thousands of dollars in support of them.

That may change.

This morning, which, coincidentally, is the National Day of Disability Mourning — more on that later — I logged onto the Criterion Channel to see what treasures they offered for March. There’s a focus on Black filmmakers and Women’s films, which reminded me I needed to finish “Barbarella” and “Jeanne Dielman” — because I know how to party.

I kept scrolling and saw a heading: “Four Films By Janicza Bravo”. I knew this filmmaker for some reason and -

I froze.

(spoilers ahead)

Bravo’s short, “Gregory Go Boom” was one of the offerings. Ostensibly a black comedy, it tells the story of a wheelchair user in the Salton Sea who is unlucky in love — so much so that he ends his life with a match and a can of gas.

That’s the punchline.

The film, which screened at Sundance, is well-made and has recognizable faces like Michael Cera as Gregory. Cera is able-bodied and for me to explain why this is a forever issue, I’d need to write a whole other piece, and I have laundry to do and another twelve hours of “Jeanne Dielman” to go. I encourage everyone to Google “disability as costume” on ye old internet and we’ll talk again if you make it out of the rabbit-hole alive.

There are many reasons I find “Gregory Go Boom” repugnant, but I want to be careful raising the torch and pitchfork against a fellow creative. My problem is less with Bravo’s myopic and complacent work than with Criterion’s ignorance toward inclusion.

I find it remarkable that, in 2021, after so many years of the media feeding off the lifeblood of the diversity movement taking place in Hollywood that a company as academic and forward-thinking as Criterion would sidestep including a movie among all their great works that is so casually hateful toward its subject.

To compound it, Bravo is a woman of color, and one might assume she has had her struggles with diversity. It feels as though she has no clue that disability is linked to all other diverse groups because anyone can be a part of it, and likely will sometime in their lives. She shows Gregory as little more than a twisted body made to ridicule and snuff out, not as a complex person who has to navigate the world in ways the able-bodied never consider.

Imagine it another way: re-imagine this story with a woman, or a gay person, or a person of color, who wakes up one morning and decides, explicitly, to take their life based on how the world rejects those physical qualities. You probably can’t conceive of such a thing because that movie would never be made now, if ever.

I ask: what makes us so inured to the plight of the largest minority group on the planet that we accept, if not outright celebrate, depictions of that plight in our art, especially when those depictions serve to only make the able-bodied feel better they are not the ones suffering, and, oh what courage to do so?

So much of my early life was wrapped up in isolation and hurt by others. I remember one instance as an eight-year-old when two boys — friends, I thought — tried to push me in a sled down into a busy street. Their plan was thwarted and I went on to things like a sex life, grad school, and writing this. I see that as a privilege, but not my life itself.

Am I mad at Janicza Bravo for making the movie? No. She can say what she wants, but I wish she would have taken the time to meet some people in the disability community. Maybe she was afraid if she found out the truth — that, man alive, disabled lives have vibrancy and meaning — it would make her idea seem trite. No artist likes to feel like his or her edginess is nothing but insulting.

But again, the issue is more with Criterion. This company should have thought more about how movies affect others. Instead, they chose the cool route and now I’m not so sure I want to support them anymore. We’ll have to see. This is my personal choice, and I’m not asking for a boycott when they already have my money. I simply want to underline/star/circle/highlight for the umpteenth time how living with a physical or mental challenge does not disqualify you from the basic rights of happiness and safety. Even if I had been left in the woods to be eaten by wolves, I’m sure with enough patience and understanding I’d have ridden one to freedom. At least I think that’s so.

To end, March 1st marks the National Day of Disability Mourning, which commemorates the disabled lives lost to parental murder. I am ambivalent about this, as the dead cannot hear us cry out. Instead, I’d rather mourn those NOT in the community who would do such terrible things. An atypical body is never grist for the mill, whether by one’s hand or another’s. Let our tears wash over those whose shame and thoughtlessness makes such a day of mourning necessary. They are the ones in need of fixing, not us.

We need artists and entertainers to take a harder look at themselves before they put pen to paper. And Criterion should know that to care about inclusion and diversity in cinema is to value all of us in our imperfection. If it isn’t right to show “The Birth of a Nation” without a context nowadays, then the “Gregory Go Booms” of the world deserve the same scrutiny.

This exhausts me.

I’m tired — tired of unnecessary pain, misunderstanding, and willful ignorance. Time’s up for the disability community to be the butt of cruel jokes, especially by privileged adults who know better.

Remember this is your club, too — at least it will be soon enough.