Visiting with Red Fish tonight, she pointed me toward a very interesting post on Asymmetrical Information today, dealing with Hollywood's inability to accurately portray individuals with disabilities.
Fake compassion
Hollywood, I believe, tends to look upon disabled people in a group, rather than as individuals with particular syndromes or pathologies that can be defined (for the most part). Lazy actors can't be bothered to actually spend a great deal of time with the invisibles of our society, so they have all sort-of come up with a standard "this is how you play retarded people" schtick. For those of us actually in the field, however, we can spot the glaring errors immediately... we're looking to find the actual "disability" being characterized, and we're seeing a bizarre mismatch of symptoms that don't go together. Let's just all feel good about "those people" and love them (but, of course, if you're pregnant and find out you're going to have one of "those kinds of people" you have every right to an abortion because obviously no-one with that problem wants to actually live with it, right?). Let's don't actually spend the time to find out more about them and what makes them tick.
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