Popcorn Disabilities: The Highs and Lows of Disabled Representation in the Movies

You can learn a lot from the movies-about sex and relationships, about business, about history. Sure, there's a fair amount of fantasy, wish fulfillment, and glorious hair to exaggerate everything, but for better or for worse, films remain one of the most important ways that viewers around the world learn about other people and cultures. And almost since the dawn of the medium, movies have shaped the public's understanding of and assumptions about disability. As a movie critic and disabled person, Kristen Lopez speaks with particular authority on how disability is represented-and too often misrepresented-in Hollywood movies. Having dealt with the effects of osteogenesis imperfecta for her entire life, she has experienced directly the lack of accommodations, political neglect, and social difficulties that disabled people deal with daily-and she has witnessed the vast difference between those everyday challenges and how they are typically depicted on-screen. As Lopez points out in this book, even when they're not just narrative props to help out an able-bodied protagonist, disabled movie characters are overwhelmingly white, affluent, and conventionally attractive, which obscures the variety of disabilities and the experiences of those who deal with them. (Roughly one in four people in the US have a disability, and a disproportionate number of them live in poverty.) Popcorn Disabilities is an impassioned but nonetheless fun and engaging survey of how Hollywood has dealt with disability over the last century, covering not only the many ways that cinema has distorted the lived reality of disabled people, but also where films have gotten it right, and how the power of the medium can continue to be used to enlighten and educate in the future. From little-remembered gems like Tod Browning's Freaks—one of the earliest well-intentioned attempts to show disabled characters as complex, three-dimensional human beings—to contemporary films like Coda, My Left Foot, The Little Mermaid, Unbreakable, and many others, it challenges popular assumptions about disability while never losing sight of movies' unique power, influence, and potential as a tool for social good.