Skip to main content

New top story from Time: Sia’s Golden Globe-Nominated Music Isn’t Just Offensive. It’s Bad Art—and the Distinction Matters

https://ift.tt/3krb8VE

When I watched the teaser trailer for Music back in November, my first impression was one of distaste. In tone and intent, I found Sia’s sensory-overloading musical film about a non-speaking autistic girl—which is up for two Golden Globes this weekend—eerily reminiscent of “The Bob Lamonta Story,” a 1997 Mr. Show with Bob and David skit that skewered abled actors playing disabled characters in pandering, stereotypical dreck and then rewarding themselves for their brave choices. As someone who cares about film as an art form—and as someone who has covered and reviewed it for over 20 years—I thought it looked like a bad movie.

My opinion began to evolve from merely bad to both bad and harmful as I learned more about the film’s genesis and production. I felt uneasy about Sia’s desire to make what she called “a love letter to caregivers and to the autism community,” without more meaningfully involving anyone from that community in her process. The singer’s callous responses to autistic people’s concerns on Twitter did nothing to increase my trust in her ability to treat us like full-fledged human beings onscreen. I was disappointed that she hadn’t tried harder to look for and accommodate a non-speaking autistic person in the title role before casting her frequent collaborator Maddie Ziegler, a non-autistic person. I was upset by a profile on Ziegler that mentioned her research for the role included watching meltdown videos on YouTube, especially because neither the actor nor her interviewer seemed to demonstrate any uneasiness about the practice of parents filming their autistic children’s most vulnerable moments and posting them online. (Like many autistic people who have issues with Music, I have little interest in blaming Ziegler, who was 14 when she started working on the project, and appears to have expressed some concerns about it during filming, which Sia shot down.)

I was genuinely horrified by the scenes in which Music, the character, was subjected to prone restraint, a technique to subdue autistic people which has caused multiple deaths. (Sia later apologized and promised to add a warning or remove the scenes; the version I rented featured neither change.) As an autistic person who cares very deeply about autistic rights and representation, I believed that Music, which was released in Australia in January and in the U.S. earlier this month, had the potential to be patronizing, exploitive and genuinely harmful.

And still, on top of all that: I thought it looked like a bad movie.

The reactions that I saw from many of my fellow autistic people on social media—one of the few places autistic voices are able to gain any traction—were also multifaceted. Plenty of people were rightfully angry, but they were also heartbroken, exhausted, annoyed and aesthetically disappointed, offering nuanced critiques of autism and disability in the media. So I was frustrated to see the entire spectrum of less than positive responses to the movie reduced to “Twitter mob” outrage in news stories and condemned as a threat to creativity by Sia fans and columnists.

The difference between criticizing art that is bad for representation and criticizing art that is bad on aesthetic grounds isn’t always clear cut—and the two frequently overlap. My efforts in the latter are often influenced by the former. I tend to find that, perhaps unsurprisingly, art made by creators who treat humans who aren’t like them as props or creative exercises tends to be quite hollow. Creators who fail to research, understand or empathize with the communities they’re taking it upon themselves to represent—or write a “love letter” to, as Sia called it—often make bad art. Even if you could separate the two, I don’t believe that aesthetic criticisms should necessarily take precedence over representational ones. It’s certainly more important to highlight that many autistic people find Music harmful and hurtful than it is to mention that there are many who think it sucks.

But reducing the entirety of the autistic response to Music to simple offense or outrage does as much of a disservice to autistic people as the film does. Art and creative expression are parts of the human experience, and autistic people are human. Autistic people also consume art and form opinions on it. Some of us even make it. What’s being treated as autistic people attempting to dictate the terms by which anyone can tell a story about autism is actually more a desperate attempt to get to participate in the conversation at all.

Sia Day 35_323.dng

These arguments about who gets to tell what stories and who gets to criticize them are especially frustrating because they’re almost entirely ignorant of the conversations on the topic that autistic people—and disabled people in general—are already having. When Sia’s supporters point to previous instances in which abled actors played disabled people, like Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man, Kevin McHale in Glee, Freddie Highmore in The Good Doctor or Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot, and suggest that those film’s creators didn’t receive nearly as much criticism as she has for Music, what that tells me is that they weren’t listening to the people who were making those criticisms. Disabled people have been making thoughtful and nuanced criticisms of these and similar casting choices for as long as they’ve been happening. The same goes for the narratives these performances facilitate. Unfortunately, until recently, platforms to discuss disabled stories have been as inaccessible to disabled people as the resources to tell those stories in the first place. Social media has helped to boost voices and perspectives that have long been ignored, but we still have a long way to go.

Rain Man.
Universal Images Group via GettyThe poster for the 1998 movie “Rain Man,” starring Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise. The movie was the highest-grossing film of the year and won four Oscars, including Best Actor for Hoffman

Disabled stories that abled people make for abled audiences are often offensive, but they’re also often predictable and boring. Abled actors’ performances, including Ziegler’s, tend to focus on portraying the appearance of disability more than the person. Which abled audiences, who generally view disability from the outside when they think of it at all, often praise as authentic. From Rain Man to Me Before You to Music, there’s a long tradition of disabled characters being treated as objects in abled people’s stories, and stepping stones to their growth. Even in critically acclaimed fare like Million Dollar Baby, these stories wind up saying more about abled people’s fear of disability and becoming disabled than they do about disabled people’s realities. Very little of this resembles the lives that disabled people actually live, or the stories we tell. There’s the occasional hint of something better or more human in some of these stories, and some disabled people I know can cite a character or story that did speak to them on some level. (For example, I think Danny Pudi’s portrayal of the autistic-coded Abed on Community did a great job of fusing mannerisms and behaviors with personhood.) But the decent stories and performances are the exception, not the rule. And they’re no substitute for better opportunities for disabled artists.

Debates about casting often come down, on one side, to creative freedom. “There’s a real narcissism at the heart of this push to police who can and can’t play certain roles. While it’s laudable to give marginalized groups a fairer crack at the whip when it comes to exposure and job opportunities, the obsession with being ‘represented’ denies the whole escapism of fiction,” The Telegraph’s Ella Whelan wrote in defense of Sia last November. But what about the selfishness of artists who want to tell disabled stories and audiences who want to enjoy them without ever once having to consider their real-life counterparts? I’m not going to cry too hard for the creative freedom of abled artists when they still have access to far more resources and support for disability narratives than disabled artists do. Nor do I have much respect for the kind of creativity that can only imagine disabled people as tools of one’s own expression, not as collaborators, cast members, or even a valued part of the audience.

I’m not particularly sympathetic to an abled viewer’s desire for escapism when disabled ones are constantly confronted by how little creators and fans must think of us. And I don’t have much faith in the opinions of critics or fans who haven’t done any significant reflection on what makes them like the disability stories they consume, whether disabled people feel different about those same stories, and why that might be. (Even Roger Ebert, whose thoughtfulness and empathy I’ve admired since I first started reading film criticism, came out of Rain Man wondering “Is it possible to have a relationship with an autistic person? Is it possible to have a relationship with a cat?” and essentially praising the lack of personhood apparent in Hoffman’s “uninflected, unmoved, uncomprehending” Raymond.)

In the interest of fairness, I did watch Music for the sake of this piece. I won’t evaluate it as representation, as I believe that non-speaking autistic people should be leading that conversation. (For more on the topic, I recommend starting with the short film produced by CommunicationFIRST and the essays by Mickayla and Hari Srinivasan.) In my capacity as a culture writer, though, it was almost exactly what I expected it to be. Music only challenged my expectations in the sense that its title character isn’t the only one treated like a prop in the story. All of the other characters and their lives, including, bizarrely, Sia playing herself, are also empty vessels for plot development and cheap emotional manipulation. The story they embody is a cloying, haphazard, and exposition-heavy mess. Even in a lean year for film, its Golden Globes nominations for Best Picture – Musical/Comedy and Best Actress – Motion Picture – Musical/Comedy for Kate Hudson as Music’s sister, Zu, are truly perplexing.

A Sia supporter might claim that I already had my mind made up about the movie, and reviewed it through my preexisting bias. But I’d argue that as someone who pays attention to both film and disability issues, I simply recognized the long-term problems inherent in the trailer, made an educated guess about what the full film would be like, and was saddened to have my suspicions confirmed. I’m not outraged at Music because it doesn’t check the specific boxes I require for good representation—I actually doubt casting an autistic actor would have improved matters much. Rather, I’m disappointed that it is yet another failure to reflect more of the human experience. I have no desire to restrict the creativity of abled artists who want to tell empathetic, respectful, and aesthetically sound stories about disabled people. I’m desperate to finally see some proof that they can.

Sarah Kurchak is the author of the memoir I Overcame My Autism And All I Got Was This Lousy Anxiety Disorder (Douglas & McIntyre).

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

FOX NEWS: Cincinnati zoo renames sloth habitat after late 1-year-old who loved sloths The sloth habitat at Ohio's Cincinnati Zoo will be named after a toddler who recently passed away.

Cincinnati zoo renames sloth habitat after late 1-year-old who loved sloths The sloth habitat at Ohio's Cincinnati Zoo will be named after a toddler who recently passed away. via FOX NEWS https://ift.tt/3DLAshi

L Taraval Improvement Project Update

L Taraval Improvement Project Update By Sevilla Mann Roundtable at the Community Parklet Shares Project Updates  This past week, the SFMTA hosted a media roundtable discussing updates about the L Taraval Improvement Project at the community parklet located in front of the The Rolling Out Café  on Taraval St.   Segment B construction began in February 2022 and is scheduled to be completed Fall 2024. Sewer and water infrastructure work is currently taking place. Future work includes track work, overhead line work, the construction of new boarding islands and streetscape improvements.    On hand to answer questions and provide updates was District Four Supervisor Gordon Mar, SFMTA Board Director Sharon Lai and Director of Transportation Jefferey Tumlin.   The Roundtable  Supervisor Mar opened the discussion by highlighting the many benefits that the local community will receive with the planned infrastructure upgrades along the corridor. These benefits include:   Replacing sew

Traffic Collisions have Decreased on San Francisco’s Slow Streets

Traffic Collisions have Decreased on San Francisco’s Slow Streets By Julia Malmo   As a whole, Slow Streets are safer than they were before being designated Slow Streets  Streets that are part of the SFMTA’s  Slow Streets Program have become measurably safer since the program began in 2020, with the number of traffic crashes falling by almost half. On average, these corridors have seen a 48% drop in collisions following their designation as Slow Streets, compared with a 14% drop in collisions citywide over the same period. Slow Streets also are more welcoming for people who walk, bike and roll. Fewer than 1,000 vehicles per day use all but four of the current Slow Streets (20th Street, Minnesota Street, Noe Street, and Page Street).  The goal of the program is to create safe, shared streets that are comfortable and enjoyable for people of all ages and abilities, using any mode of transportation. We now can see how it’s doing in a new evaluation report . When the SFMTA Board appr

IPL 2020 | KKR, SRH search for first win to get off the mark https://ift.tt/333a9nc

Having suffered defeats in their opening games, the Kolkata Knight Riders and Sunrisers Hyderabad will lock horns on Saturday at the Sheikh Zayed Stadium in Abu Dhabi. While Kolkata faced a tough 49-run loss to defending champions Mumbai Indians, the Sunrisers suffered a monumental batting collapse against Royal Challengers Bangalore, losing the game by 10 runs.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J कोरोना सकंट में TV सीरियल की शूटिंग शूरू, मास्क लगाकर पहुंचे स्टार्स- निया, पार्थ से लेकर रश्मि-PICS

कोरोना वायरस के चलते जारी लॉकडाउन में टीवी व फिल्मों की शूटिंग बंद थी। कोरोना के खतरे को देखते हुए तमाम सीरियल की शूटिंग रोक दी गई तो वहीं फिल्मों को रिलीज अटक गई। एंटरटेंमेंट इंडस्ट्री को कोरोना के चलते करोड़ों from टेलीविजन की खबरें | Television News in Hindi | TV Serials Update in Hindi – FilmiBeat Hindi http:/hindi.filmibeat.com/television/tv-shooting-starts-kasauti-zindagi-kay-naagin-nia-sharma-parth-samthaan-rashmi-desai-pics-090604.html?utm_source=/rss/filmibeat-hindi-television-fb.xml&utm_medium=23.11.231.156&utm_campaign=client-rss

Women Pioneers at Muni: Adeline Svendsen and Muni’s First Newsletter

Women Pioneers at Muni: Adeline Svendsen and Muni’s First Newsletter By Jeremy Menzies To close out Women’s History Month, here’s a look back at one woman whose work to bring Muni staff together in the late 1940s created a legacy that lives on to this day. Adeline “Addy” Svendsen was founding editor of Muni’s first internal newsletter, “ Trolley Topics .” Adeline Svendsen sits at her desk in the Geneva Carhouse office building in this 1949 shot. Trolley Topics was a new venture when it started in February 1946. As Svendsen wrote in the first issue it was created, “to bring a little fun, a little news, and a lot of good will to all our fellow employees in the Railway.” Just two years prior in 1944, Muni merged with the Market Street Railway Company, expanding the small municipal operation into the largest transit provider in the city with hundreds of employees, vehicles of every shape and size, and dozens of facilities scattered across town. The newsletter was meant to help unite

FOX NEWS: Decadent double chocolate mint cookies for National Chocolate Day National Chocolate Day on Oct. 28th calls for a serious dose of chocolate.

Decadent double chocolate mint cookies for National Chocolate Day National Chocolate Day on Oct. 28th calls for a serious dose of chocolate. via FOX NEWS https://ift.tt/3nEJxSB

New top story from Time: Summer Tutoring Is Not the Solution to a Lost Year of Schooling. It Might Hurt Kids More Than It Helps Them

https://ift.tt/2Wpnci1 Summer tutoring has become the rallying cry by politicians and pundits as a way to address the learning loss from months of remote and hybrid learning. A frightening number of students did not show up to class last school year, including up to 15% of kindergarteners in some school districts. But tutoring is the not the easy solution many think it is. Before parents sign up their children, they need to do their own homework and, except under specific conditions, they should not pursue tutoring. Simply put, most children do not benefit long term from standard tutoring. Moreover, current trends in supplemental education can end up hurting children. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Tutoring can work well under certain conditions for children. Unfortunately, those conditions are quite strict. First, tutors should have a strong command of the content and must find ways to connect it to the student’s interests. Second, tutoring is more effective when

New top story from Time: The Ballroom Scene Has Long Offered Radical Freedoms For Black and Brown Queer People. Today, That Matters More Than Ever

https://ift.tt/2O8qsKr Marginalized by prejudice, violence, housing insecurity, and HIV infection rates among other burdens, Black and brown transgender and gender-nonconforming people face particular challenges in establishing secure, nourishing communities—both within LGBTQ spaces and in society at large. One response to these stigmas has been the formation of self-sustaining social networks and cultural groups, such as the ballroom scene, a formidable social movement and creative collective for LGBT people of color. Amid what has been called a new golden age for Black culture and storytelling , a particular “Renaissance” in queer Black art and cultural representation is clear. Ballroom culture is now widely seen and celebrated (and appropriated) in the mainstream—across fashion campaigns, music videos, social media and in TV shows like Pose , Legendary , and RuPaul’s Drag Race . And i n this moment, ballroom and voguing as the body politic has much to teach the world abou

New Dashboards Give a Window into Muni Service Changes

New Dashboards Give a Window into Muni Service Changes By Kate McCarthy An inspector manages Muni service. New dashboards that help inform changes to Muni service are now live at SFMTA.com/MuniData Many factors inform our decisions about Muni service adjustments. These include making sure changes to service support the SFMTA’s values, which are economic vitality, environmental stewardship, trust and equity. We also evaluate travel patterns. You can now explore these patterns using the new Muni data dashboards  (SFMTA.com/MuniData). When looking at possible Muni service changes, the first thing we do is turn to the Muni Service Equity Strategy for guidance. Using the Muni Service Equity Strategy, we prioritize providing Muni service along routes that more often serve people of color, members of low-income households, and/or those who are dependent upon transit service, including people with disabilities and seniors. We also use ridership data to analyze where riders are boardin