Laughing with Disability

What Bradford finds more offensive are those inspirational movies about retarded guys that always seem to win Oscars. To him, they’re like the portrayal of black people in 1940s films. He’s tired, he said, of “Rain Man” or “Forrest Gump,” where the hero is “sage and heroic, and sweet and childlike and can’t do anything wrong.” He argued that I was uncomfortable with the otherness of disabled people and wanted them put away where I couldn’t see them.

Advertisements