The “Me Before You” Backlash Was Bigger Than Anyone Expected
Disability rights activists have rallied against the normalization of suicide
for disabled people in Me Before You. Protesters told BuzzFeed News the scope
of the protest is unprecedented.
Ariane Lange
Ariane Lange
BuzzFeed News Reporter
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Louisa (Emilia Clarke) and Will (Sam Claflin) dance at a wedding in Me Before
You. MGM / New Line Cinema
ID: 8849944
Disability rights activists were ready for Me Before You in part because, as
one put it, the problems they saw in the movie were “depressingly familiar.”
Protests of the film began online in February after the tearjerker’s trailer
immediately raised red flags. Me Before You, based on the British novel of
the same name, is the tragic love story of bubbly caregiver Louisa (Emilia
Clarke) and Will (Sam Claflin), a man who sustains a spinal cord injury and
decides to seek assisted suicide because he considers life with quadriplegia to
be an unacceptable compromise. It’s been marketed as a quirky, opposites-attract
romance that is thwarted by disability.
Most of the vocal detractors of the film have been people with disabilities.
Their main critique is that the film perpetuates the stereotype that life with
a disability is not worth living; they vehemently object to the film’s
exhortation (and promotional tagline) to “live boldly” when its main character
ultimately
opts to kill himself. Echoing similar defenses from the actors in the film,
director Thea Sharrock recently
said
that the movie is about “the right to choose” and called activists’ anger a
“misunderstanding,” while screenwriter/novelist Jojo Moyes
said
you can’t judge a character “unless you put yourself in somebody’s shoes” —
which only made protesters angrier. (“One of the things you don’t tell people
who are outraged is they don’t understand,” said Mark Johnson, chair of the
Americans With Disabilities Act Legacy Project, who has had a spinal cord injury
similar to Will’s for 45 years. Sharrock’s representatives had no further
comment.)
What began as an informal collection of tweets and blog posts has snowballed
into an international outcry. The backlash has proven the power of the
activists’
collective voice — and might mark a turning point for disability representation
in film and television.
Johnson called the traction of this protest — and the sheer scale of it —
“unprecedented.”
“I think it’s a huge opportunity, and I think it clearly has the potential to
be a tipping point,” he said.
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CSUN lecturer Ellen Stohl (left), who sustained a spinal cord injury as a
teenager and uses a wheelchair, protests outside a screening of Me Before You
in Los Angeles. She and other activists were kicked out of the box office area
of The Landmark. Ariane Lange / BuzzFeed News
ID: 8849922
In the face of the filmmakers’
contention
that the film is “just about one character,” protesters maintain that they’ve
been bombarded with movies about assisted suicide for disabled people for
a century. The last mainstream English-language film in which a character
decides she would rather die than live with quadriplegia was 2004’s Million
Dollar
Baby, in which a boxer (Hilary Swank) begs her trainer (Clint Eastwood) to kill
her after she sustains a spinal cord injury; his decision to kill her is
depicted as a personal tragedy but a moral triumph of the story. That film
provoked criticisms, as Me Before You has, but activists say their concerns
did not resonate much in the mainstream. It was “nothing like this,” said John
Kelly, the New England regional director of Not Dead Yet, a disability rights
group that lobbies against assisted suicide; he also has an injury similar to
Will’s. Kelly recalled an article in the
New York Times
in 2005 that addressed the disability rights perspective.
But this time — in response to a
torrent
of
critiques
by
writers
and
activists
—
The Guardian,
the Washington Post,
People,
Vanity Fair,
Salon,
BuzzFeed,
and
The Hollywood Reporter
have all covered the controversy, which has become too clamorous to ignore.
“It’s exhilarating,” Kelly said.
Social media has been a game changer for disability rights activists’ ability
to organize. “I think the huge difference is that now they can’t ignore us
and they can’t get away from us,” said Lawrence Carter-Long, an adviser to the
ReelAbilities Film Festival. “They can’t brush you off as just that one
kook out there.”
Among other things, detractors have flooded the film’s hashtags and directly
confronted the screenwriter and actors. Protesters coordinated by Not Dead
Yet have also gathered outside theaters across the U.S. handing out leaflets
and talking to passersby about what they termed a “disability snuff movie.”
The “loosely coordinated” protesters — who now gather for weekly conference
calls to coordinate their next moves — were successful in their branding, said
Ingrid Tischer, a
writer
and the director of development at the Disability Rights Education & Defense
Fund. The activists decided on “an easily understood message for people who
didn’t know anything about the issues,” she said: They focused on the
romanticization of Will’s suicide, and the hypocrisy of the film’s tagline —
“live
boldly” — when the disabled character chooses to die.
Organizers say the general public is more receptive to the idea that
representation matters. “Anybody who tries to tell you that ‘it is just a
movie’ or
that ‘movies don’t really matter’ doesn’t understand history,” Carter-Long
wrote in an email, linking to a
Nazi propaganda film
that frames assisted suicide for people with disabilities as a noble act.
Part of what’s given the protests so much purchase is the sheer volume of
firsthand accounts of people with disabilities who grapple with the real-world
consequences of the stereotypes they see in the film. At a protest outside a
theater in Los Angeles on June 2, Ellen Stohl, a lecturer at Cal State
University,
Northridge, told BuzzFeed News that when she sustained a spinal cord injury as
a teenager, “I thought my life was over,” she said. “I was still a virgin,
[I thought] I was never gonna have sex, I could never be an actress, I could
never have a husband, a career, a life. I really did believe that when I woke
up.” She attempted to refuse a life-saving blood transfusion while she was in
the hospital, because “I wanted to die,” she said. Later, sitting several
yards away from her 12-year-old daughter, she related this same story to two
people who stopped to listen. “Thank god,” Stohl said, raising her hands for
air quotes, “my mom didn’t ‘respect my choice.’”
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Stohl’s daughter Zoe (right), who turns 13 next week, attended the protest with
her friend Lily. Ariane Lange / BuzzFeed News
ID: 8849965
Dominick Evans, a filmmaker and writer, told BuzzFeed News on the phone that a
doctor at an Ohio hospital encouraged his girlfriend to let him bleed out
when he was hemorrhaging and needed a blood transfusion to save his life after
a surgery in 2012. Evans, who is a wheelchair user with spinal muscular
atrophy, has become a leader in flooding the film’s #LiveBoldly hashtag with
images and stories of people with disabilities living life on their own terms.
“If there’s nothing that says disabled lives are worth living to counter this,
then we need to provide this message,” he said.
The protesters hope that this unparalleled level of attention to the issue will
lead to a further, more nuanced critique of the way people with disabilities
are represented in film and television. Vilissa Thompson is the founder of
Ramp Your Voice!,
an advocacy and consulting organization with a focus on disabled women of
color, and the creator of the recent hashtag #DisabilityTooWhite. She points out
that Hollywood has failed nonwhite disabled people. “They’re there, and they
deserve to be seen,” she said.
Evans, who is trans, also noted, “We’re not seeing disabled trans people, and
we exist.”
This protest may also not be the last. Kelly said that in the future, “what I
would hope to see is a broad-based progressive social justice response to
these kinds of things that will make it not worth their while to make them
anymore.” Thompson called on nondisabled actors to “stop auditioning for these
roles.” Tischer thinks no substantial change will occur until gatekeepers in
Hollywood start making more thoughtful hiring decisions: “Until we have people
with disabilities who are politicized in terms of their disability who are the
decision-makers in the entertainment industry, I think it’s gonna be really
hard to make a lot of progress in front of the camera or in the storyline,” she
said.
Whether it leads to changes in Hollywood in the short term, the traction the
outcry has gotten in the mainstream has, according to Tischer, proved that
“we are active drivers of cultural critiques” — and that the filmmakers have
had to deal with the consequences. As Me Before You’s Sharrock said in her
Hollywood Reporter interview, she “didn’t quite anticipate” the level of
opposition the romantic weepie would provoke from the disability community.
Alice Wong, the founder and project coordinator of the
Disability Visibility Project
and one of the activists who has been leading these conversations online, told
BuzzFeed News via email: “When artists create works about minorities with
little research or attempt to understand the lived experience, they should
expect questions about representation. It’s 2016, goddamnit.”
Source:
https://www.buzzfeed.com/arianelange/me-before-you-backlash-disability-rights
