Post by Admin on Feb 26, 2021 3:27:13 GMT
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.)