When I was growing up and going to the movies almost every weekend, I rarely saw a character with any type of disability or life-threatening disease featured in a film, unless it was a three-hankie movie like “Love Story,” in which the female lead, Ali MacGraw, seemed to get more beautiful as she (spoiler alert!) lost her valiant fight with a terminal illness. She become more angelic as the movie went on, until you could almost see her halo.
Although disability-focused films and television shows have come a long way since that 1970 drama in terms of showing more realistic depictions of people with serious illnesses and disabilities (and the impact on their family members), there is still a big disconnect between what we see on the big screen and the grittier moments of life with those conditions.
I was thinking about this gap while watching “The Theory of Everything,” a film about Stephen Hawking, the famous British physicist, cosmologist and best-selling author of “A Brief History of Time,” among many other books.
While a doctoral student in physics at Cambridge in 1963, he was diagnosed with ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) shortly after his 21st birthday, and at the time, was given only two years to live. ALS is often referred to as Lou Gehrig’s disease, and is a progressive neurodegenerative disease that affects nerve cells in the brain and the spinal cord. The film does a very good job of showing that a disability or disease does not need to define an individual and that it is possible to keep a sense of humor in the darkest times of life. And, most importantly, that people with disabilities have the same human weaknesses and failings as anyone else.
Although the film shows Hawking’s loss of mobility (acted superbly by Eddie Redmayne) in painful detail, it still glosses over many of the messier aspects of the disease, such as the fact that as ALS develops, it can often be hard to control saliva because there is weakness of the tongue and throat muscles. Although the film shows Hawking’s wife and others feeding him with a spoon after he loses control of his hands, all the food goes down very smoothly, without so much as a smudge of pudding on his face. I appreciate and understand the impulse to show respect to such a well-regarded living person, nonetheless, this was a missed opportunity for a “teachable moment” for moviegoers around the world.
It was also a shame that Hawking’s first wife, Jane Wilde, whose memoir, “Travelling to Infinity: My Life With Stephen,” served as the basis of the movie, nixed the idea of including any sex scenes, although Hawking’s ability to father three children, and his predilection for reading Penthouse magazine are highlighted in the film. Even a flash of flesh would have been highly instructive to the general public, most of whom assume that everyone who uses a wheelchair no longer has any type of sex life. For those who are willing to admit they are curious, add to your Netflix queue the 2012 film “The Sessions,” which is based on a true story and stars Helen Hunt as a professional sex surrogate for a man in an iron lung who wishes to lose his virginity.
Lastly, I would have liked to see at least one other scene: the initial reaction of a stranger who didn’t recognize Hawking and assumed that he had an intellectual disability as well as physical problems. As renowned violinist Itzhak Perlman, who contracted polio at the age of 4, recently said in a Wall Street Journal article about disability and performing artists: “Just recently, I was sitting on a plane, and the flight attendant asked my wife if I had a chair. … This person did not talk to me, because I was the problem. People think if you’re in a chair, you have a problem digesting information.”
In “The Theory of Everything,” everyone around Hawking rallies to his cause, starting with his long-suffering wife, his college chums and even his dissertation review committee. There’s only one brief glance of dirty looks from a stranger at a concert. This just didn’t ring true to me. In his seminal work, “A Brief History of Time,” Hawking writes, “The universe doesn’t allow perfection.” Neither should films about disease and disability.
Michelle K. Wolf writes a monthly column for the Jewish Journal. Visit her Jews and Special Needs blog at jewishjournal.com/jews_and_special_needs.
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