Tag Archives: Michelle Obama

Crip Camp

December 3rd is the International Day of Persons with Disabilities. You may have heard some rumbling about disabled representation in the movies lately – Anne Hathaway took some flak for her limb difference in The Witches, and Sia’s movie, Music, has been criticized for casting a non-autistic actor in the lead role. Representation matters, and while the Oscars LOVE disabled characters, they don’t show the same love for disabled actors, who are rarely cast to portray themselves on screen, and almost never cast to portray anyone else. Although 20% of us live with some sort of disability, less than 5% of movie and TV characters are disabled, and of those few who are, less than 3% are played by actually disabled actors. That math is abysmal. Are disabilities the last place of the civil rights movement?

To mark the International Day of Persons with Disabilities, we watched a documentary on Netflix called Crip Camp.

Camp Jened (its legal name), had actually been in existence for years, but in the early 1970s it was run by hippies who created an oasis of sorts for disabled teenagers. To anyone else, it would have looked like a run-down, ramshackle summer camp of nightmares, but to those who attended, it was practically utopia. In the 1970s, the world was not accommodating to those with disabilities. Most disabled persons lived in relative isolation, dependent on others, if not outright institutionalized. At Camp Jened, they were free. Not free of their disabilities, but free of the judgement and discrimination. In a camp where everyone was disabled, no one was; the disabilities virtually unnoticed, the campers were allowed to be defined by other things, perhaps feeling fulfilled as human beings for the first time. Like any teenager, they played sports, sang songs, smoked and made out – for many this was the only opportunity to “date.”

When they grew out of camp, this close-knit group stuck together, and started advocating and disrupting for disabled rights, inclusion, and accessibility.

Crip Camp is co-directed by filmmaker Nicole Newnham and former camper Jim LeBrecht, an overdue tribute to the place that ultimately changed the world for millions of disabled people.

Although the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed 30 years ago (in 1990: that is actually shamefully recent!), disabled people to this day are fighting just for the right to exist with dignity and anything resembling equality.

I myself live with several (mostly invisible) disabilities. 2020 has been a strange year for people with disabilities. On the one hand, the whole world has gotten a taste of what it’s like to be me. Because I am immuno-compromised, I’ve always battled against viruses, each one potentially very serious for me as I lack a basic immune system to fight them. With the pandemic, every Canadian across this country automatically got all of the accommodations I’ve had to fight to have at my own work: clean work stations, physical distancing, even the right to work at home, which seems a small ask when it’s potentially life saving. I’ve been in medical isolation at home since March. When restrictions were starting to ease up over the summer, many Canadians ventured out of their homes while I stayed in mine. Like many people with disabilities, it’s hard not to feel like life sometimes moves on without us, forgets the people still trapped in their homes. Now that the COVID numbers are increasing again, Canadian regulations have once again changed to reflect it, to protect the majority, while those of us in the minority try not to take it personally that our lives are not worth the same consideration.

Before COVID, I led a relatively normal life, at least to outside eyes. I went to work, I travelled, I spent time with family and friends. My life is permanently etched with pain, and my health is constantly compromised by every passing virus, but since I don’t have a choice, I deal with it. Sometimes I miss things. Sometimes I cancel. Sometimes I can’t get out of bed. But I lived. I made significant contributions to my field, I found joy, I was a presence in the lives of my niece and nephews, I hosted dinner parties and attended film festivals and fell in love. Every moment also in pain, sometimes unable to drive or walk or sleep, but doing my best, which was still pretty good. And now my life is on pause. It’s disconcerting, it’s unfair, but it’s not without its positives: 2020 was the first year I didn’t get pneumonia in at least a decade. How about that?

Because actual representation in film is so rare, this is a very short list of actors with disabilities excelling in film:

CJ Jones: he played Ansel Elgort’s disabled foster father in Baby Driver, stealing scenes and providing the film with warmth and heart. But for Jones, parts like these are almost unheard of. “It’s hard to find a black deaf role” although it looks like he’s found another in Avatar 2.

Kiera Allen: she recently played opposite Sarah Paulson in Hulu’s Run, a mother-daughter Munchausen by Proxy thriller. The role is extremely physically demanding, but Allen, who uses a wheelchair in real life, nailed the part and showed us all what she can do.

Adam Pearson: in Chained For Life, Pearson portrays an actor with facial deformities with whom his leading lady struggles to connect while working together. Pearson has neurofibromatosis, type 1 in real life and gives a formidable performance in this film.

Zach Gottsagen: he won hearts in The Peanut Butter Falcon, playing a young man with Downs Syndrome who escapes his care home to pursue his dreams of being a pro wrestler. Starring opposite Shia LaBeouf and Dakota Johnson, Gottsagen holds his own and proves himself more than capable.

Millicent Simmonds: who can forget the deaf actress’ stunning performance in A Quiet Place, a horror film in which monsters hunt what they hear, and one family survives thanks to their ability to communicate in sign language.

Becoming

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Michelle Obama’s post-White House memoir Becoming explored her roots and the path she followed to become the formidable woman we know and respect today. Her new documentary on Netflix, also titled Becoming, shadows her on her massively successful book tour, and focuses more on the role and the identity she’s forging for herself as a former First Lady who still has a lot to give.

Director Nadia Hallgren crafts the sort of documentary that will have you asking why this incredible woman won’t just run for President herself – but if you’re paying attention, Michelle Obama answers that question in every word and sigh. It’s clear that her eight year sentence in the White House has taken its toll. For America’s first black First Family, the presidential spotlight meant constant scrutiny and a constant need for carefully modulated perfection. The First Families that preceded and succeeded them have been allowed far less criticism for far greater blemishes. The Obamas knew that theirs would be treated differently and they played the part. But while Michelle Obama’s poise seemed effortless, Becoming shows the emotional impact, even the trauma, incurred for an accomplished and intelligent woman to mute her voice. And while she was a beloved First Lady for her husband’s entire term in office, it’s clear that she has now stepped confidently out of his shadow, and that the country, and even the world, has a thirst and a fervor for this new, less filtered, more authentic Michelle Obama.

While the documentary isn’t revealing any deep dark secrets, it does allow Michelle Obama to let down her hair – sometimes literally, into luscious curls, and to step out of the First Lady’s shoes – carefully curated by a stylist who understood her White House role as a costumer projecting class and elegance and respectability – and into gold, glittery, thigh-high boots, if that’s what she wants. The White House has changed her but it hasn’t silenced her. It hasn’t convinced her mother to stop favouring her brother, or her staff to stop teasing her, or her daughters to stop needing her. Seeing her nestled amongst any and all of these people gives us a clearer sense of who she is. And while those of us on the outside can’t help but respect and admire her, we see how much that holds true, and in fact truer, for those who know her more intimately.

American Factory

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As the trade war between the US and China escalates, American Factory arrives on Netflix and shows why this war is one that China is likely to win. The US is at a severe disadvantage in this war that it started, because the American Dream now belongs more to China than to the endangered American middle class, and because idyllic post-war America was built in large part on cheap imports from China and now the pendulum is swinging the other way.

American Factory is the first Netflix film from the Obamas’ production studio, and its release is perfectly timed. China and the US continue to threaten each other higher and higher tariffs, announcing another round of increases to take effect this fall. Of course, these threats are not really to the countries themselves; they are threats to consumers, who will inevitably bear all these increases in the form of higher priced goods.

While American Factory isn’t really about tariffs, the tariffs are still an important part of the story. That’s because the tariffs were instigated by the US in order to bring manufacturing back to the American heartland, which has been decimated by the loss of factory jobs as more and more of those jobs elsewhere to take advantage of cheaper labour and lower safety standards.

One of those shuttered factories is a former GM plant in Dayton, Ohio. Its closure in 2008 put thousands out of work, but in 2015 Fuyao Glass America, a Chinese-backed company, reopened the plant and brought hope back to Dayton. However, we quickly see that the reality is not quite as rosy as the fantasy, because the workers have taken a 30% pay cut, safety standards are not enforced, and management uses every dirty trick in the book to prevent the workers from unionizing.

Chinese workers are brought in to show the Americans how to operate the plant, and managers from the US are trained in China to help them better motivate the workers. American Factory captures the remarkable contrast between the workers’ attitudes in the two nations, and the attitudes of the nations as a whole. The Chinese are willing to work harder for less, sacrificing their bodies and family lives for the benefit of the company. The Americans, on the other hand, feel entitled to earn more money than their Chinese counterparts without making any of the same sacrifices.

Something has to give there. In both the Fuyao factory and in the larger trade war, the Americans can’t possibly get everything they want but are oblivious to that reality. Working-class Americans seem not to have realized that their consumer-centric society only exists because of other countries’ cheap labour, and that unskilled labourers will never again be “middle class”. If these American factory workers want to achieve their desired standard of living, they need to acquire marketable skills. Labour is no longer marketable on its own, and China and the rest of the world are eager to live the American Dream. China and the rest of the world also clearly want to realize that dream so much more than the Americans do, so in any head-to-head battle the Americans are going to lose out. The only question is whether the Americans will realize that before it’s too late.