The Jerk

by David Bauer

Marcus, who has cerebral palsy, is a real jerk, and that’s good news for the rest of us with CP.

Marcus is a character in the 2001 movie Telling Stories. He’s a college student and enrolled in a creative writing course along with his girl friend Vi. The movie’s opening scene shows Marcus and VI engaged in wholesome, noisy sex.

And what does Mr. Sensitivity do immediately after orgasm, when most couples are content to lay blissfully in each other’s arms? He wants to read Vi a story he’s writing, a story Vi has already heard and isn’t interested in hearing it again. Marcus being Marcus, he accuses her of no longer caring for him, and she dresses and leaves.

Despite his lack of interpersonal skills, Marcus is actually a step forward in the film depiction of people with CP. He’s ambitious, aggressive, and sexually active. In other words, he’s an adult, flawed to be sure, but nevertheless a fully functioning, involved-with-life adult, which is a far cry from other portrayals of fictional movie characters with CP.

In Score, for example, a recent film with Robert de Niro and Edward Norton, Norton plays a child-like and eager-to-please person with CP who is only too happy to have a job sweeping out a warehouse. And in The Usual Suspects, Kevin Spacey won an academy award for his portrayal of Verbal, a non-threatening, self-effacing individual with CP whose goal in life seems to be the avoidance of doing anything that might offend someone else. Next to them, Marcus is a role model.

The ultimate insult of Score and The Usual Suspects is that the characters only pretend to have CP. Both characters are criminals, and both fake CP on the assumption that no one with CP could be smart and aggressive enough to commit a crime. And their assumption proves correct; Spacey’s character goes scot-free and while Norton’s character is in a jam at the film’s conclusion, he nevertheless has a chance of avoiding capture.

Score and The Usual Suspects puts me in the awkward position of insisting that people with CP can be thieves and killers just like anyone else, but isn’t that what mainstreaming is all about? If having CP guaranteed that one could steal a million dollars without getting caught, the economic difficulties many people with CP face would vanish overnight.

Not all movie portrayals of folks with CP are as objectionable as Score and The Usual Suspects. My Left Foot and Gaby are acclaimed films that show adults with CP who are bright, sensitive and intent on living life to its fullest. But as Martin Norden points out in The Cinema of Isolation: A History of Physical Disability in the Movies, these films were made by foreign rather than U.S. film makers. Norden contends that “cerebral palsy remains a foreign experience in several senses for American moviemakers” and Score and The Usual Suspects certainly support his thesis.

Why are the film images of people with CP important? Because movies feed images to audiences that are absorbed and interalized almost without notice. Joseph Reed in his book “American Scenarios: The Uses of Film Genre” notes that many people have a feel for horses that comes not from time actually spent on a ranch but from seeing them so frequently in movies. “We all lead lives that take their cue from film…” Reed notes, which explains why film characters with CP who are childlike and unconnected with the real world create considerable damage.

A friend of mine, a woman in her early 40’s, once spoke by telephone to a doctor she had not seen and was considering for an appointment. She decided to forgo the appointment when she mentioned she had CP, and the doctor replied “CP? Isn’t that the disease children get?”

The doctor is obviously a movie buff, which is why we need to see more of Marcus. And move on from there.

David wants to thank Visions Cinema and Bistro Lounge of Washington, DC for support in writing this article which originally appeared in “New Mobility” magazine.

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