Please Love Me Hollywood

For anyone who doesn’t know I am a heartless romantic, I don’t know if we can stay friends. I cry at the “I waited for you for seven years” bullshit in The Notebook every single time. Love is something I put up on a pedestal for years. I believed, truly, that one day, a man as beautiful as young Ryan Gosling would beg for me in the rain and we would go in and get warm in a brand new house made just for me. If that guy is out there, I’m single. But, I have also grown up acknowledging that those moments are dramatized for the people like me. Directors want us to have those warm feelings down there so that we will continue to watch their movies and add to their already enormous bank accounts. TBFH, If I wasn’t so passionate about disability politics, I would genuinely consider being a director because I am the perfect audience.

What I still struggle with, though, is separating the love in those movies with myself. Sure, I know that I am not Allie and I am not a beautiful, rich southern belle who will eventually marry her true love. What separates me from Rachel McAdams’ character isn’t the basic differences, it is the fact that she has no flaws from a physical disability and I do. I am that bitch who brings disability into every aspect of my life, but that is just the nature of something that is so impactful. It is the harsh truth that our society is not too kind to people with these physical flaws, and the romance in Hollywood is no exception.

It is not that I don’t see representation of disabled people in movies, but it is still quite rare. More often than not, the characters that are disabled usually have one of the three tropes: 1. In a wheelchair due to some horrible accident; 2. A loner who has the quirky friends and the popular people bully them; 3. They are overly confident about their disability and nothing can bring them down. While all three scenarios can occur, it is not the typical nature of a teenager with a mild-to-severe disability. In my 19 years of living, I have seen exactly one TV show that I felt accurately portrayed the struggles of life with Cerebral Palsy. The show is called Special and the creator is a fellow CP buhl Ryan O’Connell and it is amazing. If you have netflix, your homework is to watch at least the first episode (if you don’t have an account, I’ll give you my password, it’s that important) and tell me it isn’t great.

I do think that Hollywood does need to a better job showing love plots with people with physical “flaws.” I, in no way, believe that the effects of my disability are a flaw, but we are still at a point in this society where it is seen as such. As I write this blog post, “Bet On It” from HSM2 plays in the background and all I can think about is: Would someone have sung an angry number as Zac Efron about a girl if they were disabled? For once, I would like to see the pretty, wanted girl (or boy or any gender/sexuality - we do not exclude here) to have Cerebral Palsy. Or blind. Deaf. Have Down Syndrome. I want to be able to watch the stereotypical scene where the love interests lock eyes at a party and walk towards each other, only the girl has a limp and the boy doesn’t look disgusted and turns around. Because, let me tell you, that happened and I cried for three days. I would love to watch a movie where the “popular jock” learns sign language so he can ask a girl who is deaf to prom. Hell, I’d buy a movie if Channing Tatum creates a marriage proposal in Braille and asks the woman of his dreams to marry him, despite the fact that she is visually impaired.

If these movies existed when I was growing up, maybe I would be less skeptical when it comes to love and dating. I would not fantasize about that Notebook scene, only to disappoint myself when I know that it could never happen to a girl like me. High School is still bullshit, but I definitely would have worried a lot less when I never had boys drooling over me because that was what every high-school/teen movie taught me. I might have not cared that I didn’t look like Regina George or Gretchen Wieners at age 16. I might not have cared that the dumb boy saw me and looked grossed out. His loss anyway, I’m a great dancer. I still want that typical, straight of The Notebook love scene one day, but I just have to wait for my own Ryan Gosling like everyone else.