We deserve to tell the stories of our unique lived experience – Sydney Morning Herald

Washington Post tally, a third of best actor Oscars went to actors playing characters with disabilities between 1988 and 2015. Noting, of course, that the actors themselves were not disabled.

"Playing" disabled can be an awe-worthy and lucrative career move. Audiences marvel at an able-bodied actors ability to inhabit a disabled body. Even though disabled people do so every day.

Anne Hathaway in Roald Dahls The Witches didn't need a disability to make her scary.Credit:AP

But quite separate from the actors cast are the disabled characters written in the first place. Pop culture visibility is powerful. It should be used to subvert stereotypes, provoke meaningful empathy and help able-bodied audiences recognise their own privilege.

But the characters with disabilities that most of us watch on screen lack complexity and nuance. Films and television tend to reduce the expansive and varied experience of disability to the same four storylines.

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First, there is the evil and depraved villain, whose physical difference is used to simultaneously disgust and horrify, a la Anne Hathaways Grand High Witch. Disabled villains may well be a viewers first experience of a person with that particular disability and can colour their understanding in future. The second category is disability as a superpower. Think of films like Shine or Rain Man, where the value of someones life is dismissed until theyre "redeemed" by virtue of their special abilities.

Category three is inspirational pity porn. If youve ever sat in a cinema and begun watching a film like I Am Sam or The Miracle Worker feeling sorry for the main character but, by the end, were marvelling at how theyd done things able-bodied people do every day, thats what Im talking about. These films make disabled people seem extraordinary for doing the ordinary; rather than recognising its the society they live in which makes the ordinary difficult to navigate.

The fourth and final category is perhaps the most damaging and certainly the most common. Here, the character with a disability is angry and bitter and consider themselves a burden to others. References include the sickly sweet Me Before You, American classic Born on the Fourth of July or the James Cameron blockbuster Avatar. This trope suggests to audiences that being disabled is the worst possible experience a person could have. That life is not worth living in a body that doesnt work exactly the same way as others do.

Now heres the rub: A disabled persons relevance should not have to come from being extraordinary. Nor should our relevance be reduced to our disabilities alone. Ask any filmmaker, television show runner, author or artist and they will tell you that authenticity in storytelling is essential. Without it, we cannot captivate, excite or inform our audiences.

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Such authenticity is impossible with disabled people being part of shaping and telling their own stories. This does not only mean putting more disabled people on screen, but ensuring disabled people have decision making-roles behind the scenes, as scriptwriters, directors, producers, and costume designers. Do not presume to know our experience. Ask us.

The result would surely be more films about disabled people that are painted with all the colours of the rainbow. Films that recognise disability for what it is, a unique and personal experience. An experience that can involve marginalisation, anger, pain and frustration but also community, empathy, confidence and pride. If disabled people were involved in the depiction of characters with disabilities, then disability could become part of someones story and not the point of it.

The Grand High Witch was always a terrifying character because thats how Dahl wrote her. She had blue spit, lots of money and turned small children into mice, for goodness sake; how much more terrifying can it get? The addition of limb difference did not add to her malevolence, except in the form of damaging stereotypes being remade for a new generation. Disability cannot be a cheat for monstrosity in an era where we all know better.

Jamila Rizvi is a writer. She lives with a disability as a result of a recurrent brain tumour.

Jamila Rizvi is a columnist and former Labor adviser.

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We deserve to tell the stories of our unique lived experience - Sydney Morning Herald