DVD cover of The Amazing Mr. No Legs, featuring the iconic shotgun wheelchair firing.

Will anyone survive the wheelchair of mayhem?

We launch season 3 with a bang, heading to the mean streets of Tampa Bay to learn about drug smuggling and murder cover-ups. Despite what the title of the film implies, Mr. No Legs is weirdly absent throughout much of the film…but will that hurt or help it’s rating?

Listen at…


Grading the Film

As always, this film is reviewed with scores recorded in four main categories, with 1 being the best and 5 being the worst. Like the game of golf, the lower the score the better.

How accurate is the representation?

Jeff – 2 / 5

Sarah – 1 / 5

Total – 3 / 10

How difficult was it to watch the movie?

Sarah – 1 / 5

Jeff – 1 / 5

Total – 2 / 10

How often were things unintentionally funny?

Jeff – 2 / 5

Sarah – 1 / 5

Total – 3 / 10

How far back has it put disabled people?

Sarah – 1 / 5

Jeff – 1 / 5

Total – 2 / 10

The Verdict

Is this actually art??

Transcript

Jeff [talking over the theme music of Mr. No Legs]:

Tampa Bay, Florida. The 1970s. When a college boy turned drug dealer accidentally kills his girlfriend, there is only one person who can solve the problem. The amazing Mr. No Legs. Drugs, murder, a man with no legs. This movie has everything that you could possibly want and will likely piss off the liberals. Tune in to Mr. No Legs.

 

[Invalid Culture’s punk theme song, “Arguing With Strangers” by Mvll Crimes]

 

Jeff:

Welcome back to a new thrilling season of Invalid Culture and boy oh boy, do we have a year in store for you. As always, I am your host, Jeff Preston, and I am joined by my co-host, victim, Sarah Curry. How are you doing, Sarah?

Sarah:

I’m pretty good. How are you doing this year?

Jeff:

Well, I got to say it’s a new year and we have quite the belated Christmas present that’s been delivered to us here in January. This month we watched The Amazing Mr. No Legs. This is a movie from 1978, which you may have not heard of because it’s actually … Well, it was actually very difficult to get your hands on it, but thanks to some miraculous restoration, I was able to get my hands quite easily on a Blu-ray of this film, which may or may not be the final cut of the film. From the box, Mr. No Legs is about the “double amputee”. Mr. No Legs may not see much of a threat at first, but cross him and you’ll see why he’s Florida’s ruthless drug kingpin D’Angelo’s deadliest enforcer. With his unique martial arts mastery and shotgun welded wheelchair, Mr. No Legs is virtually unstoppable. But when a henchman kills the sister of a straight shooting cop, D’Angelo’s whole enterprise made undone and threatened to bring Mr. No Legs down with it. Would you say that’s a pretty accurate description of the film, Sarah?

Sarah:

It’s only missing the 15 minute long car chase, but I think other than that it’s pretty faithful.

Jeff:

Yeah, that’s spoiler, I think. You don’t want to spoil the ending there for people.

Sarah:

I don’t want to spoil a seventh of the entire film.

Jeff:

Yeah. You got to keep that under wraps. Under wraps.

Sarah:

Gotcha.

Jeff:

Now, this of course is … It’s a movie from the ’70s. It is a grind house film that is exactly what you probably imagined it is. It’s shooting, it’s punching, it’s bar fights, but it’s also a whole lot more than that, particularly because of the people that were involved in the making of this film, which is almost as shocking because the film itself. So Sarah, what can you tell us about Mr. No Legs?

Sarah:

According to my research, there is a kind of Adam Sandler like cast style to this film, as in the producer and the head writer of the screenplay already knew each other from five different adaptations of Flipper, like the dolphin, which apparently has five films. And then they called up all their friends in Tampa, Florida and said, “Hey, I’m doing a ’70s action film,” except it was the ’70s so I guess they didn’t say the current year, but they also might’ve. You don’t know. Because genre evolves and is inherent like that. And they got a shocking amount of people. They got an actual double leg amputee to play the titular role and he is also a double black belt in karate in real life. And he was a Marine and the director was on the US Air Force swim team. And the director was also a scary movie monster in one of these old horror films so he had some notoriety for that. There were a number of action movie stars in this that people recognized from other films. There was … Oh no, it wasn’t John Agar. John Agar was known for being the former husband of Shirley Temple. So everybody here is also really, really old.

So it was hard to get the original cut of this film and we still don’t know if we have the full cut of this film, and I think we can talk about that a little bit more when we get to the ending because that actually made the ending make more sense. Because you said you got the Blu-ray, which was restored in 2020. It came out in 1978, but it was filmed in 1975. But between ’78 and 2020, the original pre-VHS film versions, which were apparently recorded on a rarer film stock, were damaged. So they had to restore the damaged film stocks to get to the VHS versions to get to the Blu-ray versions and so on and so forth. So we don’t actually know if we have the full version of Mr. No Legs, also known as … What was the UK name? Destructor. Also known as The Amazing Mr. No Legs, also known as Gunfighter, which was the script name, and also re-released as Killers Die Hard.

Jeff:

Yeah. So this is a prequel to Die Hard is what you’re telling me.

Sarah:

Yeah. And it does better. It goes harder than Die Hard.

Jeff:

Yeah. There was a ton of very familiar actors in this. Rance Howard was here from Chinatown. Luke Halpin, also from Flipper. Flipper is all over this movie. I would say that we wouldn’t have this film if it wasn’t for Flipper.

Sarah:

It was a reunion of Flipper.

Jeff:

I never thought I would say that ever on this podcast.

Sarah:

Yep. But here we are.

Jeff:

So while it was difficult for them to actually get this film out, whether it be for the damaged film stock and the VHS and then numerous different names or the re-releasing, there is still a bit of critical acclaim for this film, in part because it becomes a bit of a cult classic. Which I was skeptical of at first. I fully understand now that I have watched the film. The film really became popular, weirdly though, in the 2000s. Probably because of the internet making it easier for people to access this film, which led to a variety of film websites and podcasts like this one that started covering this absurd film, which then spread its popularity. But people’s response to the movie is actually really interesting in a very kind of strange way. I have been provided a series of reviews for us to go through and talk a little bit about. Most of them have been culled from our favorite place, Amazon reviews. They’re the best, most authentic reviews, I would say, of popular culture. So let’s dive in a little bit.

Our first one, this is a five star review from Sean R., coming to us from Australia in 2020. So this would’ve been right in the thick of COVID. Take that for what you will. The title of this review, “Have you ever wanted to see a guy with no legs do kung fu?? This movie is insane. It’s got everything. Bar fights, detective work, a wheelchair with guns and ninja stars and bad assery all over. More movies need to be made like this.”

Sarah:

I actually included that review because I thought it was hysterical and probably reductive because there’s no way the film actually comes out this way. It’s actually pretty dead on and it’s funny to read after the fact because he pretty much nails it.

Jeff:

Yeah, it’s a pretty good summary actually of this entire film in a lot of ways. I do enjoy the fact that he wrote this in 2020 talking about a movie that was made in the ’70s, what 50 years later, and is like more movies need to be like this.

Sarah:

It was visionary.

Jeff:

They perfected it. They perfected filmmaking in 1975.

Sarah:

The cinematography anyway. And I think I called it when I was talking to you, the David Caruso style line delivery, which was obviously made pre David Caruso. But it felt like every single scene, two cops had to look at each other and deliver ’70s quips just minus the sunglasses.

Jeff:

The script for this movie … I don’t know if this movie was actually written or if they were just feeding them lines off camera.

Sarah:

They gave them a general scenario and just said go.

Jeff:

But sharp though. There were so many zingers in this film.

Sarah:

There were.

Jeff:

And they were presented in a way that didn’t feel like they were looking at the camera after they dropped the line and be like, “I don’t get it.” They were just sort of seamlessly integrated in this casual way. It was great. I will say my biggest qualm, and this isn’t a script qualm, but the accents in this movie were terrible. D’Angelo talks like Al Capone for some reason. One of the cops’ girlfriends allegedly has a Latina accent. Maybe it’s an eastern European accent, maybe it’s a Scandinavian accent, maybe it’s a speech impediment. I have no idea what was going on there. It seemed like every character was thinking about a character that they’d seen in a film previously and was like, “I’ll just try and sound like that.” So the mobster guy is like, “I’m just going to sound like a mobster, which sounds like a person from New York, even though I’d be in Tampa.” And the girl was like, “Oh, I like bond movies and I’m by the pool a lot, so I’m going to sound like a bond girl.” Who are European generally. That was outrageous.

Sarah:

My bet for the brunette danger girl was that she grew up in Tampa like everyone else in this film and doesn’t have a natural Latina accent. And the director said to make her more exotic, “Hey, can you bullshit us an accent from your country?” And she goes, “I’m from here. I’m from Tampa.” And he goes, “Just do it. Just please.”

Jeff:

Right. And she was trying to do it live. She was imagining what an accent might sound like in her head as she was trying to parrot the lines

Sarah:

That is frame for frame what I think happened in the shag room on set.

Jeff:

Yeah, absolutely. Okay. So we got another review. This one is from, I believe IMDB, from Humanoid of Flesh, which is good. I prefer my humans to be made of flesh, personally. This one is a seven out of 10. A mob enforcer with no legs. Descriptive. This is the review. “First of all, Mr. No Legs doesn’t quite live up to its outrageous title, but it’s still a decent action flick with ground house exploitation feel. Rod Slinker is a mob enforcer without legs. He gets fed up with his immediate boss’ insults and pay and decides to double cross the mob when he’s had enough. The insults about his condition enrage him to the point that he decides to wage war on the mob. There is also an awesome wheelchair of mayhem, which helps him to dispatch various mobsters and other scum. Cheaply made and rather inept action flick with several fantastic fight scenes and pretty brutal killings. The action is fairly slow moving and there’s not enough Mr. No legs, but if you are into ’70s cult cinema, you can’t miss this movie. Seven out of 10.”

Sarah:

Okay, I do love the phrase wheelchair of mayhem, however, I disagree with that the action is slow moving. I actually thought that the action went a little bit too fast a lot of the time.

Jeff:

There was pretty much only action in this movie. They were either sitting beside a pool talking on phones with giant wires all over the place, or they were fighting. I mean, there were multiple murders in the same bar on different nights.

Sarah:

And the bar fights, I almost didn’t know where to look because there were multiple fights happening at once, synchronously during the shot. So whoever choreographed the fights did a pretty okay job because they don’t run full on into each other. But there’s just so much happening. I don’t know what this guy’s watching where he’s like, “Yeah, Mr. No Legs was pretty slow for me, but seven out of 10.” What?

Jeff:

Yeah, this was written in 2010. So this is of course before this man would’ve experienced COVID and understood what it really means to be in a slow event-less sort of moment, I suppose. Also, this one really stands out to me because there’s this line in it where he talks about the lack of pay and the comments about his condition enraging him. And I’m not sure here if he saw a different version of this film than we did that included scenes, but I don’t remember any scenes in which his condition was brought up, mocked or referred to in any way.

Sarah:

He had that one line when he went inside after he flips off his hot danger angel babe, where he goes like, “The mob boss is going to flick me like a pencil into the street? Hell no.” And I didn’t really even know what that expression meant, but it was clearly supposed to be an insult.

Jeff:

Yeah. But it doesn’t seem about his condition. I think he was trying to say that he was going to be penniless. That all he would have is a pencil. He would have nothing to his name, I think is maybe what that line-

Sarah:

I don’t know if the class warfare angle works for a mob film though.

Jeff:

Yeah. I’m very curious about this. I would love to know if there are scenes in which his disability was brought up, because notably, there’s only one moment when his disability is kind of … There’s two moments I suppose that we’ll talk about a little bit later, but it’s certainly not really in a derogatory way that I would say it anyway. The drive for Mr. No Legs is that he’s a bit ambitious, he’s tired of being at the bottom of the hierarchy of the mob, and he realizes that he’s about to get flipped on. That the mob boss is going to kill him, and he decides, well, I’m going to kill him first.

Sarah:

Yeah, I think he does get wise to it and he just tries to get in on the action first.

Jeff:

Okay. So we have another one, and I want to note before I read this, this was written in 2006. So this review was written before MAGA and even before … This is before all of that, and I think that’s important. Maybe there was evidence that this was coming all along. This is a nine out of 10 review from Steve Neiland. Ny-land? Neil-and? He writes, this is the title, “My New Hero and Every Liberal’s Worst Nightmare. Rod Slinker, wherever you are, whatever you’re doing right now, you are my new action adventure movie hero. This movie is one of the most amazingly endearing and delightfully stupid exercises in brain-dead cult mayhem ever created and so badly deserves a chance to see the light of day on a DVD reissue, if only for the sheer number of people who would potentially be offended by its gleeful off the wall, willingness to go beyond the constraints of good taste and show us things that will boggle the mind.”

Sarah:

I struggle to agree with this mostly because of the N word drop like an hour into the film, which makes it very problematic. But A, he did correctly predict that this would get a Blu-ray re-release a little over 10 years later. And B, I do think there’s a lot to really love about this film, especially if you’re a bad action or an ironic film watcher. There’s a lot to love. I spent a lot of this movie laughing so hard that my roommate asked me what was going on in my bedroom place.

Jeff:

I 100% agree that this movie is both amazingly endearing and delightfully stupid. Full marks. I fully agree with that. I’m wondering about this thought. And again, we will note there is a hard R N word dropped in the middle of this film. I’m wondering about this thing about being offensive. Do you think that now as we flash forward to a post MAGA world and a world where allegedly cancel culture is out of control, do you believe that there will be a sheer number of people offended by this film?

Sarah:

I think it’s possible he’s comparing this kind of off the wall nonsense film to this deep intelligentsia culture that I think is just as much a parody as the counterculture that this is parodying. Neither of those two cultures actually exist in any semblance of reality and him pinning those realities against each other is just this over the top way, like this film, of bringing two worlds together. Does it lean more to the, I don’t know, traditional hard right? Yes. But I don’t think if this came out now, anybody would A, take it seriously or B, think that it was at all trying to be this Christopher Nolan-esque hard go at epistemological thought and beat cops in Tampa Bay.

Jeff:

And at the same time, there was some interesting gender things going on in this film. I don’t know if it was intentional, but there was a scintillating homoeroticism happening at all times between almost all of the male characters. There were some delightful crop tops in this film. There was a trans woman at the bar in this film. There was a little person.

Sarah:

There was also a little person.

Jeff:

Yeah. There was a little person.

Sarah:

Watching the bar fight. Nobody punched him. They just let him watch.

Jeff:

Having a great time. And then at the same time, there were these women are to be seen, not to be heard, that women played no real role in this movie beyond delivering phones and flirting with the men a little bit.

Sarah:

But counterpoint, they did make being a danger angel look incredibly good. I came out of this movie like I wouldn’t say no to that career. They were living large. They were in cabanas. They were in rooms entirely composed of shag beds. They were eating huge breakfasts and dinners. They were being driven around everywhere. Not so bad. All I have to do is get told to fuck off when the guy has a phone call from his mob boss. Deal.

Jeff:

And also she had a gun. One of them had a gun as well. She had a loaned some gun.

Sarah:

Oh, the brunette. Yeah.

Jeff:

Yeah.

Sarah:

My gun is in the other guy’s Camaro. And she goes, “Here, take mine.”

Jeff:

Take mine. Yeah. And it’s like a little dainty two shot pistol and he’ like, “Oh, is this even a gun? It’s not even a man gun.”

Sarah:

My baby handgun.

Jeff:

There was some stuff going on there. There was also an implication of a pimp that was pimping out men potentially. They see a pimp on the street and one of the greatest lines of the film is, “What he’s selling, you don’t smoke, you stroke.”

Sarah:

Yes. Extremely memorable.

Jeff:

I’m not sure. Maybe that was a reference. I read that as referring to that he has men that he is prostituted out. Maybe I’m wrong on that. Maybe they’re within-

Sarah:

No, I think you read that completely right. I think this was one of the most accidentally inclusive films of the 1970s. It’s from the Schitt’s Creek school of inclusivity where they never comment on who they’re using ever. They’ve got gay guys in bars, they’ve got sparkle wearing guys, they’ve got every edict under the rainbow. They’ve got a variety of genders and people of various ages going to school. There was like a 40-year-old in college. There was the little person in the bar. They had everybody. They had the guy in the wheelchair, and he’s not even one of the top seven or eight I named, and that’s supposed to be the titular disability or way of inclusivity in the film. And I’m just like, everybody here has something to bring to the table. That was pretty neat and nobody comments on it at all. They’re just like, “nope. Standard. This is everyday life. This is how these people want to live. They do them and I do me.

Jeff:

Yeah. I mean there was a race riot in the bar at one point.

Sarah:

But that was only because of the one woman who was then promptly killed for not being inclusive. Everybody else hated it.

Jeff:

Yeah. Well, there was a white guy who didn’t like the black woman, and then the black bartender bottled him. So there was a bit of justice in this film too. I think it’s also important to note that this movie is named after Mr. No Legs, but Mr. No Legs is not even the main character of this film, I would argue.

Sarah:

No.

Jeff:

A side character. 100%.

Sarah:

He gets as much screen time as the danger angels, and one of the danger angels is actually the calling from on high that signals that Mr. No Legs is about to get a short scene. Whenever you see the blonde babe danger angel at the pool, you know that we’re about to see her counterpart, Mr. No Legs.

Jeff:

100%. Yeah. She is the siren that inaugurates the birth of Mr. No Legs.

Sarah:

Oh yeah.

Jeff:

Yeah. So I’m interested. I don’t know that I fully agree with Steve that this would cause a liberal nightmare to occur necessarily. Which is interesting. I think maybe this film has something for everyone, which is a very weird thing for this podcast. That’s not usually the case.

Sarah:

No. We were joking that every scene construction, I guess mostly because of Mr. No Legs himself, was automatically ADA compliant in the architectural sense. There were no scenes about, oh man, the mob thing is in the basement. Mr. No Legs can’t get down there. Which was what I was kind of expecting coming into this film. No. It’s just inclusivity and compliance and racial justice and LGBT justice and alliances the whole way through.

Jeff:

We got to put a pin on that because I actually want to come back to this and talk a little bit more about the fact that this film is wildly wheelchair accessible. But we will come back to that. We have one last review. This one from Coventry. I assume the entire town came together and wrote this. I assume that’s what that means. This one is the eight out of 10, so another happy customer. This one is titled, hilariously, “He’s a role model to us all. Let Mr. No Legs be a source of inspiration for all of us. Not because he’s a relentless one man killing squad, of course. Because he’s living proof that you can still chase your dreams and realize your ambitions even if you’re physically disabled. Yeah, right. Enough with this rubbish. The Amazing Mr. No Legs is totally demented in idea as well as execution exploitation feature with a premise that is unique and refreshing, and production values look so cheap and amateurish that you simply have to show admiration for the costume crew.

“If you just imagine what these guys could have accomplished if they had a proper budget at their disposal. The titular anti-hero controls the complete drug business of a major town and acts as judge, jury, and especially executioner whenever someone screws up or tries to double cross him. Although he hasn’t got any legs, duh, everyone fears it obeys Mr. No Legs because he’s merciless, is an expert in martial arts and drives around in a heavily armored wheelchair. When the sister of a dedicated cop gets in a drug execution, it means the start of a devastating war between the good cops and the bad drug dealers and everyone in between. The script is surprisingly convoluted and well-written, but those are not the main reasons why this film will stick in your memory. It has girl on girl bar fights, wild shootouts, bad acting, sword fights, odd cars, and virulent chases and much more.

“The Amazing Mr. No Legs is extremely violent, but never actually shocking since the effects of the stunts aren’t exactly convincing. Some people might take offense upon seeing the fight sequences involving the handicapped lead character, but then again, I don’t suppose easily offended people are likely to put Mr. No Legs on their Christmas list. The slow motion sequence where actor Ted Vollrath demonstrates his genuine martial arts skill is literally jaw dropping. Ever seen a guy with no legs kick someone repeatedly in the stomach? No legs. The titular ought to be considered as one of the greatest cult icons ever. A truly menacing, bad to the bone and self reliable villain. Mr. No Legs is not an easy movie to come across, but it’s definitely worth the search.”

Sarah:

I love that he wrote his dissertation on Mr. No Legs and I kind of wish I did too because I think I would put out a banger dissertation on the inclusivity potential of Mr. No Legs. I think I figured out what we don’t like about these people apparently repeatedly saying that easily offended people won’t like this movie. This is what I think it is. I think it’s because people who tend to do the worst, most devilish, far right MAGA-esque part of that view would be of the opinion that Mr. No Legs could never be amazing or an action star or an action hero because to say that would be to go against the traditional American values that they hold as their Lord and Bible. So to have these people come out like, “Oh, the liberals are going to hate this super inventive and investigative and inclusive flick about this man with no legs that achieves everything we could ever offer.” It doesn’t really make sense, and then they try to throw it back at you with the, “If you’re easily offended, you won’t like this.” But he’s talking about himself and that’s wild to me. Right?

Jeff:

100%. Yeah. I think that they are feeling uncomfortable about it, and they assume then that the other side will also be feeling as uncomfortable as they are about this.

Sarah:

But we’re not. You guys are just unknowingly slipping over to our team here.

Jeff:

Yeah. I will say I do find it really interesting that this starts out as a weird inspiration porn. Being like, we should all be inspired by him.

Sarah:

I think he’s mocking the liberals.

Jeff:

…but then he also then comes back to it. He recants it and he’s like, “No, no. That’s all silly.” But then he returns to it and is like … First of all, he’s like, “The violence in this is not very convincing.” And then he says, “But the no legs guy’s martial arts was legitimate and amazing.” That this was an incredible ability that this guy portrayed. And I’m not a black belt martial artist. I did not personally find any of the martial arts in this film, let alone Mr. No Legs, as either A, legitimate or B, impressive in any way.

Sarah:

Okay. From background, we do know that this guy in real life is a double black belt.

Jeff:

Is a martial artist. Yes.

Sarah:

So he knows what he’s doing and he obviously does his own stunts, but we know there’s also a big stunt cast in this movie, so a lot of people are not doing their own stunts, especially when we get to the car chase. I think that’s just one or two guys playing the part of every single person in the car chase for the sheer danger level of that entire sequence. I do agree with him that a lot of the action scenes you kind of can’t take seriously because you can tell, especially in the bar fight, when they’ve got the broken bottles, they’re not actually hitting each other. They’re kind of coming close and stopping and you catch it in the lens, and it’s funny in kind of a kitschy way. Or that sword fight scene where he’s got the broad sword going into the Camaro, it makes no sense whatsoever, apart from the fact that it was a pirate themed bar. So you’re like, okay, I guess the broad sword could have maybe come from there. But could it beat the shit out of a Camaro? I’m not sure. I think the Camaro would win that fight. And then how many spoilers can we do?

Jeff:

All of them.

Sarah:

All of them. Okay. So the other one … And maybe I just don’t have enough martial arts experience for me to personally believe this, but you were led to believe during Mr. No Legs’ martial arts sequence that once one of the baddies got him and threw him in the water, you’re like, “Oh man, it’s over. He’s got no legs. He’s going to have to use all his energy to just stay afloat.” And he ended up being more dangerous in the water than he was on land. He was taking kills like nothing, and then climbing out of the pool and climbing back into his chair like it was just another Tuesday for him and rolling away.

Jeff:

Okay. So do you believe then that Coventry, when Mr. No Legs karate chops a man to death in the pool, do you think that this person was actually what an incredible display of martial arts?

Sarah:

I mean, I think he thinks that, which is fine with me. He is allowed to be in beloved community living the reality where his martial arts skill is so great you can karate chop a man to death underwater.

Jeff:

One karate chop to death.

Sarah:

One chop. It’s all it takes.

Jeff:

Yeah. And so I found that really interesting that … Again, I’m not a martial artist. I didn’t find any of the martial arts that this felt impressive. I mean, I didn’t feel like I was watching Bruce Lee here by any means.

Sarah:

I think his above water martial arts were pretty cool.

Jeff:

Oh, I think they were cool scenes. I don’t disagree with that. But I don’t think there was anything impressive. He literally blocks a kick. Okay. The front kick and the back kick that were in slow motion, that was great cinema.

Sarah:

He delivered a very literal ass kick.

Jeff:

Yeah. I don’t know though that that would hurt. Again, I’m not a martial artist. I’ve never been punched. But I kind of feel like getting a bum to your belly probably isn’t going to incapacitate you. But again, I’m not that. What I do kind of feel though is Coventry is like, “We shouldn’t be inspired by this guy. That’s liberal nonsense.”, but then he comes back and is like, “Oh, but he’s so inspiring in his martial hearts abilities.”

Sarah:

Okay, but he doesn’t say the word inspiring. He says the word menacing, bad to the bone and self reliable. So the real villain in this is rhetoric all along. You just couldn’t use the liberal catchphrases to describe his inspired-ness. If you say menacing and bad to the bone, that is the same thing as saying you’re realizing your ambitions and being an inspiring character. You’re just being more of a badass about it.

Jeff:

Yeah. He’s cool. He’s a cool guy. And I think he is a cool guy, but it’s interesting that this need to both preface it, recant it, but then also lean into it at the same time. That even-

Sarah:

I don’t think he knows he’s leaning into it.

Jeff:

I don’t think so either.

Sarah:

I think he sees a legitimate difference in rhetoric there. And I think because we have the benefit of multiple degrees and arguing with people, we can see that he’s just circuitously making the same argument and he thinks that argument is different.

Jeff:

Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think that this maybe actually gets us to a really interesting insight in people’s responses to disability in film. That I think everyone obviously is bringing their own baggage when they watch something. They’re bringing in past insights and past experience. They’re like, “I’m a black belt martial artist, and that’s not martial arts.” For instance. But I think that in this instance, and in a lot of instances, people are bringing in with them what they believe the expected response should be to the disabled character that they’re supposed to feel a certain way. They then maybe feel a different way, and either that’s a good thing or a bad thing. So I think often because he felt good about this character, that he felt that he was cool and menacing and badass, and maybe something that he would aspire to be, then it shifts it into this is a good representation, I like it, I’m happy. But then when those ideas are conflicted or confronted in some way, people don’t feel the same way or don’t feel right about it. They have this different response then, I think, to the film and then perhaps say maybe that was offensive or that was unrealistic or unbelievable. It’s interesting that at no point did Coventry not think it was an unbelievable thing that a man with no legs would be this mobster. He was like, “Yeah, this is possible. It’s happening and it’s fricking cool.”

Sarah:

Yeah. I think what I was saying at the beginning of the review about how I think the words easily offended are working in multiple reviews is what you’re saying about how he’s taking inspirational. So we got to the same conclusion using different keywords.

Jeff:

Yeah. Well, I have to say, ladies and gentlemen, this film was a ride, literally and figuratively. And when we come back next week, we are going to get into the nitty-gritty and take this film step by step and really unpack what is the genius, maybe, of The Amazing Mr. No Legs.

 

[Theme song, “Arguing with Strangers” by Mvll Crimes finishes out the episode]

Part 2!

Jeff:

Previously on Invalid Culture.

Have you ever wanted to see a guy with no legs do kung fu?? This movie is insane. It’s got everything; bar fights, detective work, a wheelchair with guns and ninja stars and badassery all over. More movies need to be made like this.

Sarah:

I actually included that review because I thought it was hysterical and probably reductive because there’s no way the film actually comes out this way. It’s actually pretty dead on and it’s funny to read after the fact because he pretty much nails it.

[Invalid Culture’s punk theme song, “Arguing With Strangers” by Mvll Crimes]

Jeff:

Welcome back to another episode of Invalid Culture, Part Two of the amazing Mr. No Legs. I as always, I’m your host, Jeff. I’m joined by your other host, Sarah.

How you doing, Sarah?

Sarah:

I’m pretty good. Pretty sorry to leave the audience on a cliffhanger.

Jeff:

I know, but this is the car chase of the No Legs episode. We got them here and now this is the last 20 minutes of destruction.

Sarah:

That’s true. You made it and now you get 15 unabridged minutes of hilarious violence.

Jeff:

Yeah, that’s how every Invalid Culture episode’s going to go this season pretty much.

Sarah:

Oh, perfect.

Jeff:

So it’ll be good.

Okay, Sarah, so for those of our audience who have not, for reasons that I will never understand, not watched this film, can you help us understand as best as you can, the plot line of the amazing Mr. No Legs?

Sarah:

So in act one, the rising action of what becomes Mr. No Legs, you get the inciting action of the killing of a 20-something female and her 30 or 40-something boyfriend. The boyfriend is obviously tangentially involved with the Tampa mob scene for the smuggling and selling of cocaine and cocaine accessories, and-

Jeff:

A very small amount of cocaine.

Sarah:

Yes, a bizarrely small amount for… And D’Angelo gets called a kingpin for this. So Tampa in the ’70s, extremely non-competitive drug scene. Anyway, Tina finds Ken’s drug paraphernalia in his bedroom and the paraphernalia itself is hilarious, but she flips out and Ken accidentally kills her. But this kicks off the whole film because Ken was a low level mob guy and now the mob people have been called in to help cover up Tina’s death and for some bizarre reason, they decide to also kill off Ken.

Jeff:

Yeah. To get rid of the evidence of course.

Sarah:

Yeah, but they didn’t even really have to. Tina fell… It looked like she found the stuff, she goes into the living room, she falls into the back of a CRT TV, takes a critical injury and dies on the floor. Nothing needed to be covered up.

Jeff:

No, not necessarily, but they are mobsters and the key detail here, Tina’s brother is a cop.

Sarah:

Okay, that’s true. So Ken was the problem. No, Tina was the problematic character and Ken couldn’t have Tina’s dad getting involved, but he obviously had to get involved. But with all of that action, you set up what became the kind of environment, if you can call it that from the film, where there’s this kind of Romeo and Juliet action between the cocaine mobsters and the Tampa Bay beat cops.

Jeff:

The start of the movie also introduces us to our titular character, the amazing Mr. No Legs who rolls into this film literally in his manual wheelchair in which he has double shotguns mounted in boxes on his armrests. So he rolls up on some people that were skimming a very, very small amount of cocaine out of the already tiny amount of cocaine. He pops his shotguns out of his arm rest and blasts away taking out these two dock workers. He will then later be called in to help dispose of Tina’s body. And it’s at that point that he explains that he leaves no evidence and shoots Ken in the head.

Sarah:

Yeah, my understanding is that he’s like a Mike Ehrmantraut style mob enforcer, but he kind of just comes onto the scene and his analysis of every single scenario is just killing whoever was involved. There’s no analysis whatsoever. He gets called to the scene, he gets there, he brings out the shotguns, he shoots whoever’s there on site. The dock workers didn’t need to die. Ken didn’t need to die. The people in the bar in act two didn’t need to die. Arguably, the only people he ever fought that actually had a reason to die were at the very end of act two, beginning of act three when people were actually coming after him. He was just ruthlessly killing for sport beforehand.

Jeff:

So he’s this merciless character. He’s a killer. He’s an enforcer. He’s also a problem solver, and he seems to have what may be the best PSW in the world. There is a man who is unnamed, does not talk and drives him around at times, seems to help him, but then also vanishes halfway through the film and is never seen again. So I don’t know exactly who this man was, if he was another mob guy or possibly like a state assigned support worker who just was like, I just worked here. I’m not saying anything. I’m enabling this man to live independently.

Sarah:

He could. Okay. It’s arguable because we also know from the last episode, he’s got that blonde bombshell, Danger Angel, and whenever he starts doing mob dealings, he just turns to the Danger Angel and goes, “Beat it baby.” He could also be doing that to his PSW. Maybe he just waits in the getaway car.

Jeff:

I mean, the PSW was there for the first murder for sure.

Sarah:

That’s true.

Jeff:

But the dock workers, the PSW was behind him and then helped him back into the car.

Sarah:

Yeah, that’s true. I don’t think we see him again after that though.

Jeff:

We see him once more when they’re back at the house. Yeah, which is why I’m not sure who this person is, but I like to believe that they’re just some low level PSW fresh out of college, and this is just the luck of the draw. This is who they were assigned and to work for.

Sarah:

Sometimes you get a grandfather, sometimes you get a mob enforcer. It’s just the way she goes.

Jeff:

Yep.

So I think we got to talk about the wheelchair because I think this is something that a lot of people are going to want to talk about because it’s so ostentatious. It is amazing. It’s very cool.

Sarah:

What did the reviewer call it? Because he had a great phrase for it. I think it was something like wheelchair of mayhem and that’s dead on.

Jeff:

Yeah, pretty much describes it.

I want to know. So Sarah, I don’t know if you noticed this, but you can clearly see the shotguns at the back of these boxes that they’re in. I thought they could have done a better job of hiding them. They did do a very good job of hiding the ninja stars, which are magnetized to look like hubcaps on the wheelchair’s rims.

Sarah:

The shuriken additions to the wheelchair killed me. When those came out…

Jeff:

Absolutely incredible. So he’s a gun wielding martial artist. He’s adept at throwing stars.

Sarah:

That’s right. And that brings us to act two. So act two introduces the homoerotic romance angle of Captain Hathaway and beat cop, Chuck, who teams up with his homie, who has the second-highest kill count in the film after Mr. No Legs, not Chuck, his homie to investigate Chuck’s sister’s death at the hands of her deadbeat boyfriend who was in the mob, but they don’t know yet he was in the mob, but they also don’t know yet the big reveal at the end of act two, that Hathaway, the police captain, is also in the mob. So they spend an entire 15, 20 minutes sussing this out on police investigations in Camaros and other muscle cars, and they find time to get into two different bar fights.

Jeff:

At the same bar.

Sarah:

At the same bar. Yeah.

Jeff:

Yeah. This is one of my favorite parts of the film is that Chuck goes to this bar to meet with his informant in which he walks into a full-blown race riot and is just like, okay, and just starts killing people.

Sarah:

He said something like, “You didn’t like the service here,” and then they launched.

Jeff:

He full-blown murders at least three people in this bar, like fully murders.

Sarah:

Four people were bottled to death, which I thought was awfully specific.

Jeff:

So he’s a bloody path through this bar. The following day, he returns to the bar and kills another two people.

Sarah:

Yes. And it was funny because when they were sitting in the Camaro and Chuck was sitting there like, “Man, this is really boring police work.” And Andy goes, “Our tusk is to observe and report.” And Andy can’t stop killing civilians.

Jeff:

So I also really appreciated the Colombo investigation scene in which Andy…

Sarah:

Oh, my God.

Jeff:

… goes into the house of Ken and finds the blood on the floor, which he picks up with a napkin, puts it in his pocket, the broken television, the dead flowers, and he proceeds to walk around and just push around some shirts, look under the bed, and then comes out. He’s like, “Well, I figured it all out. I think this guy killed Tina.”

Sarah:

I’ve done a better job looking for my phone charger drunk in my bedroom in total darkness than he did with the crime scene with Tina’s body.

Jeff:

The crime scene felt like those apps that you see advertisements for on your phone where it’s like, can you find the clues of the mystery? And there’s this giant key, it’s all highlighted. It’s like, can you find it?

Sarah:

And he brushes past the shirts in the closet and he lifts up the bouquet of flowers and he is like, “Well, no damning evidence under here.”

Jeff:

Now, all of this has led to, of course, Chuck has an informant who turns out to be a racist who drops the N-bomb in the middle of this film and starts out the [inaudible 00:11:48] riot, and that’s how he ends up at the amazingly named bar, the 7 Seas.

Sarah:

Okay, so the first bar fight was the race riot and the racists, which is weird for Tampa, but maybe not weird for Tampa in the ’70s. The racists are clearly the ones in the wrong here, and they get the shit kicked out of them by the rest of the bar mates, including Mr. No Legs, who shows up about halfway through. I don’t think we’re ever told who called him.

Jeff:

He was there. He was at a table. He was at a table in the background.

Sarah:

People get thrown through the plate class window. People get thrown over the bar top. There’s transgender people watching. There’s little people watching. There’s people of all different races watching. There’s the bartender who’s this older black male with an afro kind of just holds his head and rubs it like, “Oh, another Tuesday.” This is just standard practice for 7 Seas Bar.

Jeff:

After the fight is over, the bartender laments, “I’ll be damned.”

Sarah:

He was not upset enough about the trashing of his bar.

Jeff:

And so this leads to another, I would say, iconic scene in which it is discovered that the police have found the body of Ken, which was apparently not very well hidden. And now Leo, who is the branch manager of the mob, I guess, he’s like a middle management below Mr. No Legs, above Ken, I believe. And so he and someone called the Mower, never explained why that’s his name, dress up as ambulance attendants to go and try and steal the body from the hospital. And this of course does not go well. They are interrupted by our two researching detectives. A fight ensues, as every 40 to 50 seconds, a fight ensues in this film, and the badlands get away, but something very fishy is revealed. Captain Hathaway has sent them to identify if the body was Wilson’s body, but Andy had never said Wilson’s name to Hathaway.

Sarah:

But I love that he specifies it’s because he didn’t do his paperwork. He’s like, “I know he doesn’t know that name because I did not submit the work I was supposed to do yesterday.” The crime here was that Hathaway thought that his beat cops were halfway competent and they weren’t. And their own incompetence actually leads them to kind of accidentally reverse Colombo solve the crime, because he was like, “Wait, Wilson?”

Jeff:

“He shouldn’t know that name. He didn’t get the blood in the napkin like I did.”

Sarah:

“I haven’t done my homework for weeks.”

Jeff:

This was like the ChatGPT solution of a mystery, like a murder mystery, where it’s like the end of the second act, they don’t know how to wrap it up and they’re like, “Oh, I know a good trick. We’ll just have someone disclose something that they shouldn’t know and that’ll be the way that we resolve this.”

Sarah:

Well, I’m honestly surprised that they even caught that. That had to be end level mystery solving for both of them at that point. That was their career highlight.

Jeff:

Now, at this point, we haven’t got a whole lot of Mr. No Legs. I remember as we were watching it, commenting, Mr. No Legs is not actually very present in this film, and when we do see him in the middle act, it’s either A, at the bar, shanking a racist in the stomach, or B, it’s by his pool with his bombshell, blonde mistress, wife, support worker, maybe, not sure, throwing his ninja stars at dartboard.

Sarah:

Okay. And I think that actually makes him a legitimately aspirational character because when he is not out at the bar achieving racial justice, he’s hanging out with Danger Angels at the country club.

Jeff:

This is also the moment when we finally had an answer as to why Mr. No Legs is Mr. No Legs. It’s disclosed in a conversation with D’Angelo, the mob boss, that Mr. No Legs, before he was Mr. No Legs, I guess he was just Mr. Legs at that point, was at the docks. He’d worked at the docks and he’d lost his legs in a dock accident, and D’Angelo then brought him on to the mob racket to take care of him after the injury because, of course, there is no healthcare in America.

Sarah:

Yeah, I think it’s relevant at this point to include that Mr. No Legs does in fact have no legs in real life because in disability film, we really cannot take that for granted. And he does all his own stunts.

Jeff:

Yeah, they did not Lieutenant Dan this 100%.

Sarah:

No, they did not. They did not Beautiful Mind this operation.

So then we get to act three, the final act, and the final act is also surprisingly absent of Mr. No Legs for a film that’s called Mr. No Legs. So you get the showdown. Mr. No Legs decides that he’s had enough with the bullshit of his mob boss, and he’s pretty sure that the mob boss is lining up to pick him off anyway because he’s always been fairly low level. And I think that’s where we get the review, where the reviewer thought that there was some kind of class consciousness angle there, but I don’t think Mr. Legs is about that.

Jeff:

No.

Sarah:

I think we agreed on that. So Mr. No Legs sets up a showdown between his secret informant, captain Hathaway, and D’Angelo, the small shipments of cocaine mob boss of Tampa Bay, Florida. And when they meet up, it’s actually kind of funny because they look at each other and they go, “Hey, who told you to come here?” “No legs.” “You?” “No legs.” And they kind of chuckle and they go, “Well, that’s kind of funny, actually because I was a bit to pick him off.” And Mr. No Legs, just like how he appeared in act one, rolls back into the same warehouse, does the same stunt with the double barrel shotguns on both sides of his manual wheelchair and immediately picks off D’Angelo. But Hathaway puts up more of a fight, kills No Legs with, I think he emptied the entire gun, like six shots into Mr. No legs. Unfortunately, he doesn’t even get a good death scene. We just see his arms fall to the side and that’s it. We never see him again. And Hathaway goes on an epic car chase with the rest of Tampa Bay, Florida. Discuss.

Jeff:

Yeah. Yeah. So Mr. No Legs goes out in a bit of a blaze of glory. So he’s jumped at the pool by, I believe it was three, possibly four thugs. He fights all of them off with his incredible kung fu. He judo chops a guy to death in a pool. He drowns another man. He ninja stars another man. And he butt kicks another man and then punches him to death in the face. So he is taking out four guys single-handedly. His PSW helper man, I think, ran away. He was not present at all during this scene. And then he goes and has this blaze of glory, kills the man that wronged him but doesn’t get the cop.

This car chase that Hathaway then goes on literally feels like half of the movie. It keeps going and going and it has literally every car chase cliche that’s ever been created. There are rollover cars that explode. There are cars that go through a mobile home. There are cars that drive through baskets of fruit. There’s a car that drives through ice bricks. There is cars that spin out. There is…

Sarah:

You forgot the jump.

Jeff:

… power slides. There is a jump off of a raised bridge.

Sarah:

The jump.

Okay. My pop theory is that the script was actually created after they had fully written this car chase to justify the budget needed to make this spectacular Hot Wheels style car chase. It was wild.

Jeff:

I fully endorse this theory, and it’s odd that there’s so much emphasis on the car chase, but in all of the promotional material, that is not what people talk about. Everything is about fighting.

Sarah:

That’s why I was so bothered by the synopsis. Yeah, a fifth of the film is actually just the car chase.

Jeff:

Right. And so why are you talking about gunfights and martial arts and all this other stuff when the car chase is literally the only thing you cared about? And the bar fight, I guess.

Sarah:

Fair.

And if we’re talking about things the film does well, which I think is later, but I’m going to jump in really early here. Off the top, the cinematography of the car chase, the whole sequence I actually thought was beautifully shot. I think, on average, the cinematography in this film was nothing special. Definitely not Villeneuve level or anything. When we got to the car chase, he was putting some serious thought into the direction of these supercars and muscle cars and all the damaged cars and where the placement of all these obstacles should go. It was better than Die Hard.

Jeff:

My theory is this, my vibe for all of this movie is that it’s all a pastiche of the things that the director and the writer like in film and television, and they just took all the stuff they like and tried to reproduce it. So the fight scenes are WWF, right? They are so WWF. They clearly were wrestling fans, and the bar fight in particular was like they live on steroids. It was so WWF. And so I think similarly, they love car chases and they were like, well, what are all the best things we’ve seen about chases and let’s just redo them.

Sarah:

They did that. It was greatest hits. It was the Shania Twain Greatest Hits album of ’70s, early ’80s. They’re actually also omniscient car chase scenes.

Jeff:

100%.

Sarah:

Amazing.

Jeff:

It was high octane. The cops were wearing visors clearly to hide the fact that it was the same stunt driver in every car.

Sarah:

Yeah, because the stunt driving was actually really good. They were doing stuff where I was like, this is actually actively dangerous to shoot. It’s the ’70s.

Jeff:

Oh, yeah. Again, it wouldn’t surprise me if literally this movie created three or four Mr. No legs during the car chase.

Sarah:

So in that way, it’s actually disability activism.

Jeff:

Maybe, actually. Yeah.

Sarah:

DAV recruitment. Not only inspiration, but active recruitment.

Jeff:

Yeah. I really wonder if the buddy cop piece came first or if the No Legs piece came first. Was this a matter of they knew this guy and he said, yeah, let’s get him into a movie. Let’s put it together. Did they have this buddy cop car chase thing, and then they met the guy and were like, “Oh, let’s shoehorn him in”? And then we’re like, “This is the best part. So let’s make this the sell for this film.” Because it is the most original part of this film.

Sarah:

Definitely.

Jeff:

Mr. No Legs is everything else you’ve seen a million times before.

Sarah:

Okay. And this is edging into disability theory light. And I wouldn’t say I’m on the side of goodness here because you could say that I’m being kind of tropey or putting him up on a pedestal, but stay with me. If you were the guy who directed five different versions of Flipper and a producer called you up and was like, “Yo, I’m going to give you like 100K. You want to grab your boys and make a film?” And he goes, “Adam Sandler style, knocking on doors of his friends’ houses in Tampa, Florida. And one of his friends says, ‘I got a guy. He’s a war vet. He was literally on the Marines. He wants to dabble in acting as a side gig, but there’s one thing.'” And the flipper director and the flipper writer was like, “What? What could it possibly be? This guy’s a badass.” And this other guy goes, “He’s got no legs.”

Jeff:

Movie brain.

Sarah:

Origin story. And a film was born.

Jeff:

A film was born.

Sarah:

And I think the sheer notoriety of that guy, because even in the IMDB reviews, and these guys get intensively into film in ways that we don’t. I think we are casual film lovers and these guys can name every second cameraman in Caddyshack type film lovers. And they were naming other things that these relatively unknown actors were in besides Flipper. And everybody seemed to know Mr. No Leg’s backstory as this war vet, but he hasn’t actually done anything else. So I think he’s just this whole guy in Florida, like Waterloo used to have this guy named Bucket Man, and all he did was walk up and down the streets of Waterloo banging a bucket to a beat, and everyone knew who he was. My theory is that Mr. No Legs is the bucket man of ’70s Tampa. And they were like, we got to do it. We got to make an action film with Mr. No Legs and everybody treats him like he already exists and he belongs here because he does. He’s already a local legend.

Jeff:

And grew into this cult legend beyond. He is the best part of the film.

… about this film. And I got to say, of all the films we’ve watched so far for this podcast, this one didn’t give us a lot to chew on. The one most obvious thing to point out, I would say disability trope that comes up in this movie, of course there needs to be the disclosure scene. So there is that moment where it’s like, why does he have no legs? It was an incident at the dock. So we had to have that little slipped in. It had no real relevance, and there was no reason for us to know why Mr. No Legs, A, had no legs, and B, why D’Angelo employed him. Because at that point, we already knew that he was a merciless killer. That’s why he’s employed. It has nothing to do with the fact that he was injured at the docks.

Sarah:

Absolutely.

Jeff:

That didn’t need to happen. But there’s this, again, this desire that you must position disability, you must explain why it happened or what happened, because that’s the thing that everybody wants to know and they can’t get past it.

Sarah:

I think it’s worth noting though, that they wait till almost halfway through the film to do it. Normally that comes pretty early on. It was late into act two before somebody was like, “Yo, what’s the deal with Mr. No Legs?” Our introduction to him, I actually thought it was pretty badass, even from a CDS angle. He rolls into the warehouse, flips down the… What’s that called? The arms…

Jeff:

It’s an armrest.

Sarah:

… of his chair, flips them down into two fully loaded double barreled shotguns, looks up, starts firing. That’s your introduction to disability in this film. And I have no notes. That’s great.

Jeff:

Yeah, it was completely unnecessary to disclose it. I mean, and similarly, I fully believe, I thought that they were going to just be like, “Oh, he got injured in Nam.” That he’s a war vet and that’s why he’s also a killer, because he is a soldier, he’s trained, but they were like, “No, he was a dock worker and now he’s a martial artist.”

Sarah:

Well, it’s funny that they reversed the trope for it because he really was an injured and retired marine. So that would’ve been the only legitimate instance where you could do that without being tokenistic…

Jeff:

Totally.

Sarah:

… because that’s his real ass backstory. And you got to wonder if it was Mr. No Legs himself who was like, “Nah, just make me a dock worker.”

Jeff:

“Yeah, no, I’m just a regular man. Anyone could do what I do.”

Sarah:

Yeah, “Except I have shurikens on my wheelchair.”

Jeff:

“And I will go right for the neck.”

I did see the other one, and this is a little tropey. There does seem to be this desire often when it comes to adaptive devices to build in cool features. And this is something that some people get bothered by it. I actually am going to go in a really different direction with it. I think that we need to actually embrace this and realize that at the moment, we are not creative enough with wheelchairs. At the moment, we think of wheelchairs purely as mobility devices. We’re like, we’ll give you a chair, we’ll give you some wheels, maybe a battery and a motor. And that’s it, more or less. But what if we built wheelchairs that were like go-go gadget chairs. Why aren’t we putting things like our robotic arms and lift devices and all these other tools that could help somebody live independently?

We don’t do that for a variety of reasons, but a lot of them are because of policy. A lot of them are money related, but I think a lot of them is that we don’t have the creativity. And so I find… And this is where I wanted to come back to from the previous episode or mentioned, I want to talk about accessibility in this film because something that I think is really amazing about this movie, and I think this is something that we see in this super wheelchair that’s rigged out with gadgets, is that within the movie space, we have the ability to create anything. The world of a film doesn’t exist. Literally, they have to build sets to make a film. You are building buildings often if you have budget or in this instance, you’re like choosing buildings.

So for this film, they actively made these choices to ensure that all of the places that they were going were wheelchair accessible, and they needed to because they had a cast member that had a disability. But what’s amazing about it is that we then present this fantasy world in which we kind of had a what if the world was accessible? And so in some ways, in 1975, the same year that the UPIAS puts out their manifesto of the social model of disability, we have this movie that comes out that basically shows if the world was just accessible, disabled people could be anything, even killers, they could even be mob enforcers.

Sarah:

I was wondering where you were going with that whole bit. And I’m really glad we got there with it.

Jeff:

I landed it. It was a bit of a journey. I apologize.

Sarah:

You did a lot of work to get to that destination, and I appreciate that.

Jeff:

Yeah, but it’s one of those things where I feel film so often lets us down, is that rather than leaning into the fantasy of what disability and accessibility could be, they instead lean into the fantasy of a world either without disability, a world that’s precarious for disabled people or a world in which disabled people are the threat themselves because of. And I feel like this movie resists all of those things, even though Mr. No Legs is dangerous.

Sarah:

Okay, I’m going to go, yes and. And I mentioned this in the last episode, but we didn’t go into too much debate over it. I mentioned the Canadian TV series, Schitt’s Creek, because it got really famous for this kind of defacto inclusivity angle it used, and everybody was kind of wondering because the same way there’s a trope around how did you become disabled, there’s this kind of corollary trope around, especially for leading gay characters, how did you become gay? What was your moment? What was your coming out? All of these side questions. And Schitt’s Creek was really interesting because they kept doing interviews mostly for American publications where they kept answering that with, we didn’t want to honestly engage those questions. We wanted to just show you a town and a place where nobody wants to ask that. It’s just it’s fine however you are and however you come, and all the problems they have are not identity based in that way.

It’s like silly problems about socialization or class rhetorics especially, or I think there was an arc with a minor racial rhetoric, but they never, ever, ever brought the LGBT intersectionality angle to account on purpose. And I think there were some people who said, that’s not realistic and therefore not inclusive because it’s kind of this envisioning of a reality that doesn’t really exist. But I guess, my counter argument to that would be kind of [inaudible 00:34:00], the reality we’re currently in doesn’t really exist because I’ve made that up too. You can do that forever and ever and ever because my experience of the real is obviously really different from the real that existed in Tampa in 1975, and that is going to be really different from the reality of 1980s Kuala Lumpur. So if I’m trying to build arguments on what I feel the real is, we’ve entered this kind of pseudo [inaudible 00:34:31] in fantasy of now I have to define something that which is, by its own nature, undefinable. So in that instance, why don’t we just create what we want to see?

Jeff:

Yeah. Build the world that you wish to live in.

Sarah:

Yeah. Kind of Adrienne Maree Brown vibes.

Jeff:

Yeah, a little bit. A little bit. One thing that I think we need to leave off before we go into our ratings of this film is that it is remarkable in some ways, that this movie was made in the 1970s and is possibly one of the more progressive representations of disability that I have ever seen.

Sarah:

Absolutely.

Jeff:

In part because it just is. It doesn’t need to be defined. It doesn’t need to be a motivating factor.

Sarah:

No.

Jeff:

He just happens to be disabled. That’s just a thing.

Sarah:

And apart from race, which I guess was beyond the realm of the believable in the ’70s, especially ’70s America, especially ’70s southern America, you can keep adding layers onto that, but they treat kind of disabled identity, but also sexual identity with this kind of Schitt’s Creek nature of, “Yeah, dude, that’s just you. That’s how you’ve come to the table. That’s fine with me.” The only thing characters ever seem to have a problem with is race, and it’s only really the white characters who have a problem with it. So that’s saying something too, right?

Jeff:

Absolutely. Yeah, and I feel like they fully knew what they were doing in that, or not, or maybe not. Maybe they accidentally got this right. And maybe-

Sarah:

If that was accidental, that’s a phenomenal accident because that film was more inclusive than most actual published disability theory I read in my lifetime.

Jeff:

There were so many accidents, so many accidents in this film.

Sarah:

Yeah.

Jeff:

Well, as you know, every movie that passes through the gates of Invalid Culture must be evaluated through our completely scientific, rigorous, tested methodology, a scale that we use to measure the quality of film.

Sarah:

It’s at least as rigorous as anything coming out of clinical psychology, I’ll say that.

Jeff:

Taking shots, I appreciate that.

So like in golf, our scores mean the lower the score, the better a movie fares. Lower is better, that’s what we’re looking for.

So we’re going to start out here. On a scale of one to five, with five being the least accurate, how accurate does this film portray disability?

Sarah:

I think if we’re reading it with the live into what you want to see and be and do in the world argument, which is what we were ostensibly operating on toward the end of this conversation, I’d have to give it a one, because it is portraying the disabled world as we want to see and be and do in it. And it’s doing a lot of work that a lot of modern disability films seem completely incapable of or are blatantly unwilling to do, which is to take people as they are.

If you put this up against, especially psychosocial disability films like Silver Linings Playbook and A Beautiful Mind, the entire consciousness of the film is about what’s wrong with them and how you can use that positively. In this film, it’s still about… It centers on the disablement of Mr. No Legs. They call him Mr. No Legs. It’s probably not his name, but it’s about everything he can do. Even the reviewers who called themselves far writers who in this argument, you think they wouldn’t be with you on this, they could do nothing but tell us how much of a badass, how much of an inspiration, how much he brings to the world and society. So in that way, he would be a really phenomenally well done disability character, even if this came out last year, which I think in a lot of ways is kind of sad, right?

Jeff:

Right. Yeah.

So I was almost in line with you. I gave this a two out of five, and the only reason that I took off marks was that I don’t believe the full accessibility of the mob layer and everything else in Tampa was very accurate to reality. It did present this sort of dream world of full accessibility, but I think that’s a minor sin. I’m not totally against that, but it would’ve been kind of hilarious if he had gone to the bar, the 7 Seas Bar to start shit and it was inaccessible and he wasn’t able to get in. That would’ve been… Actually, and then double barrel shotguns [inaudible 00:39:43] for it. [inaudible 00:39:44].

Sarah:

Okay. He would’ve, I’m calling it, thrown the chair with one arm down the stairs, launched himself down there and started fighting.

Jeff:

Yeah.

Okay. On a scale of one to five, with five being the hardest, how hard was it for you to get through this film?

Sarah:

I thought this film was an absolute delight. I said in the last episode, my roommate actually asked me what I was doing because I was sitting in my room with Jeff just laughing maniacally for much of this film. It is genuinely hilarious. I give it a one. I’d watch it again tomorrow.

Jeff:

Yeah, this was a hard one for me. It was under 90 minutes. Blessings. But also every scene, at the end of the scene, I was ready for the next. I was like, give me more. I want to see what’s coming next. There were zingers throughout the film that were delivered perfectly. It was silly and funny and weird and a fight every 10 seconds.

Sarah:

And you know what? Callback to the cinematographer. Whoever they got for that, he was legitimately very good. He was well above the caliber of Mr. No Legs, the film, and he made it look, especially the car choreography at the end, really good.

Jeff:

Totally.

And this might be actually the hardest one for us to answer. On a scale of one to five, with five being the most, how often did you laugh at the [inaudible 00:41:20] that we’re not supposed to be funny?

Sarah:

Okay. Yeah, that’s hard because I really do think that there’s no way this was supposed to be serious. There’s no way. And if you know, it’s supposed to be a funny kind of pseudo parody, but also goes really hard for a parody on manly man bravado action films, it’s a one. But if you think that they legitimately wanted every minute of this to be Die Hard and you come out of this kind of wishing you were him, I guess it would be a 2 or a 2.5. I don’t know. I think maybe I’ll go in the middle. Maybe I’ll go two.

Jeff:

So hilariously, I had almost the exact same wrestling with angels in my mind, and I also came out at a two. And the only reason I came out at two is that I think there were lots of moments in this film that were objectively hilarious. I think they clearly wanted to be funny. A lot of the little one-liners were clearly supposed to be funny. I think a lot of the fight scenes… When you stab at a Camaro with a broad sword, clearly intended to be funny.

There were other parts of the film that I’m not totally sure if they were in on the joke or not. I’m not sure if they were trying to mock hypermasculinity or if they were just performing hypermasculinity, unclear. But either way, it was funny, and I think I lean more towards you, like this is supposed to be like a Grindhouse-like film. And so I think that that kind of over the top nature, that sort of funny, I think it’s supposed to be funny. So I’m going to give it a two. It might be a one, but I’d want to talk to the directors and find out a little bit more about what they were actually intending.

Sarah:

Yeah, if the directors came out and said, this is a parody of big macho action films, it would be a one for sure.

Jeff:

Okay.

And our last question. On a scale of one to five, with five being the most, how many steps back has this film put disabled people?

Sarah:

I think we should be citing this film in the AODA. I think this should be a core piece of disability arguments and disability empowerment moving forward because it wins over even the most hard to win people on the epistemological and ontological use value in the loosest sense of CDS gang. One.

Jeff:

Yeah, this was an easy one. I didn’t even have to think about it. If there was the ability to give zero, I would give zero. I do not believe this set us back. Okay, maybe it did earn the one. It doesn’t deserve the zero. The only thing is that I think it does unfortunately lead to a tremendous disappointment by both disabled and non-disabled people when they realize in the real world that every wheelchair does not have double barrel shotguns hidden in the armrest. And that maybe does set us back a little bit. It promises a future that never occurs.

Sarah:

You know what? Never say never. Because everybody thought iRobot was a spectacular 2044 future, and it’s looking more like a 2004 future.

Jeff:

Fair enough.

With the lowest score ever on Invalid Culture, drum roll please, the amazing Mr. No Legs clocks in with a score of 10. This might be an underappreciated piece of art.

Sarah:

If I saw a poster in a store for this film, I would buy it outright.

Jeff:

If I saw Mr. No Legs’ in Tampa, Florida, in real life, I would beg to become his Danger Angel.

Sarah:

I want to be a Danger Angel as a career choice now. This movie has changed the trajectory of my life and probably yours because you will forever be in pursuit of a Mr. No Legs style chair.

Jeff:

Yeah. So I’m going to chalk this one up as an enormous win for the disabled population and an absolute abject failure, on my part, for trying to find a terrible movie, because I didn’t. I accidentally found a good one.

Sarah:

I’m going to be so much more disappointed next month because the fall is going to be hard from here.

Jeff:

It is a steep drop-off as we get going in the year of 2024. That’s right, folks, there are many more episodes to come, so be sure to tune in next month as we continue, or rather maybe begin our descent into the depravity of disability representation in film.

And thus concludes another episode of Invalid Culture. Thank you for joining us. I hope you enjoyed it or not.

Do you have a film you would like for us to cover on the pod, or even better, do you want to be a victim on Invalid Culture? Head over to our website, invalidculture.com and submit. We would love to hear from you.

That’s it for this episode. Catch you next month, then until then, stay invalid.

[Theme song, “Arguing with Strangers” by Mvll Crimes finishes out the episode]

 

 

Come for the teen murder, stay for the harshest eulogy of all time.

What happens when the movie “Mean Girls” has a baby with the movie “Carrie”? You get the excessively strange Christian inspiration porn adjacent film “Touched By Grace”…apparently. Currently viewable for free on YouTube, this film follows teenager Cara’s evolution from high school bad girl to caring youth group member, a metamorphosis made possible by a special friendship with a young woman with down syndrome.

Join Erika and Jeff as they dive into promposals, questionable eulogies and possible crimes against humanity in another thrilling episode of Invalid Culture.

Listen at…

Grading the Film

As always, this film is reviewed with scores recorded in four main categories, with 1 being the best and 5 being the worst. Like the game of golf, the lower the score the better.

How accurate is the representation?

Jeff – 4 / 5

Erika – 4 / 5

Total – 8 / 10

How difficult was it to watch the movie?

Erika – 4 / 5

Jeff – 2 / 5

Total – 6 / 10

How often were things unintentionally funny?

Erika – 5 / 5

Jeff – 5 / 5

Total – 10 / 10

How far back has it put disabled people?

Jeff – 3.5 / 5

Erika – 4 / 5

Total – 7.5 / 10

The Verdict

A Crime May Have Been Committed

 

Erika:
Welcome to Invalid Culture, a podcast dedicated to excavating the strangest and most baffling representations of disability in popular culture. Unlike other podcasts that review films you’ve probably heard of, Invalid Culture is all about the abyss of pop culture adjacent media that just never quite broke through because, well, they’re just awful. I’m your host, Erika.
Jeff:
I’m your other host, Jeff. It’s time now for us to think about some culture that might just be invalid.
[Theme song: “Arguing with Strangers” by Mvll Crimes, a choppy punk song with lyrics “I’m arguing with strangers on the internet – not going out today because I’m feeling too upset. Arguing with strangers on the internet and I’m winning. AND I’M WINNING!!”]
Erika:
Jeff, how are you doing today?
Jeff:
I am excited to be back. I feel like I haven’t watched a terrible movie in so long.
Erika:
Well, I would be able to say the same if I hadn’t just recently watched Touched by Grace. Safe to say I am happy to be back, coasting as we are, straight through the second full year. Are we into the third year of pandemic now? I’ve actually lost count.
Jeff:
I don’t know. I think we’re still in 2020, so we’ll just see where we pop out the other side.
Erika:
Perfect.
Jeff:
I think so. I think so. Speaking of what it feels like to be in a global pandemic, this episode, we watched a thrilling film called Touched by Grace, which had all of the same what is happening that we have experienced in COVID. Now, I’m all of our loyal listeners have listened to the, or have watched rather, the movie before, but in case you have not yet managed to watch this amazing film, let’s give you a little bit of a breakdown.
What is Touch by Grace? Well, Local mean girl, Cara is moving away from her best friends forever after pulling a totally sweet, albeit, fat shaming prank on a fellow youth. Now, in her new city, she has no friends, but it’s okay because Cara’s thirsty mom encourages her to befriend cafe worker and high school, 35-year-old senior Brandon, and eventually connects with the other local mean girls, Quinn and Skyler.
One day, went out taking pictures at a playground, for reasons, Cara meets and befriends Grace, a person with Down syndrome. Cara begins to become a better person or something, but still wants to impress her new friends. Skyler and Quinn, her new mean girlfriends decide then to play an epic senior prank modeled after a prank that Cara claims to have played at her own school, which includes getting Grace nominated prom queen and then humiliated her before the school by making her sing on stage.
But wait, Brandon, the cafe worker, and his brother Ben, who is essentially the Down syndrome version of Dr. Ruth, surprised Cara and Grace within awesome promposal that involves a gorilla costume and pop in a million balloons with a group of very cool Christian teens. The plan succeeds and eventually Grace will have some sort of attack of some version on stage while singing and legit dies.
Her preacher then gives an impassioned speech, repeatedly clarified that Grace was a broken blight on society. Lessons were learned, I suppose. No one is charged for manslaughter and the movie ends. Perhaps most importantly though, the box description of this movie explains it is inspired by real bullying events that our teenagers in our community have witnessed happening in their local high schools. Did we witness a murder, Erika?
Erika:
We witnessed some violence, that’s for sure.
Jeff:
I think that is completely fair. Okay, if we take a high view of the film, what were your general impressions of this beautiful piece of art?
Erika:
I think my most general impression was that I felt, in some ways, that we were watching a recap of season one of Invalid Culture. It was as though every theme we had discovered discussed during the first season was recapped for us in this film with, of course, some notable additions. I’m pretty pumped to be getting into those additions today, but yeah, I think just like your standard train wreck.
Jeff:
Yeah. I have to be honest with our viewers. I started watching this film a couple weeks before Erika and I watched it. I got about halfway through and I stopped it because I knew that this was going to be the first episode of our season because this movie is so ridiculous, so absurd, but yet, I don’t know, there’s something about this movie that brought me back that made me want to watch it again. Part of it was because I wanted to see some of the just borderline human rights violations that occurred in this film.
Number two, I was enamored with the fact that the film seemed to actually have a lot of insight into people with disabilities, but seem to have almost zero insight on people that do not have disabilities. This is, I think, the first film I’ve ever watched where I’m like, “Have you never met a non-disabled person ever,” because none of the non-disabled characters behaved like real people in this film. That, I thought, was just such a beautiful inversion. I knew we had to do it.
Erika:
Shall we get into some of what the critics had to say?
Jeff:
Yeah, absolutely. There are people much smarter than us that have words to say about this film.
Erika:
We are looking here exclusively at the popular critics. Shall we begin with Judy F. from Christian Cinema?
Jeff:
Absolutely.
Erika:
Judy F. gave this film five Stars and said, “What a wonderful movie. As a child that was teased due to my walking handicap, I saw an excellent lesson for all to watch and learn from. Thanks for the great movie.”
Jeff:
Now, I want to talk about this a lot more later, but what lesson did this film… I do not actually know what the lesson that is being learned by this film.
Erika:
No.
Jeff:
I have no idea.
Erika:
I was going to ask you the exact same question.
Jeff:
I actually am more partial with another Christian cinema reviewer. Two stars from iOSC. Yup, that is right, iOS is in the Mac operating system for your phone. iOSC, two stars, “I enjoyed the film.”
Erika:
Jeff, you found my review. That was me, iOSC, two stars, “I enjoyed the film.” Shall we move on to Amazon? Honestly, I mean, I guess Amazon has everything. Part of me is a little bit surprised that this film is on Amazon.
Jeff:
Yeah. It’s barely on Amazon. You can buy it on Amazon. It is very expensive, very expensive.
Erika:
Okay. That means that Amazon is aware of it but does not actually have it.
Jeff:
Precisely.
Erika:
All right. Another five star review. We have Carolyn Kowalski, “Yes. Great movie. Teaches kids to respect and appreciate each other. Also working with special ed kids and adults, which I do every day at the grocery store. Sara Cicilian was great in this movie. She was one my scouts in high school, so I was very anxious to own and watch one of her movies.”
Jeff:
I love this review because of this weird admission right in the middle. Why do you believe that Carolyn needed to disclose to us that they work with special ed kids and adults in grocery stores?
Erika:
I’m just having trouble processing what that means.
Jeff:
I wonder if this is an appeal to authority. I know disabled people, therefore, I can assess that this is a good film.
Erika:
Oh, yup, yup.
Jeff:
You know who has figured it out, is our reviewer Wimpy Charlie, four stars explains, “It’s an excellent movie, but perfect for teenagers. I would recommend this movies for teenagers to watch.” This is actually something we’ve seen a lot in a lot of the reviews. A lot of people believe that this is a film for teenagers, and I would strongly debate that point.
Erika:
Yeah. I would advise, I mean, I would not advise anyone to watch this movie, but especially not teenagers.
Jeff:
No. I think the lessons that teenagers would learn from this film is how to murder someone with Down Syndrome.
Erika:
How to murder, how make fun of. I just don’t, I mean, the film as we know it is called Touched by Grace, but the alternative title is the Senior Prank.
Jeff:
Yes. Yes. That’s a good point. The movie was originally going to be called, The Senior Prank. The Prank is the heart of the movie.
Erika:
Yeah. No, definitely not for teens.
Jeff:
We have one last review and this one I’m going to turn over to you, Erika. This one comes from the YouTube channel that is hosting this entire film free for you to watch right now, Christian Movies on YouTube.
Erika:
From Kate Pearson,” I absolutely loved this film. If only everyone could see the world through Grace’s eyes. I used to work and look after people with Down syndrome, and I always wanted to have a child with the condition too. The way they see life and the amount of love they have in their hearts, we see life and stress and worry about stupid things. We get upset and argue with others, but people who have this disability are so loving, pure and see life full of color and compassion as well as full of happiness.
God only gives children with disabilities to special parents. It makes me sad that, although, it was only a film, that there are so many judgmental people out there who are so sad and unsatisfied in their own lives that they have to be nasty and ugly to others because they see them as different, but God made us all different for a reason. He gave us compassion to use it. Some people say manners don’t cost anything. Well, neither does compassion or love. Use it.” Xxxx Kate Brit Flag xxxxx.
Jeff:
Okay. There is a lot going on. I don’t even know where to start.
Erika:
I strongly suspect that Kate Pearson had a role in creating this film.
Jeff:
Interesting. This is a hot take. Tell me more.
Erika:
I am hearing themes of the film that none of the other, let’s say “objective reviewers” have picked up on. The idea that the world is such a cruel place, which again, I am baffled that none of the other reviews picked up on this because that was probably the most striking feature of this film for me.
Jeff:
Should, absolutely, yes, absolutely.
Erika:
As we will unpack ourselves shortly, there really seems to be a description in this review from Kate about the way that disabled people are different in a very good, trust me, listen to me, honestly, I swear, very good way, but different, and that’s kind of what I was getting from the film as well.
Jeff:
Now, what do you think about the desire to have a child, the idea that almost like this has pet vibes to me, where it’s like, “Oh, I’ve always wanted a Corgi dog and I’ve always wanted a Down syndrome child.”
Erika:
Yup. I mean, right on brand for this kind of peculiar objectification that we see come through in this film. A bit of out of alignment with a message that came straight from the dialogue of the film where it is stated that disabled people, no matter how much people are willing to care for them, are actually extreme burdens on society.
Jeff:
Right. Yeah and what is perhaps the best eulogy of all time. I find that this really leans into this idea that people down syndrome are these sharabic, angelic, loving in all ways, simple people that see the best in life, which strikes me as the belief of someone who doesn’t actually have any sort of interactions with people without Down syndrome, which isn’t to say that they are monsters, but that people with Down syndrome are complex people because they’re people.
Erika:
Yeah. As I read this review, I think like, “Oh, I’ve heard this before. I’ve seen this represented before.” It’s not what I got from the film. It’s not what I get from real life, but I’ve definitely heard this narrative before.
Jeff:
Yeah. It feels like it comes from the Special Needs Mom “branded” TM. This idea that, it’s like this desire to make them valuable. Well, they’re not valuable in all the ways that we see other people valuable. Maybe they’re good spirited nature, that could be the way that they’re valuable and there’s a productive value in that because it helps us to be better people and to see the world through their eyes.
There was a lot of that, I think, in a lot of the other reviews as well. This idea of wanting to see the world in the way that Grace sees the world, which I find particularly bizarre in this film, where Grace doesn’t actually have that much of a role in the film other than being a friend, eventually being a date, talking about wanting to tell her to preach, to give her testimony as to her relationship with God and then dying. That’s Grace’s arc. I don’t really actually understand what people are learning from Grace in this film.
Erika:
No. I don’t think that Grace is a character, a properly developed character in this film. Grace is, I spent this whole film just wanting to know more about Grace and this film does not deliver on that in any way.
Jeff:
Hot take, hot counter argument, I thought the other character with Down syndrome, Ben, the brother of Brandon, I actually felt the kind of opposite. Ben actually kind of felt like what people were saying Grace is like. Ben was kind of loving and happy go lucky and was living his best life as a rocker. He was sort of doing all these things, but the movie is not Touched by Ben. It’s Touched by Grace. I wonder, because I think Touched by Ben is probably a very different Christian film probably.
Erika:
Whew. Yup. Yup. Just to yank us back on track here. I would agree with you fully, not all aspects, but I did overall really enjoy the Ben plot line character representation. I mean, what is that? What is that? What is it that the supporting actor has no depth of character and then this random side plot character has so much?
Jeff:
Yeah, it’s a huge question. Maybe this is just about actors, actor ability. Maybe Ben was just a better actor than Grace, but if you think about what we know about Ben, there’s actually a pretty good list of stuff, of things that we know about Ben, whereas Grace, we know that she is obsessed with a butterfly metaphor. This idea of the ugly caterpillar becoming a beautiful butterfly that is core to her personality. She appears to American Idol and she dies. She has many medical conditions, apparently.
Erika:
Yes, extremely ill despite appearing fine all of the time.
Jeff:
She has a bad heart. That’s like the most distinct of the medical problems that were given is that she has a bad heart and maybe asthma, but that’s never actually described. I’m not really sure. This movie was a train wreck, but it is time for us, I think, to get a little bit more analytical. To start our journey through this film, let’s play that old fun game of name that trope. Erika, what was a great disability trope that you found in this film?
Erika:
One of the clearest messages coming out of this portrayal is that the world is overtly hostile towards disabled people in the most extreme and dramatic ways. I don’t think in representation or in real life, have I ever seen more abject disablism.
Jeff:
Yeah.
Erika:
Including, I mean, this film also flashed me back to elementary school when I think some 20 to 30 years ago, the sort of public imagination about disability was maybe a little bit less educated, a little less PC and eight-year-olds were using the R word and certain hand gestures and of mocked slurred speech to make fun of each other. I really did not expect to see that from teenagers in a, what was this, 2014 production.
Jeff:
This was not an old movie, correct. Yes.
Erika:
Yes and not just teenagers, but the mother, the mother of the…
Jeff:
The mother-
Erika:
The protagonist mother has, just to the point that she sees disabled people walk into a restaurant and says, “We need to leave immediately.”
Jeff:
Yeah. She’s like, “What is this, a Special Olympics?” There was three disabled people. We’re not even talking, it was a small group of friends.
Erika:
She’s just appalled to find out that her daughter’s new friend has Down syndrome.
Jeff:
Horrified.
Erika:
How could you? How could you?
Jeff:
A shame on the family.
Erika:
Yeah.
Jeff:
Oh, 100%. The mother was hands down my favorite character in this film because her discrimination was both so kind of real, but also so extreme. This was cranked up to 13. No one would be able to watch this and not be like, “That was a horrible thing for you to do or say.” I’m like in equal parts honored and impressed by, but also kind of horrified by.
The level that this film decided to go at like stereotypes and discrimination against people with intellectual disabilities, because some of it is like, yeah, it’s dead on, but it’s always taken to the most extreme level, a level that I’m like, I actually don’t think, I mean, it’s bad up there for disabled people everywhere, yes, but I don’t think it’s ever this overtly and randomly and casually terrible.
Erika:
To the point that the actors, at some point, seem visibly uncomfortable with their character portrayals.
Jeff:
Okay. We have to address this great scene, my favorite scene, the scene that I paused the movie afterwards and immediately texted Erika, Skyler and Quinn start to do a pantomime and in a very brilliant way, I would argue. First, Quinn does what a century sounds like somebody with hearing loss or a deaf person trying to talk, sort of the slurred speech and Skyler is like, “No. You idiot. She’s not deaf. She’s this.” Then, does the Donald Trump cerebral palsy sort of hand beat it on the chest, this slurred version of the R word? If you look in these two actor’s eyes during the scene, you can see the exact moment they realize they’re going to hell.
Erika:
Which, I think that’s a beautiful segue into trope two, because I think that’s actually part of the point of this film, is using disability to find God, to find a path to redemption, and these mean girls that you were just describing, they’re the non-religious crew. This is kind of a clear setup in this film where we have the non-religious folks are extremely and overtly prejudiced towards disability. Then, the religious folks are extremely compassionate and caring.
Jeff:
Yeah. I mean, you kind of know what you’re getting into when you start a movie and it’s called Touched by Grace, we’re all about to be touched by this disabled person. Yes, but I think you’ve made a really interesting point though here too, that there’s actually two roles being played here. It’s not just about how is disabled person going to teach us how to be better people, but there seems to also be some clear instruction about the role that nondisabled people need to play in the lives of disabled people.
Erika:
Yeah. I was getting this strong able bodied saviorism where we have these non-disabled or non-apparently disabled main characters. Brandon is the dreamy, far too old to be in high school.
Jeff:
Easily 45 years old. That guy has a 401(k).
Erika:
Yeah. I mean, the mom knows this because the mom starts to hit on him immediately and then sort of realizes, “Oh shoot, are you a high school senior? I should be setting you up with my daughter, actually.”
Jeff:
Yeah. Phenomenal pivot there.
Erika:
Yeah. This is in the smoothie shop where Brandon works. We have, and Brandon, you mentioned the second character with Down syndrome is Ben, who it turns out to be Brandon’s brother. Brandon is the brother to men with Down syndrome and he knows Grace from the smoothie shop or from school, oh, I guess, from youth group.
Jeff:
It’s probably from youth group, yeah.
Erika:
Right. They’re all kind of connected. Brandon is just so impressed with the, I can’t remember his words exactly, but how naturally Cara is able to treat disabled people like equals. She assures him that it’s not…
Jeff:
Well, not-
Erika:
… natural at all for her and she’s trying very hard.
Jeff:
Which to be fair, I would also be impressed if my first introduction to you was your mother being like, “We have to leave this place. There’s a disabled person here.”
Erika:
Right. We watched this arc. I think really this is what the film is about. The arc of the main, the primary arc of this film is watching Cara’s evolution as a human away from this fat shaming bully to secular, fat shaming, bully to this found, saved, caring person, and we sort of rely on Grace in the film to help, to be able to see this evolution in Cara from sort of an ignorant hatred to this care, albeit a pity-laced care. There’s always sort of I’m doing it because I care for her, not because I actually see her as my equal, but because I understand that the good thing to do is to treat her as an equal.
Jeff:
That there’s value, because I will also get access to this understanding of a different way of seeing the world, but I will see this beauty, once you stop paying attention to the, and they say more than once, disgusting, hairy caterpillar into the beautiful butterfly…
Erika:
Yeah.
Jeff:
… which is maybe a puberty. Is this a puberty text? Is the hairy, disgusting caterpillar like puberty?
Erika:
I mean, okay, I think at face value, it seems that this butterfly metaphor, and for anyone who might not have watched the film yet, the only thing we know about Grace is that she really loves butterflies and is actively…
Jeff:
Harvesting.
Erika:
… fostering these caterpillars in their process of metamorphosis. On the surface, you have this noble message that it’s what’s on the inside that counts, but, I mean, ultimately it’s not really about inner beauty because it’s not like you have the beautiful thing that stays on the inside. It’s really about metamorphosis. It’s really about shedding this ugly interior and letting your inner beauty shine or as I read it, finding God.
Jeff:
Becoming sort of a beautiful, better person in the life of the Lord.
Erika:
I assume this is the direction that you were going in when you called this trope the disabled as patron saint.
Jeff:
Right. Yeah. Not quite spirit guide, exactly, but this totem that symbolizes or evokes or maybe materializes these deeper teachings, these deeper teachings of care and compassion and seeing the best in people and caring for people. I think looking at this through the lens of metamorphosis, kind of does explain this awkward moment at the very beginning of the film when Cara meets Grace for the first time and she sort of like doesn’t want to be friends with her, and then Grace mentions that she’s friends with Brandon and that she can help set Cara up with Brandon. Now, all of a sudden Cara’s like, “Yes, I will be your friend.”
Erika:
Okay. That’s just really interesting to juxtapose with Ben being the, how does he self-describe as the?
Jeff:
The doctor of love.
Erika:
The doctor of love. They’re both this sort of conduit to relationship or to love.
Jeff:
Yeah. They facilitate the relationships, despite the fact that central in the movie is Grace’s anxiety, literal to the point that she has some sort of medical attack that requires a puffer after she gets sprayed with a milkshake, but this anxiety that she will not find love and that no one will ever ask her to prom. Then, Brandon’s like, “Well, I do have someone who can ask you to prom,” but really it’s because now I’m able to ask Cara to prom.
It’s like I really do wonder how the Ben-Grace relationship acts as this way of sanitizing the life’s sexual desire of Cara and Brandon. Cara and Brandon want to pork, but you can’t because this is a Christian film. Instead, they’re going to go on this innocent date with Ben and Grace, because it’s obviously innocent. They have Down syndrome. They’re not sexual beings. Therefore, Brandon and Cara can also then go on this date and it’s safe and it’s not sexual because they’re all just friends in the Lord, but they would’ve porked probably if Grace hadn’t died.
Erika:
Yeah. That was the curve ball that no one saw coming. I mean, okay, looking back, the film is full of this gratuitous medicalization. The foreshadowing was 100% there. It just seemed so illogical. Yeah, we heard that she needs her meds, she needs her meds, she needs her meds…
Jeff:
And a new heart.
Erika:
… and a new heart. Her mom sort of shamefully draws attention to the medical equipment in her bedroom. “Oh, don’t look at that,” but do.
Jeff:
Which is sitting beside her butterflies.
Erika:
Oh.
Jeff:
Currently these are gross, hairy caterpillars, and that’s where the medical equipment is sitting.
Erika:
To be totally fair, the foreshadowing was there, but I think literally as we were watching it, we were saying, “No. No. They’re not. They’re not. They wouldn’t.” Then, flash forward, and you’re clearly at a funeral.
Jeff:
Yeah. This, I honestly, I’m going to go out on a limb here, this is one of the most shocking disability deaths at the end of a film, which we should have seen it coming, but the way the film is going and the tone of the film, you would never imagine that they were just going to slaughter this girl at the end. It felt like she would have trouble and she would make a recovery because of her faith in God, there was going to be this Christic pure movie. That’s really what it really felt like.
I really felt like all this, she’s sick and she’s sick and dying, felt like it was more setting up that, and then they were just like, “No. Rug pulled out. She dead.” I was thrilled, thrilled. I had cheered. I was so excited. I couldn’t believe it. I was like, I didn’t think I was going to get this, but once again, the disabled character must die.
Erika:
I don’t think I had time to be thrilled. I mean, I can’t say I would’ve been thrilled, but I don’t think I had time to before we launched straight into the eulogy to end all disabled eulogies.
Jeff:
We have to play this clip. We have to just let people hear it because it is the most beautiful eulogy that has ever been given for a disabled person. I have to tell you, I almost Graced at the end of this eulogy. I literally almost died watching this. If you’re driving right now, please pull over, just in case you also die.
Speaker 3:
Internationally renowned nurse and journalist, Claire Rayner, once stated that, “The hard facts are that it is costly in terms of human effort, compassion, energy, and finite resources such as money to care for individuals with handicaps. People who are not yet parents should ask themselves if they have the right to inflict such burdens on others; however, willing they are, themselves to take their share of the burden in the beginning.”
This philosophy has been echoed throughout most so-called advanced civilizations. In fact, because of this philosophy, over 90% of Down syndrome babies are aborted before they ever have a chance to take a breath, but we are here today because we believe in the words of First Corinthians 1:27, that God shows the foolish things of this world to shame the wise.
God shows the weak things of this world to shame the strong. We are here because one of the weak things, one of the least in this world, Grace Elizabeth Young touched our lives with the brightness of her strength and changed our lives forever with the light of Jesus shining in her smile. Let’s pray.
Erika:
He quotes a nurse, a nurse who says it’s expensive and requires a lot of human resources to care for people with handicaps and that those who are not yet parents should ask themselves whether they really have the right to inflict such burden on others.
Jeff:
Yeah, which then connects to the horrifying stat that we are regularly aborting people with Down syndrome. Then, he pivots again to repeatedly assure us that Grace is a weak, despicable person who is there to shame and humble the strong and intelligent, and that she did. She was a successful vessel for the message being sent by the Lord through this person. Then, it ends, and that’s all we get at the funeral.
Erika:
That was the point at which I went, “Oh, this is a pro-life propaganda film?” Now, I see, the whole time I’m wondering, but why disability? Why was disability in this film? Then, it was just like, “Oh, there’s the convergence.”
Jeff:
Yeah, but funny enough though, it’s like it’s dropped in there, but then it also isn’t really touched again really after either? I thought it was about to get really preachy after this, but it kind of doesn’t. I wonder, I’m starting to wonder if this was a funding thing. If in order to get this film that they wanted to tell this story about bullying and acceptance, but they also needed money to make this thing work to be able to do it.
I honestly wonder if they were, they applied to some point grant that was if money for pro-life propaganda films, and they were like, “Okay, well, we’ll just put this scene in there.” Why do you think that at no point did they decide that the eulogy should be complimentary of this person?
Erika:
Again, because I think in this film, Grace was never a person. Grace was always an object. What do you have to say about an object at its funeral? Only praise for what it did for the human people around it.
Jeff:
I know, I think this is interesting because in some ways then the film itself serve, there’s this meta thing happening in the film in which the film objectifies Grace in order to tell two different sort of, one sort of religiously motivated and one sort of more propaganda ideology motivated sort of lesson, that there’s these two lessons that are happening here, which is like pro-life, yes and beauty and compassion is the Christic way.
Then, if you step back even further, then you have this meta metaphor of Down syndrome becoming this useful tool in the arsenal of pro-life campaigners that Grace becomes this symbol of the problem with abortion, that we’re going to kill all these people, which again, the stats do say is actually fairly accurate, that people do actively choose to abort fetuses of disabled people, but yet the film never actually gives us any real understanding about why Grace’s life is valuable outside of how she is useful to showing people the way to God, basically.
This is like double objectification that’s happening of disabled people both within the text, beside the text, outside the text. It’s just like, it’s like a nesting doll of objectification.
Erika:
All right, why don’t we move on to our next segment, I’m sorry, can we talk about?
Jeff:
Yeah. I have a hot, a scorching hot take. After now, we have spent most of this podcast kind of pilfering this truly horrendous film, I have a hot take, and my hot take is that this film, I wonder, does this film perhaps almost certainly unintentionally provide a [inaudible 00:38:39] critique of the electing of disabled people as prom king or queen within high schools?
Many of you probably know it. If you don’t know, there’s this viral trend, right, where teenagers will elect often the person with Down syndrome, but not always, sometimes it’s other various disabilities, elect them as prom king, prom queen, and then it makes the news about how great it is that these local non-disabled children have given of themselves and seeing the inner beauty of these disabled people and made them prom king.
This movie, though, presents this inversion in which not only do they make them prom king and prom queen, but then they mock them to death at the end. Grace starts singing and everyone in the auditorium is dying of laughter. This is the funniest thing they have ever seen, and in some ways, I wonder, is this the perfect critique, the perfect critique of these prom king things where it’s never about the person with Down syndrome. It’s not about Ben being the doctor of love and loving rock and roll or Grace wanting to see the inner beauty or being a good singer, it’s all about the emotional enjoyment of the viewing audience and the voting audience.
Erika:
Jeff, I have a gift for you.
Jeff:
Oh, I cannot wait.
Erika:
I don’t know if this throws a wrench into your theory or helps it along, but when I looked on IMDB and I couldn’t find any information about Amber House, the actor who plays Grace, I did a little bit of poking around the web and you will not believe what I found. What I found was a headline, “Dream come true for family after daughter with Down syndrome is asked to the prom.”
Jeff:
What?
Erika:
Covered on both the dailymail.co.uk and Huffington Post.
Jeff:
What?
Erika:
It turns out…
Jeff:
No?
Erika:
… that according to Huffington Post, Amber’s mom actually ran a campaign. Amber’s mom desperately wanted Amber to be asked to the prom and felt that no one would ask her, and she just really wanted her to have that life experience. It was unsuccessful, but it turned out that unrelated to that, a choir friend had actually invited Grace to prom already.
Jeff:
Whoa! Wait a minute.
Erika:
Yes. It was a little hard, unfortunately, in my viewing area. I could not actually watch the live news clip. I just was able to read the article, which is a real shame because I really wanted to see the interview with the promposer. Interestingly, in the Huffington Post article, the articles about Amber and someone else who also got promposed and then was elected Queen, the prom queen. I just, I got the feeling reading this, did they find Amber as an actor through this media story?
Jeff:
Which came first? Did the movie come before the promposal?
Erika:
The promposal came first.
Jeff:
What? Okay, wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. These people saw this article and were like, “We should get this girl to be in our movie in which she gets elected prom queen and dies.”
Erika:
Yes, I believe that’s what happened.
Jeff:
This is the weirdest film of all time.
Erika:
Okay. The other little fun piece of trivia that I picked up on while researching actors was that the actor that played Ben, Frank Stephens is actually a fairly active advocate, including, conflict, I think he’s had some communication with Obama or was critiquing Ann Coulter about her use of slurs against mentally disabled people when referring to Obama.
Jeff:
What?
Erika:
I just found this really fascinating because I know in our first season when we sort of noticed some trends where when there were disabled actors involved in the film, there seemed to be some better representation we suspected because the actors were lending some critique to the film. I wondered, just given that the Ben/Frank actor is a seasoned advocate, if perhaps that’s how his character got to be, have a little more depth and be a bit of a cooler character where it seems that Amber’s not an experienced actor and perhaps maybe not as much experience in this kind of setting and not having say, the confidence to push back on the filmmakers to shape her character at all?
Jeff:
Unbelievable.
Erika:
I’m really sorry for hijacking your, I’m sorry, can we talk about, but-
Jeff:
No. I want to talk more about this. Okay, wait a minute. Okay. I’m sorry. I’m just processing this. I need to go back for half a second. Did you say that she had a date for the prom, but her mom was like, “No. She needs a better date for the prom?”
Erika:
No. No. Her mom, no, no, no, no, no. Her mom did not, okay, before, I guess before the household prom conversation comes up, because that’s a totally normal thing, before that came up, Mom actually led a campaign to try and find her daughter a date. To me, this just aligned miraculously with when we were talking earlier in the film about how that parent trope of my child is broken, but I to have to try and give this, redeem the value of my broken child.
According to the Huffington Post article, although, her parents said she never had a problem making friends, they were concerned she would have difficulty finding a date. Peggy’s mom started a campaign for a prom date a few months ahead. That was unsuccessful, but meanwhile, Amber already had a date and her mom just didn’t know about it yet.
Jeff:
That’s even better than my original suspicion…
Erika:
Yes.
Jeff:
… in some ways. I also like, what would you have done, Erika, if you’d found out that your mom had been running a campaign to find you a prom date when you were in high school? Would you have been touched by grace?
Erika:
I mean, I guess it might have been nice to have a prom date, but I just wanted to round that participation from mom out and actually, I want to just contrast in this Huffington Post article. Matt was the promoser. He said, “Grace was my number one choice. I know her from choir. I really like her. She’s awesome. She’s fun, great to hang out with.”
Mom said she was amazed. This is a quote, “I started crying. I’m just so proud of the young man who would step up and take her and that she’s able to do this and have that experience with all of her friends.” Whether my mom went out of her way to try and find me a prom date or not, I think the part that wouldn’t sit so well with me if my mom said that she was just so proud of the person who would step up and take me.
Jeff:
I’m pretty sad right now, actually, that during at my wedding that my parents didn’t get up during their speech and say how proud they were of my partner stepping up and taking me off their hands. Incredible. I find it, this is so tough because the response to this, we’re sort of laughing and cackling at this, and the response to this is always kind of the same, which is, “Well, you don’t get how hard it is. We do. We live it every day. We see what they go through,” which I’m not going to deny.
At the same time, I honestly really wonder, are these utterances really the deep, deep, genuine belief of these parents or are these parents merely playing out this script, the script that you have to play out if you’re going to get the coverage, which you want for reasons, reasons that actually probably actually translated into their daughter being at film in which she’s killed at prom. I really wonder that though.
I wonder how authentic are these or is it just people playing the part, playing the part that they’ve seen so far, playing the part of the hell has no fury, the special needs mom, or because that was a big thing in a movie that we’re going to hear from a little later this season in our Valentine’s special coming in several months or this trope right about, “Oh, my poor child is such the least of us.”
Erika:
I suspect most parents, probably their imagination of what a good life is relates to their own life experiences. If they want their child to have what they had, and the teen years are sort of a difficult, they’re their transitional point in life where life is directed largely by parents until the young person is getting to that point in their life where they’re able to lead their own life and really kind of center their own life around their own personality.
I wonder if this is sort a teenage, a bit of a teenage issue as well, or whether, I guess, it might be constrained a bit too by parental or societal perceptions of what’s appropriate for people at different ages, different life stages, or even different abilities.
We have done our deep dive into the themes. We’ve heard from the critics. Now, it’s time to get trivial. Let’s look at some fun facts about the film. Jeff, you want to kick us off?
Jeff:
Yeah. Our first little segment is, you might remember me from such films as, and if you were watching this film and thinking, “I feel like this Cara girl looks a little familiar.” This is, of course, our actor, Stacey Bradshaw, probably the most “famous in this film,” predominantly because of her appearances in several anti-choice films, including playing the lead in the understatement of the year, controversial film called Unplanned, which you may have heard of before.
Stacey has also been in other films that are anti-choice, such as a short film, which I’m trying to get my hands on, called Wheelchair. Stacey is not the star in this, but she does appear in it. This is a short film about a mother of a three-year-old who temporarily needs to use a wheelchair and is allegedly a “pro-life” mini film, which I have no idea what is going on there.
Erika:
Then, we also have Sara Cicilian, a former scout perhaps who plays mean girlfriend, Quinn, who interestingly enough is listed as Drunk Girl number one in The Dark Tower and was in a Fall Out Boy music video.
Jeff:
Two very different career paths for these two women.
Erika:
We didn’t get the actor’s name on this list, but character Skyler may or may not stunt double for Blake Lively.
Jeff:
Yeah, they definitely were looking for the great life brand, Blake Lively, for that character. Absolutely.
Erika:
Now, I know this is one of your favorite segments, the equipment facts, no wheelchairs to speak of in this film, so no quickie identifiers here, but we did have a couple of devices on Grace’s bedside table. What were they? Research and speculation can only get us so far.
Jeff:
I have no idea what these two things are. There is this gray device with a giant butterfly sticker on it, and I’m guessing that that butterfly sticker is covering the brand name, which means I could have probably figured it out, but they covered it. Then, there’s this tube thing, with a tube thing, with a tube, with a nipple on it and I just have no idea. I have never seen this device. I’m wondering if it’s a feeding device maybe, or if anybody knows what the heck these two devices are, please email us because I just have no idea.
Erika:
Yeah, I’m guessing that since Grace’s medical condition was entirely fabricated, the medical equipment on her bedside table was whatever the heck we could get our hands on that looks like it helps her breathe.
Jeff:
Sort of, yeah. It was sort of gestured as medicine and breathing apparatus. The gray device might be a suction device of some variety, but it does not look like any of the types of suction devices I’ve ever seen. I haven’t seen all of them. I’m not like a suction device aficionado. I mean, I have one, but I use, because I do have breathing problems and these are not the devices I would’ve seen.
Then, Grace also uses a puffer, which is also, I don’t understand because they say that she has problems breathing, that she has heart problems. Maybe they’re saying she has asthma. I’m not sure.
Erika:
Yeah. Is that the two times that she has unclear whether it’s an asthma attack or an anxiety attack and…
Jeff:
Or a heart attack.
Erika:
… it’s like, me, “Get her, her medicine. Where are your meds? Where are your meds?” It’s unclear what meds.
Jeff:
It’s a puffer, which, yeah. I don’t know what is happening in this whole situation. I also find it hard to believe that somebody who has “heart problems” wouldn’t have an EKG or some sort of heart monitoring device beside the bed.
Erika:
Yeah. Onto production facts, we have Donald Leow, producer, director of such Christian hits as For the Glory and Badge of Faith.
Jeff:
I really want to watch Badge of Faith. There are prop guns in Badge of Faith. I want to see it.
Erika:
Yeah. Well-
Jeff:
No disabled people that I know of.
Erika:
Yeah, that on your own time, I guess.
Jeff:
That one’s just for me, my private viewing.
Erika:
Then, we have, we really don’t have anything for production facts for this film. We know written by Chris and Katherine Craddock, who as far as research can tell us, have basically done nothing else.
Jeff:
Yeah. There is a reference throughout the text about a Christian youth group that seems to be very active in the United States. There are divisions of this youth group in Canada, but shockingly, none in our hometown in London, Ontario. We had no means of trying to find out anything really more about these people. I have no idea if they paid to be involved or if they paid to make the film maybe, but I will say I think every actor in this film had strong Sunday School, Christian Youth Group vibes, every single one of them, even like the adults. Would you say that’s fair, Erika?
Erika:
Yeah. Even the mean girls who notably were not wearing crosses around their necks, if they weren’t acting mean girl and were wearing crosses around their neck, they fit in well with the rest of the cast.
Jeff:
I wouldn’t be shocked if most of the people in this film are all a part of the same youth group.
Erika:
Yeah. Well, how else would they have multiple T-shirts in the film that have the youth group name on them.
Jeff:
It is that time, our favorite time of every episode where it is time for us to rate this film. For those of you who have not listened to the show before, we have our very own Invalid Culture scale, which measures the quality of film based on four scientifically designed questions. He puts his tongue firmly in cheek. The way this game works is like golf, the lower the score for the film, the better the film is.
Let’s start out with question number one. Question number one, Erika, on a scale of one to five, with five being the least accurate, how accurate does this film portray disability?
Erika:
I’m really torn on this one, but I think I’m going to go with a four out five. I am giving mercy for Ben because I thought Ben was a pretty decently portrayed character. I also thought that, although overblown, the ableism was in the direction of reality.
Jeff:
Yeah, I also gave it a four.
Erika:
Okay.
Jeff:
I took off marks for a different reason. I took off marks because the biomedical of this film was just complete nonsense. I mean, yes, people with Down syndrome do have chronic heart conditions. Typically, people with Down syndrome could have problems breathing. All of those things are accurate, but the way that it was just smashed together in this jambalaya of medicalism, I felt was, definitely should have removed a mark. I agree. I think the ableism, although, on steroids, I think was kind of accurate to the ways that people think about intellectual disability at times.
Erika:
Onto the next question, with five being the hardest, how hard was it to get through this film?
Jeff:
I always struggle with this question, always, but it’s because I am a weirdo who loves terrible films, but I gave this one a four. It wasn’t the hardest thing I’ve ever watched. There were some trying moments, but I think the thing about this film is that it takes very seriously that old school like filmmaker’s motto, which is that every scene should increase the drama from the previous scene, but this movie starts with a fat shaming of a teenager whose parents come outside and scream, “Why do you hate our daughter?” It has to go up from there.
This thing just ratchets every scene is just more extreme and unbelievable than the last. That kept me hooked. I’m giving it a four. Sorry. I guess, I shot the other way around, I’m giving this a two, a two out of five. I felt that it was actually very easy to get through this film.
Erika:
Wow. I gave this one a four because I did find it cringe factor alone made it hard to get through this film. I was physically uncomfortable watch. I was so distracted by just the silliest little things, like why are they selling popcorn in a smoothie shop and why are there clearly no drinks in the drink until it gets spilled? There were just so many, they’re not even disability related bits, but just the film production had so many cringy and then it’s just, oh gosh, I can’t, that’s a separate episode. We’ll just leave it at a four.
Jeff:
Yeah. I mean the production of this film was fairly bad. This was YouTube quality film making. I’m so sorry everyone involved, but actually I’m kind of not sorry. All right. Question number three, scale of one to five, with five being the maximum, how often did you laugh at things that were not supposed to be funny?
Erika:
I think that’s a five for me. I laughed…
Jeff:
Easy five.
Erika:
… constantly at this film.
Jeff:
Easy Five. This movie was unintentionally hilarious. Even the things that were trying to be funny, were hilarious because they were so cringy.
Erika:
Yup. I’m with you there.
Jeff:
Easy five.
Erika:
Yeah. Our last category, how many steps back has this film put disabled people with five being the most?
Jeff:
I gave this a 3.5. I don’t think it set us back a lot. There were definitely some questions. I think the preacher’s sermon alone set us back at least one step. I’m going to give it a 3.5.
Erika:
I’m going to have to give this one a generous four for well-intentioned because although, I don’t think it hit the mark by any means, I do think that there was some well-intentioned here.
Jeff:
Okay. Drum roll please. That means this has achieved our third award. Our third rate a crime may have been committed. I think that’s fair because that scene of the two girls definitely felt like something that would be shown at the UN.
Erika:
Yeah, I had a feeling of being violated at some points in this film.
Jeff:
Absolutely. I definitely gagged at least once while watching this film. This concludes another episode of Invalid Culture. Thank you for joining us. I hope you enjoyed it or not. Did you have a film you would like for us to cover on the pod or even better? Do you want to be a victim on Invalid Culture? Head a word to our website, invalidculture.com and submit. We would love to hear from you. That’s it for this episode. Catch you next month and until then, stay Invalid.
[Outro verse from the chorus of “Arguing with Strangers” by Mvll Crimes]

 

Movie poster of "Mac and Me" featuring a star light night sky in blue with Mac and Eric's faces superimposed on the moon. The text reads "Eric's new in the neighborhood. Mac's new on the planet."

When you order ET on Wish.com…

This month on Invalid Culture we break our “no popular film” rule in order to take a journey deep into Erika’s childhood to watch Stewart Raffill’s baffling 1988 alien buddy film Mac & Me. Set in California, Mac & Me follows young Eric Cruise as he attempts to catch, befriend and eventually save a disturbing looking alien child who is addicted to Coca Cola. A movie that is almost universally hated by critics, how will Mac & Me fair when looked at through the lens of disability?

Listen Now!

 

Grading the Film

As always, this film is reviewed with scores recorded in four main categories, with 1 being the best and 5 being the worst. Like the game of golf, the lower the score the better.

How accurate is the representation?

Jeff – 1 / 5

Erika – 1 / 5

Total – 2 / 10

How difficult was it to watch the movie?

Erika – 3 / 5

Jeff – 4 / 5

Total – 7 / 10

How often were things unintentionally funny?

Erika – 3 / 5

Jeff – 3 / 5

Total – 6 / 10

How far back has it put disabled people?

Jeff – 1 / 5

Erika – 2 / 5

Total – 3 / 10

The Verdict

Mistakes Have Been Made

Podcast Transcript

Jeff [doing a voice]:

Have you ever had one of those days, out slurping cola from below the surface of Mars when, out of nowhere, NASA comes and kidnaps your entire family? No? Ever wonder what it would be like?

Join disturbing google-eyed alien Mac as he product placements his shapely little booty around California, befriending a young disabled boy with a death wish and eventually having a sick dance party at a totally real McDonalds.

Was ET a little too mainstream for you? Real cinephiles know the best alien/child friendship adventure is Stewart Raffill’s Mac & Me.

[Intro song: “Twinkle Lights” by The Sonder Bombs, featuring a punky rock riff]

Erika:

Welcome to Invalid Culture, a podcast dedicated to excavating the strangest and most baffling representations of disability in popular culture. Unlike other podcasts that review of films you’ve probably heard of, Invalid Culture is all about the abyss of pop culture adjacent media that just never quite broke through because well, they’re just awful. I’m your host, Erika and as always, I’m joined today by my co-host Jeff.

Jeff:

How you doing Erika?

Erika:

Oh, I am good. I am so ready to get going on this one.

Jeff:

Are you regretting doing this podcast yet? It’s episode three. How are you feeling?

Erika:

Oh I am more committed than ever. And I mean that in all possible interpretations of the word.

Jeff:

So this is a very special episode of Invalid Culture because this film comes to us, not just from the realms of popular culture but also from Erika’s past. Erika, what can you tell us about your childhood and the film Mac and Me?

Erika:

All right. Well, I wasn’t aware, I think until you brought up the possibility of doing an episode on Mac and Me that people knew about this film, it’s one of those films that I associate with my childhood. I mean, I remember E.T. but Mac and Me was something, it was something else. I remember the purple box. I remember the V-shaped whistle amplification that the aliens do with their hands. I remember the windmills, there are windmills. And I think I live in a, I come from a geographic area in which windmills became very PO popular in the last few years. And as I saw those windmills come up, I was reminded of my childhood and this film, this film about an alien and that’s really all I had to go with. I remembered the windmills. I remembered the alien. I did not remember that the main character used a wheelchair.

Jeff:

So you wouldn’t say that this film inceptioned you into becoming a disability studies professor.

Erika:

I mean, I’m rethinking everything now. It is, it’s possible that actually my life path was altered by my childhood love for this film that I now understand is a bit of a cult classic

Jeff:

Divisive. We’ll, it’s a divisive film for sure. Lovers and haters both. The film we are going to be talking about today is of course the 1980s classic Mac and Me, if you want to know what the movie Mac and Me is about, basically watch the movie E.T. and then imagine if E.T. was placed in a microwave. And what came out was the movie Mac and Me. Mac and me essentially tells the story of a young boy moving from the rough and tumble world of Illinois to greener pastures or I guess desert pastors of California. Our main character, Eric arrives in California only to discover that an alien from another planet has arrived in this town.

Jeff:

They then become friends and go through some hi jinks. And eventually our alien friend Mac is reunited with his parents. All of course, under the watchful gaze of the government who is trying to capture this alien perhaps to send them back home. Is this text an immigration text? I would say yes, definitely it is because it ends with our alien friends being naturalized as American citizens at what is perhaps the strangest citizenship ceremony I have ever seen. Is that a pretty accurate description would you say of the film?

Erika:

Yeah. I mean, a few details here and there but we’re going to fill those in as we get going.

Jeff:

So why did we decide to do this film? I mean, obviously there’s a boy in a wheelchair but why this film?

Erika:

I mean, for me personally, it was really about revisiting my childhood and just the disbelief that this was a disability film.

Jeff:

This film also has some pop culture credentials, perhaps that goes beyond what we intended for Invalid Culture, we’re breaking the rules a little bit. You may actually recognize a scene from this film, even if you have not seen it because an actor by the name of Paul Rudd for years has been using an infamous scene from this film every time goes on Conan, let’s hear actually a quick little clip explaining what in the world is going on with Paul Rudd and Mac and Me.

Paul Rudd:

I never really imagined 20 years ago. That here we would be.

Conan:

Yeah. Well, someone obviously on the internet put together, they didn’t even do all of them but you can and see, I mean, you don’t age but you see me go from a, here’s Paul Rudd to like, just this rotting pumpkin head and you see it happen over a period of years and it’s absolutely stunning, it’s this crazy performance art that lasts forever.

Paull Rudd:

I just remember the very first time thinking it’s so artificial to come on and sell your wears and show a clip from your movie. And what if I just show a clip from another movie?

Conan:

Right, right.

Paul Rudd:

We’ve never talked about this really but I thought, what if I show a clip from this movie that I saw a long time ago, that is just really strange. And there’s one scene in particular but I was waffling because there is another movie that I was obsessed with at the time that was equally like, who was this made for? Called Baby Geniuses.

Conan:

Baby Geniuses. Does anyone know baby, oh okay-

Jeff:

So this film essentially is known for being bizarre, strange, over the top, ridiculous and has had this life that I think has been extended beyond the original release as essentially a joke for an absurd film. But as people find out, I think there’s more than perhaps meets the eye when it comes to representations of disability in this film. Perhaps disability is the only thing that’s not ridiculous in this film. So where does this film come from? Well, it was written and directed by Stewart Raffill and Steve Feke and Stewart Raffill you may recognize, he has done some movies. Things like Ice Pirates was one of his, also was a big animal tamer and Wrangler through many Hollywood films and then eventually got into the writing and then directing. As we watched this film, unlike other films on Invalid Culture, we decided to watch it with the commentary enabled. Most of the films we’ve watched don’t have commentary. This film, however, was released as a collector’s edition Blue-Ray. Yes, we watched this in 1080P as God intended. And we listened to the audio commentary and it was actually really informative.

Erika:

And everything that we learned here is verified in a thrillist.com article, so definitely know that this is legitimate information we are working with here. So the director Stewart Raffill, really begins the audio commentary by explaining that this film was created in a rush, I believe he said five weeks, five weeks in total. He talks about how they were developing the costumes for the alien while writing the script with actors already on payroll and were under direction to just get it done. Why the rush unclear. We also learned that the producer R.J. Louis had spent several years negotiating brand rights with McDonald’s. And so this film came about presumably at, the deal was passed, we went into production.

Erika:

A little more on why the deal was passed. So Louis had a history with the Ronald McDonald charity and actually wanted to create this film in order to raise funds for the charity, for the Ronald McDonald charity. And so something that you can’t help, but notice when watching the film, that there is some brand placement, product placement, like next level going on in this film, riding on the coattails of E.T. there’s some Reese’s Pieces,, here we’ve got Coke. We’ve got McDonald’s. We questioned whether maybe Porsche was involved, perhaps also the Quickie wheelchair brand, although unconfirmed on the latter couple. But really what we learned in this audio commentary right off the bat was that this film was created to raise money for the Ronald McDonald charity.

Jeff:

Yeah. And a lot of investment financially by McDonald’s to get this made. McDonald’s was actually quite involved in some ways with the production of this film. But on the other hand, as we learned on the audio commentary, McDonald’s didn’t actually seem to have a whole lot of say about what happened. And this wasn’t quite like other product placements where the brand comes in and says, “Well, we want to be represented in these ways.” With the duration of the speed at which it was produced, it sounds like they just got this money and made something because I would really wonder, I would love to know what did McDonald’s think about this film after it came out? Were they happy with their investment? I don’t exactly know but let’s talk more about the Ronald McDonald charity a little bit later because I have some theories about what might be happening but let’s instead look at some critical response because we are not the only ones who have opinions about this film. So Erika, what did some of the major critics have to say when Mac and Me was released in, I believe 1988.

Erika:

Well, let’s start with a Richard Harrington from the Washington Post who said.

Jeff [doing a voice]:

So why is it so hard to light this fiddle? Having that scene done much better by Spielberg doesn’t help of course.

Jeff:

Right. Fantastic. Fantastic. I think it was Richard Harrington as well that mentions just casually that RJ Louis, the producer of the film. It turns out that they were an account executive for an ad firm that handled McDonald’s. So RJ Louis had a past relationship as an adman for McDonald’s and Richard just wanted us to know, just throwing it out there. Now, what else did we find?

Erika:

Well, we’ve got Steven Ray from the Philadelphia Inquirer who says.

Jeff [doing a voice]:

Everything about Mac and Me not at least the fact that it is fairly well made and involving, smacks of crass calculation, the filmmakers even have the gold in the movie’s part and shock to announce a sequel.

Erika:

Yes, that’s right. This film ends with a still and a cartoon text for unknown reasons. Announcing what is it, see you soon?

Jeff:

We’ll be back.

Erika:

We’ll be back.

Jeff:

We’ll be back.

Erika:

Hey, didn’t another movie pick that up another time, that we’ll be back?

Jeff:

Yeah, I believe so. I’m still waiting for Mac and Me to be back, frankly.

Erika:

I have a pet theory that it’s coming.

Jeff:

If honestly, if any of our listeners are interested, we will start a GoFundMe and we will film Mac and Me two.

Erika:

Should we just start-

Jeff:

If you want it.

Erika:

On me.

Jeff:

If you want it, we will do it. I am fully admitted because apparently copyright doesn’t matter. Apparently you can just tell whatever stories you want, E.T. E.T. ish.

Erika:

So next we had Chris Dafoe from the Globe and Mail.

Jeff [doing a voice]:

While worse films have, no, don’t touch the heart of the general public. Mac and Me is not only crass, it’s boring and insulted to children’s intelligences.

Erika:

And I want to say, I took issue with this. Funny that we got crass again. But I just, I took issue with this a little bit because watching this film, this is actually a film that is almost entirely showcasing children. And I think children’s intelligence, specifically their autonomy. We hardly see, the adults in this film are secondary roles. This is a film that is led by children and an alien.

Jeff:

It really does seem to be more about children living as this agentic operators. And I think it really stood out to me in the commentary when they’re talking about how he realized that children want to see themselves on screen. I don’t feel like this movie is trying to trick children. I think it’s trying to be fun and funny. And I would argue that it fails miserably at doing that, 100% fails but I don’t think they’re trying to trick us. I don’t think.

Erika:

No, I don’t think so either. And I really, I think that’s a really astute observation about children wanting to see themselves represented and maybe not unrelated to the fact that we have here, our first disabled actor in a disabled role. Maybe this team, maybe a film production wasn’t their forte. It was just the medium.

Jeff:

Yeah. RJ Louis allegedly had always wanted to do a film starring a disabled actor playing themselves. And in that way, this film is perhaps actually quite progressive. I think one of my favorite critiques of this film, however, came from Juan Carlos Coto from the Miami Herald, who said, quote,

Jeff [doing a voice]:

His pace is quick and the numerous chase scenes made for good fun. For sheer thrills, Mac beats Pippy and Peewee claws down.

Erika:

Oh, sorry. Just for clarification. Do we know who or what Pippy and Peewee are?

Jeff:

This is definitely referencing Peewee, Herman and Pippi Longstocking. And I would imagine anyone listening to this who have seen either of those films is deeply concerned about the mental state of Juan Carlos Coto. I don’t know how anyone can argue that this horrifying monstrosity of an alien is better than Pippi Longstocking or Peewee Herman.

Erika:

I mean, he might be wrong. He might be, we could debate that but I do think he’s probably nailed the class, the class as that belongs in.

Jeff:

Yeah, that’s actually a good point. Maybe this actually maybe does make more sense alongside a Pippi Longstocking or a Peewee Herman. That actually might be a better place to put it. Whereas E.T. is like, oh, I was about to say high film and I apologize for that. But I mean, Spielberg is in a completely different film production category, I would argue. That maybe makes some sense but the fact that it beats it claws down, Juan Carlos Coto what did they have on you? Did they have your family?

Erika:

Does Juan Carlos Coto also work for McDonald’s?

Jeff:

Everyone works for McDonald’s. But of course, film critics are not the only ones that have important opinions. In fact, some of the best opinions about movies in my humblest of opinions can be found within the Amazon Review categories. So we have curated some of our favorite Amazon Reviews of Mac and Me. And we start with a great one. This one comes to us from Sheldon five stars titled. Okay. And the text is okay. Sheldon believes, eh it’s okay. Five stars.

Erika:

Yes, we’ll give it five stars.

Jeff:

Five stars, it’s okay.

Erika:

So, S.A. Hansen, another five star titled a little more descriptively, Look for the Good, Not a Bad, with the text, I see nearly everyone dislikes this film. Everyone either gives it one or no stars. Video movie guide 2000 gave it the Turkey. After I got it, I read the positive and negative reviews. And now I’m glad I was able to enjoy it. Yes, it is a pale clone of E.T. but that is what makes it all the more better. Nothing is better or than E.T. but this is right next to it. Perhaps there won’t be a sequel because of how poorly it did with the box office but it definitely didn’t deserve worst picture.

Jeff:

I love that they say maybe a sequel won’t happen 30 years after this was released. So this is a good one. I like this one for a lot of reasons. This is from our friend, Brian. Five stars titled Inter Galactic Good Times ellipses. The text is, quote, Mac and Me is one of Hollywood’s most overlooked pieces of classic science fiction. Fun for the whole family Mac and Me will take your heart from the introduction of the film’s protagonist and cute little extraterrestrial. Don’t jump to any conclusions. This is no E.T. knockoff. Mac has a mind of his own. After a fabulously choreographed scene at McDonald’s Mac and his handicap friend bracket Me bracket, get into some hefty trouble with the law. Excellent. Pyrotechnics and special effects, a true classic.

Erika:

Is it possible that this review was written on Amazon in 1989?

Jeff:

I think there was like, this was probably shouted out on a CB radio when the film came out and this has been captured and curated for us here. I love how it equal parts, defends the movie and then it plays up other parts and then minimizes others. So for instance, I love the implication that unlike E.T. Mac is an agentic free thinker, E.T. is apparently a conformist, a slave to the system, unlike Mac who thinks for himself.

Erika:

Okay. But Brian also claims that it’s cute and I’m not sure I can agree with that.

Jeff:

That is also an extreme, an extreme, I mean the first time I saw this film, I was old, I was an adult and I was worried about nightmares after I saw this for the first time, the alien to me is terrifying. All of them are very disturbing. I would argue.

Erika:

It is not, I would not cute. And cuddly is not the vibe I get from Mac, which I think Mac is actually said to be an abbreviation for or an acronym for mysterious alien creature.

Jeff:

I think this was a rip on Alf perhaps.

Erika:

Oh, I see it.

Jeff:

I believe, I believe. I also love the statement that quote, they get into, quote, hefty trouble with the law, which is of course an abbreviation for Eric will be shot by the police by the end of this movie, he’ll be shot and killed by a police officer.

Erika:

Depending on which country you watch the film in.

Jeff:

Correct. We’ll talk about that more in a moment.

Erika:

All right. Up next, we’ve got Jason Nickert five stars titled, Jay’s Review on a Childhood Classic. See Jay and I were coming from the same place. So Jay had to say, this movie was was my all time favorite movie when I was growing up, from the first time I watched it on the old TMN movie network. This movie is a great movie with a lot fun attached to it. It was and always will be a cult classic to me. It helped me grow up and it’s tremendous grasp of a boy who falls in love for a being greater than man and shows a compassion that is lacking our day and age. I rate this movie an easy 10 but if, since I can only go to five, I will have to settle for that.

Jeff:

There is a lot to unpack here. Is this a romance movie?

Erika:

I mean, that was not my initial read but-

Jeff:

Do Mac and Eric hook up?

Erika:

I mean, no, we definitely don’t see that happen. I did not have the sense that it happened either. I mean maybe worthy of mentioned, there is a certain, there is a caring relationship, certainly that develops between them.

Jeff:

Definitely.

Erika:

I think we see them both extend care and support towards each other.

Jeff:

If you were watching What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, would you say that he fell in love with Gilbert Grape?

Erika:

No, no. This-

Jeff:

It’s the falls in love that’s very strange to me.

Erika:

Yep. Yep. I mean, what is love?

Jeff:

I also want to know, is Mac genuinely a being greater than man?

Erika:

See, yeah. I mean, I was onboard with most of this review. But that one I’m not so sure about. Certainly portrayed as an other. An other things. Yep. Greater. I mean, yeah. I don’t know about that.

Jeff:

And so his powers are essentially, he’s able to get sucked into things. He essentially has a completely malleable body. He can fit into very small spaces.

Erika:

He doesn’t rely on water.

Jeff:

Right, he lives on Coca-Cola. I don’t know if that makes him better, I’m not sure. We also got a five star review from Kim. This one was titled, Great Movie. And it says quote, I thought it was a good movie. Did you know that the kid in the wheelchair wasn’t just acting in the wheelchair? That was actually his, he has spina bifida and he did all his own stunts, like the water scene where he falls off the cliff. Now this is a good review. I brought this quote on the show because it straight up lies to us in its justification of the film, the actor does have spina bifida. The actor was using his own wheelchair. However, he did not do almost any of the stunts, including he did not do the stunt where he falls off a cliff and into the water. That was definitely not him. And it has stated repeatedly in the commentary of the film, that they were very afraid of killing this child throughout the film. They were really worried that they were going to kill him with the stunts. And that’s why they used stunt doubles. It sounds like very heavily. So Kim, the one thing you tried to sell us on, it wasn’t true

Erika:

Last up. And this is probably my favorite and I would say the most accurate of all of the reviews. So Dylan Kelly gave us a very unforgiving one star review titled, “Truly terrible” with the slightly more generous text, “God, awful, loved every minute.” So I’m just going to say, I think that actually pretty well sums it up for me. How about you, Jeff?

Jeff:

It’s so perfect.

Erika:

So I think we, we pretty much sum up the reviews there. Shall we get into a little bit of a deeper analysis of what happened here?

[Musical Interlude: “Body Terror Song” by AJJ, singing “I’m so sorry that you have to have a body, so very sorry that you have to have a body, oh yeah” over an upbeat piano and acoustic guitar]

Erika:

All right. So let’s get started some general impressions on the film. I mean, clearly we are looking at a low budget. Well, I think if we look at the numbers, it wasn’t exactly a low.

Jeff:

It was not a low budget film. There was a lot of money, but it looks like a straight to DVD film.

Erika:

Yeah. Yeah. So we’ve got what looks like a low budget film. I think that what I want to say first and foremost is I am, I was, I remain just floored at what an excellent disability representation this is. I don’t think we started this film knowing that we were looking at an actual disabled actor. I believe that this was something that we started to pick up on as we watched. Did you know going in?

Jeff:

I fully expected that this thing was going to be a gong show. I figured that this was going to be an absolute, like just paint by color or paint by number just all the worst stuff. And as we were watching this film, I had this dark sneaking suspicion that this actually might be one of the best representations of disability that we’re going to see. It might be a completely unwatchable movie, but it actually may have gotten disability right. And that’s shocking, considered all of the other problems within this film.

Erika:

Right. And so, I mean watching this, especially after the last couple of films that we really, really, I think railed for their unfortunate acting disability. It was very immediately evident that the actor was not sort of imagining disability and acting this. What an able bodied actor might imagine Spina bifida or, I mean, very unique among this film. I don’t think that his diagnosis is ever mentioned. I don’t think except for one incident we’ll get back to. He’s really not medicalized. There’s no dwelling on his leaky body. There are no kind of awkward and inconsistent arm, hand-leg movements. It’s just a kid using a chair and that’s not even, I mean, it’s not even that. It’s just a kid who happens to be using a chair. It’s never the focus. It’s never the focal point. And that is just, that is rare.

Jeff:

Yeah. I don’t know how they got this, so right. Considering everything else, like I think it is important for us to clarify here. This film is terrible. It is a terrible film, but somehow within this pile of excrement, this is like beautiful flower of representation emerged, and that is shocking.

Erika:

Yeah. I mean, I think you throughout the hypothesis that, because the film was strewed together so quickly, maybe they just didn’t have time to overthink the disability representation.

Jeff:

I think that might be it. I feel like they didn’t even think about disability because they didn’t have time. Like we hear in the commentary that at times they were literally like right and stuff. And then like looking for, see places to film the next scene and finding these locations like the night before, and then just like go in there the next day to shoot the scene. I wonder if, when you don’t have a time to think about the story and you’re literally just shooting one scene after another, then it just, it becomes like a non-factor. They were like, “Well, we don’t have the time or the capacity to actually engage with any of this stuff, because we’re trying to film a movie in like a month and a half.” And I think a lot of the stuff in this film is reflective of that philosophy.

Jeff:

It’s like, well, we’re not going to think of like an original plot line. We don’t have time for that. So we’re just going to take parts of ET and then put it in there. We’re going to take parts of Back to the Future and we’re going to put it in there. We’re basically just going to be like, “Oh, do I, Spielberg, we’re going to take a bunch of stuff from his films. We’re going to jam it together. And we’re just going to get this thing out the door. That’s what our plan is.

Erika:

Well, and that really squares with the intent for this film to essentially raise money for a charity. It wasn’t about reinventing cinema. It was about how do we use the medium to meet our end. And I think, two things related to that, that I think sort of played out. We heard on the commentary, the directors say, “We really had to take Jade’s lead because we imagined a scene would go one way. And then we got there and Jade sort of told us it needed to go another way.” And so that we saw in another film, I think it was Miracle in Lane 2 that had an onsite wheelchair consultant.

Jeff:

Yes.

Erika:

And so, I mean the director of this film and the commentary acknowledged how much they learned about disability and just sort of the mundaneness of living with disability, through working with Jade on the film.

Jeff:

Now, I’m sorry. Can we talk about the cliff scene? I think we need to talk about it. It is the elephant in the room for those of you who have not seen the film yet, Eric has decided it is finally time to capture this alien. He’s been sort of pursuing it. There’s weird things happening in his house and he follows the alien out of his house, ends up on a cliff, which his wheelchair then runs down. He tries to put on the brakes, the brakes snap off and his wheelchair then launches off the cliff. He falls for a long time into this water below at which point, typically he is to drown. And it is at this point that Mac finally reveals himself, swims out into the water and somehow rescues this man or child, pulls him to the shore. The next time we will see Eric, he’s now in his bedroom being consulted by doctors. What stood out for you in the cliff scene? Erika?

Erika:

I mean, there’s the shock, certainly. Like, who thought to launch the wheelchair kid off a cliff? Why was that? Why? Where did that come from?

Jeff:

The stakes have never been higher.

Erika:

Right. I mean, in one sense it seemed kind of realistic because I don’t think we’ve mentioned that the family had just moved into a new home. So, a kid out exploring it’s not unrealistic. It’s not that sort of trope that we’re used to seeing where a blind character sort of feeling around for things in their own home that they most likely know where to find them. Right. It’s not that kind of thing. It’s not unrealistic that he would slip down. I don’t know what to call it. A cliff.

Jeff:

Ravine, cliff side. Yeah.

Erika:

And lose control. Did that seem realistic to you?

Jeff:

Yes and no. The way he reacted to it is what actually got me. And it’s interesting because as we found, unlike what Kim, the liar would try and tell us. Jade, the actor had nothing really to do with this. It was a stunt double that was used, which I think is also incredible because I believe it looks pretty obvious that there is not a person in this wheelchair. Allegedly, it is a person. I am not super convinced on that. But one thing that I think that doesn’t speak to the reality of manual wheelchairs, I don’t know many people that go to the brakes to try and stop themselves from moving. But the brakes, when I was in a manual wheelchair, those breaks are rickety. Like they don’t really work and it’s really more so for like, when you’re doing a transfer, when you’re sitting still, right.

Jeff:

You’re like, I’ve come to a stop and I’m going to put this on so that I don’t roll down a gradual incline. When I was in a manual wheelchair, the gut instinct was, you just grab the wheels, you just full on, grab the wheel with your hands. And at the time, if you’re going at the speed that your brake will snap off, you are well beyond the point I think of stopping the chair. And I think you would just bail out. I think you would just jump out of the chair. So I think that was a little bit obviously kind of ridiculous. And it’s interesting that in the scene that doesn’t use Eric, we see kind of a different use of the wheelchair that maybe doesn’t exactly resonate. I really am surprised that they basically tried to kill him off this early in the movie. That was like a full blown. He almost died.

Erika:

Yeah. I mean he almost died and the alien quickly came to his rescue. So I mean, that’s interesting. That’s an interesting way to cue our first real meeting with the alien. Is there something to that?

Jeff:

I wonder too, like how did the alien know that he was drowning? How does this child alien from a different planet that is ostensibly a desert in which they use straws to suck Coke out of. How was the alien like, “Oh, he’s drowning. He breathes air. I need to get down in there and pull him out.” I also want to know, after the scene is done. So once he hits the water, the actor is separated from the wheelchair. And so when he is saved, he’s like dragged to the side of the water by Mac, which again, I just want to point out as well. We do see Jade with his arms exposed, in this film. And this kid was ripped because he was like borderline Paralympian.

Jeff:

He was doing like wheelchair races at the time. I have a hard time imagining that he didn’t have the physical capacity to swim, but anyways, we see him get pulled out of the water. The next time we see him, he’s in his bed, but his wheelchair is there who got his wheelchair from the bottom of the lake. Did Mac go back? Cause after he pushes the boy to the side of the water. He then goes back underwater, like Mac goes back down. Is he going down to get the wheelchair? And how is he like, this is a $6000 or $7,000 wheelchair. I need to go get that for this kid.

Erika:

The curious thing is that we see Eric flailing in the water in a way that suggests there is not a chair pulling him under the water, but then we see him lifted out of water on the chair. But yeah, the question remains. How did he get from the bottom of this valley? Back up to his home on the cliff?

Jeff:

Yeah. There’s fire. There’s fire people there. There are multiple fire trucks and multiple cop cars. And I feel like that is also a real over response to a kid who was at center. He was fine. There’s no indication that this child suffered any sort of injury from what he definitely should have probably died from.

Erika:

And see, this is where we see some good representation that I don’t think we can probably credit to Eric. Right. Because decisions were made around Eric. With Eric slash actor Jade. Decisions were made not to sort of portray his helplessness or his neediness by showing anyone, carrying him or dragging him or however it was that he got out of this situation that wasn’t shown. We didn’t sort of dwell on his fragility, this thing happened. And he was so fragile already that he just crumbled to pieces. Not at all. I mean, we did see the next scene. We do see him next in bed, but other than that, we don’t go. Those tropes weren’t sort of milked the way that we’ve seen them in other films.

Jeff:

Also, can we talk about their van? Because I do not understand how Eric, the character Eric. How he is put inside this Volkswagen van. I don’t understand what the heck is going on. Okay. So we see throughout the film, Eric is presented in several different configurations within this old school Volkswagen van. We see one scene in which his older brother, Michael grabs his wheelchair and carries the wheelchair and Eric out of the van. So the there’s not like a ramp or a power lift or anything.

Jeff:

There don’t appear to be like tie down straps. Sometimes he is basically between the front seats. Other times, he’s way in the back of his fan. He is like all over the place. And it feels like we hear on a commentary that there was a whole lot of drama around filming within the van. And the problem was not Eric himself. It was that they needed a bunch of puppeteers, also in the van with all the film crew and all the film equipment. And that there just wasn’t enough room. And so I think Eric was just getting sort of pushed around into different spots of the van in order to make it fit. But the van stuff was wild to me because there was just no consistency in how this boy was transported.

Erika:

Yeah. So I looked into this because I was curious. How is the wheel chair getting into the van for one? And actually it turns out that the, as in character, Eric even explains to someone else. The question comes up, “Well, how do you get in the car?” And they say, “Oh, well, I can just hop in my wheelchair and sit in the back.” So he explains that himself, their van curiously not have a ramp or a lift of any sort on it. And we never see him navigating that. That the timing, the actual year, this film was 1988. Yeah. Looking into it, it turns out it was sort of in the mid seventies, that the converted van was first sort of being explored. And I think it was 87 or 88, actually. That vans really started to be adaptive. So its very likely that they wouldn’t have actually had any concept of an adapted van. It’s possible that someone in the production might have seen one or known something about them, but it might actually be that we were just in a sort of in an era of makeshift accessibility for automobiles.

Jeff:

It’s fascinating because in some ways, again, perhaps not even intentionally, this movie made the right choice because I think often when disabled characters are brought in, there’s this weird pressure, like they’re trying to figure out like, “Well, how would someone in a wheelchair use a van?” And then, well, they didn’t have the internet really in 1988, but they would’ve like called and then like, “Well, what’s up there.” And what you end up finding is that often people with disabilities in films are using the top of the line equipment that no one else actually has access to like different drummer. They’re using a piss tube, which no one else had access to that technology nor have they ever gotten access to it. And, so it’s interesting because again, by perhaps not even intentionally, I think they probably did show the reality of usable wheelchair where they’re like, “Ah, let’s just get this Volkswagen bus thing and take out the middle seat and we’ll just sort of jam the chair in there.” Because that’s kind of what families were doing at the time.

Erika:

Mac and Me nails it once again.

Jeff:

Now, while there were lots of good things, I think in this film. There were some interesting tropes that we noticed. Things that we see a lot in disability film. One of the tropes, I don’t have a lot to say about it, but I do want to fly that right off the bat. Is that similar to Miracle in Lane 2. Within this film, Eric’s brother Michael, we go into his room at one point and discover that he has tons of sport medals. And so once again, we have this idea of the disabled child and there’s simple and being hyper performative that Michael is apparently very physically successful. I don’t believe we really see any metals in Eric’s room. It didn’t stand out anyway. He mostly had toys.

Erika:

Well, and what’s interesting about that. We learned on the commentary that Jade was actually a high performing athlete.

Jeff:

Yes.

Erika:

This was very much one of those gifts from the imagination of the writers. Not from reality.

Jeff:

It’s funny too, because sport is always in the background of this film, but never actually does become in the center within both of the boys’ bedrooms. We see this cornucopia of Chicago Sports Team references, there’s posters to the Chicago Bears. There’s posters of the Cubbies. There’s all this sort of reference to Chicago sports in the infamous dance scene in the McDonald’s. There are people in full blown football uniforms, but only like two or three of them, not a team, just like a couple of guys going to McDonald’s after the game. Why is that?

Erika:

I mean, is that just a, is it an eighties sort of stereotype of the culture at the time? I think in the dance scene, we see, there are street performers, there are the athletes, there are, I think some ballet dancers?

Jeff:

There’s ballerinas. I think it maybe, it’s like, I wonder if this was a way of signifying, like reminding us that they also are fish out of water. Like the alien, obviously Mac is a fish out of water, but so too is Eric and Michael because they’re from Chicago and they’re not from California. And that division of Illinois and Chicago and California being different places with different ideas about the world is something that comes up a couple times. Like Erica and Michael are also kind of immigrants into this California world. And so I wonder if the sports teams were just like an easy way to be like, “Don’t forget, they’re not from California.”

Erika:

I want to come back to this one actually, but let’s go first to the other trope. I think we saw, even though briefly was why Eric was not injured by his fall off the cliff. Why do we next frame see him in bed with a doctor?

Jeff:

I love it. This is such a fascinating trope to me that when characters are hurt or sick, we symbolize it by putting them in bed. I mean, this kid just fell off a cliff and into the water. Is his first instinct to be like, “I should go lay down.” Or is it more this iconic image of the doctor at the bedside, caring for the patient. It

Erika:

It called to mind for me, the Frankie Muniz character in Miracle in Lane 2. How he was always about to burst. Right. 911 was on speed dial because three clicks was too many. You had to get medical help there so quickly. There’s almost some remnant of that in the doctor, get the doctor here quick. Most kids, we do, we kind of monitor the mob on the head and see if it goes down before we call the doctor. But this is sort of maybe some glimmer of that because disability is present. Medicine is always just off scene.

Jeff:

I wonder if this explains the overreaction from EMT as well. At this idea that he wasn’t just hurt. It was a wheelchair kid that fell off a cliff, not just any kid. And so you need multiple police cars, you need fire. You’re going to have the doctor’s going to visit at home. And the doctor essentially gives him like a clean bill of health. And he just, all is he does is to prescribes him a sedative. Is that how all doctors operated in the 1980s?

Erika:

We might need to bring that back if I’m being honest.

Jeff:

Right. Just prescribed sedatives. Just opiate of the masses, maybe literal opium. I think this was a really like, it’s such a cliché. And I think it’s funny in watching this film from the 1980s and looking at where American healthcare is now. I think the idea of a general practitioner coming to your bedside, that period of healthcare in America is dead. But there was no reference to HMOs who was going to pay for this medical care. There was no reference to paying for the fix on his wheelchair or any. There was no delay, even in repairing the wheelchair. It was just like, “Well, of course we care for people when they’re sick or hurt. Because that’s what our culture believes in. That actually felt really foreign watching this again in 2021.

Erika:

Yeah. Is that a relic? Is it a fantasy?

Jeff:

That’s a good question. Maybe somewhere in the middle. I think that there was maybe this desire to believe of America as the best. This movie is very much about America, right? It’s about America being the best at sort of everything. And so I think similarly, this idea that we provide the best healthcare, that I think was really important back in the ’80s in a way that now I think America, for whatever reason, has now been like, “Well, whatever, we might have great healthcare, and maybe we don’t, but you got to pay. One way or another you’re going to pay.”

Erika:

Which ironically is also the genesis of the film, right? Was that-

Jeff:

Right. Charity.

Erika:

Funding a charity. So yeah, I was going to ask, I don’t really know the historical evolution of healthcare in America from the bedside doctor to the hospital industrial complex, but we’re certainly looking at a film that was created to fund a charity that helps families of children getting medical care.

Jeff:

Now I want to flag this because we’ll come back to it again. But, I do want to point out why did he not end up in a Ronald McDonald House after this? That seems like such a clear synergy because the intention was to fund Ronald McDonald Houses.

Erika:

The thing about this film is that it is not actually a film about disability. It’s a film about all America, right? It’s a film about another, but it’s not the disabled other, despite there being a disabled character, it’s really about the alien other. Who, I think we already read into it, some kind of a, immigration text before we heard the director call it an immigration text.

Jeff:

Yes, absolutely. That is confirmed.

Erika:

Yeah. That was just, I think an unexpected trope for a disability movie that’s maybe not really a disability movie at all.

Jeff:

I think in that vein, I’d like to unpack a little bit here. This idea of disability and the other. So as we saw in both of the previous movies, so in Miracle in Lane 2 and in Different Drummer, there’s this idea that disability is bound to, or drawn to the other. In this film, it is a disabled character who gets bound to an alien. So, did Mark choose Eric, or was Eric determined to befriend the alien because of his other status?

Erika:

It’s a really good question. Literally what we see, there’s sort of this big commotion early in the movie. It’s a car crash and the alien is present and the alien and is sort of meandering around the car crash. And what we next see is Eric at home and the alien has hitched a ride or followed them home, right. So, literally what we see is that the alien chose Eric.

Jeff:

Yeah. Not just chose the car. There were many other cars. I will say, in that car crash, there was a man who was straight up on fire during that scene. This movie, the stakes have never been higher. People were on fire, in this multi-car pile up caused by the alien. But he does, he looks in the middle, he jumps in. And I think similarly, Eric and his family do not seem to be phased really, at all. That there is now this terrifying alien wandering around and destroying their house.

Erika:

Destroying their house, being pursued by the FBI. Right? They’ve got cars, they’ve got on foot officers, they are chasing this alien down.

Jeff:

There’s a brief moment of doubt. So, at first his family is like, no there is no alien. And then they’re like, oh shoot, there is an alien. Okay, well now there’s an alien. I almost wonder if this is, this notion that difference begets difference. That because they are living this different life with a son that has a disability, they’re just suddenly kind of more accepting of difference as well. They’re like, oh we need to see the value in everyone. Even if they look different or behave different or act different. They’re more accepting of that difference. And so at no point are they like, whoa, there are other intelligent species in this world that live on different planets.

Erika:

Yeah. I think the fascinating part of this for me is that, I’m not convinced that this was an intentional part of the writing of the film. I don’t think that our friend who essentially bragged about launching the wheelchair off the cliff and the genius of that writing, I don’t think that that same person wrote this deep sort of trope around the other and the openness that living with around disability might beget. I think that this is really one of those special moments where we get a very kind of subconscious trope written into the film and where this sort of bonding between others or openness compassion to others because of an othered existence. But something else that I think I felt in this dynamic was that, because disability was being portrayed as so just mundane, it was almost, the otherness of disability was really overshadowed by the otherness of the alien.

Erika:

And almost not even, overshadowed in a sense, but also sort of humanized. I think in a lot of the films that we might consider, whether they’re our preferred offbeat representations or the mainstream representations, we see disability treated as its own. It is sort of the object that carries the film. It’s the object that is analyzed and picked apart in the film. And disability wasn’t objectified in that way here. And because Mark is clearly not human, it almost creates, it almost bolsters the humanity of the disabled character.

Jeff:

Yeah. Mark becomes the obvious other, and also the problem to be solved. Which then allows Erin to A, not be a problem. And B, to be actually in closer proximity to the other human characters, and therefore marked as a human character.

Erika:

Yeah. I don’t know if this is a stretch to observe, but noticing that Eric cares for Mark in a, almost parental, in a kind of parental custodial kind of way.

Jeff:

Motherly.

Erika:

Yeah. Right.

Jeff:

Motherly way.

Erika:

Himself, sort of leaned over at the bedside, holding up his head and feeding him the Coca-Cola that he needs to survive.

Jeff:

Yeah. I was disturbed by that scene. I was waiting for the breastfeeding to happen in that moment. He’s creative with his head, and it’s like, “Have some bitty my friend.”

Erika:

Maybe we’re really getting deep into the subconscious here.

Jeff:

Is Eric Mark’s mother. An interesting question. But I honestly do not know of many other films in which the disabled character is a provider of care. The one that pops into my mind immediately, and I hate that I’m going to say this, would be I Am Sam. There is, it’s a two-way care relationship, but he does provide care for his daughter. But Eric is definitely a provider of care, throughout this film, and also the advocate. He is literally the voice for Mark.

Erika:

Who doesn’t speak just as… If you haven’t gotten around to watching the film yet Mark does not communicate using verbal language.

Jeff:

No. And also does communicate in extremely abstract hints. So for instance, what he wants to say, my family is by the windmills, he puts a flower in a straw. And that moment, when Eric is like, oh, the windmills. That’s what he is referring to. I’m like, I would’ve never made that connection. Mark would’ve never reconnected with his family, if I was Eric.

Erika:

Is that giving Eric a bit of that sort of superhuman? Is he then, we often see that either lesser or greater than human. Is…

Jeff:

She seems to have some sort of insight, but again, I wonder if that is not the nature that Eric has a unique ability. And I don’t even necessarily think it’s an idea that Mark maybe has a telepathic ability. So he’s sort of actually putting the ideas maybe into Eric. I don’t think that’s what’s happening either. I think they were like, we got to get this in done in 90 minutes. So, we’re just going to throw the stuff out there and Eric will just figure it out, and it’ll be fine.

Erika:

It’s a movie by and for the children.

Jeff:

Also, if you are an American, you should be ashamed of your government in this film. Because, the fact that they’re not able to capture these aliens is a true indictment about the incompetence of law enforcement and not the only indictment of law enforcement within this film.

Erika:

Yeah. So, our ending scene. You’ve already kind of thrown out the spoiler that our protagonist is shot at, at least by the police. So we have the, Mark is reunited with his parents and sibling. They enter a grocery store and essentially, it all just breaks loose at that point. The police are there, presumably they’ve been called to deal with the aliens in the supermarket. How does the fire start?

Jeff:

From the shooting. Cause it’s a gas station.

Erika:

And the gas station. Okay. Okay. Yeah. So, we have not only a store full of people, but we have Eric rushing in to try and help them while the police continue to shoot at the aliens, and now at Eric. We learn that in an alternate ending, not the one that we see, Eric is actually shot by police. Which is of course leading up to his being brought back to life by the aliens, how? Something that looks a bit like the seance that we practiced in, early ’90s. Did it come from, when was the craft made? Anyway, clearly another precious time capsule. But yeah, the cops are just shooting. They shoot the kids. In our American version, it’s been edited so that we don’t actually see that happen. We see sort of Eric Rush to save his friends and the explosion, and he’s sort of presumably affected by the explosion. But, the police were indeed shooting openly at the aliens and everyone else in the vicinity who happened to be at a grocery store slash gas bar.

Jeff:

My favorite part, I think about… So number one, if you have not watched The International, you could find it on YouTube. You can straight up watch the police shoot and kill a disabled child, which is a bold stance for this film to take. Hilarious. But I love, so afterwards Eric’s mother is brought to the scene, and she’s rushing and there’s a police officer. And he is like, “One of the kids was shot.” And she’s like, “Which one?” Which I think is also hilarious thing. And she’s not necessarily equally concerned based on what child has been gunned down. She’s like, well, I love my one son more than the other. And she’s like, “Which one?” And the cop is like, “I don’t know, but he uses a wheelchair.” And then there’s like, “Oh no Eric.” And she runs over and then this sort of scene happens.

Jeff:

It’s an interesting moment because, I think there’s some authenticity here. Where I think if a woman was like, “Oh, who got hurt?” And the police were like, “Well, I don’t know his name.” I don’t think they’d be like, “Oh, I don’t know. He was wearing a Patagonia jacket. Or like, “Oh, he had blonde hair.” The wheelchair is definitely going to be the defining moment. And in fact this is like the only time really, one of the rare times that he is defined by his disability. But I think it was a really authentic moment. I think that’s exactly what would happen. I fully agree. It’s like, “Oh, shoot, we killed the wheelchair one.”

Erika:

Nevermind that the mom was helicoptered in when they didn’t even know who had been shot.

Jeff:

Yeah. They knew she was related in some way. I don’t know where this helicopter got her from, I guess maybe, the seers see. So, the mom was at seers. And they have a little run through at seers, but I think that was aways earlier. So, I don’t know that they necessarily would’ve known that they were connected. But the mom meant to be there, and the child is saved. And I hate that. I wanted this movie to have the courage to kill the boy in a wheelchair.

Erika:

I just want to say, Different Drummers. We also had a death and a revival.

Jeff:

Yeah. The return. Yeah. Now that was more of a biblical revival, but the disabled kid comes back. And I think we all knew it was going to happen. I think the movie was really forecasting it.

Erika:

But I think the better question really is, and you’ve already posed this, why? Why? Why did he not end up in a Ronald McDonald House?

Jeff:

Well, that’s the thing. There are multiple times in which this child has almost died, and the film is supposedly to the benefit of, I’m assuming Ronald McDonalds House. They refer to it as the Ronald McDonald Charity, which, they do other things, but Ronald McDonald House is the main thing, as far as I understand. And yet they don’t do it. However, what we do see is that McDonald’s is the place to rock. What the heck is happening in this organized dance scene?

Erika:

Okay. Another point of great pride for the director, in the commentary. This dancing, and I thought let’s make it a musical. And so we made it a musical, what and why? I think, when we watched the movie the first time without the commentary, that was really the moment that, is this a film or is this a really drawn out commercial for McDonald’s?

Jeff:

That McDonald’s, is like exactly what a marketer wants you to think. It is like to go to a McDonald’s. The place is pumping, bopping, the jams are on, there’s a dance battle happening in the parking lot.

Erika:

So, this is another one of those, I think culturally relevant throwbacks. And maybe this is more relevant to my own childhood where I grew up, we had a McDonald’s caboose. Were those universal, or did we just happen to have one?

Jeff:

I think it was really specific. I think they did different things at most of the McDonald’s. So, like some of them had the play house type things. My McDonald’s in Port Elgin had a terrifying, torture chamber in the basement. There was a basement and it was horrifying and it smelled really bad. I went to one birthday there, and I vowed that I would never return to this dim lit, no window. What can only be described as BDSM torture chamber.

Erika:

Okay. This is fascinating. Maybe the topic for an entirely different podcast that is not our own. But in Chatham where I grew up, we had a caboose and it was the place to have your McDonald’s birthday party. So, I think yeah, maybe that was it. Maybe that was what the McDonald’s execs wanted. Was, we just, you do what you want with the film, we need to push the McDonald’s birthday party as the place to be in the late ’80s, early ’90s, for a birthday party.

Jeff:

It is the coolest place. And it’s a place where the party never ends. The population within this McDonald’s is radically diverse, diverse in age, diverse in ethnicity, diverse in preferences and interests. There are, like you said earlier, ballerinas, there’s football players, there’s old people, there’s young people, there’s basically, I think every race is represented in this McDonald. And everyone’s just intermixed. Ronald McDonald is literally there making puppets and balloons for people. The people working at the front are happy and clapping. A dance sequence breaks out. This place is so much fun. The most fun. At no point, do they ever reflect the feces covered bathrooms, or the seats that were literally designed so that you couldn’t sit in them very long, so that you got the heck out of the McDonald’s, so they could bring in the next feeder to sell their burgers to. It is… And the plants, this McDonald’s is full of lush greenery. And I definitely do not remember there being any sort of plant in a McDonald’s that I ever visited.

Erika:

I think this answers our earlier question. That was, is this a relic or a fantasy? Clearly-

Jeff:

It is 100% a fantasy.

Erika:

A fantasy,

Jeff:

A big time fantasy. And one thing that I’m kind of here for, can you imagine if there was a place where you could go to where all creeds and religions and ages are all just together, dancing and partying and celebrating all the time, and there’s a clown there who will make you things. I would go there.

Erika:

Are you not describing Disneyland?

Jeff:

Actually wouldn’t go there. I… (laugh) Disney, the mouse is furious that they didn’t get in on the Mac and Me. That’d be a great theme park there, right? Come to this, fantasy McDonald’s where the party never stops. The other thing I will say, if you want to see some child actors dancing their bloody hearts out, this is the scene for you. The intensity with which these people are dancing, it is like Toddlers and Tiaras, decades before it happens.

Erika:

And, fun fact, Jennifer Anderson is in this scene.

Jeff:

I would argue without Mark and me, Friends never happens.

Erika:

Yep.

Jeff:

So, if you’re looking for a place to go where fun is happening all the time, it is time for you to go to, the Rock ‘n’ Roll McDonald’s.

[Music Interlude: “Rock ‘n Roll McDonal’s by Wesley Willis, auto-tuned singing “Rock ‘n’ Roll McDonald’s. Rock ‘n’ Roll McDonald’s. Rock ‘n’ Roll McDonald’s” over a synth beat] 

Erika:

All right. So, as we do, we have put this film through the ringer, but, some closing thoughts. To be fair, what were some things that you thought the film did well?

Jeff:

Full bloody marks, for them, casting an actor with a disability and actually listening to them actually embodying some of that advice, but maybe there were consequences to that.

Erika:

Well, I think what you’re sort of teetering on saying, something that they did well, really worked to their disadvantage. Because they wanted this movie to raise money, right? But it did not raise money. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that they did not. They did not produce a stereotypical tugging at your heartstrings, trope, and that’s where they were going to get the money. So, I think, what the film did really well, ultimately shot them in the foot.

Jeff:

Absolutely. I wonder if they had leaned more into the disability tropes, if they may have gotten a bit more slack. I think one thing that’s fascinating about the commentary about this film and some of the things that the directors have talked about is the, one of the director and writer, is on record basically saying that, he’s like, “We cast a disabled kid in this film. I can’t believe people hate it.” I believe he literally says that he thought America was more charitable than that. As though that by doing this, should just gloss over, or fix, or remediate the flaws of the film, which obviously is a ridiculous thing to believe. I think it really speaks to this idea that disability can be used in films to cover over other problems within the film. And so without the crutch of disability, all of the problems were laid bare and it just couldn’t survive.

Erika:

Ooh, that is, yep. That pretty much captures it. Yep. And, maybe it didn’t make the money that they wanted to make, but maybe it really had more of an impact than they could have foreseen.

Jeff:

I would argue this film should be shown in schools that want to teach directors how to do disability. And that’s a shocking thing.

Erika:

Right. Once again, this is not to be shown for how to make a film or how to be successful.

Jeff:

No.

Erika:

Or how to win awards.

Jeff:

No.

Erika:

But it is absolutely a film that should be shown to teach people how to do disability right in a movie.

Jeff:

It’s painful to admit.

Erika:

It’s painful, but it’s just so simple. I think what we see in this film is literally what everyone is asking for all the time, can you please just cast a disabled actor in a disabled role? Can you even consider casting a disabled actor in a non-disabled role? Yep, it is going to cost more because you know what? Living with disability does cost more.

Jeff:

I think that’s another thing that really resonated with me in the commentary of this film was the way that they talked about… They acknowledged outright that they had to do things differently when they were filming with this child who uses a wheelchair. They had to find a house that was accessible for the child to actually be able to get into to do the filming. But what was great about the way he talked about it was it wasn’t like a oh geez, we had all these problems and barriers and burdens.

Jeff:

It wasn’t that at all. He literally said, he was like, “That was actually the fun part, was that we had all these problem, and we had to find solutions for it.” That I think is like exactly the mindset that you have to go into. And now maybe this commentary is recorded decades after the film was done, maybe in remembering it, if you remember it is more fun than it was at the time, but I think that’s the mindset you should be you going in with. So other than the representation piece of it, was there anything that you enjoyed about the movie, Erika?

Erika:

Hmm.

Jeff:

I know that’s a tough question.

Erika:

That is a tough question. I think I did enjoy some of what we have been able to read into the immigration metaphor. There’s some interesting gender stuff around the aliens too. It’s funny to see how we imagine aliens, what do we imagine that they’re going to look like, and a very clear projection of some heteronormative stuff onto these aliens that are… They’re sexless. I think the adult and child male and female bodies, the bodies are the same. I think the only real difference we see are the males have two bumps on their head and the females have four. I won’t say it’s something I liked. I think for me it felt like a bit of a missed opportunity, certainly a product of its time, but it got me thinking, seeing these sexless bodies got me thinking if we were thinking here more about gender than about disability and immigration, I think we could see something cool here in a more sci-fi realm or in an alien movie.

Jeff:

I love the fact that these aliens are basically like a Frankenstein’s monster of sex organs that have just been cobbled together, and yet are completely desexualized. These aliens are like nipples, boobs and butts everywhere. If you look at this thing, their elbows, their joints look like boobs and mammary-ish. They’ve got these head nipples, they’ve got booties on the back of their heads. Mac, I’m not going to say that he was dummy thick, but I will say, Mac had a little bit of a booty. He had a shapely little bum in a way that I think clocks as cute, like a baby bum situation. But these aliens, if you look at them, these are sex organs that have been compiled together with these giant eyes and these weird little butthole mouths.

Erika:

I don’t know if we want to go in this direction, but I wondered, some of that you’re reading these real human body parts into these alien costumes, and maybe it’s just a coincidence, but I wondered, thinking deeper into that, is this reinforcing that idea that these are not actually other worldly, so much as they are people from another place? And just really concretizing that immigration trope that we know was actually intentional.

Jeff:

I think you’re right on.

Erika:

We did hear in the commentary that the primary focus in designing the aliens was to not rip off ET too closely.

Jeff:

Yes, I think that was the driving emphasis of this entire movie. [crosstalk 01:14:48]

Erika:

This was mirror mantra? It was on all of their mirrors, do not rip off ET too closely.

Jeff:

Close, but not too close. I think it’s time for us then to get a little trivial. What’s some trivia from this film that we discovered? So are there any repeat offenders in this film? And the only one that I… Well, okay, let me take a step back. There were a ton of people that would go on to do some amazing things, they had big careers, but there isn’t a really clear direct line to disability. I would say maybe one of he closest, one of the people involved was also involved in the film Mask, which was definitely a disability text. And the director, Stewart Raffill, also did a movie called Mannequin: On the Move. Now this is a movie about a woman who essentially is paralyzed by magic, and she becomes a mannequin. I don’t know if you would count that as a disability text, I would, she has no control of her body because of magic.

Jeff:

That’s about the extent of it. We also, as we’ve done in previous episodes, like to talk a little bit about the equipment, some equipment facts coming at you. Throughout the film, Eric, of course, is rocking a quality chair. He is in a QUICKIE manual wheelchair, but the product placement isn’t just about McDonald’s and Coke, my friends, because also in this film we see a t-shirt for QUICKIE wheelchairs, as well as, I’m pretty sure, a hat. There’s a red hat in his room. I believe it’s a QUICKIE hat. It may also be a MAGA hat. I’m not sure. I think it’s a QUICKIE hat. I don’t think they had MAGA hats back in 1988. I don’t know. I’m pretty sure Donald Trump was a Democrat still at that point. What about some production facts, Erika? Do we have any good production facts?

Erika:

Oh, we have a couple, yeah. So we had some pretty heavy hitters working in the background on this production. And one of those was the maker of the music. Do you remember the name of that person? Does it matter? You can look it up. It’s easily available online. But the individual responsible for the score for this film was also responsible for Back to the Future, which I really want to give Jeff full credit here, because when we watched this film before we knew who this music person was, Jeff said, “Is this the Back to the Future music?” So wow. Nailed it. Absolutely. You might also find continuity into Predator or The Avengers, because our music maker for this film, the score guy, do we call him?

Jeff:

Yeah, sure.

Erika:

Okay. The score guy also worked on these absolute real success films. I do have some questions. There were moments where the music had me feeling like I was actually watching ET. So I think they may have forgotten to put the memo on his mirror.

Jeff:

There was some overlap, for sure.

Erika:

Yes. Another fun one we had, our director is a known animal wrangler. So working on films, wrangling animals in a way that I wouldn’t even understand what that meant were it not for two stellar animal wrangling scenes in Mac and Me. The first of which is a scene in which a pack of dogs, wild dogs, but not wild dogs. Very much like…

Jeff:

They’re neighborhood dogs.

Erika:

Somehow, 50 or so, would you say, 25? I don’t know. There’s a whole bunch of dogs.

Jeff:

A lot.

Erika:

A lot of dogs are out chasing Mac as he… Is he soap boxing…?

Jeff:

Yeah, no, he’s in electric car. He’s in one of those electric Jeep car things.

Erika:

Yeah. So we have the dog chase scene. And then a very, very gratuitous wild horses scene at the end. We are in a desert shore, why is there a VW camper van hurling through the desert followed by a pack of horses? I don’t have an answer for you.

Jeff:

Because nothing says the free spirit of the American West like a VW van.

Erika:

Well, that explains the horses.

Jeff:

I’m so curious about what that was all about. So curious.

Erika:

Honestly, I think maybe you’re onto something there. Maybe someone says, “But wait, it’s a Volkswagen. We need some horses.” Or maybe the animal wrangler was like, “Guys, guys, can we just put some horses though?”

Jeff:

I got all these horses, let’s do something with all these horses.

Erika:

I know a guy…

Jeff:

I rode a horse!

 

Jeff:

So there’s obviously a lot of product placement in this film. If ET is all about Reese’s Pieces, this film is all about Coke and McDonald’s. McDonald’s of course having a strong partnership with Coke. There’s a temporary use of Skittles. Skittles is temporarily in the film. It just appears for the first half and then it’s like they forgot about it, and were just like, “Well, no more Skittles in this film.” Now all of this is put off. It’s explained or justified by this charity angle. The argument made by many of the people involved in this film is that all of these things were necessary evils, because it was all about the money. Let’s raise some money for a really good cause.

Jeff:

Now I am going to question this motive deeply and seriously. I think there are numerous instances throughout this film where if the object was to talk about Ronald McDonald House or the Ronald McDonald charity, why was it never addressed in any way? Why was there never any press to tell people why it was a good charity? Why they should donate to it? There was no actual appeal within the movie. Which is probably not a bad thing, it would’ve broken the movie a little bit. I agree. But I feel like this whole Ronald McDonald charity explanation doesn’t seem to really surface until after the movie bombs. The movie is a bomb and everyone’s critiquing how product placement it is, and then suddenly you have this narrative of oh well the producer always wanted to make a movie about the disabled person, and oh, he really liked the Ronald McDonald charity, which has nothing to do with him working as an advertiser for Ronald McDonald, of course.

Jeff:

The director in the commentary literally says that they were trying to see how they could push the envelope of product placement in this film. They were like, “How far can we go with placements before the audience is turned off?” And the answer is they went too far. They went way too far. It was literally described as being crass. And so I wonder if charity is being used here to sanitize the monstrous invasion of capital within this film and the ways in which they don’t try to make a movie, they tried to make a commercial, which also maybe explains why this movie that had a multimillion dollar budget was filmed in six weeks, because the story actually didn’t have anything to do with it. This is just purely a vehicle to sell McDonald’s, to sell Coke, to sell whatever other product they could place in it. And then it didn’t work, and now there’s this revisionist history.

Erika:

Well, as usual, you have done your research and you have used that research.

Jeff:

I don’t know. I’m just saying, but this is the part of the podcast where we get sued. But I do find it a little sus, it’s a little sussy.

Erika:

I don’t disagree with you. I think it’s potentially an answer to why didn’t we get a Ronald McDonald House scene? Why didn’t we get there if this is what this was about?

Jeff:

Absolutely.

Erika:

Surely someone would have known to tug at the heartstrings if you’re trying to get the cash. Telephones were well established at this point.

Jeff:

Oh yeah. Jerry Lewis was rolling in it by 1988. In fact, several years after this film, I would make my appearance as a poster child…for muscular dystrophy.

Erika:

So I guess this is why we have our rating system, because at the end of it all, sometimes it looks like a draw.

Jeff:

Yep. It’s hard to know. And that is why, like good social scientists and humanities professors, we turn to a statistical method in order to unearth the reality of a film. Tongue firmly placed in cheek. So here at Invalid Culture we have developed a scale in order to measure our movies. It is based on four primary questions. Marking our movies on a scale of one to five, five generally being the worst. The idea being the higher a movie scores, the worse the movie was. So let’s dive in. Question number one. On a scale of one to five, with five being the least accurate, how accurate does this film portray disability?

Erika:

I gave it a one. I think it was pretty accurate.

Jeff:

I gave it a one too.

Erika:

Woo.

Jeff:

It was shockingly accurate. Okay. Question number two. On scale of one to five, with five being the hardest, how hard was it for you to get through this film?

Erika:

I’m giving this one a three, because I’m going to be honest with you, it was reasonably hard.

Jeff:

I’m going to one up to you. I gave it a four. I found it actually quite difficult to get through this movie. I feel like I was bored. It was pretty difficult. I don’t know that I would’ve soldiered through this if I was a child. I think I might have bailed.

Erika:

Well, see that’s where I think the nostalgia factor made it easier to endure, because I think that this is actually much more tolerable for a child who cannot see the glaring problems with this film.

Jeff:

Okay. On a scale of one to five, with five being the maximum, how often did you laugh at things that were not intended to be funny?

Erika:

You know what? I gave it a three. I’m rethinking that three. I think it should be higher, but I’m just going to stick with my original rating and call it a three. I laughed a reasonable bit at things that were not supposed to be funny.

Jeff:

I also put this as a strong three. I think it’s a solid three for me as well. I definitely did not laugh at most of the things that I was supposed to laugh at. I definitely laughed a lot at the dance sequence, and not in a good way, I would argue. It was pretty unintentionally funny. And last but certainly not least, perhaps the most important, on a scale of one to five, with five being the most, how many steps back has this film put disabled people?

Erika:

So I gave this a two. And I just want to qualify and say that the film on its own, I only gave it a one. This is, by a landslide, the fairest, most accurate disability representation, in my view, that we have seen so far. But I’m giving it an extra point here because, I don’t know, this whole made a film for charity purposes, I feel like there’s something a little icky behind that. So that’s where my two came from

Jeff:

I struggled with this one, but I thought about it and I realized, particularly as we looked at the reviews of this film, no one addresses disability when talking about this film. The wheelchair is not a thing. And so I think it may be a film that put filmmaking back a century. However, I think disability, by and large, got out scot free on this one. I think we emerged unscathed as a people. And so for that reason, I am going to give it a one. So if we take all of our scores and we tally them together and we place them into our scale, we see that this film as not a terrible score, this film comes in at a regrets, I have a few. Which is our second best possible rating for a film.

Erika:

I honestly thought that it was going to squeeze in under this might be an under appreciated piece of art it, but having watched the film now a couple of times, I think it would feel wrong if it fit that category.

Jeff:

Yeah. I don’t think it’s art. Even if the disability representation is strong. I cringe at the idea of this film being used for anything in the world.

Erika:

Well, there it is. Filmmakers, movie buffs, bring it on. I hope that we will. It is my absolute goal. This podcast will not stop, I dare say, until we see a low enough ranking film that we can call it an under appreciated piece of art.

Jeff:

And goal number two, that we are able to finance Mac and Me 2, the sequel.

Erika:

Oh, yeah. Also that, for sure. I think as soon as we shut down here today, I am going to go start that GoFund me up and I think all we’d have to do is get Paul Rudd’s attention and this could happen.

[Music Interlude: “Wholesale Failure” by Days N Daze, singing “and the worst part is I know that this isn’t even close to how devastatingly bad everything is going to get” over a up tempo ukulele and horn-based folk rock]

Jeff:

And so ends another episode of Invalid Culture. Are you enjoying your time with us? Do you have a good time listening? Well, why don’t you tell your friends? Tell them to check it out. Maybe to go on to Apple Music or wherever it is you find your podcasts, give us a like, give us a comment, that would be greatly appreciated. But maybe even more important, do you know of an amazingly terrible disability film that you would like to hear us talk about? Go over to our website, invalidculture.com. Submit it to us. We would love to hear. So long, and we will see you on the other side.

 

DVD Cover of Different Drummers, featuring Lyle putting maximum effort into pushing David's manual wheelchair

What if ADHD was a movie?

An autobiography written and scored by Lyle Hatcher, this 2013 film was almost doomed to the bargain bin of Dollar Stores across the nation when a miracle happened: streaming services like Amazon Prime and Tubi decided they did not care what quality of film was included in their libraries. Join Jeff & Erika as they explore this bio-pic about the trials and tribulations of two young disabled boys growing up in Spokane, Washington. Oh and also it’s about using plastic tubes to pee.

Listen at…

Grading the Film

As always, this film is reviewed with scores recorded in four main categories, with 1 being the best and 5 being the worst. Like the game of golf, the lower the score the better.

How accurate is the representation?

Jeff – 3 / 5

Erika – 4 / 5

Total – 7 / 10

How difficult was it to watch the movie?

Erika – 4 / 5

Jeff – 4 / 5

Total – 8 / 10

How often were things unintentionally funny?

Erika – 5 / 5

Jeff – 5 / 5

Total – 10 / 10

How far back has it put disabled people?

Jeff – 3 / 5

Erika – 4 / 5

Total – 7 / 10

The Verdict

Jerry Lewis Seal of Approval

Podcast Transcript

Jeff: Growing up in Spokane, Washington can be tough. But you know what’s tougher? Growing up in Spokane, WA in the 1960s while also being a prophet of death. Follow the childhood hijinks of Lyle Hatcher, a young boy chronically afflicted with “the feeling”, as he forms a friendship with David Duffy. But David isn’t like the other kids. No, it’s not because he has muscular dystrophy. David is different because God tells him when people are going to die. But don’t worry. This movie isn’t really about that. It is really about the joys of childhood friendship and learning to accept difference. Follow David as they form an unbreakable bond, mourn the untimely death of their teacher, attempt to seduce one’s first girlfriend, put together a school science project, debate the usefulness of ADHD medication, attempt to teach Dave to walk (because God said so) and eventually forget all of that other stuff and instead host a fundraiser to find a cure. If you’re a person who likes countless obscure plotlines that are never fully resolved, that might make you a different drummer 

 

[Theme Music] Hip hop beat from “Hard Out Here For a Gimp” by Wheelchair Sports Camp 

 

Erika: Welcome to invalid culture a podcast dedicated to excavating the strangest, most baffling and worst representations of disability in popular culture. Unlike other podcasts that review films you’ve probably heard of Invalid Culture is all about looking into the abyss of pop culture adjacent representations that just never quite broke through because, well, they’re just awful. I’m joined today by my co-host Jeff Preston. Jeff, how are you? 

 

Jeff: Back at it. Ready for another fun day. So, I’m Jeff Preston. I am an assistant professor of disability studies. My research focuses on representations of disability in pop culture. So I am also joined here by my co-host today, Dr. Erika Katzman. How are you Dr. Katzman? 

 

Erika: Oh, I am thrilled to be back at this again. We’ve got a great conversation ahead of us. I’m losing my track of thought on how to introduce myself today. I am also an assistant professor and disability studies and my research doesn’t really focus on so much on the media side of things but I’m just generally interested in understanding how people think about disability, what kind of stories people are inclined to tell about disability. 

 

Jeff: Now, before we get started today I think it’s important that we start every episode with that mental health check in. Erika, are you regretting doing this yet? 

 

Erika: Of all the things in my life that I regret this is pretty low on the list. 

 

Jeff: Wow, that’s great. I’m going to hold that. I will replay this clip at episode 50 when you wonder why, why you allowed me to talk to you into this. 

 

Erika: And you? Are you are you feeling OK about this decision? 

 

Jeff: you, know I really do question a lot of decisions I’ve made in my life. This one’s actually pretty high, I think. I don’t know that that regret is the right word but it’s going to be very interesting to see how our brains are ruined by these films. I think just sadness and rage would be the outcome. 

 

Erika: if we ever need to rebrand “sadness and rage” might be the name. 

 

Jeff: So, today we have another just stupendous example of invalid culture. We are going to be watching a film which touches the heart, I guess? This is a horse movie that you can find on almost every streaming platform as well as vast majorities of it can be found on YouTube. We are of course talking about the film Different Drummers. So, what is Different Drummers? How does Different Drummers describe itself? Erika, take it away. 

 

Erika: From the box: based on an inspiring true story Different Drummers follows the heartwarming yet unlikely friendship of two boys growing up in Washington in the 1960s. When David, who is bound to a wheelchair and growing weaker for muscular dystrophy, accurately foretells the death of his fourth-grade teacher, a doubtful Lyle, who has an increasingly high energy level decides to test the existence of God by attempting to get David to run again. A pact is made and Lyle soon begins to twist the rules in a desperate attempt to give his friend some of his own excess energy. Along the way, the two boys come face to face with life’s most painful truths and Lyle’s question is ultimately answered in a way he never could have imagined. 

 

Jeff: I think this is a phenomenal place for us to start because if you were listening to that and have no idea what the beginning, middle, end of this film is, I think the back of this box captured the viewing experience of Different Drummers. 

 

Erika: It captures a lot more than I would have imagined. I mean, I don’t want to launch into our themes quite yet but I’m amazed to see them surfacing here. 

 

Jeff: it’s almost as though they understood what they were doing. Maybe. 

 

Erika: you know, I think that’s a good way of characterizing this particular film. Like, this is one where it actually, perhaps more than with others, feels like they might have understood what they were doing. 

 

Jeff: They certainly seemed to have some technical abilities. There was some technical things that were, like, I think it was well lit. The audio was fine. There was actually some passable CGI in this film. Like there was actually some production value. While at the same time just being ,very confusing and very all over the place throughout. I think one of my first questions to you is what question was Lyle trying to get answered? 

 

Erika: I think the questions were out there. I don’t know if they were answered. I mean, they’re claiming that the question was answered, but I mean, when we get to talking about that very blunt answer, I’m not sure which question it is meant to answer, to be honest. 

 

Jeff: My other question I had for you on this is, was their friendship unlikely? Like, because it’s a wheelchair boy in walkie? They’re two young boys, who you, know appear to be of similar ethnic background, class, same age. So, there’s a whole lot of similarities going on that would lead me to believe this is very likely friendship. 

 

Jeff: Yeah, I mean, this isn’t like a bear becoming friends with a rabbit by any means. 

 

Erika: No, it strikes me as a highly likely friendship. 

 

Jeff: [laughing] Right, completely plausible friendship. I guess that doesn’t have the same ring. 

 

Erika: This is where it is important to note, to remember that this is Lyle’s story.  

 

Jeff: Yes. 

 

Erika: So, if we’re being told that this was an unlikely friendship, is this is this Lyle telling us that it was an unlikely friendship? That it caught him off guard? 

 

Jeff: Interesting. I would say that Lyle was perhaps not the only person caught off guard in this film. I think, actually, a lot of the reviewers of this film were also caught a little off guard. Now, we have two interesting popular press reviews that we have pulled, one which is really interesting and the other which is quite harsh. So, we have officially reached our first milestone on this podcast in which we found somebody who did not like a film featuring a child with a disability. They persevered and they were like, we’re going to write bad on it. And that was, shout out to you Josh Terry, the Deseret News. Here’s what he had to say: “poor writing, acting and execution leaves Different Drummers impossible to justify. If the weak actors aren’t monotoning their standard lines of dialogue, the reasonable actors are stumbling their way through the muddled ones and myriad cheesy and distracting music passages persistently undermine the whole lot. A simple problem for Different Drummers is that it is playing out of its league. As a direct-to- video release, it would be passed over as a harmless, low budget tribute to a boy who lived with muscular dystrophy 50 years ago. But, as a major Multiplex, at nearly $10 a ticket, the film feels painfully out of place.”  

 

Erika: That’s harsh!  

 

Jeff: George Terry does not care anymore he is just going to eviscerate anyone in this film. 

 

Erika: Like, I guess this is the point at which it becomes very clear that I am no film critic. I did not think it was that bad. I truly did not notice poor acting, muddled delivery. Did you? 

 

Jeff: I think this is what happens when you and I don’t have it direct financial claim against this film. As people who have paid for prime video and are using it for a myriad of other wonderful films, I think Josh Terry here is just feeling really burned for that $10 they had to spend. Also, why is the Deseret News not paying for their reviewers to watch these films? 

Erika: I think he was on about the music. I did, the music was something. 

 
Jeff: The music felt like the early days of YouTube when people were first getting copyright striked and then you had all of these like, royalty free or copyleft music that were just like, just adjacent to good that YouTube users started piling on, where you’re like, right, this is a classic generic rock song that’s completely nondescript and just like a little off.  

 

Erika: So, musically that’s where it was, but lyrically it was very much tailored. Like, do we know? The soundtrack must have been custom to this film. 

 

Jeff: I have absolutely no doubt that Lyle and Don wrote the music for this film. I have no doubt and if I’m wrong I don’t want to know because in my world they were in the studio cutting these things up. This is all you need, it’s not every emotion you could want to feel through song. It’s got it all. Now, Josh Terry’s wasn’t the only review we were able to find. We also found this very interesting review by Tim or Tom Krogh? How do we say that last name do you think?  

 

Erika: Keogh?  

 

Jeff: Sure. TK, as he is known by his friends, presumably. From the Seattle Times, he had this to say: “There’s a sense of unstructured play about Different Drummers. A kind of ambling from one whimsical activity to the next without much traditionally story telling”. TK then goes on to give this film a three out of four. 75 %. 

 

Erika: So, he was not bothered, he’s really more remarking on the unstructured play then critiquing it. 

 

Jeff: Yes, it was an observation. It’s like, ‘so I watched born on the 4th of July and there was a man in a wheelchair in it. Three out of four stars.’ 

 

Erika: Now, this was actually something that you had remarked on yourself watching the film, was it not? 

 

Jeff: yeah, 100%. I felt like the first time I watched this film — and yes, that is a confirmation that I have watched this film more than once — the first time I watched it I remember feeling like all the movie did was introduced new plotlines and I don’t really remember in the first viewing many of those plotlines being resolved. Now, on a second sober viewing I’ve discovered that, much like the Canadian Senate, you can understand things better when given time to evaluate things. And, in fact, there was some resolution. But, by my count, there are approximately 7 plotlines that informed this film. So, you know, the movie starts out with this plot line around Lyle having a crush on a girl at school and he want to dance with her and then we get our first extremely long musical interlude. Things then change up and move on to, I think, our second plot, which is a science project to disprove or prove – I think probably prove is what they were thinking, to prove God’s existence, using science to prove God. And then there’s sort of this like subplot, I think, under there, around David is going to teach – sorry, Lyle is going to teach David how to run. And then we wonder the bug collection. They decide they want to collect all of the bugs. That then shifts very quickly into raising money to cure muscular dystrophy, which I guess is maybe a continuation of the teaching to run subplot, but I don’t think it is, because that of course culminates in this, like, variety show fundraiser, which is kind of its own thing. We then, about halfway through the movie, maybe a little more than halfway through the movie, we get this very serious plot around ADHD and medication and this huge debate as to whether or not Lyle should be medicated. Lyle then get threatened by a bully in a school bus and there’s this like, ominous “you’re gonna get what’s coming to you, Lyle.” He doesn’t. It’s never addressed. And then we have the final act, which I think is about this question around death and dying. People die, and will people die or won’t they, dying and death is everywhere, we can escape it. By my count that’s about 7 plotlines. How many of those seven would you say were resolved? 

 

Erika: [laughing]. OK I’m pretty sure we forgot about, the romantic things dropped, that was never carried. The bug collection came and went. 

 

Jeff: that’s true, they did find — they sort of resolved it in that it got eaten by a mouse? 

 

Erika: [laughing] the bully dropped off, that didn’t happen. So, I think we mostly ended up focusing on this, I mean the ADHD medication and medicate versus segregate situation, kind of, that was pretty forefront. Did we prove God’s existence? 

 

Jeff: I’m gonna argue yes, because of the final scene when he runs with David.  

 

Erika: And I guess money was raised. 

 

Jeff: Yeah, the fundraiser happened. OK, so they’re batting like 80%. 

 

Erika: Yeah, you know, I’m kind of with Tom here. TK? I think it may have broken some rules of traditional storytelling but I don’t think it was unsuccessful in doing so. 

 

Jeff: yeah, I think you’re right. It was untidy, but I think there was like, a story was told. I feel like we were given a slice of life of these two boys. Like, a year of their time together.  

 

Erika: yeah. I have a hard time following multi plots and multi characters. I’ve never been able to make it through Snatch. I’ve tried several times. I didn’t have any trouble following what was going on here. 

 

Jeff: Yeah, no. I think it was it wasn’t bad. There were also a surprisingly number of actors in this. Yeah, usually like the key to those low budget films is there’s like four people involved. There were entire classrooms of people involved in this film. 

 

Erika: Oh yeah, I had the sense that we were genuinely in a school.  

 

Jeff: There was a presence, there was a reality to it. Even if all of the characters seemed to have this like, retrospective sheen about them, right? Like, the cop is just like, a little too like, 1950s police officer at the café, you know, sitting on the barstool. Like, it was a little too American Gothic in some character development. 

 

Erika: Yeah and like the janitor, similarly, he’s a little overdone. He’s great, but a little overdone. 

 

Jeff: He’s a stud and I’m in love with him and I would 100% marry man if it was Mr Merrick. Yeah, both of those characters seemed to have an underlying, this may have been a porno shoot that was happening at the same time. 

 

Erika: 100%. 

 

Jeff: And they were just like, alright, so we will take the clean bits for Different Drummers and then the hardcore bits we’ll put over for our janitor porn and our cop porn. There was a bit of a porny vibe to both these characters. 

 

Erika: The cop especially, he was having a hard time getting out of character when he dropped back into the kids movie. 

 

Jeff: yeah, 100%. He looked like he was a moment away from putting someone under arrest for being too sexy. Now, if you are a film connoisseur you will know that the real reviews are not to be found in the newspapers but rather they are found in the Amazon review section.  

 

Erika: And do we ever have some goodies today. 

 

Jeff: We have curated some phenomenal examples. There were a lot of phenomenal reviews for this film. Erika, why don’t you start us off. 

 

Erika: I will happily start us off. So, Robin S, one of many five out of five stars. A review titled “a very meaningful story”: bought this for my 89.5 year old dad. He loved it and really enjoyed the two boys. This is not one of the ‘happily ever after’ stories that I normally try to pick out for him, but he still gave it a thumbs up. 

 

Jeff: Robin’s got a lot of detail. A natural storyteller. 

 

Erika: A keen eye for detail.  

 

Jeff: Her father is not 90 years old. 

 

Erika: 89.5. 

 

Jeff: I’m glad that he liked the two boys. That’s good. I also like the idea that Robin is like, trapping her father at home and just feeding him these happily ever after stories as some sort of like, mental health treatment maybe or like just trying to keep him optimistic about the world and this one kind of like, snuck in. 

 

Erika: I’m just also very curious that like, this was bought? 

 

Jeff: [Laughing] right? 

 

Erika: When and where was this purchased? 
 
Jeff: That is actually a great question. Presumably off Amazon, I suppose. I suppose she purchased this from Amazon, which then also begs the question: how did Robin S find this film?  

 

Erika: Oh, well naturally while looking for happily ever after stories. 

 

Jeff: right. 

 

Erika: If there’s a wheelchair on the cover you know it’s a happy ending. 

 

Jeff: it’s going to uplift you. You’re gonna feel uplifted. 

 

Erika: so, this is what actually, this is what I love about this review is that Robin deems this is not one of those happily ever after stories. I mean, ah, OK. I guess we do end with death. 

 

Jeff: but arguably it is a sanitized death. Like it is positioned as like, a freedom that is bestowed upon this child. He is liberated from his impairment. 

 

Erika: Yeah, again that’s why this one caught me, because, and maybe this is a strange thing to admit but when I read this review I forgot that he died. And I thought — because the death was not the sort of the pinnacle moment of this film. 

 

Jeff: It was definitely the moment when I almost peed myself in this film, I will say. It is the most brazen movie ending I think I’ve ever seen. It takes a real tone shift in that last 10 minutes. 

 

Erika: So much so that Robin’s dad still gave it a thumbs up. 

 

Jeff: Yeah, he liked it. He was there for the ride. 

 

Erika: Despite the death of one of those two boys, he really enjoyed it. 

 

Jeff: This is markedly different than the review by Joshua Matthew Manibo Samarita, who, also five out of five stars, however, “quite disappointed” was the title of this review. “I will give this movie a five star but I’m kind of disappointed. It feels like expectation versus reality. My expectation is there though it is not enough. I thought this movie make me cry but it was not. I still recommend this movie. It quite nice. 

 

Erika: [laughing] 

 

Jeff: [laughing] Joshua, you are a beautiful human. A beautiful soul. You wanted to cry, you didn’t get it, but you’re still going to pump the tires. 

 

Erika: interesting, right? Robin and Joshua both had significant expectations of this film going in. 

 

Jeff: High expectations. 

 

Erika: Robin, I guess so like, Robin was expecting happily ever after. Josh was expecting to cry. 

 

Jeff: He wanted to feel terrible. 

 

Erika: but I can only assume, oh, I was assuming it was like, I’m gonna have a good cry but then I’m still gonna get my happily ever after. Like, I think maybe Joshua was just misidentifying what happened here. Joshua was actually quite disappointed because it was not quite the happily ever after that they were after.  

 

Jeff: That’s an interesting read. “I thought this movie made me cry, but it was not.” I think that might be the new slogan of this of this podcast. “I thought this movie made me cry, but it was not.” That’s my feeling about all of the movies we watch for this so far. 

 

Erika: [laughing]. For something completely different, Melissa Lindsay, another five out of five, title of the review: “donation”. Review content, and I quote: “a donation for rainy day bingo basket.” 

 

Jeff: [laughing]. Perfect. 

 

Erika: May I posit this is where Robin S bought the video. 

 

Jeff: or received. 

 

Erika: [laughing]. 

 

Jeff: she received this one day playing bingo. 

 

Erika: Is a rainy day bingo basket a thing? Like, is she saying that there’s the lottery, like you just pick up those discount DVDs at Walmart and chuck em in the rainy day bingo basket and then when it’s a rainy day you just draw one out and give her a go? 

 

Jeff: I think so. So my suspicion on this, this is my hot take, I could be totally wrong. Melissa Lindsay, contact us if we’re wrong on this, if I’m mischaracterizing you. I suspect that Melissa Lindsay is an educator. I think that she may be a teacher, whether that be public school or possibly a Sunday school situation and I’m guessing that what she’s doing is she’s buying cheap things, like little trinkets and prizes and then when the kids can’t go out ’cause it’s raining they play bingo and she gives or they can choose something out of the basket. That’s my theory, that’s my fan theory of Melissa Lindsay. 

 

Erika: I like it, I like it a lot.  

 

Jeff: if you were a child and you received this DVD for winning bingo, would that drive you to violence? 

 

Erika: I don’t know if I would get this film as a child. I don’t think this is a kids film. 

 

Jeff: no. I don’t know that this is an anyone film. Can we just put that on the table right off the bat? The question of who this is for, I think this is for Lyle Hatcher. That is who this is for. 

 

Erika: oh, 100 %. 

 

Jeff: This is an audience of 1. I think I would probably turn this DVD into a weapon and try to stab someone if this was the prize I won. As a child, I would not understand why there were no real drummers in this film until the absolute end. So, a more nuanced analysis comes to us from Frances, four to five stars, titled “well acted, layered message, very worth seeing.” And that title is actually her review, the review also reads “well acted, layered message, very worth seeing.” Would you say the message was layered in this film, Erika? 

 

Erika: I mean, if you think about all those plotlines like lasagna layers, there was a lot going on/ 

 

Jeff: that is true, it was very tiered. I think tiered is maybe what she means. The other one that I thoroughly enjoyed was by user “caddy”. 5/5 stars, the review reads, in all caps: CHILDREN’S MINISTRY. CHILDREN ENJOYED THE DVD. 

 

Erika: [clears throat]. We did just a salad but this is not a children’s movie, right? 

 

Jeff: I believe so. I would love to know whether or not the children actually said that. I would really wonder. I also like that, I respect the fact that she felt the needed to explain where she screened it. 

 

Erika: I mean, there is a fair bit of God. 

 

Jeff: yeah, God adjacent.  

 

Erika: mhm. 

 

Jeff: Yeah, I like the fact that this movie does not really lock down its religious, like it is sort of monotheist religion but, you know, it’s not really pushing any particular brand of religion provided it’s like a monotheist. So you know, any of those sort of old testament could fit under this rubric. And I think, Erika, you my other favorite. 

 

Erika: ooh, if we have time for one more, please may I? 

 

Jeff: I think so, ’cause it’s so good. 

 

Erika: PewDiePie, untitled but three out of five stars: “it was OK. I didn’t like the ending.” Yeah. 

 

Jeff: It was OK, I didn’t like the ending. 

 

Erika: There’s a chance that I’m PewDiePie.  

 

Jeff: This is actually the exact same review I left on Titanic. 

 

Erika: [laughing]. 

 

Jeff: it was OK. I didn’t like the ending. 

 

Erika: I actually, you know, this captures my feelings about this film. 

 

Jeff: do you think that that Lyle and Don have read these reviews and are like, if we had just made a better ending this would have blown up. 

 

Erika: see, I think where they erred is like, I think they essentially have two endings. 

 

Jeff: why did they not end it at the end of the telethon celebration? 

 

Erika: had he run through the woods yet at that point? Because… 

 

Jeff: no. 

 

Erika: yeah. 

 

Jeff: [laughing] and they needed to kill him off in order for that scene to happen, I suppose. 

 

Erika: I just feel like maybe they could have, instead of killing him, just had him run through the woods, as a like, euphemistic or more ambiguous… 

 

Jeff: Right, like maybe they did cure muscular dystrophy in this universe. 

 

Erika: exactly. Like, we didn’t need to know for sure whether he died to enjoy him running through the woods. 

 

Jeff: I would argue that whether or not David died in real life he was going to die in this film. 

 

Erika: ooh. 

 

Jeff: it was destined to happen. Cause death lurks around every corner. So, we’ve heard what the experts have to say, let’s hear what the dunces have to say. Erika, where are you on this? 

 

Erika: Like I said, I’m with PewDiePie. I didn’t like the ending, but it was OK. 

 

Jeff: I’m going way off the board on this one, I’m giving this sucker 4.5 out of five stars. 

 

Erika: woah! 

 

Jeff: I think this movie was almost perfect in that it gave me everything I wanted. Which was, a horrible film that was just baffing in most of the time and I’m not even joking, I literally almost peed myself at the end of the film. It was very close. Very close. I almost burst with fluids because I was laughing so hard. 

 

Erika: can I just say, I hope that while bursting with fluids you had your piss tube too handy. 

 

Jeff: [laughing] 

 

[musical interlude] Rock n’ roll piano progression from “Dead Letter and the Infinite Yes” by Wintersleep 

 

Erika: this is the point at which we start to get into the nitty gritty and talk a little bit more about what happened here. What worked, what didn’t. But, where we always like to get started is unpacking a bit how this film, which was certainly a film about disability, how was disability portrayed in this film? 

 

Jeff: a question it’s a little bit hard to answer in some ways. This film shows, unlike a lot of the other films, I think it approached the story of disability not from the like, the really hard biomedical perspective, there were no doctors really in this film, there wasn’t like, long descriptions of biological results of impairment. They really did try to like capture this through the lens of two children trying to understand each other in some ways, with two main characters that do have very different disabilities. So, I would say that with muscular dystrophy there’s this constant story about how David, who has muscular dystrophy, presumably Duchenne’s muscular dystrophy, is degenerating. He’s gotten weaker, there’s all these other comments about how he’s not able to do things, how he remembers how he used to be able to walk and run, now he can’t. One of my favorite scenes is when Lyle and David are comparing their thighs in the pool and their legs in general. It was this bizarrely corporeal moment which is also, though, like, I could see young boys doing this. Like, it was essentially a phallic measuring moment in which we find out that David has enormous legs and feet and Lyle does not. We’ll let the Freudians unpacked that however they wish to. But disability is really, I would say, marked add as being a lack. The individual is lacking in quite a few ways even if they are, David is marked as being quite smart. He’s supposed to be a bit of a brainiac. 

 

Erika: And then in contrast we have Lyle. I had not heard of this diagnosis before, minimal brain dysfunction. I was puzzled to piece together that this was an ADHD. So, we learn that Lyle is at times overtaken by “the feeling”. 

 

Jeff: “the feeling”. 

 

Erika: This ominous, possession almost, that, it causes him to run. This is a little foggy for me too. The feeling I think suggests something more emotional, needing it needing to run it off suggest something more emotional, and so the ADHD label that we come to realize it is was it, just felt like a slight mismatch. But, having said that, our research reveals that this film is essentially Lyle’s story. This is Lyle telling his own story, his take on himself and his relationship with David and so understanding that this is Lyle’s self narrative, I mean, I’m inclined to accept it for whatever discrepancies there are, whatever I’m perhaps missing, I think it is Lyle’s expression of himself and his experiences, so I’m open to it and I, yeah. I’m kind of here for that. 

 

Jeff: yeah the way that, and maybe it’s just the actor, the way he delivers the first line when he’s like “the feeling”. When I first watched this, I thought this is going to be like a psychosis. 

 

Clip from the film:  

 

Lyle: see, I got this thing, my brother calls it “the feeling”. It’s kind of a problem. 

David: OK. Well, I was wondering about it. I mean what’s it like?  

Lyle: You know those little drummers, the kind you gotta wind up? 

David: yeah. 

Lyle: you know when you wind them up and wind them up and wind them up and they go like this [rapid footsteps]. 

David: are you kidding me? That’s what running is like? 

Lyle: running? I thought we were talking about the feeling.  

 

Jeff: And I guess that what he’s sort of talking about is like the energy, this like electric kind of feeling, I guess, is where it’s coming from. But despite having the feeling, there was this weird, interesting dynamic with his family and feelings [emphasized “s”]. What was that all about? 

 

Erika: yeah, what was that all about? It did not feel organic to the film, it felt kind of forced that it was being written into dialogue that emotions are not allowed. And it was, interestingly, it was coming from this mother. So there’s a scene where the boys are playing and they get shot? 

 

Jeff: Yeah, Lyle gets—there’s a gang bang drive pellet gunning. 

 

Erika: [laughing] yes. 

 

Jeff: Where did these kids grow up? 

 

Erika: right? Another scene that just came out of left field. 

 

Jeff: He ran through private property and then when he was running through the private property there were these, I’m going to say, antifa, probably, warriors, on the private property squatting, who had two rifles, who then proceeded to pellet and bludgeon Lyle to the ground from cutting through this private property. 

 

Erika: and so, as Lyle is back at home and his mom is, I think, tweezing the pellets out of his leg, she reminds him that he’s not cry. 

 

Jeff: no crying. 

 

Erika: there are no emotions allowed in this family. 

 

Jeff: yeah. Lyle has just experienced an attempted assassination and his mother tells him no crying. 

 

Erika: This is interesting, ’cause this almost, I feel like with Lyle’s ADHD, like, there’s this portrayal of him as almost too much. You know, if David is lack, Lyle is excess. He’s just oozing with energy. He’s running, he’s climbing, he’s loud. You know, he’s just kind of bouncy and so this, the no emotions narrative is almost like a reaffirmation that he is excessive and needs to reign it in. 

 

Jeff: And I feel like that’s where I struggle with that definition that they are an unlikely friend grouping, because I feel like this is a really common thing in film right where they’re like, this is like the opposites attract, the odd couple. We’ve seen this story so often, right, where it’s like, one of them is super energetic and running around and very physical all the time and high energy and the other is quiet and slow and more thoughtful and he’s sort of like the brain and Lyle is like, the action. This is like that movie The Mighty (which might be another film we should probably watch for this). 

 

Erika: hmm. 

 

Jeff: there like, this is actually a really common trope in stories about disability, where they are like, well if one of you is lacking something then we need to give the other one like, this excessiveness. And then we put you together and together you almost form like, one person. It’s like you have enough when you’re put together. 

 

Erika: yeah, I mean. it’s kind of a natural recipe for chemistry, like for harmony, some kind of balance. 

 

Jeff: right, yeah. Like there’s kind of this yin/yang thing going on.  

 

Erika: What can, what can these opposites offer each other. 

 

Jeff: right and there is like completely this transactional kind of narrative around his relationship too, right? That Lyle has the physicality, David has the thought, the ideas. He’s the ideas man. 

 

Erika: does it play out such that David kind of brings Lyle up academically? Because they’re working through the science fair and they’re doing all of these cool science things and then on the flipside Lyle and all of his energy is sort of like working on David’s physicality, like getting him more active. 

 
Jeff: I think absolutely that’s what’s going on here. That they are balancing each other out. Lyle has a purpose through David and it’s the first time that he ever really like commits to anything as we’ve been told in the film. 

 

Erika: I guess this is kind of reflecting the overall fact that this is Lyle’s story, but we see this play out in a few ways in the film. So Lyle takes on this sort of mixed quest to, I guess, maybe it’s not that mixed. Lyle’s quest is essentially to cure David. 

 

Jeff: Yeah. 

 

Erika: He wants to make him walk and he wants to raise money for him. 

 

Jeff: To get him to run again. 

 

Erika: yeah, by curing. I think, I’m pretty sure he specifically says in the movie that he wants to raise money for researchers. 

 

Jeff: yep, this is a bit of like a, this like a nature versus, or a science versus religion, I think, in some ways, right? And it is once they lean into science that David is smited. They have a fundraiser to get a cure and David is killed almost immediately after.  

 

Erika: really God wins this science-religion … what is the word? 

 

Jeff: Debate? 

 

Erika: Duel? 

 

Jeff: [laughing]. Schism? 

 

Erika: ooh. You made it all fancy [laughing].  

 

Jeff: maybe? I don’t know. Now, religion was a big part of this film and its tied directly, I think, to disability. Specifically, through these very strange inserted moments of Lyle’s mother and often Lyle himself watching televangelists Jack Lalane and specifically the phrase, “the great physician above”. 

 

Move clip: 

 

Lyle: I don’t want you to get discouraged or anything to get your way. At first you’ll think it’s things impossible, but believe me,  if you just asked a good position above for guidance and to give you the willpower to do the right thing then I don’t care what you do next. 

David: wait a minute, what did you just say? 

Lyle: uhh. 

David: what did you say right then, about the good physician above? 

Lyle: oh, oh. What I said was, if you just ask the good physician above for guidance and to give it the will power to do the right thing that I don’t care… 

David: wait a second. Wait just a dog gone second. Jack Lalane  said that on TV this morning. This whole thing is Jack Lalane. 

 

Jeff: the physician then becomes this apt metaphor for a higher power that has the power of life and death in their hands and like, although it’s a little clunky, it’s not and perhaps the best execution of it but there are several moments where Lyle seems to be asking for David to give himself over to a higher power. He literally uses that kind of phrasing but it’s not quite as like, obvious as it would be I think in other religious films where there’s this very like, you must give yourself to God in order to get the, whatever, and that might be because this film seems to play into another common trope, which is the connection between disabled children and God himself. That’s right, David is in commune with God. He speaks to God, God tells him things, he actually prophesizes things in the movie. He prophesizes the death of their teacher. So David is talking to not already, but Lyle is going to become this like, spiritual leader to train him how to walk again. Tied always right with the question of God though is this question of death and dying, which I think is another big trope that comes up a lot with disability. That proximity to death. Like, we’re primed like right off the bat — David is going to die. Now, there is a bit of a playfulness ’cause it appears as though he’s going to die in a wheelchair accident at the very beginning of the film, is how it’s sort of primed. Oh, I should mention there’s a flash forward in this film. If you want if you weren’t sure about how many balls are in the air, the movie begins with a, ‘here’s something you’re going to see in about an hour and a half later’. Maybe an hour later, when they’re going to run down the down the road on the wheelchair and nearly die. But death is sort of constantly surrounding him, but it’s also kind of also surrounding Lyle as well. We got all this sort of talk about Lyle having these sort of episodes that are perpetually putting people at risk and particularly this belief that Lyle is going to be the death of David. That Lyle’s excess is just going to eviscerate the fragile body of David. 

 

Erika: so, yeah, there’s an interesting play with Lyle being all about this excess, being so big and so much for people to handle but he’s also lacking. For reasons unknown it is mentioned that he’s colorblind very briefly, he’s bad at school, of course, because you know he’s having trouble sitting still and focusing, staying engaged and we also see that he’s kind of unsuccessful with love. Interesting that he has some romantic exchanges at all because we definitely notice that David doesn’t have any of those. 

 

Jeff: none. 

 

Erika: but a couple of times we see Lyle flirting with a young woman or professing his strong feelings for one of his classmates but he’s not successful in love ultimately and so we do see him we do see him portrayed as lacking in a couple of different ways. 

 

Jeff: He seems to be positioned as really disliked within the school. Lyle does not appear to have friends until he meets up with David, which I think it means that it’s time for us to talk about perhaps what went wrong in this film. Some of the oddities, the strange things that we noticed, the questions that are left unanswered and the first question that I have for you Erika professionally, as an occupational therapist: these two characters meet in the bathroom. They are sent to the bathroom together which, maybe that was a thing in the 60s I don’t know, and it is here we are introduced to the way that David uses the toilet. Now I myself, as a man with a physical disability, have never thought of or been instructed to use a PVC pipe to pee down and into a toilet. And, to mount this urine tube like a rocket launcher on the side of my wheelchair for ready access to my piss tube whenever I need it. My question to you Erika, as an OT, how many piss tubes have you prescribed in your professional career? 

 

Erika: to date, um, yeah none. 

 

Jeff: [laughing] 

 

Erika: That’s not a thing. I mean I have seen piss in tubes, but never a PVC pipe with a chest strap attached is something that I could only describe as a poster holder? Yeah, that’s not a thing. 

 

Jeff: yeah. The piss rocket immediately got my attention. 

 

Erika: oh, Jeff. I will not forget the day that you texted me, long before we had even discussed the podcast. 

 

Jeff: the first time I saw this movie in the midst of the movie I immediately picked up my phone and texted Erika and asked her if, in her experience, she has ever seen someone using a piss rocket. A shoulder mounted piss rocket. I have gone in and looked and I could not find any examples of this in the world. Like, portable urinals,  the jug urinal things, existed well before this movie and well before the 1960s. I am baffled by this. 

 

Erika: oh, it’s entirely impractical. Just like everything about it. If you’re gonna take a pipe like why would it be straight, right? 

 

Jeff: Right. 

 

Erika: Why wouldn’t it be curved? 

 

Jeff: Right! 

 

Erika: it’s like an arm length tube.  

 

Jeff: it’s like 6 feet! 

 

Erika: how are you gonna wash it? How are you going to keep it, this is just, nothing about this makes any practical sense.  

 

Jeff: You would have to be very far from the toilet, extremely far. I actually would argue this may only work in a urinal ’cause I don’t know if you would have the right gravity. I don’t know that the wheelchair sitter would be high enough for the urine to run down the tube and into the toilet.  

 

Erika: without it being dipped right into the toilet water. 

 

Jeff: right, yes and whether or not your seat is actually higher. Like, I’m not always higher than the toilet. They have those really tall toilets right, for transfers, where I think you’d be like peeing across like a plane. You wouldn’t get the gravity flow down and in fact it might actually roll back on you this piss tube would also smell just terrible. 

 

Erika: oh yeah. 

 

Jeff: and it’s right beside his head the entire movie. 

 

Erika: yeah, I mean this thing is, it’s just ridiculous in so many ways. I have maybe 2 theories about the piss tube. One is like, it must have existed in real life.  

 

Jeff: how could it not? There’s no way someone would make this up. 

 

Erika: so that’s running theory one, is that this was real and who knows why. Maybe in their, I mean, weren’t they in Washington? 

 

Jeff: Spokane, WA yeah. 

 

Erika: yeah, so it’s not like they were in like a small isolated place where maybe they didn’t have the same access to medical equipment like a urinal. The only other theory is that for some reason, and again, calling on our psychoanalysts, they just really wanted a very visible reminder of David’s urine. 

Jeff: I wonder if this was about the gag. Like that this was like, they added this in because they thought it would be funny. When they first me, Lyle would have like a moment, would have a “condition”,  where he would grab the pipe, start swinging it around, and then use it like a trumpet. 

 

Erika: which happened. 

 

Jeff: which happens, 100% that is what happens and that’s how they like, bond. They bond over Lyle essentially putting his mouth on David’s penis. Or at least putting it somewhere David’s penis has been. And it’s played as this is sort of like, ha ha ha that’s so gross. And I think it’s like a boys will be gross thing maybe? I don’t know. Or maybe this is, as you said, about the fluids and about how Lyle is — their friendship is locked in because Lyle doesn’t run away at the contamination of the urine. 

 

Erika: yeah, his reaction is mild for having just realized that he just put his mouth on someone’s urine stick.  

 

Jeff: He is like that was inconvenient. 

 

Erika: [laughing] 

 

Jeff: I probably shouldn’t have done that. Will I do it again? Maybe. I think it’s also germane to the conversation that there are several real photos of David on the Internet in some documentaries and none of those photos include a shoulder mounted piss rocket. 

 

Erika: [laughing] 

 

Jeff: I don’t know if they just take it off for photos maybe, or this is completely made up which leads to a big question: does Lyle understand how David uses the bathroom? Or was this an assumption that Lyle has made over the years.  

 

Erika: I wonder if David had some other kind of device that he actually hung on his chair that Lyle just always fantastically presumed was a piss tube. 

 

Jeff: This wasn’t the only thing though that was a little weird about disability in the film. 

 

Erika: this was the weirdest though and this one I think like, this one was weird in a way that the others were not. This one was uniquely weird, weird and unique to this film. The other like, doing disability weirdly things were more like stereotypes. 

 

Jeff: Oh yeah. 

 

Erika: obviously while David needs someone to go to the bathroom with him. There was a good ol head pat at least once in the film. 

 

Jeff: there was that, and I think the other thing that was very common about this film was David’s asexuality. David is really the only character that doesn’t seem to have any sort of interest or active engagement in the world of sexual relations. Lyle has like a weird little obsession, David teases him about that obsession, David is friends with the girls. He has no problem talking to them, but shows no interest otherwise in any of the women. We even meet David’s brother’s girlfriend. We meet everyone else’s interested, but David is not sexual. He has no interest in the opposite sex aside from friendship. I think it’s bound up in like, physical disability therefore not sexually active. 

 

Erika: do you think there’s any connection with like, his closeness with God and his presumed imminent death? Do those layer in there? 

 

Jeff: mm. like a piety thing perhaps. That’s an interesting take. 

 

Erika: so carrying on with the aspects of the film that we are not celebrating, shall we say? There was definitely that disability as requiring treatment or cure, so we had this pursuit to cure muscular dystrophy. Interesting, well I guess we were– so we have these two disabilities kind of running side by side in the film, we’ve got the muscular dystrophy and ADHD. And clearly like, a lot of emphasis on curing MD. I wouldn’t say that it’s curing ADHD that we’re after but there’s this whole conversation about medication, medicating Lyle in order to contain him. 

 

Jeff: yeah, I would say that is this interesting politics around the desire to cure David. There seems to be a desire for Lyle, Lyle is being let down and it’s more about the structural challenges that he faces. The school just isn’t set up right for him, presumably. 

 

Erika: I want to come back to this when we talk about what went right in the film, because I do think that there were some — this is kind of a strength of the film, is the fact that we have, you know, given that this is Lyle’s perspective, everything around ADHD is first person perspective, but I think that the flip side of that was that, and this is part of where the film goes a bit wrong, is that Lyle’s telling David story, making it all about this cure and overcoming. 

 

Jeff: This is a part that I think is really difficult when it comes to media studies and representations of disability, because in this unique instance we have a character with a terminal disability. At this time, children with Duchenne’s probably weren’t making it much past age 13, 14. They would have been dying quite young. That age expectancy is obviously a lot higher now, closer to 30 years old now, but it is still a terminal disease and so on the one hand it’s, there’s this desire to eradicate the disability but on the other hand Lyle is trying to save his friend. The death is the biggest issue, but at the same time that’s not how the film positions it. Because the real positioning is David needs to run again. David needs the freedom from the chair. Not so much that David’s going to die from this. And he does die from it eventually, but that is sort of seen as like, maybe part of God’s plan? And so really it was the walking that needed to be cured. And I think that’s what really separates this film, you know. If it’s a movie about somebody with a terminal disease and they’re trying to survive I think that’s a completely rational, understandable, and that makes a lot of sense to me. But the weird focus on the running here, that it’s not just about saving his life, it really is about giving him a corporeal experience that he has lost and that’s thought to be somehow meaningful. That has like, a value that is urgently necessary for him.  

 

Erika: Well, OK. So I just I want to jump back to Jack. His stick was physical wellness as salvation and like, we see this repeatedly on mom’s television, so this is obviously something that was like, Lyle grew up hearing — that sitting is going to kill you. You need to get physically active. 

 

Jeff: Right. 

 

Erika: so I don’t know, maybe it’s a little bit of a time capsule. 

 

Jeff: that’s fascinating. 

 

Erika: yeah. And that’s not the only, I think we could speculate, TV influence that has shaped the plotlines of this film because we know for a while that Lyle wants to raise money and then we learn that there’s going to be talent show at school and I think, as we were first presented to it I thought like, oh OK we’re just setting up one more thing that David, for whatever reason, isn’t going to be able to participate in. But then we realize that Lyle has decided that specifically he’s going to walk on his hands for, what is it, like 100 yards or something? To raise money. And then all of a sudden as it starts to come together, we suddenly have essentially a telethon on our hands. 

 

Jeff: right! That is another one of my favorite parts of this movie. 

 

Erika: oh, hands down. 

 

Jeff: Is that this is a movie set in the 1960s and as our beloved listeners know, I’m sure, the Jerry Lewis telethon on starts in 1964. So this is happening right, essentially, at the start of the telethon. This film ends with essentially a variety show in which the children get up and do a bunch of talents and then culminates with a fundraiser. I think this is a telethon. 

 

Erika: oh, I think you missed the detail where firefighters are standing by, waiting collect donations. 

 

Jeff: Right, absolutely. And of course, firefighters are, most firefighter charities are giving money to muscular dystrophy, that’s their disability of choice. I believe that actually wasn’t a thing yet in 1960. But correct me if I’m wrong. 

 

Erika: more forecasting. 

 

Jeff: yeah, I think this is that revisionist history that’s happening with Lyle, where he’s reflecting back on things and I’m wondering how much of this story is like, this is how it happened, you know, hand to God gospel truth versus this is the way in which after a lifetime Lyle is now reflecting back on his life and he’s seeing the ways in which pop culture aligns weirdly with his experiences, or he’s kind of bent and mutated the happenings could fit within this narrative. And maybe that was because of film — I find it odd that they would have a talent show and science fair at the exact same time in the gym, that seems, I don’t think I’ve never seen that personally. Maybe that’s common? I don’t know. And so it’s like, they had this whole narrative of the science project, that’s how they really are — that’s the bug story and possibly the proving god’s existence story, and they were like, well, but we also need to have him do this like, feat. This physical feat for his friend. This show of strength for his friend who’s so weak. So, I think there’s also that dichotomy happening here too, that they like, needed it to happen. And so, I’m wondering if it’s like, he’s thinking back and he’s like, Oh yeah, the Jerry Lewis has these, you know, these sort of musical acts and carnival acts and then it’s all brought together under this, to raise money, essentially for MD. 

 

Erika: now, chronologically, so David is going to have an accident that’s going to ultimately culminate in his death. Had that happened yet? Like, was David sick already at the point of this show happening? 

 

Jeff: I believe the implication here is they have the fundraiser and then immediately afterwards David drowns. 

 

Erika: okay, speaking of revisionist, though. That scene was so much like the scene in The Sandlot. Like, I’m pretty sure it was based on that scene. 

 

Jeff: yeah, absolutely. Part of the reason why I think that laughed so hard is because it is so out of nowhere. Like, they have this great triumph and you’re assuming that this is like the denouement. Your assuming that this is going to be, like, they’re going to wrap this thing up. You know, they have a happy life or you know, maybe there’ll be a black screen and it’ll be like, David died a year later or whatever. I assumed this was going to end after the charity fundraiser. It’s a bit success, they raise all this money. He proves that evil principle wrong. But no, they’re like, David has to die and we’re going to watch it. And we now get this additional, I think it’s about 15 minutes, in which David drowns. We watch him drown and then he dies moments later from complications resulting. That’s true, according to David’s mother. David did in fact have a drowning in his family pool and it wasn’t long after that he passed away. Now, where that happens in terms of the actual timeline of events – unclear. But, according to the movie, it appears to be fundraiser, dead six months later. 

 

Erika: This is definitely a weird point of transition into talking about what went right. But, I think that what you just described, a potentially rapid descent from being pretty healthy to death, like it can happen. That captures something that can be very real. Obviously, the historical inaccuracies or, you know, the fantasies that are kind of interwoven with the retelling. You know, it’s a natural part of retelling a story but if I could kick-off our “what went right” or “what did this movie do well”. I want to come back to that point that this is Lyle’s story and I think I felt watching the movie that the whole theme around ADHD was actually treated quite well. We end up, it’s not intended to be the focal point of the story I don’t think.  

 

Jeff: mhmm. 

 

Erika: maybe it is. I mean, if you think about the fact that this is, you know, it’s called different drummers. It’s sort of implying that we have, I think, those who marched to the beat of their own drum are oddities, they’re different people, and you know, it’s not different drummer. It’s not a story about David. 

 

Jeff: yes. 

 

Erika: it’s a story about these two different drummers, these two oddballs that for whatever, they’re odd in their own ways but they’ve united. It’s a story about friendship, but the telling and again this goes back to that review that was pretty generous with the film despite remarking that it was kind of all over the place. Like I almost feel like there was also in the narrative structure sort of a portrayal of Lyle’s somewhat scattered, bouncy mind. So we, you know, I think that’s a reality of life for someone who has struggled holding attention. That there are a lot of stories that are all very pressing and they all need to be told and they might not fit neatly together but that’s how my brain works. So, that’s the story you’re getting. Really a sharp contrast, because I saw a lot of those sort of typical narratives about David that were sort of this other perspective on disability, which I think is just always a trap that you’re going to fall into when you have the person without lived experience telling the story, but the flip side of that, and something really unique about this film then, was Lyle telling his own story and this sort of nuanced conversation that came up around whether to medicate or segregate, and sort of the politics around medicating Lyle for this condition or for the symptoms that were really less bothering him and more bothering other people. 

 

Jeff: absolutely. I don’t think we’ve ever been more aligned on something. I love the fact that this film, the portrayal of ADHD is predominantly not comic in nature. Lyle is presented as kind of a funny and goofy little guy but he’s not your typical like, bouncing off the walls like wild person by any means. I think as you said, I think this storyline actually represents that in a really interesting way. In a way that has way more nuance than your typical understandings of ADHD and I honestly loved the actual complexity that was given to this medication story, right, about whether or not to medicate Lyle, and the pros and cons, the financial impact, the pressure from the school. I feel like that story line probably rings very true to a lot of people with ADHD, whether or not it was in the 1960s or in the 2010s. 

 

Erika: That was a solid strength for me. 

 

Jeff: I liked the fact that the principle eventually becomes the only real villain in this film. I think that Lyle is extremely gentle and really uplifting towards his teachers and obviously the janitor especially. He sees in all of these people friends of his and in is parents he sees friends and allies is supporters. In David’s family he finds friends and allies and supporters. At the end of the day it is only the principle who is a monster and hates Lyle more than anything. Even the police seem to love this little guy. And I actually thought it was interesting how it’s like, you can see the like creative process and Lyle as he’s presumably writing this being like, alright but I did, I kinda like my teacher in grade four and the janitor was kind of nice but I need someone mean. Well, I didn’t like the principle. The principle was the worst. So, we’ll make her the villain. But I want to know, so at the end of the film Lyle proceeds with his plan, which the principle has been against the entire time. The principle then goes into the bathroom and cries. What did that scene mean? 

 

Erika: it was baffling scene for all involved. If you remember, I think she was in conversation with the cop? 

 

Jeff: she was. 

 

Erika: and the cop is baffled, everyone is baffled. Nobody really understands. Although, you know, the fact that you brought it up, I kinda suspect that you have to take on this. 

 

Jeff: I don’t. I am still baffled to this time, after several watches, I do not understand why the principle goes to the bathroom and bawls. 

 

Erika: I don’t know, maybe the irony of it is that she seems to be having a bit of a breakdown. She’s doing that kind of like, sobbing, laughing, crying, and she’s hiding and so, I don’t know, maybe there’s something around like, she’s trying to medicate this child for not being able to contain his excesses and now she’s hiding out in the bathroom so that nobody else can witness her excesses. 

 

Jeff: mm. maybe it’s a moment of allyship. 

 

Erika: self-realization, or not self-realization, but like introspection. 

 

Jeff: Right, she realizes that she’s a bad person maybe. How did you feel about the near death experience? 

 

Erika: honestly, I loved it. I think characterizing it as a near death experience makes me sound kind of sadistic for saying that, but let me see, how to explain why I loved it. I loved it because it was so normal. There was no there was no stereotype, there was nothing. It was so organic. It’s a scene in which these two mischievous boys decide like, hey man, you wheel. This is a big hill. 

 

Jeff: Let’s rip. 

 

Erika: let’s run up this hill and fly down together. Yeahhh. Right? So this is the whole like, Lyle’s going to kill David. 

 

Jeff: [laughing] right, yes. 

 

Erika: but like it’s not even, you know? They’re fully in it together. It was totally that like, yeah. Let’s do this. And like, so much joy, totally normalizing the chair, like, hop on bud, riding on the chair and they’re flying down and it’s like oh God what’s going to happen? Is this when he’s going to die? What’s going to happen? There’s a lot of emotion, but the beauty of this scene to me is just all of that. It’s so, it just feels so normal. I don’t know, maybe you can speak to whether this is real because like, did you do this as a kid? 

 

Jeff: Absolutely when I was kid. Both my manual and electric wheelchair there was so much play. What I found interesting about this scene, and I think because in some ways this scene is a microcosm of all of the technical things that are wrong with this film, when you think about this room like a film production analysis, whatever. So, this film is set up as the climax at the very start of the film. This is not the climate of the film. This is like the midway point of the film. So I don’t know why it teases it at the very beginning and then we arrive at it, it happens and yeah. It’s a part of the plot but it’s certainly not the climax. You assume it would be. It’s not. And as it’s happening, as a viewer, you’re sitting there and you’re like I have no idea where this is going to go. Are they gonna wipe out die? Maybe. Are they gonna get run down by a car and die? Maybe. Are they going to arrive at the bottom and nothing bad will happen? Maybe. 

 

Erika: [laughing] 

 

Jeff: all of these things could have happened at the end of that scene and it fundamentally would not have changed the film. There is a sort of like subplot that as a result of it maybe Lyle and David shouldn’t be friends anymore, but you could have just taken that entire subplot out essentially and the movie is still pretty much the same. It doesn’t really necessarily change the film. So I’m like, you are forecasting a scene that doesn’t actually have a ton to do with the film even if it does give a good representation of their relationship, and then the scene happens and some things happen and it moves the plot forward I suppose, but it’s still kind of a strange scene that’s just like, shoehorned in. I also am very impressed that the two actors got as far down the hill as they did in this clearly rickety wheelchair. 

 

Erika: Oh yeah, that was the other possibility that didn’t mention was that like a wheel was gonna pop up off— 

 

Jeff: yeah the thing just, they like full send down the hill and the chair just literally rips itself apart and that, not even as a scripted part of the film, that just happened. 

 

Erika: [laughing] 

 

Jeff: a really sketchy metal wheelchair are they using. But I think you’re right. I think the fact that the wheelchair becomes a part of their play is actually pretty representative and I would not doubt for a moment that this happened and that both David and Lyle were equal conspirators in the plan to go down the hill. 

 

Erika: And just, when do you see that? Like you don’t. That’s never, I feel like, that’s the joy, that’s the cool stuff and nobody ever tells that story.  

 

Jeff: So of course we’ve talked about David’s death, but David’s death is not actually the end of the movie. It keeps going after this for just a very stereotypical and unintentionally hilarious ending. Erika, take us through the end of this film. 

 

Erika: ugh, the cringe factor is so big.  

 

Jeff: [laughing] 

 

Erika: So, the movie was supposed to end after the romp down the hill. It didn’t. Then the character died, briefly, came back to life and then he died again. So, after David dies for the second time, Lyle finds out and as Lyle is prone to, he’s overcome with “the feeling”— 

 

Jeff: The feeling. 

 

Erika: and he takes off running. And he runs through the woods, he heads back to, you know,  the places that he and David have spent time together and who should appear next to him but David. Running, in death achieving the goal that Lyle had for David’s life. 

 

Jeff: and then a freeze frame. 

 

Erika: so that you will always remember etched in your consciousness, David running. 

 

Jeff: these films seem to desire, the character must escape the chair by the end. By some way, by anyway. And maybe that way is death, but we see the exact same thing at the end of Theory of Everything, where it’s like, you could not end the story of Stephen Hawking without walking, and he wasn’t dead yet, so instead they have to like, construct this scene where Eddie Redmayne gets up out of the wheelchair and picks up a pen for an attractive woman. Freudian! It’s similar in this film, it’s like there’s this desire, like David has to run. I thought it was going to end when Lyle puts David on his back and then sort of piggybacks him and runs around. I thought, OK so they’ve wrapped that story line up — but no, they had to have this post – no, not post partum. What is that, postmortem? 

 

Erika: [laughing] post mortem. 

 

Jeff: they have to have this post mortem, although maybe actually postpartum might describe much of this film because it was a sadness after it was born. There’s this desire, this post mortem that has to happen, where he has to be seen running and he has to overcome. He has to get out of the wheelchair. It’s the payoff that we have been promised by this film and this is where I say this is a film clearly trying to sort of end on an inspirational note. It’s like they thought, well, it’s too big of a bummer to end with David dying, so we’ll end with maybe they did get to run, once, in the sun, in the forest where they used to play. 

 

[Music interlude] Summery groove with deep bass notes from “Passionfruit” by Drake 

 

Erika: alrighty, so. We have gone through the critical reception of this masterpiece. We’ve run through our hot takes, but this isn’t just a fictional story. This is very much one that is maybe not even inspired by reality, this is a true story. This is based on real life. So, we have some good possible facts, some hot trivia to uncover. I think we need to start by asking the obvious question here, Jeff, which is: why does David wear your wardrobe? Were you involved in the creation of this film? 

 

Jeff: [laughing] so, I think that they may have broken into my house because David wears definitely more than one cardigan that I’m 90% sure I own, and several other great little combos of pants and sweaters. David does not seem to have my shoe taste. He is not a sneakerhead. I don’t know if that means that David was very fashion forward or if I dress like a 1960s child.  

 

Erika: [laughing] 

 

Jeff: It’s unclear. 

 

Erika: Maybe this is a both/and. Has anyone ever mistaking you for David? 

 

Jeff: for David? That is not happened yet. In fact, if that becomes a thing, I would actually be thrilled. If people were like, oh aren’t you that guy from Different Drummers? It would be a phenomenal turn events in my life. 

 

Erika: I think you just need to start promoting the film a little harder. So we’ve talked about chairs before. Is this, the chair in this film, is this one that you have also had at some point in your life? 

 

Jeff: This was a frustration for me. I have been trying to track down what this wheelchair is, who made it, what type of wheelchair it is. It appears to have a relatively generic frame, however there are some oddities, particularly around the footrests that I have been trying to track it down. I do not know what type of wheelchair this is. I am not able to identify it. If one of our lovely listeners knows what kind of wheelchair this is, please let us know because we’re going to keeping track of all of the brands that get shout outs in these films, whether it be through usage or possibly direct product placement. 

 

Erika: I read that the actor who played Lyle was, there was a good amount of effort that went into casting Lyle. They really shot for a kid that looked like him, and not just look like him but was like him. Recruited from a Christian school, 7th grader, just like Lyle in a lot of ways. And he said not only did he himself, I don’t know if he described himself as having ADHD, but definitely as a hyper and everywhere kind of all over the place kid, but also had mentioned that he had a disabled sister who used a wheelchair, which I think is fascinating because another one of those opportunities in the film to probably approximate reality in the representation a little bit better. Like, I think the more people that have lived experience on the set involved in the film you’re probably going to get a better outcome, a more accurate outcome. 

 

Jeff: yeah, and that actually might speak to why their relationship felt kind of authentic in some ways, because this was, this this actor Bradon, was able to kind of tap into things that himself — he probably has also ridden down a hill on his sisters wheelchair at some point. 

 

Erika: [laughing] 

 

Jeff: I think that’s really fascinating. They actually do look kind of similar ,photos of young Lyle comparatively is fascinating, but there does seem to be this interesting connection with disability kind of throughout the film, which is something that we didn’t really expect when we started this project.  

 

Erika: mhm 

 

Jeff: We presumed it was going to be a lot of nondisabled people talking about the disabled and that’s not the case for this film. 

 

Erika: yeah I mean, I think when you’re looking at, when you’re looking at when you know that the end of the film is this kid who can’t walk regains the ability to walk you have pretty low expectations for the rest of the film. 

 

Jeff: right, yeah. The bar is already quite low. 

 

Erika: And although it doesn’t say that on the box, it’s very, very early in the film pretty clear that that is where this is going. 

 

Jeff: Oh yeah, yeah. Like, David is going to die or walk and bless these creators we got both. 

 

Erika: [laughing] do you have any hot trivia to bring to this? 

 

Jeff: I have a few things. So there’s two things that I have been really thinking about. So num, ber one, there is a lot of content about this film that has been made, presumably by Lyle Hatcher and Don Keran, the other cowriter and director. They have a YouTube channel, they made documentaries about this film. They have all sorts of content. They have like, on the DVD there is all this like, teaching tools and other materials. They really wrapped this movie up into a real package and as a result we actually get some really interesting stories about where this film came from. So, it is confirmed by David’s real mom in one of the documentaries that David did in fact have a “series of prophecies” that were shared to him by God. David apparently predicted the birth of a daughter, a family friend I believe was they didn’t know was pregnant. He predicted that she was not only pregnant but had a daughter, that happened. And he did in fact predict the death of his teacher. What is not shared in the film exactly, it’s kind of hinted at, the teacher was apparently chronically ill. So I don’t know if this is exactly a prophecy so much as kind of an inevitable conclusion. But I think this notion of David as prophet I think explains this film in some ways, because I would argue that Different Drummers, as much as it is about telling Lyle’s story, what I think this movie is really about is about canonizing David. I wonder if this is about trying to get David like, a sainthood status, to show these miracles that David produced. And there is this amazing quote from Lyle Hatcher, the real Lyle Hatcher, in one of documentaries where he’s talking about why he made it and, let’s roll that clip: 

 

The real Lyle: over the last 40 years I kept going back to the places that David and I, where we had our adventures, our friendship. All the fun places and the fun things we did together. The open fields, the hills the river, the school. There was something that constantly kept pushing me back in that direction. Every single time I would go back I would remember something different, something unique and maybe something that gave me comfort, and to some degree strength. Something that I was missing that I left behind. The memories of David and I have been haunting me. I need to know why. Why would something like this stay with me for 45 years? 

 

Jeff: Lyle is haunted by David’s presence. Quite literally haunted by it. It stuck with him. And he goes on to tell the story about how he went on a hike, up a mountain, and a thunderstorm happened, and he took that as a sign that “David and our friendship should be a movie.” He then proceeds to work for 8 and a half years to write, fund, produce and eventually film this movie with the help of a local film studio guy named Don Karan. It went from like, a five-page script into a full-fledged feature film which was put out in theatres and people went and saw it. It made just under $20,000 I believe in box office, which I also believe is well below the budget of this film. I think they spent a ton of money on this movie and I don’t believe they made it back. But, that might be wrong and if I’m wrong, good for you. That’s great. But I think that the way that Lyle talks about the film really reveals that this isn’t just about his own personal narrative, which we both actually thought would have been better perhaps, as being the focus of this, but really I think this is about the light the mystical religious relationship between disabled people and God, higher power, whatever it might be. This idea that it, just as in Miracle in Lane 2, God doesn’t make mistakes. That David’s disability provides him this deeper connection to a higher power, which I think we’re going to hear a lot in many of these films. 

 

Erika: This is fascinating. It really, it is fascinating that that this is a story that gets told and retold, that people feel so profoundly touched by their brushes with disability. 

 

Jeff: that it literally haunted him and he had to tell this story, he had to — maybe this is an act of remembrance, maybe it’s an act of revealing a life that is otherwise not talked about or not shared, not honored, perhaps. But I think I’m with you. I think these are actually stories that are continually honored, continually shared, to the point that it’s the only story that we start to hear is about this disabled people who are troubled, they have a hard life, but that this connection with God, which maybe makes it worth it or implies that there’s a rational reason for it to happen, that sanitizes it in some ways, and then allows them to be, to stand as these sort of religious objects. So Lyle then is able to show his compassion through his ability to care for David, to support David, and to love David. 

 

Erika: I think we are making a very natural slide out of trivia and into final thoughts here. 

 

Jeff: so, Erika, final thoughts on Different Drummers 

 

Erika: My final thoughts on Different Drummers are that I am once again surprised. I came in pretty ready to tear this apart and for all of its problematic tropes and representations, I am pleasantly surprised to find through deeper analysis some merit. I once again hesitate to give this film too much praise, but you know, we’re not really here to judge the film itself. We’re really here to talk about how did it treat disability, and I think it treated disability in some decently realistic ways and it, through the stories that it told, it has certainly made for some thought provoking conversation. 

 

Jeff: when I think about Different Drummers and I think about this broader project of Invalid Culture, I’m struck by this question about whether or not it is possible to both make a good movie and a progressive movie at the same time. Because it appears as though like, objectively Different Drummers is a bad movie. It is poorly made, it is it is all over the place, I think all of the critiques of this film are completely accurate from like a film perspective. I do not recommend this film to anybody. And so then, we have to ask ourselves, is the general audience, is the truth of disability an aesthetic that actually lends itself to movies that we perceive as powerful, evocative, interesting, artistic or good? Can we actually make a good movie on both sides of that equation. A technically good and also disability good? I wanna say yes, I want to believe that that’s possible, but I wonder how many of these movies that make good points are getting bogged down by the ways that they don’t reflect what is presumed to be examples of good disability art. So this movie doesn’t break through because it’s not Rain Man and people are left looking at it as a bingo bargain, bargain bin purchase, as opposed to some sort of legitimate artistic interrogation of childhood with various disabilities. But at the same time, it’s a bad movie. 

 

Erika: well, and I think, like, we are definitely being generous with it but I think one of the traps that we see here and that we’re likely to see time and again is that these are “other” narratives. These are not people telling their own story, these are people telling someone else’s story and so I think that we are always, they sort of, these films lack the technical success to bring these stereotypical tropes which people love. Our Amazon reviews confirm. 

 

Jeff: absolutely. 

 

Erika: they lack the technical quality to bring these lovable, mainstream lovable stories to success, but they lack the storytelling power of a narrative that’s grounded in lived experience. And again, that’s that was that was what made this film for me, was that it had that aspect. So, I think we carry on in our quest to find some first-person narratives that are like, people who set out to tell their own story. 

 

Jeff: my hot take for tonight’s episode, our closing thought, we’re not gonna see any self representation on this podcast because I don’t think that those films will reach our high low bar for trashy, trashy content.  

 

[Outro music] Hip hop beat from “Hard Out Here For a Gimp” by Wheelchair Sports Camp 

 

Jeff: And so concludes another episode of Invalid Culture. Did you enjoy the episode? Have a good time? Why don’t you tell a friend about it. Tell em right now. Send a message, email them or message them on tik tok wherever it is you’re socializing. Tell them to check out this podcast. Do you have a film that you think it would be great for us to cover? Do you want to torture us with a terrible movie you once watched? Awesome. Go onto our website invalidculture.com and send us your worst films. Who knows, maybe you will get to hear an episode in which we cover it. So thank you again for tuning in and until next time, take care and we’ll talk to you soon. 

 

DVD cover of the Disney Channel's "Miracle in Lane 2" with the caption "Justin tried for a trophy. What he won was extraordinary"

What if Malcom in the Middle was disabled?

Released just before Frank Muniz would become a household name, Miracle In Lane 2 is the “true” docu-dramedy following the life of Justin Yoder, a young boy with a physical disability who just wants to win something gosh darnit!

When this episode was recorded, this film could be watched on Disney+. But we at Invalid Culture are purists and, of course, watched it using Jeff’s personal DVD copy.

Listen now…

Grading the Film

As always, this film is reviewed with scores recorded in four main categories, with 1 being the best and 5 being the worst. Like the game of golf, the lower the score the better.

How accurate is the representation?

Jeff – 4 / 5

Erika – 3 / 5

Total – 7 / 10

How difficult was it to watch the movie?

Erika – 3 / 5

Jeff – 2 / 5

Total – 5 / 10

How often were things unintentionally funny?

Erika – 3 / 5

Jeff – 4 / 5

Total – 7 / 10

How far back has it put disabled people?

Jeff – 3 / 5

Erika – 4 / 5

Total – 7 / 10

The Verdict

Crimes have been committed…

Podcast Transcript

[Theme Music] Hip hop beat from “Hard Out Here For a Gimp” by Wheelchair Sports Camp
Erika:
Welcome to Invalid Culture, a podcast dedicated to excavating the strangest, most baffling, and worst representations of disability in popular culture. Unlike other podcasts that review films you’ve probably heard of, invalid culture is all about looking into the abyss of pop culture adjacent representations that never quite broke through because, well, they’re just awful. I’m joined today by my co-host, Jeffrey Preston. Jeff, why don’t you tell us about yourself?
Jeff:
I am a professor of disability studies and my background is in media. I teach media studies, I love movies and television, and I first got interested in media and disability because as a person with a physical disability, I always found it strange how the things that we see on television and in film were just not representative to my lived experience. And I wanted to understand why that was. I also have a love for terrible movies. The worse they are, the more I enjoy them. I don’t care about the Oscars, I’m here for the Razzies. But I’m not the only one here at Invalid Culture, I’m also joined by my co-host, Erika Katzman. Erika, why don’t you introduce yourself?
Erika:
Well I am also teaching in disability studies. I have a PhD in health and rehab science. I have a background in cultural anthropology, so that’s sort of where I come to this table. I’m really interested in the stories that we tell, the things that drive us, the cultural narratives that find their way into these cinematic representations. And I can’t say that I share your passion for terrible film, but I’m thrilled to be along on this ride with you. So that’s sort of where I come to this table.
Jeff:
And it is going to be a ride. So what is Invalid Culture? Well, we decided that it would be interesting to do a podcast, not about those classic films that we all hear about and read about in scholarship, we’re not here to talk about Rain Man or What’s Eating Gilbert Grape or whatever Eddie Redmayne is trying to win an Oscar with this year. But rather, we decided it would be more interesting for us to look at maybe not just the B-list films, but the C-list films. Because it turns out, there are a ton of bizarre, strange, often confusing films about disability that are not the type of thing that you’re going to probably see in theater, but is 100% the thing that you’re going to see on your streaming platforms like Netflix and Prime Video and Disney Plus, Tubi.
Jeff:
So Erika, why did you agree to do this with me?
Erika:
Why? Why would I agree to do this with you? I mean, I am interested in … I don’t know if it’s unfair to call this the underbelly of popular culture. I’m interested in knowing what are the … I’m familiar with the Oscar winners, I know those stories. But I’m curious to learn more about and maybe pick apart a little bit, some of the lesser-known tales that I wonder if these are going to really be lesser known tales, or if these are going to be tales that we know kind of well in different boxes.
Jeff:
So Invalid Culture is going to be about looking at the culture that is just that, invalid, things that probably should not be consumed. But don’t worry, weary traveler listening to this podcast, Erika and I will watch it for you and we will filter through the fun and the joy. If you’d like to play along with us, I’d recommend watching the movie before you listen to the podcast, but maybe not. Maybe you prefer to be spoiled, hear what the movie is all about, check it out after. But most importantly, we want to hear from you. Do you know an absolutely absurd film about disability? Have you seen something that left you questioning existence, reality, the very nature of humankind? Please send it to us, send it in. We want to know the filth that you’ve had to endure. Punish us for doing this to you.
Jeff:
So it is our first episode of Invalid Culture, and we have chosen, I would say, a great place for us to start. Erika, what was your … Did you have any relationship with this film before you watched it?
Erika:
No, I had never heard of this film. I mean, I knew who Frankie Muniz is from Malcolm In the Middle, of course. I was shocked to hear that when you spoke to people of a slightly younger generation about this film that it seems to be quite well known. I knew nothing about this film.
Jeff:
Yeah, I was also in the dark until, actually it was young people, kept referring to it in my class about disability of pop culture, my university class. And I will share I have special connection, I think, to this film, because right in the early 2000s, I suddenly had people telling me that they thought I looked like Frankie Muniz. And that’s a weird thing, because I do not look like Frankie Muniz at all. I mean, we’re both men I suppose, boys. We both have brown hair, I suppose. And I never understood it. And it wasn’t until years later that I saw this film and was like, “Oh dear lord. It’s because Frankie Muniz was in a wheelchair in a film.” And that’s what people are clocking. I’m reminding them of Miracle on Lane Two on some deep unconscious level.
Erika:
That is something.
Jeff:
It is weird. So let’s just put the record out there, I don’t look like Frank Muniz, I don’t think. Even if I do low-key maybe have the same manual wheelchair as he does in this film. I’m fairly confident that I have his exact same wheelchair. Different color, because I’m not basic, but the same wheelchair, I think.
Jeff:
So what are we even talking about? Well our friends that are listening, we are of course talking about Disney TV, not film, not even really Disney Plus, it didn’t exist at this point. We are talking, of course, about the made for TV movie, Miracle in Lane Two.
Erika:
From the Vox, “Sensational Frankie Muniz from TV’s Malcolm in the Middle, stars as Justin Yoder in Miracle in Lane Two, inspired by the true story of a mischievous and courageous 12-year-old who refused to let a physical challenge defeat him. His unrelenting desire to win a trophy leads to Justin’s discovery that it’s perseverance that makes a winner as he prepares for a national soap box championship race. Fresh, funny, all of action and heart, Miracle in Lane Two combines courage, challenges, and thrills for the ride of a lifetime.”
Jeff:
The ride of a lifetime. The bar is set very high.
Erika:
It is, but you know, I mean reading this over, it doesn’t even really ring, it doesn’t even ring with the film.
Jeff:
No, anyone who’s watched this film might be wondering, they’re like, “Well, I mean, Frankie Muniz is in it, there is a soap box race.” But a lot of the rest of it seems really disconnected. Did you find it fresh, Erika?
Erika:
[crosstalk 00:08:14] committing the pun?
Jeff:
Ah, interesting. That’s clever. Did you find it full of action?
Erika:
I mean, I’m not big on action so I can’t really say, but I think most of the action was contained within a short, five or so minute window, near the very end of the film.
Jeff:
Yeah, I’m wondering what they’re definition of action is here. I mean, Frankie Muniz didn’t kill anyone in this film that we’re aware of, implied, there may have been some implied massacres.
Erika:
Oh yeah, I think I would agree with that.
Jeff:
Maybe, I don’t know.
Erika:
I mean, if we’re talking attempts, I think there was an attempt at funny too.
Jeff:
Okay, yeah, I’ll give them funny. I laughed at it, probably not the way they wanted. Would you say that it combined courage and challenges?
Erika:
I mean, in the matter of speaking, there was a lot of … Was there a lot of courage? I don’t know. I think challenges were a real theme in the film.
Jeff:
Oh yes.
Erika:
And coming from unexpected angles. If we take a close look at the film, Frankie, excuse me, Justin wasn’t the only one facing challenges.
Jeff:
Which is actually something I kind of liked about the movie, I’m going to say. I liked the fact that everybody was broken in this film. Literally everyone. Maybe the reporters, they were maybe not broken, but of course lamestream media, so you know, they’re probably broken too. But I found it interesting just, “Would not let his physical challenge defeat him.” Did you feel like that was really part of the film?
Erika:
It wasn’t. I mean, I think it was the narrative. The narrative was intended to be he wasn’t going to let this physical disability ruin his life. But ultimately, I think what we see play out in the film are that there are real limitations that he faces.
Jeff:
Yeah, he does face challenges, I suppose, that are tangentially connected. As well as he almost dies a few times, that’s a recurring…theme which I guess…It’s funny, but I think watching the film, I don’t know that I really saw the disability as being the thing he was really fighting in some ways. It seems like he was fighting a lot of attitudes and physical barriers and trying to understand his where he fits in the family.
Jeff:
We are doing a review of this film, but we are just two random people from Canada. So we don’t know anything. So we thought it would be important for us to go to the legitimate sources of film review, and as you can probably imagine, the reviews were, in the press, not great for this film, not well-loved. I think one of my favorite comments comes to us from David Kronke, not sure, sorry David, DK, as his friends call him. Anyway, he wrote on the LA Daily News this brilliant quote.
Jeff [doing a strange accent]:
“It could also be important for some children to see someone they respect so much playing a handicapped character. They might feel a little sympathy for the disabled, and understand that there are fewer differences between them than there might appear.”
Jeff:
What we noticed in a lot of the reviews for the film is this real desire to situate the value of the film, not in its ability to stand as a part, but rather as its functional purpose in normalizing disability to non-disabled people, but also a little bit about what to do about disability.
Erika:
Just for anyone who might not know, something that really hit me about this quote is that, as you mentioned, DK themself, are not non-disabled, we presume, and so is Frankie Muniz. And this is something that I think really gives some shape to the film itself. Frankie Muniz, as far as we know, is not physically disabled. And I think we presume, having seen the film, that the writers and directors also, perhaps, don’t have a lot of lived real-world experience with physical disability, and we really see that in the film. So it’s interesting that this review is sort of setting this up as a story that’s maybe going to teach people, educate people, warm people up to this perhaps unfamiliar idea and experience of physical disability.
Jeff:
Yeah. It’s almost like they couldn’t just be like, “This movie is bad.” They were like, “Well, we should reward them for trying.”
Erika:
But this professional review really resonates with those Amazon reviews. This is a recurring theme, that this is an educational film.
Jeff:
Erika, what was your favorite one that you read?
Erika:
I think I’ll have to go with Gertrude Black’s five star review, Soap Box Derby, which reads, “I purchased this when my sons were participants in the local soap box derby. It was great inspiration for them. I have the trophy, magazine article, savings bond, and pictures to prove it.” So just, help me out with the interpretation of this, if I’m understanding correctly, Gertrude’s sons were in a soap box derby and were so moved by this film that they won a trophy.
Jeff:
And savings bond, they won money.
Erika:
Someone wrote a magazine article about this win, and obviously there are pictures. But this movie was so moving, it was so moving.
Jeff:
Without this film, her sons would be destitute and poor right now.
Erika:
What do you think that savings bond racked up to?
Jeff:
Honestly, I wonder. Did the savings bond get wiped out in the ’08 housing crisis? Did it survive that? Did it get wiped out in the start of the COVID financial crisis? I love it. I also love the idea that Gertrude is perhaps using films to inspire her sons in all of their tasks and she’s like, “Well, when they were getting ready for University, I got them that Matt Damon film, and they watched that. And now they know about apples and anger and they did great and now they’re Harvard grads, and I have the pictures and the educational debt to prove it.” Do we need to get more tactical with the disability movies? Why have we not made a movie about a disabled person during COVID? Because maybe that’s all it would take.
Erika:
If there’s anyone out there working on it, we need to know.
Jeff:
Hollywood, you can have that one for free. That one’s on us, the next ones you’ve got to pay for. So I like that one, I also liked … There was one from presumably a completely real name, Gurgly Bidet. If that is a real name, and Gurgly, if you’re listening to this, shout out to you brother. Five stars Miracle in Lane Two, “This movie is one of my favorite movies. I can learn a lot from physically disabled peoples’ lives and I can see that everything is possible if we want. I will see it again and again, I like it.” “I can learn a lot from physically disabled peoples’ lives.”
Erika:
I mean, I think that is the moral of this story.
Jeff:
Yes, we are educational tools, predominantly. That’s sort of what we’re here for. I love this … And this is going to come up a lot in our podcast, I love this narrative of anything is possible if you believe. And it’s like you can’t fly, it doesn’t matter how much you believe, you’re never going to be able to fly, you’re not a bird.
Erika:
If we can dive into the film, there’s this question of wanting to play sports. And Justin, who I’m having a very hard time not calling Frankie, wants to … It’s not that he wants to play baseball per se, it’s that’s he wants to be an athletic superstar like his big brother. But we see this attempt to play baseball and realistically, he can’t play baseball. The question is asked, “How are you going to run the plates? How are you going to traverse the grassy outfield? Can you play baseball?” And maybe … I think that just kind of flies in the face of this idea that you can do anything you want if you just will it to be, you can overcome reality?
Jeff:
Yeah, and that just completely ignores, obviously, the actual experiences and challenges that people with disabilities face.
Erika:
Right, that’s the challenge.
Jeff:
Yes. Or maybe this is actually disconnected totally, but it’s like, “Okay, disabled people, their lives are terrible, but what we can learn from them is that as a non-disabled person, I am a tremendously powerful and [inaudible 00:17:49] person, I can do whatever I want, and I should stop wasting my life.” This is that inspiration porn thing, right?
Erika:
Yes. And I think we do catch a little bit of that in this film.
Jeff:
A little bit. There is one other review, I think, that stuck out to me on Amazon by Pandorafan685. It’s unclear if the rings or of, of course, the home of the Na’vi in the film Avatar. I assume there are hundreds of fans on both sides. Pandorafan685, five out of five stars, Good Filmmaking is the title, which is very suspect already. There are some typos in this, so I am going to try not to butcher this as I read, but … “Disney did a good thing shooting a movie about a wheelchair bound boy in Justin Yoder, based on a true story. I also liked the scenes when they are in courtroom deciding whether Justin should play baseball or not. I like how the mom always defends him because he’s handicapped and should have a right to play. This is a good movie.”
Erika:
It’s a balanced critique.
Jeff:
I know, I like how he starts out as it’s like, “I’m glad that Disney did this.” And then he’s like, “I’m going to talk about the one very specific moment in the film for one sentence, and then I’m just going to wrap it up. In and out.”
Erika:
I think Disney would appreciate this one, because they got the pat on the back that they were definitely looking for.
Jeff:
They went, “Finally!, Finally someone appreciated what we were doing with this film.”
Erika:
I do have a couple questions about their “based on a true story,” and I want to note that in the intro to the film, I believe the text is, “Inspired by the life of…” I have some questions about the historical accuracy of this-
Jeff:
Inspired by the life of Justin Yoder. So for those of you who are listening, yes, there is a real human named Justin Yoder. But I wouldn’t say this is an exactly blow-by-blow as far as two Canadians have been able to ascertain. Justin, if you’re listening, call us. And that’s actually real, I’m not even being a dick right there. I’d love to be your friend, Justin, not because you’re inspiring.
Erika:
I really want to know what Justin has to say about this film.
Jeff:
I would love to know what Justin has to say about this film. So we’ve looked in at what the fans have said, “fan” might be, I’m putting that in giant air quotes.
Erika:
There are a lot of five reviews, these are fans.
Jeff:
Yeah, these are fans. Okay, these people loved it. There were a couple three out of fives, that also seemed to love it, I will say. They were like, “Eh, TV movie, but I loved it.” But this idea about who the film is for is a recurring theme in a lot of that. Is this movie for non-disabled people to learn about disability? Or is this film for disabled people to be inspired by the accomplishments of the disabled person? Where do you fall on the paradigm, Erika?
Erika:
This is where I tend to fall in general on this whole discussion of disability narratives. I’m not sure it’s necessarily one or the other. I’m not even sure that this is really, at the end of the day, a film about disability.
Jeff:
No.
Erika:
Right? I think we’re going to see some big themes that are less about disability and more about humanity and life and death and everything that falls in between, and human interactions, and family dynamics. The family dynamics here are interesting, but [crosstalk 00:21:36] if I have to fit your mold, I’m going to go the narrative about I think it is more about inspiring than educating, and that is all that I can give you right now.
Jeff:
What’s fascinating is that a lot of the reviews seem to indicate that this is a movie for disabled people. They’re like, “Oh now, I would never watch this film, however, if you have a child with a disability, this is for them. Go and watch Miracle on Lane Two with your disabled child, that’s who this is for.”
Jeff:
And I find that fascinating that there’s this massive divide between what I think was the intended audience, which is I think to normalize disability. I think that’s what they were trying to do. And that’s totally not how people have seen it. Even our old friend DK, at the LA Daily News, he was like, “This might be an important film for disabled people.” This might be good for them to watch.
Erika:
I don’t know if this is the point at which we get to dive into where they went wrong if their intent was to educate, but I do think we have to talk about the way that disability is constructed in this film.
Jeff:
The good news is that this film is actually really straight forward and open about how it feels about disability. It doesn’t really hide anything. In fact, I think the best way to understand the politics of this film is to actually listen to the opening monologue. I cannot stress this enough. This is the opening monologue of the film, in which Justin, sitting in his bedroom, watching his able-bodied brother, Seth, play basketball, begins to lament about his life, and then eventually goes and has a nice conversation with God in heaven about everything that is wrong with his body. Take a listen.
Justin Clip:
In this living room, if Seth is perfect, then I’m special. Which is my all-time least-favorite word. It’s how people say they don’t expect much from a kid in a wheelchair. God, are you listening? God? God?
God Clip:
Who’s there?
Justin Clip:
I thought you knew everything.
God Clip:
I don’t like being tested.
Justin Clip:
Justin Ross Yoder.
God Clip:
Why are you here?
Justin Clip:
I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but I think when you made me you messed up.
God Clip:
I don’t make mistakes.
Justin Clip:
Well, somebody sure did. I mean, look at me.
God Clip:
You look fine.
Justin Clip:
Fine? I’m 12 years old and already had 24 major surgeries. My legs are linguine. I have more stitches in my head than a baseball.
God Clip:
What do you want me to do about it?
Justin Clip:
Isn’t it obvious? Fix me! Make a miracle! I mean, you still do miracles don’t you?
Jeff:
Do a miracle. And ideally, a miracle that is in an area where vehicles travel, perhaps a lane or a pathway would be fantastic.
Erika:
Not the main one, but the secondary one.
Jeff:
I think the fact this movie starts right off the bat, right off the hop, talking about Justin’s disability as he’s looking out this window forlorn, looking at his sporting brother playing, “My brother’s perfect and I am but a broken special child who was not made right with my linguine legs and my stitches in my head.” Defining disability seems to be a really important part of this text. How do they define disability in this film?
Erika:
Leaky. Wet, very wet. I think we later learn that the apparent diagnosis is Spina Bifida and Hydrocephalus and we hear a lot about the Hydrocephalus because this fluid-filled head could burst at any moment, bringing on death. And that’s a big theme here that our hero, Justin … Is he the hero? Antihero?
Jeff:
Yeah.
Erika:
… That he could burst at any time. That he is living under the shadow of imminent death, he is broken, not made right-
Jeff:
A mistake. Although God says, “I don’t make mistakes.” But I think we, as the audience, are supposed to kind of agree with Justin, “What the heck?” But this is the journey, this is the journey the movie is going to try and take us on is that we are going to learn through Justin that he’s not broken, that he’s not a mistake, that he is special, I guess, but that it’s all part of God’s plan. If you didn’t know, there is a religious undertone (overtone?), central thesis in this film. And there’s a reason for that, I think, which we’ll discuss later.
Jeff:
But it feels like the medicine doctors, science, seems to be essential roles here in terms of defining who Justin is. His diagnosis proceeds him everywhere he goes.
Erika:
It’s virtually all that we know about him. I mean, we don’t know anything about Justin’s social … Outside of his family, we don’t know, we never meet Justin’s friends, we don’t meet his teachers, we meet his physician.
Jeff:
Yeah, we meet his doctor.
Erika:
That’s it, and God. He has a relationship with God and a relationship with his family, and that is virtually all we know about Justin other than his very leaky body.
Jeff:
Yeah, it’s almost like this weird … It’s like every time he meets a new character, he reveals a new thing about his body, like his body is him, that is his life, there’s nothing outside. I find it fascinating that we meet his brother’s friends. His brother maybe has a girlfriend, maybe it’s just a woman who’s a friend, and then there’s this other boy that is sort of around his brother for some reason. We meet his brother’s baseball team, we meet all of these people in his brother’s life and we never meet anyone in Justin’s life.
Erika:
Except for the villain in the movie who he links up with eventually.
Jeff:
Right, Justin does make a friend. Disability, then, seems to be very much situated within the body that this is a kid who’s entire life circles, it orbits. And that seems to be kind of the center of his family in some ways too.
Erika:
The concerns about Justin himself? Or the concerns about the medical aspects of Justin?
Jeff:
I would say both, I think, in some ways. Early on in the film there’s this scene where he has a bit of a headache and it’s like, “Drop everything, get him to the hospital.” Everything seems to kind of orbit the needs of Justin.
Erika:
And fascinating in that scene, Justin is not being heard. Justin is trying to tell the family that this is not an emergency, but everybody is so locked in their routine to save Justin’s fragile medical life that they can’t hear Justin telling them that he’s fine.
Jeff:
Right, being like, “No, this is just a headache, I’m fine.” Yeah. And even both the parents are working long hours to pay for medical bills. In a scathing indictment on the payment of academic professors in this world, the father is both a STEM teacher, he teaches in STEM, but has to work as a house painter to pay for the medial bills. And the mom’s hours and even the brother, eventually, will then sort of break down in the ways in which his relationship with the family is driven by Justin’s medical fragility.
Erika:
Is it worth noting that the brother, himself, also has some kind of undisclosed invisible mental health disability something? It’s not the center point, it’s apparently not as expensive, although he is going to therapy, it sounds like, weekly.
Jeff:
Yeah, and drinking bottles of medicine, like straight from the bottle, for his what I assume is erectile dysfunction. It’s unclear. It has something to do with his tummy.
Erika:
I believe he describes it as, “Matters that are like baseball.”
Jeff:
Yes, so like a stick and balls being erect.
Erika:
Scoring bases.
Jeff:
Yes, yes. I think the movie is probably implying that he has some sort of anxiety disorder.
Erika:
In either case, it is very much about emotions, very much about his emotions.
Jeff:
Absolutely. And doesn’t really get any play. In a lot of ways, it’s like, “Well you’re fine, Justin’s not. His physical needs are far more important than you psycho-social needs.” So I think one of the things that, as we said earlier, a really contentious moment in many of these films are what I’m going to call the Yoder fantasies. So Justin Yoder often daydreams throughout the film, he has these sort of fantasies. So we made notes on all of the ways in which Justin kind of fantasizes, and what the outcomes of all of those fantasies are. And the film actually starts with a fantasy scene in a very relevant moment.
Erika:
So I think they’re at … Is it a grandparent? Great Uncle?
Jeff:
A Great Uncle? I think it said Great Uncle.
Erika:
Yeah, so they’re in a church, at a funeral. There’s a religious figure talking about the life of the deceased and Justin goes into this wondering, “What would they say at my funeral? What would my funeral be like?”
Jeff:
As one does at a funeral.
Erika:
But the anxiety is, “Nobody would have anything to say about me, what would they say about me?” There’s nothing to say about me. The only thing that anyone knows about me is my fancy, Quickie manual wheelchair.
Jeff:
Yeah, there’s this monologue from the preacher, right? Who’s going on about all of the sweet add-ons to the wheelchair. Which I am going to contest. I do not see offensive wings anywhere on that wheelchair. I think that is completely made up and shame on you. But it’s funny, it’s like immediately he, number one, as a child, a 12-year-old is thinking about his own death which we’ve been primed to understand that death is a part of his life, it’s lurking around every corner. But at the same time, shout out to this film in some ways. I think it’s actually a really clever fantasy here, to be like, “People don’t see me. I’m just a wheelchair, the wheelchair is the best part of me that people see.” And that that’s not true. Even if it is literally the first scene in the movie, second scene, they’re like getting ready for the funeral in the first scene and then they immediately are at the funeral and he’s dreaming about the sweet release of death.
Erika:
You know where the fantasy ends, is where he actually … So it’s all in his head until he vocalizes, “What about me?”
Jeff:
Yes, at the funeral. Which, hilarious for one. That’s something I’m going to start yelling at every funeral during the eulogy. And this is what then sets off the journey. This is the hero’s journey, is for Justin Yoder to become more than his wheelchair. You know what, I actually think I now agree, I think this is a battle against his physical impairment. But if he wants to beat the wheelchair as being the most important thing about him.
Erika:
And the vehicle that he chooses-
Jeff:
Is another wheelchair.
Erika:
It’s through sportsdom. It’s through ultimate achievement of athletics as embodied by Seth, his virulent but-
Jeff:
Erectily troubled brother.
Erika:
More subtly fragile brother who has a supreme collection of trophies. I have a fair few trophies myself, but this is unlike anything I have ever seen before.
Jeff:
This man has won every sporting competition in America since the 1980s, all of them.
Erika:
Since before he born.
Jeff:
Yeah, he was winning trophies in utero for sure.
Erika:
Although I don’t know about that because mom, we learn, doesn’t … Her sports knowledge is quite lacking. I believe he argues something about a touchdown at a baseball-
Jeff:
Right. Yeah, because she’s a woman, right? So sports don’t work in women’s brains. We all know that, that’s just truth.
Erika:
The gender stereotypes in this depiction are strong.
Jeff:
Oh yeah. Yeah, if nothing else, Disney is like, “There are two genders and we know everything about them.”
Erika:
And they know nothing about each other.
Jeff:
Right, so they are completely divorced from each other and they only tolerate each other insofar as sexual relation. Procreation is a part of it, but this movie is actually pretty pro-sex.
Erika:
I mean, again with the under overtones, they are there. But there is no sex.
Jeff:
No. Unfortunately, the movie does not have any hardcore pornographic moments, unfortunately.
Erika:
They are alluded to. There is the strawberry massage oil in the bedside table.
Jeff:
Yup, absolutely. And his parents do try to bang on the kitchen table?
Erika:
But they can’t, because they are too busy making money-
Jeff:
They’re interrupted, literally.
Erika:
-To cover Justin’s medical bills.
Jeff:
Oh yeah. Let’s put a pin in that one. Because those are really more our fantasies, as opposed to Justin’s fantasies.
Erika:
Right, Justin’s fantasies.
Jeff:
Right, yes. So he has these sports fantasies, he fantasizes about his sportsdom.
Erika:
So the sports one that I remember, did you remember this one? He’s picturing himself playing baseball. It’s like a bases are loaded, crowd going wild, dark night lit by stadium lighting, and he’s in the outfield waiting to catch this ball or I should say, the ball is waiting for him to catch it.
Jeff:
Precisely.
Erika:
Because the ball hangs in the air as he gets out to it.
Jeff:
Yeah. The rules of Justin’s fantasy life are confusing, I am confused. Because he has the power to control the ball so that he can wheel to get to the ball. And honestly, shout out for them not eliminating his wheelchair in his fantasies. That is a common thing in films, where they’re like, “Of course he would fantasize that he could walk.” And that’s not Justin’s fantasies, Justin’s fantasies are really about a world that kind of bends around him in the way that he is. Which, dare I say, this movie might be kind of progressive accidentally. So he can control the ball, but he can’t make his wheelchair go easy in the grass. Or, he doesn’t fantasize about himself being muscular and ripped. We never see Frankie Muniz in an athlete body in any of these fantasies.
Erika:
I don’t know, I think what we see is it’s not that he wants to play ball, it’s not that he wants to be good at ball, it’s that he wants to accomplish the quintessential act that will earn him the symbolic trophy.
Jeff:
Right. Yeah, it’s the win that he wants.
Erika:
It’s the win.
Jeff:
And he doesn’t want to change for it.
Erika:
I don’t know though, because he asks God to fix him.
Jeff:
That’s true, that is true. And then we have the legal fantasies. The legal fantasies are I guess I’m team family court, what are you? Are you team family court? Or are you anti-family court?
Erika:
I was kind of neutral in the family court. It didn’t bother me. It fit in well with the other fantasy scenes that we have appearing throughout. They moved the plot along, they enable some grappling with topics that we might not have otherwise seen come through. I thought the jury composed of 10 or so different couples of the parents was a bit of a stretch, but …
Jeff:
I liked how it showed two different but also kind of familiar archetypes of disability parents. They showed this dynamic in which Justin’s parents, the mom and the dad, are not actually totally aligned on what’s best for Justin, and what Justin needs.
Erika:
Exactly.
Jeff:
And then we get this … I don’t actually know the dad’s politics, that’s a little bit less clear, but the mom’s politics are really clear. What she thinks is best for Justin is abundantly clear, and that is inclusion. This is that fierce disability mom, the special needs mom that we hear so much about, where it’s like, “My son-”
Erika:
Well, Justin even calls her … He describes her as the grizzly bear.
Jeff:
Yeah, right, that she’s going to maul anybody that gets in the way and that the most important part is that her son is included, inclusion.
Erika:
Because sports are for fun, she says. And the thing that we learn about Dad is that Dad is sportsman, but Dad has renounced sports because Justin can’t play. So what Dad really wants … And we see this as his enthusiasm for soap box derby picks up, what dad really wants is for Justin to have the authentic sporting experience.
Jeff:
To be a sporting man, yeah. Yeah, so he wants authentic inclusion, whereas the mother seems to want more participatory inclusion.
Erika:
Yup, totally.
Jeff:
And the final fantasy, the reason that I first messaged Erika and was like, “We have to do this film, we have to,” because it has one of my favorite scenes in a film that I maybe have ever seen. That’s going to change as we do this. As we do this podcast, I’m going to come to new favorites. So tell us about the end of the movie, Erika.
Erika:
How to begin to describe this scene? I wish I could recall, and we might have to go back and look at this … What is the prompt? What does Justin say to God that prompts God-
Jeff:
So I know this.
Erika:
You know this?
Jeff:
I actually know this.
Erika:
Okay, what is it?
Jeff:
Everything is wrapped up, the movie is basically over, and Justin realizes he’s a champion now, he’s won soap box. So he connects with God one last time. And because this is a movie about death, he’s like, “Hey God, what is it like in heaven?” Like, “What is heaven like?”
Erika:
And God, who does not make mistakes…
Jeff:
And so then, God’s like, “Well let me show you.” And I can’t describe it without dying and seeing it. And Frankie Muniz, Justin, describes it as perfect. What is perfect heaven?
Erika:
Perfect heaven for Frankie/Justin is everyone in manual wheelchairs tinged in gold with giant flopping angel wings.
Jeff:
Just zooming around.
Erika:
Zooming around, looking as angelic as you could imagine. Perfect, it’s perfect.
Jeff:
Okay, let’s take a step back here. Here’s what I want to know. What are the rules of heaven in this world?
Erika:
Well I’m just wondering, is it that you are physically disabled on arrival? Or is that only physically disabled people get into heaven?
Jeff:
This is the question, the existential question of this film, does God disable you when you arrive in heaven and put you in an angel wheelchair? Or the more militant interpretation, only disabled people go to heaven? Or, are there multi-heavens in which the disabled go to the disabled heaven, the non-disabled go to the non-disabled heaven, and Seth goes to erectile dysfunction heaven?
Erika:
I think this conversation might be it’s own podcast, but I think the most salient point here is that we have reached the culmination of this film, it’s utmost message, which is Justin is perfect.
Jeff:
Yeah, perfect as he is.
Erika:
Now the real question is, is he perfect because he has now achieved his trophy?
Jeff:
Well yes. See, he was flawed before. He was going to hell because God only likes winners.
Erika:
I mean, he’s a champion race car driver.
Jeff:
Yeah, this seems to be the message. Okay, we have to talk about sex. We have to. Because we have come too far.
Erika:
Because Disney wasn’t going to, so someone has to.
Jeff:
But Disney does talk about sex. What is amazing to me about this film is ostensibly, it is for children, but there are overt references to sex. Like, his parents are written as sexual beings.
Erika:
I think the first thing that we see, Dad comes in the front door, Mom’s on the phone, and they have this sort of quick romp in the front hallway.
Jeff:
Yeah, before a funeral.
Erika:
You may be wondering why we keep referencing strawberry lube. And that is because there is a scene in this film where Justin Yoder discovers the strawberry “massage oil” in the bedside table of his parent’s bedroom.
Jeff:
I am not a sex therapist, I am not a registered massage therapist. But it seems to be the only reason you would want a flavored massage oil is if you were going to consume said massage oil. Is that an accurate take?
Erika:
I mean, there’s got to be something to be said for the olfactory experience.
Jeff:
It wasn’t scented though. It was strawberry flavored.
Erika:
I mean, flavor is … Yeah. I mean, you can’t contest that, nope.
Jeff:
This was clearly a sex lube joke in a children’s show.
Erika:
Oh yeah.
Jeff:
Undeniably.
Erika:
And if it were just on it’s own, let’s say dad was a massage therapist, and happened to have a collection of massage oils, that’s not the case. We have flirty parents who are-
Jeff:
Constantly trying to bang, perpetually.
Erika:
But are they actually sleeping together? Because I think we see them, they’re trying to, they want to, they have made kids. But there seems to be this obstacle.
Jeff:
Right. Yeah, they’re always being interrupted. They’re always interrupted by the disabled kid. It’s like, “Who will win? Two horny parents or one wheely boy?” And the answer is the wheely boy is supreme.
Erika:
Perfection prevails.
Jeff:
Yeah, he is perfect in his absolute desexualizing self.
Erika:
Is there something here about the religious overtone and the abstinence?
Jeff:
That’s a really interesting question, because I feel as an audience, we are supposed to feel for the parents, like we want the parents to be just mating all the time. And we want them to have that. But Justin, his differences, his specials, makes that just not really possible. But I think we’re supposed to want it though.
Erika:
I think it kind of also helps us tap into this impaired masculinity that is a commonality between, I think, all of the men in this film.
Jeff:
Yeah, so let’s talk about how a film about little penis cars go down a road. I will say, the film informs us that some people believe the soap box derby racers with the black tips go faster. Unconfirmed if that’s true or not.
Erika:
Completely unnecessary comment. When that comment is thrown out, there are no black tips to be seen.
Jeff:
No. And Justin Yoder does not have a black-tipped car. So it’s not true. The color of your car does not necessarily impact the performance. What if we look at this film through the lens of gender masculinity?
Erika:
I mean, this is your wheelhouse, but this is a quest for a trophy. It’s a literal quest for a trophy.
Jeff:
Right, the basis of the movie is … It’s almost like a Cain and Abel story, sort of, where it’s super God sport athlete brother who has friends, and all of these phallic trophies, and then loser beta brother who wants to be a man and win trophies, or steal trophies.
Erika:
Oh yeah, because he doesn’t have to earn it, he would happily just give his hand. He will lie, he will cheat, he will steal, as long as he gets the trophy.
Jeff:
Possession of the trophy is what matters. But if possession of the trophy validates him in the way that his brother Seth has been repeatedly validated as the holder of the [inaudible 00:48:46].
Erika:
I was surprised to find out a bit later in the film that Dad also was an athlete.
Jeff:
Also, holder of trophies.
Erika:
Not just a STEM professor painter.
Jeff:
Slash house painter.
Erika:
Also, former holder of trophies. But he has renounced his athleticism in the name of … I guess, is he trying to be on Justin’s level? He doesn’t … Because this is the tension with Seth and Dad, older brother and Dad, is that Dad hasn’t participated in this athletic lifestyle with Seth. He has to sit it out because Justin can’t participate and he can’t be there for Seth if he can’t be there for Justin in the exact, precise same way.
Jeff:
Yeah, there’s like this guilt. Like if he engages with Seth’s proper masculinity, it forces an acknowledgement of the improper masculinities of Justin, that he’s not a winner, he doesn’t possess the phallus. Is this about guilt in creating? Does the father … Is the necessary punishment of birthing an inadequate male, the punishment is that he then is also not a male? Is he contaminated by … Because that is the fruit of his loins, this disabled child, and therefore he has to give it up. And he also has to relinquish Seth, but as Seth can’t be the son anymore because he produced a faulty product.
Erika:
Right, I think then the mission of his life becomes rehabilitating this impaired son. His only chance at redemption is to fix the son.
Jeff:
Right, to be able to reclaim, to get back the power of masculinity. So the brother is a big part of this film, obviously. The interaction … Sort of the interaction with Seth and Justin is one thing, but more so, it’s this interaction with Seth and the family and the ways in which his athletic achievements are no longer being validated because Justin now is into racing soap box cars. But the brother also has problems. So as we said earlier, he is now seeing a doctor for reasons that we do not know, and he’s guzzling non-descript medicine.
Erika:
I think it’s Pepto because of his stomach issues.
Jeff:
Interesting. But it’s a medical bottle, this is not over the counter Pepto. This is the real … This is medical grade.
Erika:
Antacid? Is it an antacid?
Jeff:
Antacid, yeah, maybe. Yeah, it’s odd. Whatever it is, apparently there’s no dosage. Because he just slugs it like it’s a bottle of whiskey. What is it about these films that seem to always position the disabled person in juxtaposition with the hyper athletic and hyper performative sibling, whether it’s a brother or a sister?
Erika:
Is it the contrast? Like is this part of defining disability as lack or as other?
Jeff:
It’s like a desire? Literally in this film, Justin literally desires to be sad.
Erika:
I have a beef, and maybe it’s a beef or a confusion. So we started this film and Justin is gazing out on the driveway basketball court, flat pavement surface.
Jeff:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). And a Paralympic sport.
Erika:
Right, fabulous. So it makes sense when we see the baseball fantasy, you know, we’ve got grass, it’s tough to traverse in a chair with a glove on, that much makes sense. But why can’t he be out there playing ball in the driveway?
Jeff:
Yeah, with his brother.
Erika:
And his dad. Later in the film, we see the dad and the brother reunited and they are, once again, on this flat plane of a driveway playing ball, which Justin explains that his legs are linguine but his arms are kind of ambiguous. His arms seem to function well most of the time. But occasionally, he is acting some kind of hand gesture.
Jeff:
Some sort of spinal cord injury.
Erika:
Yes. I mean, he does enough with his hands in the film to suggest I think he could hold a basketball.
Jeff:
Yeah, and probably throw one, probably. Yeah, and note also that the brother literally plays every sport. So we hear that he is a baseball star, we see him play basketball, he wins the league or something at soccer. This kid is playing every sport and dominating at every sport, just crushing it. And Justin wants to live … He lives through that a little bit, he talks about Seth pushing him around for a victory lap when his brother wins. So he gets to kind of earn some of that or feel some of that pleasure of masculine conquest. But he wants the real thing, it’s like not a good enough hit for him.
Erika:
The moment that that starts is when his brother, instead of taking him on a victory lap, is gallivanting with a woman.
Jeff:
Right, absolutely, yeah. He’s like showing off to this ambiguous woman character, who I do not believe has a line in the film.
Erika:
Is she the same blonde friend?
Jeff:
From the beginning, yeah. I’m 90% sure.
Erika:
Yeah, if she is the same one I think they might have had some dialogue when they were roaming through the neighborhood. And then there’s also the outburst scene when Justin calls out that his brother is crazy, that he’s going to a shrink, and that he’s crazy, cuckoo, nutso, he just unleashes everything…rawr…
Jeff:
Right, exactly, he’s like, “Well my legs don’t work, well his brain doesn’t work,” right in front of the girl, because she is there, right, when that happens.
Erika:
Yeah.
Jeff:
Yeah, he has to humiliate him. It’s like I can’t get to the Zenith of masculinity so now I need to pull you down into the sad castration land of the man without the phallus.
Erika:
Yeah.
Jeff:
Now another thing that I’ve noticed, I’ve noticed this in a lot of films, particularly about physical disability. I think it has to do with masculinity, I believe, is that Justin Yoder, throughout this film, is just bursting with fluid. This is a goopy dude who just does not have control of his fluids. He’s got water in his brain, he makes reference to losing control of his bowels, he makes a lot of references to bladder problems. He is just this leaky, fluidy boy. And I wonder how much of this is about contamination. It’s that anxiety, not just that Justin might die, but that idea that Justin’s body is just seeping out on everybody. And I think fluid and masculinity, there is certainly a connection I would say. A seminal connection, if you will.
Erika:
You seem to have glossed over the blue vomit scene?
Jeff:
Yes. Literally bursting with fluids. Oh man. I’m assuming that vomit scene, I think they probably thought that would play with the gross funny. This guy is just fluidy, super fluidy. And that seems to be a problem. Like literally, there’s the problem of his life. But there’s a lot of times where his bowels and his bladder comes into it with just no connection or context.
Erika:
Yeah, the other connection that it’s just bringing me back to is when the race car driver, not in a God fantasy, but in real life, visits him in the hospital when he finally does burst with fluids. Race car driver visits him in the hospital and picks up his bed pan as a steering wheel and then takes it as a souvenir.
Jeff:
Which he definitely pooped in.
Erika:
Oh yeah.
Jeff:
There is no way.
Erika:
Think also, when the family comes in and he tells them that the famous race car driver has taken his bed pan, there’s sort of a bashful moment of, “Oh yeah, by the way, can someone call the nurse?”
Jeff:
Right, like, “Also, I still have more fluids that I need to get out of my body.” Why did he not try to win a trophy for biggest poop?
Erika:
I have a question about this leakiness. How are these fluids different from the tears that his brother ultimately sheds? Because I do believe his brother is the only one that we actually see cry.
Jeff:
Yeah, that’s true.
Erika:
I think Vic, who we haven’t really talked about, but Vic, our sort of villain turned family member.
Jeff:
Something.
Erika:
Vic talks about sadness following the loss of his child and-
Jeff:
Entire family.
Erika:
But yeah, it was the brother that we do eventually see burst into tears. And that just seems like that those fluids are treated differently.
Jeff:
Yeah, I think part of it is control. I think control is another thing that’s running under this. Things that Justin cannot control, things that Seth can and cannot control as well, that seems to be a big part of this narrative, right? Like the ways in which Justin is not at fault, and the ways in which Seth perhaps gets to a point where he also is seen as blameless in his erectile dysfunction.
Erika:
But the thing with … I guess Justin’s leakiness is Justin. That is how we know Justin, he is a leaky boy.
Jeff:
He’s just a moist boy.
Erika:
But Seth, Seth has this on lock. No one is to know what these secret doctor’s appointments are about. He has a stomach ache, he does not have any kind of emotional issues. He doesn’t even have emotions because he is sport.
Jeff:
And as the famous film quote goes, “Winners never shiver.” He’s in control.
Erika:
The famous quote?
Jeff:
Yeah, it’s Werner Herzog. That is probably a very niche reference.
Erika:
Well, this might be the right demographic.
Jeff:
Maybe, our friends and family specifically.
Erika:
Specifically your friends and family.
Jeff:
That’s who’s listening to this, I assume. Hello family.
Erika:
Hello friends.
Jeff:
Thank you for caring for my leaky body. Don’t have a brother, but my sister has a lot of trophies, maybe they were right. What I didn’t have growing up was a villainous black man who eventually became my best friend. This is, of course, the character Vic. And I think we need to talk about Vic.
Erika:
Child hating is a descriptor that you have left out.
Jeff:
Oh sorry, yes, hates children. And is feared. At the beginning of this movie, he is feared by the townsfolk. Right, is that what I would say? I think that’s accurate.
Erika:
Oh absolutely. He’s this mythical figure that supposedly kills children or murders someone.
Jeff:
Yeah, he’s a murderer for sure. But also is very concerned about hooligans in his neighborhood, specifically the children hooligans. Don’t believe me? Take a listen to how Vic is introduced at the start of this film.
Justin Clip:
I’m in a good town with friendly neighbors, with one major exception. Old man Vic.
Vic Clip:
You hooligans are going to get somebody killed.
Justin Clip:
Who is all alone, hates kids.
Jeff:
Vic is a complicated character. At the start of the movie, he does not want to get involved. He is literally the villain. But eventually Justin discovers that he can access a trophy through Vic, either by stealing one of Vic’s trophies from his garage or maybe, if Vic will take him under his wing, to learn the ways of the box.
Jeff:
So Vic eventually takes Justin under his wing, they form a relationship, at which point we are informed that Vic has lost his entire family. That his daughter drowned?
Erika:
Yes.
Jeff:
Died swimming.
Erika:
Swimming accident.
Jeff:
And then the wife, I think, died of a broken heart, I think is the … implication?
Erika:
Yes, the doctor’s called it many things, but he’s convinced that it was a broken heart.
Jeff:
It was a broken heart, classic, absolutely. Is this a prequel to Star Wars? And Vic himself wanted to die.
Erika:
He didn’t have the courage.
Jeff:
Yeah, he had contemplated ending his life, but he didn’t have the strength to do it. And so he lives as a villain, an angry man taking care of cars. He’s into rare cars, sports cars if you will, and swears off soap box.
Erika:
This is how they meet. They meet because villain Vic is in a car show and Justin sees an opportunity to co opt this trophy.
Jeff:
Right, yeah, so Justin makes this deal. He’s like, “I will help you win the car show by being the pathetic wheelchair boy, and in exchange you will let me have the trophy of the car show.”
Erika:
He is like, “Yes.” And then Justin gets impatient and tries to steal a trophy and ruins Vic’s prize possession sports car in the process. And I don’t think we can look past the symbolism of the sports car.
Jeff:
Yes, Justin Yoder breaks into his garage and destroys his sports car. And that is the birth of a beautiful friendship.
Erika:
A beautiful friendship that inspires Vic to become a new person.
Jeff:
Yeah, it’s like as Justin is learning how to be a soap boxy derbier, because apparently Vic is like the Dale Earnhardt of soap box, this guy knows it all. He’s like, “Oh yeah, the instructions tell you to make it this way, but that’s wrong, because soap box derby is a lot like nuclear physics.” And Vic is the Oppenheimer of his text. So it’s ostensibly Justin learning from him. But of course, this is a family movie, old Vic has got to learn a lesson as well.
Erika:
And what lesson does he learn? We have an audio clip for this one.
Jeff:
Yeah, roll it.
Erika:
If I may.
Vic Clip:
I wanted to die, but I just didn’t have the courage, just crawled up into a ball and forgot to care. I was doing pretty good too, until you come busting into my garage.
Justin Clip:
I’m sorry.
Vic Clip:
Sorry, that’s the best thing that could have happened to me.
Justin Clip:
Really?
Vic Clip:
Yeah. I got to know you, see what you’re going through, how you just keep going. You got me and my car back up and on the road again.
Jeff:
And now Vic is ready. He’s overcome his feminine emotions and he’s ready to be a man again. But that was the piece of him that was broken that needed to be fixed. It’s funny, too, because at the end of the film, Justin’s dad tries to hug him and he’s like, “A handshake will suffice,” because I’m a man again.
Erika:
And then shortly thereafter they are out on the freeway, he has decided he will no longer be towing his red sports car around, he is ready to drive it, and he’s got his convertible, hot woman in another convertible is checking him out on the highway. Confirmation that this masculinity has been restored fully.
Jeff:
Oh yeah. Vic and that woman, 100% met up in a truck stop, they got out the strawberry lube, and then Justin interrupted them.
Erika:
He had not yet-
Jeff:
I think that was a deleted scene.
Erika:
He had not yet achieved his trophy at perfection.
Jeff:
No, he had not fully achieved. So no one is getting laid until Justin gets laid.
Erika:
So when we get into the soap boxing … Soap boxing? That’s what they call it, right?
Jeff:
Yeah, the suds. When they get into the suds.
Erika:
When he first starts the sport, there is this extreme celebration over the fact that he finishes. It’s like … That is definitely not what he was in it for.
Jeff:
Survival was a huge accomplishment.
Erika:
Right.
Jeff:
Yes, and then he goes on to win the national trophy. He wins it all against a woman. Most of the people he races against are women, I will also note.
Erika:
Yes, which is interesting because what do we know about the sport? Have there been female champions in this sport?
Jeff:
Because I’m now a sud head, like everyone else, I actually did look this up and there are female winners, 100%. I will say, the year that Justin Yoder competed there were no women that won that year.
Erika:
Justin must have won.
Jeff:
So that’s a fun thing about that, is because according to their website, Justin Yoder has never won a national championship of the All American Soap Box Derby.
Erika:
You’re telling me that a novice joined the sport and didn’t win in his first competition?
Jeff:
Yeah. Oh also, we should also point out for our listeners who have not seen the movie, he only makes the nationals because someone has to drop out.
Erika:
But he lost to that person because of his leaky malfunction.
Jeff:
Yeah, he had a disability, a leaky moment, and ends up in the hospital. So as far as I know, Justin did not win a national championship. Justin Yoder, if that’s wrong, come and fight me, and we will prove that we are both real men. So the movie ends in triumph. He wins the championship, which he didn’t.
Erika:
We’re re-writing history here, so go with it.
Jeff:
I’m going with what I read on the internet. And if I’ve learned anything about the internet, it is that it is 100% true. But the movie inspired by, not based on, Justin wins, Vic becomes a man again, Justin’s dad and brother figure out their relationship, they’re now besties again. And that’s it. Are you inspired?
Erika:
Were you inspired?
Jeff:
I mean, did I for a moment consider whether or not I could take over the soap box industry? The thought crossed my mind. I would say no, I was not inspired. I’m sorry.
Erika:
I think I was maybe slightly … I don’t know if inspired is the right word. But I did kind of appreciate the … I appreciated that this ultimately ended up being a story about Justin learning to accept himself.
Jeff:
I will fully agree with you, from a disability politics perspective, I actually didn’t hate this movie. Even if it was completely ham handed most of the time.
Erika:
Yeah. I mean, when you have someone telling someone else’s story, presumably without consulting the protagonist, despite their brief cameo.
Jeff:
It’s unclear how involved Justin Yoder was in the making. Yeah, they don’t cure Justin Yoder, he wins the medal, I think he has to win. I feel like if he didn’t win people would be upset. Because the real story of Justin Yoder is that the brake that is invented, the Justin brake, that is a real thing. And that literally is a thing in soap box now. He does have a mechanism named after him. But that’s not exactly made for TV movie material.
Erika:
No, and it was … Unfortunately, that was quite down-played. There was a good bit of a scene where the brother, interestingly, kind of inexplicably, because the brother does not strike me as the type who was so politically engaged that he was going to be the one to come up with the strategy to call the media to ensure that this hand brake was allowed to be used despite very strict soap box rules that regulate the construction of soap boxes and only allow a foot brake.
Jeff:
Yeah, feet only.
[Theme Music] Hip hop beat from “Hard Out Here For a Gimp” by Wheelchair Sports Camp
Jeff:
So we felt it would be remiss of us to not talk a little bit about some of the very strange little things we’ve learned about this film in production of this podcast. Because of course it is not just about watching the films, but rather it’s about digging in and trying to find out what, if anything, we can find out about the film. And we actually did find some interesting things about it.
Jeff:
So one of the things we wanted to keep track of is what brands of disability equipment are present within these films. So for those of you who are wondering, I’m sure you are, Justin Yoder’s wheelchair in Miracle in Lane Two is a Quickie brand wheelchair, so that is one notch for Quickie. And I also was thrilled to see in the credits, there is a wheelchair consultant credited in this film, a Barbara C. Adside. Now why Justin Yoder was not their wheelchair consultant, I don’t know. It seems like you had one in house. After all, he does appear at the end of the film. What does a wheelchair consultant do, Erika? Do you have any idea?
Erika:
I mean, I think your question about why it wasn’t Justin is rather on the nose, because if we already have someone involved in the telling of this story who is rather expert at wheelchair use, why are we hiring an outsider? But on the flip side, if we’re writing and directing a film, folks who have no insider knowledge about the world of wheelchairs, I suppose there are … We need someone who can talk about the logistics of chairs and fields, for instance.
Jeff:
Like how to push it maybe? I wonder if this is like an OT. I wonder if Barbara C. Adside is like an Occupational Therapist or something who was like, “Okay, this is where you get the chair, this is what it looks like, here’s how you push it.”
Erika:
Oh, so you think it’s more about acquiring it and using it rather than … I was thinking about the translating it into reality into the film.
Jeff:
Okay, this is like the dramaturge for Frankie Muniz, he has his own wheelchair person maybe. He’s like, “Oh no, I’ve got a woman … I’ve got a person for this very role. She’ll really help me work through it.”
Erika:
Of all people, Justin’s pastor came up with the concept for this film, I believe wrote the film.
Jeff:
Wrote it, and was involved in directing.
Erika:
So there’s a factoid for you.
Jeff:
His pastor, which to me means he wrote himself into the film. Because the pastor at the beginning of the film at the funeral.
Erika:
Yeah, so there’s a real life connection. And another interesting real life parallel is that Justin Yoder’s dad is, in fact, a college professor in deaf community. Does he teach ASL?
Jeff:
Teaches ASL I believe.
Erika:
I found that rather fascinating that on the whole, we’ve agreed this film has some troubling plots, perhaps representations, and so this was a factoid that really shocked me, that there were disability or deaf community actors here. And this just raised a lot of questions for me about what was their involvement in the film? Were they consulted? Was the family, was Justin consulted or part of the film? Or simply the subject of the film and not really invited to participate beyond that?
Jeff:
Yeah, if you look online and read, there’s actually an article about his father talking about the importance … His real father, not the man who plays his father in the film, the real Father Yoder, he talks about the importance of deaf culture and protecting deaf culture, and trying to bridge the hearing world and the deaf world, and really advocating for deaf people, deaf culture, particularly within the church. And it was at that church that they met the two writers of the film. And it’s interesting, since the Yoder family are actually this kind of activist family, or at least advocate. They are trying to raise the voices of lots of disabled people. And Justin seems to do that as well. There’s not a lot on the internet about Justin Yoder, but it does appear that he continues to try to speak out for acceptance of disability, I would say. Which is kind of cool.
Jeff:
I almost wonder if they told the wrong Yoder story. I wonder if there’s actually some more interesting things going on in the family that soap box derby is maybe actually just one slice of a broader narrative of acceptance, inclusion, thinking about disability not as a revolting other, but rather as an other that we should be accepting as opposed to fixing, rejecting, changing.
Erika:
Yeah, and it’s unfortunate, then, that that’s not the story that got told here.
Jeff:
So final thoughts. Erica, Miracle in Lane Two, what does it mean?
Erika:
I definitely don’t want to give this film more credit than it deserves.
Jeff:
Fair.
Erika:
It is all kinds of problematic. I’m quite disappointed in some of the significant oversights as I’ve already expressed my frustrations with why is Justin watching people play basketball from his bedroom window when he seemingly is perfectly capable of playing basketball? It tells us something about who created the film and what imagination drove the creation of this film that we see those kinds of oversights. I do … Ultimately I feel okay about the sort of underlying story of self-acceptance, but for me, that glimmer of hope was very much shrouded by the sap, the very thick sap that, I think, said a lot more about the people creating the film than its supposed audience. Whether we believe that the supposed audience were the disabled in need of inspiration or the non-disabled in need of education.
Jeff:
Yeah, at the end of the day, Yoder has to win in a non-disabled place in order to be seen as valuable. That is the overcometh that happens. He couldn’t go and join the Paralympics, that wouldn’t have been enough, that’s not the trophy he wanted.
Erika:
Absolutely. But I will say, in sort of maybe some credit … Again, I don’t know why I’m trying to give this movie credit, there is perhaps some credit due in the fact that they didn’t force him into the baseball. He didn’t go and play baseball just for fun. He found a sport where he didn’t have to change who he was to participate, he got to be himself and he won the trophy.
Jeff:
Absolutely. And if we were to take a theoretical take, what do you think … Not the politics, but what do you think is the ideology of Miracle in Lane Two.
Erika:
I mean, kind of summarizing … If I could summarize what we’ve covered in as few words as possible, I saw a narrative of this phallic trophy masculinity life, threatened by, pursued by this disability as death.
Jeff:
Yeah, like it’s not just the loss of the phallus, it’s like the death of the phallus.
Erika:
And for the procreative possibility to die en route.
Jeff:
Yes.
Erika:
All the death.
Jeff:
All the death.
Erika:
What’s your theoretical take?
Jeff:
I feel … I think that this film, it treads a lot of the typical physical disability tropes. Like the feelings of inadequacy, the feelings of wanting to be included but not being included. And the idea that the focus of the person is the body, caring for the body, trying not to lose the body, trying not to die. And knowing that that might be inevitable anyways. So while I think it does some good things, which perhaps is actually a credit to the Yoder family … And maybe the good stuff in this film is actually the influence of the Yoder family and what was kind of observed in them, the way that they operated, talk, and that kind of thing. It’s interesting, to me, that the film still had to cling to that kind of … He still had to overcome, there was still that drive, they couldn’t let it go. He had to win at the end of the day.
Jeff:
So I wonder how much of this is about performance of normative activity is the pathway to acceptance for disabled people, that disabled culture is not the direction. You should not lean into your disability, but rather you should force yourself into the normative world.
Erika:
100%, I feel that. My question is, is that a conscious objective of this film? Or is that the sort of subconscious leaking into the attempt to create a film that’s going to sell?
Jeff:
I think so. And I don’t even know if the idea was to sell. I think part of this was a desire to heroicize Justin Yoder. I feel like one of the intentions was to share the story about the special boy. I think that that was a driver to show this fun family who are doing great things despite the challenges they face.
Erika:
But to retell the story in a way that he wins …
Jeff:
Yeah, to give him what he didn’t have.
Erika:
Or to give him what the filmmakers felt it was important for him to have.
Jeff:
Which is why I will be making the sequel to Miracle in Lane Two, which is about how Justin Yoder won the Oscar for best film.
Erika:
For best cameo?
Jeff:
No, the film in general, because he directed it in my movie.
Erika:
Oh, yes yes.
Jeff:
In my movie, Justin Yoder wrote, starred in, and directed Miracle in Lane Two, and then won the Oscar.
Erika:
This just goes to say, you can do whatever you put your mind to. Anything is possible.
Jeff:
Yeah, exactly. And he won it against Kathryn Bigelow, because he has to defeat a woman apparently.
Erika:
Oh yeah.
Jeff:
Did you see the Hurt Locker? That was nothing compared to Miracle in Lane Two.

[Theme Music] Hip hop beat from “Hard Out Here For a Gimp” by Wheelchair Sports Camp

Jeff:
Well I think that is maybe as far as we can go on Miracle in Lane Two. I think we’ve really unearthed some things. And if you feel the same, if you enjoyed your listen, then check back. We are going to have more episodes coming in. Make sure you subscribe, and of course make sure you tune in, because our next episode is sure to be a barn burner. That’s right, we are going from the glorious streets of Akron, Ohio, out to the West Coast, for a little film known as Different Drummers.

From all of us at Invalid Culture, we hope to talk to you soon.