Tag: Impairment-Cognitive

Transcript – Part 1

Jeff:

Hi friends, Jeff here. This month’s film and by extension, the next two episodes come with a big content warning ahead. You will hear on several occasions a harmful word colloquially referred to as the R word that has been used to invalidate disabled people for a very long time. There’s also an above average number of swear words in these episodes. Kind of related kind of not. While we have tried to avoid using the R word when possible, there are moments in this podcast where it couldn’t be avoided, and for that we are sorry. If you are not in a space right now to hear this type of content, this film and next two episodes might not be for you. That’s okay. Don’t worry. You’re not missing anything by taking a little break. Before we go on, we also felt that it was important to note that contrary to what folks may argue, the R word is absolutely connected to histories of medical labeling that have been used to invalidate the personhood of disabled people.

And it is these histories that animate its use to this present day. You cannot refer to someone or something as an R word without evoking this connection and perpetuated the belief that people with cognitive disabilities are less than saying, I didn’t mean it that way. Doesn’t change this what you mean pales in comparison to what it means to others and maybe even more importantly, what it presents as natural or uncontested willfully. Continuing to use this word makes you at best, complicit and ableism and at worst, a failure of a human being. Our languages are filled with millions of colorful ways to disrespect people. So maybe let’s commit to using words that don’t rely on de-legitimizing metaphors of our brothers and sisters, just to make a joke. Be nice to each other, even if this podcast is really not about nice things.

[The trailer for Special Unit plays to open the episode]

Jeff:

You are listening to Invalid Culture, a podcast dedicated to excavating the strangest and most baffling media representations of disability. This podcast is all about staring into the abyss of pop culture adjacent films that never quite broke through because well, they’re just awful. So buckle up folks. The following content is rated I for invalid.

[Mvll Crimes song, “Arguing With Strangers” plays]:

I’m argue wing with strangers on the internet, not going out today because I’m feeling too upset, argue wing with strangers on the internet and I’m winning.

Jeff:

Welcome back to another thrilling edition of Invalid Culture. As always, I am your host, Jeff Preston, and I’m joined by co-host. Sarah, how are you doing?

sar:

Straight out of the hells of avernus because it’s 44 with the humid X today. How are you, Jeff?

Jeff:

You know it. I’m feeling just as hot as this movie is. It’s fitting that we are living in a literal hellscape and we had to watch this movie.

sar:

It’s true. It’s also straight out of avernus.

Jeff:

We are not the only ones of course who had to watch the movie. We are joined as always by a very special guest, a very fitting special guest. Actually, given the movie that we’re talking about this week or this month, we thought we should get a poet on to the show because only a poet could actually unpack this. I think so we are joined today by Liv Mammone. She is an editor and poet from Long Island. Her poetry has appeared with Button Poetry, the Poetry Foundation, medical Journal of Australia and many other places. In 2017, she competed for the Union Square Slam as the first disabled woman to be on a New York National Poetry Slam team. That’s pretty amazing. Liv was also a finalist in the Capturing Fire National Poetry Slam 2017 Brooklyn Poets Fellow Ze Glossier fellow. She’s also currently editor at Game Over Books and in 2022, lib had one of the most red poems at splitting this rock’s poetry database to worry her first collection, which will be about 18,000 times better than the movie that we watched is coming out in 2025. Liv, welcome to the pod.

Liv:

Hi. I am so delighted to be here, and yes, even with all my imposter syndrome, I can genuinely say the book will be at least 18 to 20,000 times better than the movie that we just watched. No amount of imposter syndrome can take this away from me.

sar:

Liv, do you ever get physically exhausted by the amount of awards per year you win? Do you ever just go home covered in Taylor Swift style Grammys and you’re like, I literally cannot carry them all?

Liv:

That’s very sweet of you. Yeah, no. Actually, that bio is actually the crst thing about me. I sent Jeff the bio because we’re not as close as some of Jeff’s other friends who have appeared on this podcast. So I emailed Jeff and I was like, do you want a bio? And I always feel so cringey sending the bio to people. It does actually sound like I have a career as opposed to just sitting at home in my house telling people when they get commas wrong in their sentences and telling them when they’ve been ableist, which is kind of my job. The book basically is just stuff that able-bodied people have said to me in publics, kind of what I do for a living is just look at people and be like, you’re never going to believe what happened to me today. I was actually really nervous to come here because I was like, oh, they’ve had Lawrence Carter Long on this podcast who I actually think is a brilliant man, and I’m like, oh, they’ve had some really smart people on this pod. I’m not a film person. I don’t know how to talk about movies really. And then I watched this movie and I was like, I’m good.

sar:

Don’t worry Liv. They also have me on this podcast, so it evens out, right?

Liv:

No, you’re so smart. No, I’m not going to do what I did to you off mic and shower you with compliments, but you are so, so insightful and I am so excited to get to talk to you about this terrible movie.

Jeff:

Well, Liv, I’ll tell you, the good news is you are not the only person who’s not a film person. Christopher Titus is also not a film person, and they are the ones who created our film. This month we watched the baffling film Special Unit. Now for those of you who have not watched Special Unit from the Box, this is the description of this movie due to the Fairness and Disabilities Act, the Van Nuys PD is forced to hire four handicapped undercover detectives and their training officer happens to be the worst cop in Los Angeles. Now, Sarah, would you say that’s an accurate description of what happens this film

sar:

Compared to the other descriptions of other films you’ve made me watch? This one’s actually phenomenally accurate.

Jeff:

I actually agree this. I’ve never seen a more accurate description. That’s exactly what happens in this movie.

Liv:

Yeah, summed up. Summed up very well, very succinct. Yeah. Again, not to jump too far ahead, this movie could have been 40 minutes long. It’s an hour and 40 minutes long, and just with that summary, it’s like this movie could have been 45 minutes and we wouldn’t have lost anything.

Jeff:

Oh, easily. I think when we started watching this movie before we watched it, I said to Sarah, oh yeah, I think that’s an 88 minute, 90 minute in and out. Wham bam. No, it is not friends. It is almost two hours that you will never get back.

Liv:

So freaking long.

sar:

Couple movies have been longer actually.

Liv:

Yes, The Hill was very long. I checked the runtime on that one too and I was like, man, that’s long. It’s not. It’s too much. That’s more than I would invest.

Jeff:

It’s far too much.

sar:

Not all of y’all are Martin Scorsese

Liv:

Really truly. Even Martin Scorsese sometimes is not Martin Scorsese. There’s no need for those movies to be that long.

Jeff:

Absolutely, absolutely. Now it’s fitting me via, the tagline for this movie was Surrender Before They Hurt themselves, which I think gives us a bit of a sense of what type of movie we’re getting ourselves into. This movie has been described as a screwball comedy. It feels very much like Family Guy, kind of edgy. We’re going to say offensive words and it’s going to be funny. I think that was kind of what they were trying to go for, but the movie has also, bafflingly won several awards. It won the best actor, David Filioni won best actor in a feature film at the Chicago Comedy Film Festival Second City. What are you doing?

Liv:

I feel bad for, I don’t want to cut down one of my own because that actor is disabled and I don’t want to Good for him, but also, oh my God, why? What? Really not even Debbie Carrington. Okay,

Jeff:

Sure. Nope. It also won the best comedy feature at the Los Angeles Film Awards and it won the jury prize Best Direction award at the Hope Film Awards. Now, the website for that award has not updated since 2017, which means that in my opinion, Christopher Titus is the undisputed uncontested champion of the Hope Film Awards now of seven years running. As far as I know,

Liv:

Viewers, you can’t see how far my jaw is actually away from the top of my face listening to the fact that this won awards. Wow, guys,

Jeff:

It won multiple awards. The film itself is dedicated to James Troesh. They are a quadriplegic actor writer. They passed away in 2011 and thus we’re not required to be in or watch this film, an early version of the script. This is…okay, are you guys sitting down? Everyone needs to be sitting down. If you are listening to this and you’re in a car–pullover. An early version of this script was designed as a pilot for TV and it was directed by Brian Cranston.

Liv:

What? Oh my God. Yeah. I want that so badly. I want to see it. I want to see what Brian Cranston did to this. I have so many questions.

Jeff:

So by my account, Brian Cranston now owes the disabled community for two pieces of crap that he has been involved in.

Liv:

I was going to say, wasn’t there. The other one as well that I haven’t watched that the in

Jeff:

Intouchables, yea

Liv:

That version of the French film that he made. Yeah. He still owes us for that one as well.

Jeff:

Yeah, Brian owes us for that. He owes us for this. We’ll give him Breaking Bad, but he’s still behind. So Brian, if you’re listening, you owe us.

Liv:

You owe us. Sorry dude.

Jeff:

Yeah. So who is actually responsible for this movie? Brian Cranston was not directly responsible for this movie. It is predominantly the responsibility of a writer director, comedian Christopher Titus, who’s been kind of all over the B movie circuit. Most notably Christopher Titus was in the class cult classic Tiller Clowns from Outer Space. He also appeared in one episode of 21 Jump Street. He also appeared in an episode of Colombo and an episode of the Twilight Zone reboot. He also has written and starred in his own television series titled Titus, which was nominated for a daytime Emmy, did not win and won the 2003 Excellence in Production Design award for the Art Directors Guild. It should also be noted though before we move forward that this is not the first time that Tida has got involved in disability, in fact, and one of his very popular standup specials.

Liv:

Oh, good. I’m so glad we get to talk about this. I’m so glad we get to talk about this.

Jeff:

We’re going to talk about “Voice in my head”. Titus goes on a bit of a rant about the R word stating that he does not believe the R word is actually associated with disabled people. For instance, he thinks that disabled people like Oscar Pistorius are advanced. I do not know if this joke was made before or after Oscar Pistorius murdered his wife. Rather, he defines “retarded” as quote, “it means you were born a certain way, you were born a certain level, but you didn’t live up to that. You were behind where you should have been and goes on to say that if you have everything working perfectly, you have all your facilities about you, you end up addicted to crystal meth and living under a bridge, you are effing retarded.”

Liv:

So a definition that no other person uses. Great, good. So he’s invented his own definition for why he’s allowed to say this word. No other person who’s ever used this word has used it in this context. Okay. Alright. Titus. Alright. Right.

sar:

I don’t want to attribute it solely to him because he’s using a manifestation of that word that was around quite a bit when I was growing up. So late nineties, early two thousands. That’s pretty much what it meant. He’s right about that, but we were all wrong. Right now, I think one of the filling words for that now might be just working class, all the stereotypes associated with people who live their entire lives below the poverty line, which would include me, but I also feel like the original definition included me. So Christopher Titus just made a career out of being a slightly less funny and worse looking. Joel McHale with terrible disability writer.

Liv:

Thank you so much. I was actually going to say he’s trying so hard to be Joel McHale in this movie. It is wild to me. I now having watched community, I actually, the reason that I picked this film is because I am a tightest fan girl. Really. His standups were really, really important to me when I was 1920 in college and when I saw that he made this film, I love him and I love Billy Cardell, so I didn’t have a lot of hope, but I was like, okay, how cancelable are these two guys going to be at the end of this hour and 40 minutes? How offended am I going to walk away? Really, really feeling bad about my affinity for Christopher Titus’s work at the end of this 40 minutes, and that’s why I really wanted to watch this. I went in kind of with this very graceful, I don’t think this is going to be made with bad intent because I know this is kind of titus’s thing.

He has a lot of jokes in his standup about his disabled friends, comedians of his who are disabled, who have done things that he thinks are really, really funny. I was like, okay, I don’t think this is made with bad intention. Let’s see how badly they missed the mark. It’s not like I went in saying it was going to be a good movie. I just was like, alright, let’s just see how bad the misfire is because I don’t actually think that Titus is trying to make fun of me. I genuinely don’t believe that. I genuinely do not believe that he is trying to, it’s not like watching Family Guy where I’m like, I genuinely think that people who make the show hate disabled people and are trying to make

Disabled people. What I do think at the end of this movie, not to jump too far ahead, is the Titus is deeply confused about his feelings about disabled people and really just wants to be able to say the ar slur with impunity and has made an entire hour and 40 minute movie about why he should get to do that and that’s what this movie is. I really think that that’s just what the whole point of this was, that he just really wants to get to say the ar slur you guys just really a lot. So

Jeff:

It’s okay. It’s a funny word apparently.

Liv:

It’s a funny word.

Jeff:

Yeah. So I bring this quote up because we’re going to circle back to this exact conversation in a moment. Before we do though, who else was in this film? Well, that’s right. Sports fans. We have for the first time ever on invalid culture, we have a back-to-back appearance, a repeat offender on our podcast, and that is Debbie Lee Carrington who plays Sophie. You may remember her as Kitty Kats in tiptoes, but more likely you will recognize her from pretty much every pop culture thing of the eighties and nineties, including appearances on Harry, the Hendersons Seinfeld, Baywatch in the Color, the Drew Carey Show, married with Children was also in movies. This is True Life Returned of the Jedi, Batman Returns and Men in Black, but more than that, most of you probably remember her as Thumbalina in Total Recall.

sar:

I was going to say, how did you do that list without total recall? Come on!

Jeff:

Yeah.

Liv:

I want to talk to Debbie Harrington so bad after watching this movie. I have so many questions I want to sit down on. You have a discussion. I really, I want to have a discussion so bad. It’s like, oh my God.

Jeff:

Debbie has had a genuinely incredible career and in no way deserves to be tortured by movies like Tiptoes a special unit. So Debbie, get help. Please, please. So our fan favorite in Chicago apparently for whatever that is worth is David Figlioni who plays the artistic savant Alvin. As far as I can tell, David does not identify as disabled. I looked everywhere. I don’t see any description of this. Figlinoi has made a lot of appearances in television. He was on an episode of Brooklyn nine nine. He was in an episode of Mom. He was also in Penny Dreadful. He also apparently has been in over 100 national television commercials, which is amazing, but even more amazing Canadian connection. He did a three year international tour as a circus clown for Cirque de Soleil.

Liv:

Oh my God, yes. I want it so much. I need to see it.

Jeff:

It makes a lot of sense actually. When you think about the character, there was definitely some clowning going on with the Alvin character.

Liv:

I suppose the one thing I will say is that he’s having a great time this actor, regardless of what I have to say about the performance, which is we’ll get to it. I have a lot to say about it. He’s having a ball and you can tell, and I really hope that everybody on this movie had a good time. This goes back to what I was saying about I don’t think this movie is made with ill intent. I really genuinely feel that this movie thinks it’s funny and thinks it’s trying to say something different and interesting, and I really hope that everybody on the movie had a good time because I did not have a good time watching it, and it’s only saving Grace is if the people making it had a good time because we obviously didn’t, so I hope

Jeff:

So. It was a bad time. It was a bad time.

Liv:

It was a bad time.

Jeff:

Yeah. Our stuttering cop with Cerebral Palsy, Morgin, it is played by Michael Aronin. Now, Michael Aronin is an actually disabled dude who does a combination of motivational speaking and comedy from his speaker’s Bureau website. It says Michael speaks about what it is growing up with the disabled in an able-bodied world and of the importance of Believe it in ourselves of building and maintaining a support system and of the crucial role humor and attitude can play in our lives. Michael will tell you his only disability is losing his hair at an early age.

Liv:

Okay, that’s funny.

Jeff:

That paragraph comes two paragraphs after a paragraph, which says that his disability is cerebral palsy. So I think she actually has two disabilities, cerebral palsy and losing his hair

Liv:

Yeah, I get very cynical about stuff like this. I get very cynical about the only disability is a bad attitude. It’s like, nah. Especially as I’m getting older and I’m getting sicker, I’m kind of like, ah, I don’t know. Dude, I have some questions.

Jeff:

Yeah. Oh, for sure. Our foursomes rounded out with conspiracy seat theorist, wheelchair user, Mac, who was played by Tobias Forest is also actually disabled, uses a wheelchair in real life, whatever that means, and has probably most famously appeared in an episode of How To Get Away With Murder in 2014. He also, however, wrote and appears in a fairly successful 14 minute indie film called Dead End Drive, which is a zombie movie. You could watch it on YouTube that picked up a bunch of festival awards in 2020 and 2021. So presumably scorned by not winning any awards for his turn in this movie, he went and did it himself and won way more awards with that end drive. So you could check that out.

As you can probably imagine, there was not a lot of critical response to this film. There are no reviews on Rotten Tomatoes that you could access. So I had to go a little deeper in. I did, however, find two fairly detailed reviews of this film, one which was quite positive and one that hated it, and that’s the one that I want to talk about. So Flinthart wrote on a website called Mutant Reviewers Movies, which is a great name for our website. Flint Hart was not a fan of the film, basically wrote a dissertation about this movie. It is the longest review I’ve ever seen. It is extremely angry from the review. Flinthart says, quote, bottom line, the movie is one long string of R word jokes and what kind of solace, sociopathic idiot figured you could mount a premise like that for comedy while still somehow respecting the people whose disabilities underpin every single joke that made it to the screen.

Liv:

Ding, ding, ding. Yeah, this is definitely what I walked away from this movie with, but better stated.

Jeff:

Well, unfortunately, not everyone walked away with that opinion because if you scroll to the bottom of this review, you will discover that Christopher Titus has jumped into the comment section and replied to the review.

Liv:

He’s a reply guy. Oh, delightful.

Jeff:

Okay, so here’s Christopher Titus’s review to the review quote. This is a quote folks, I did not say this. There are some swearing, so plug your ears quote you piece of shit you think these actors didn’t read and approve the script. They did that. They didn’t know what it was. My friends are disabled. They get fucked over by Hollywood on the Daily. I made a promise to Michael Arman that I will get this made disabled people with power, not the normal sage of the wheelchair or cripple that needs to be protected. So fuck you and your review. I have parents who have thanked me for the vision and inspiration their disabled children have been given because of my $3,000 film. You’re a shit reviewer with the insight of a blind air light pilot fuck off. Sincerely, Christopher Titus.

sar:

That’s an incredible review

Liv:

It’s a rich text

sar:

I want to agree with it, but I also kind of disagree. How do I want to say this? I have a nuanced opinion on this and I’m trying to say it non offensively. I think that Christopher Titus’s goal here was an in-crowd film by disabled people for disabled people that wanted to do kind of the quid pro quo thing of making up what he felt the in-crowd would be and do and act like. And it’s possible that between him and his friends, this really is his day-to-Day and his day-to-Day and disability culture is just late eighties, early nineties. Constant slander and unenlightened opinions and really derivative thinking about Crip culture and I accept that and I think he is kind of trying to defend that Crip culture isn’t any one thing by saying, fuck you, you piece of shit. But if you read between the lines of that to hear super generously, I think I can create or co-create what Crip culture looks like.

For me. It’s an overly generous review of what Christopher Titus is trying to do, but I don’t think the movie is entirely guilty of just being full on parody. I think there are elements of it that you can pull out of it where there’s a little more nuance and that can explain things like why most of this cast is disabled and why Brian Cranston wanted to direct, but what we came out with in the end is hard to defend and that makes this opinion really difficult to say out loud. You hear what I mean here?

Liv:

Yes, absolutely. Thank you so much, Sarah, because this is what I mean when I said I have a little bit of grace for Titus going into this movie. I wanted to do this movie because I actually really like Titus and really respect him and actually was thinking of getting a tattoo of something that he said in his most recent standup. This is our relationship is serious. We have a relationship. Christopher Titus and I do actually believe that this is how he talks to his disabled friends and his friends have given him the go ahead about this. I think that that is genuinely true, and as somebody who I am not the most politically correct person, I have a very, very dark sense of humor if I know you and love you. My non-disabled friends have made jokes about me that have made me cry laughing that if you ever said them in public, people would beat my friends in the street.

Really just genuinely terrible. My whole barometer is it’s only offensive if it doesn’t make me laugh and this movie Sin is, it did not make me laugh for a whole hour and 45 minutes. So I don’t actually even have as much difficulty with the premise as it is just profoundly unfunny. This would be fine for me if any of it was funny and if the jokes weren’t all making fun of the protagonist of this movie, which is really where I think Titus is a little bit confused. You can’t make a movie. He doesn’t know whether he wants to uplift these characters or call them idiots for an hour and 45 minutes, and that’s where it all kind of gets a little bit muddled, which is why I kind of don’t, I believe that he believes what he is saying. I really do. I also want to draw out specifically disabled parents telling Titus that this…

Jeff:

We can talk about…

Liv:

Thank you? Yes, draw some attention to that a little bit because that really for me is a very important distinction. Parents of disabled children or adults rather versus actual disabled people giving Titus the go ahead on this movie that was made for three grand. So I really want to draw attention to that.

Jeff:

So I have two things for, so I fully agree with you with eyes. To me this feels like Christopher Titus is a blunt instrument trying to perform surgery. This is a thing that needed a bit of delicacy and a bit of, I don’t want to say wit, that’s not the right word, but Titus feels like a bit of a bull in China shop. It feels like you’re just going to run in and smash stuff up. Okay,

sar:

But wait, maybe that’s part of the point. If you continue to do the good faith reading, maybe the fact that we think that Crip culture has to be done delicately is part of the point he’s making.

Liv:

Yeah.

Jeff:

Yeah. Very, very possible. So I fully agree with them. Disabled people are regularly screwed over by Hollywood. They say when people are regularly presented as these sages or Indian protection or whatever. He’s totally right about that. I don’t know that this movie did anything to combat that. Well, no, and I would love to know what parents are showing this movie that they’re, oh

sar:

My God, yeah, that audience is zero. Who would do that? He’s on about an audience for this movie that doesn’t exist

Liv:

Generously that perhaps happened to him once maybe, and that’s what he’s going on

Jeff:

Christopher Titus, if you are listening to this, please connect us with the parents of these disabled children. We would really like to talk to them. That would be fascinating to learn, but folks, it actually just gets better. A review of this film was also posted on Reddit on r slash bad movies, and once again, Christopher Titus jumps into the comment section with a defense of his film. Love Titus says, this is on Reddit. We did this movie because I have so many friends that are disabled and they only get bullshit rules. They’re wise, sage, disabled guys or someone able bodied has to help them and save them. This movie, I made them the heroes. We hired 16 disabled actors. The movie is funny with a message about just treating disabled people like you want to be treated, and yes, they do stop a school shooting to you who are offended yet not disabled. Fuck all the way off. Sincerely, Christopher Titus. I will say I’m enamored with the reality that this man signs off his internet comments with sincerely Christopher Titus

sar:

It’s giving email signature. “Sincerely”. When people sign their name and then underneath they know it’s going to attach their email signature, but they attach it anyway

Liv:

Or it says, sent from my iPhone. When you get an email from a really old person and it says, sent from my iPhone at the bottom of every single one because they don’t know how to change it, this is such a delightful encapsulation of what Titus is doing with his time. I really, oh God bless. I just really, I love knowing this so much and the fact that this doesn’t really make me feel any worse about him. I love that. For me, I’m kind of like, oh, the level of empathy that I feel towards this man, like, oh buddy, I really, oh, I want to have a conversation with him so bad. I really want to be able to sit down with him and be like, I understand. I get it. You didn’t hit the mark here, my guy, you just didn’t do it.

Jeff:

Yeah. So I included this because I thought that it was important context to get us into Christopher Titus’s frame of mind, and I think it maybe does help us to unpack the movie a little bit later, but I also wanted to do it because I have never seen a producer of a film from a movie that we’ve covered kind of defend their film publicly in the comment sections, and so shout out, that was great.

sar:

Well, it actually made me more willing to defend the movie here because I showed up today ready to just rip this film apart and now I’m trying to give it this kind of pseudo blaxploitation like reading where he’s trying to do this at least somewhat intentionally, and I think it is making a really interesting point about casting and role setting and type casting and this and that and the other thing, but it’s also making a kind of derivative point about how humor translates, even when you take it for granted that there are different in groups for humor and there are different Crip cultures and there are different ways that people want to tackle both of those things, and the Venn diagram of this intersection is oceans apart, and I think that’s where you can start debating was his intention that people hate disabled people more after this? No, but I can see why you got that.

Liv:

That is unfortunately what will occur perhaps if you watch this film. I don’t know. This gives me a really interesting insight into a question that I came away from the film with, which is who is this movie for Christopher Tit

sar:

16 Disabled Friends? That’s where this movie was for

Liv:

That’s it exactly, it’s him and the people who were in this movie. That’s who this movie was for because I walked away from this being like, I don’t know what, who was the audience for this? I don’t understand.

sar:

It very clearly defined an in-crowd, and if you weren’t in that in-crowd, by Titus’s definition, he not only wanted you to feel alienated by this film, he wanted you to feel actively disrespected by it and it worked, but it didn’t do what he thought he was going to do as a result of that.

Jeff:

Yeah, I don’t know that this was exactly the gotcha that he intended for it to be.

Liv:

It did not offend me as much as I thought it was going to is the most generous thing I can say because there is a long bit in one of Titus’s earlier standups that I actually used to find very funny, and then I got radicalized where he refers to kind of the voice in his head that tells him inferior things about himself as his inner ARS slur, and he does the voice and kind of does a proto Trumpian very clearly cerebral palsy, inspired hand gesture, and it’s supposed to be this kind of thing about that’s the voice in your head that tells you things about yourself that are untrue. That’s your kind of negative is your inner because that person is an idiot and doesn’t know you as well as you know, and therefore that’s kind of the payoff of the joke. I also think that there’s something interesting here to say about genre, and this is a point that a friend of mine made. I’m taking this from a friend of mine, a journalist named Esme Mazzio, who wrote an article about how a lot of the comedy of our youth in the eighties and nineties is just making fun of disabled adults without actually knowing that that’s what they’re doing. If you watch Elf or Billy Madison or Happy Gilmore, a lot of that.

sar:

I think Happy Gilmore was very aware of what it was doing.

Liv:

Do You think he was aware of it? Okay.

Jeff:

Dumb and Dumber.

sar:

I think that was the entire joke of Happy Gilmore.

Liv:

Okay, great. So if you watch The Waterboy or any of those types of films or even some of the early Jim Carrey stuff, I feel has a little bit of this flavor to it as well. And I remember being that age and watching those films and being 10 or 12 and thinking, I didn’t have a sense of humor because I just didn’t find any of this very funny, and I was just kind of like, oh, okay, sure. They’re doing a weird voice, all right, for a whole couple of hours. And then it was only when my friend made this point in her article about Elf that I was like, oh, maybe that’s why I didn’t think I was funny for 20 years because this is uncomfortable for me and I just didn’t realize that it was me and people like me who are being made fun of. So I think if you look at it in that RA of film, I think Titus is really going for, what if we said the quiet part loud? What if we actually did absolutely what we actually were doing the whole time, but we didn’t admit we were doing and we actually hired some of the people that we’re making fun of to make fun of themselves.

sar:

Yeah, you’re thinking like a marriage of American Pie meets The Ringer and he just did both badly.

Liv:

Yeah. Yes.

Jeff:

Now I also agree with Christopher Titus, the reviewers in this world don’t know anything. The real reviews we find from random people on the internet who post things on websites like Amazon and IMDB. Now this movie I had a really hard time finding because yeah, no one writes about this movie. I don’t think many people have seen it until this until now. People are going to see it. So I do have two though that I want to read to you because they tickled me and I really need your help are saying this. Okay, so our first comes from IMDB. Both of ’em actually come from IMDB. Our first is from User Greenheart. They gave the film a seven out of 10 and the review is titled The Specials A lady Mayor Jilted by her ex-fiancee that seemed to work with a group of cadets who are part of a disability scheme in order to get reelected.

I really don’t know what to feel about this. I would love to have a view for the disabled community. The four Disabled cadets are excellent, very funny, and yet there is so much cheap shot humor, although you would expect that everything will turn out okay. Calling people with disabilities retards constantly is just not cool. The idea was great. The acting in casting was spot on. The script was the only thing that I found close to retarded. I’m using scenes at a gun range, at a martial arts class. The scene where school kids parade to safety when a shooter enters their school is just plain heroine. So much potential. I really did enjoy it. I just felt unnecessarily uncomfortable at times.

sar:

As I think about this, and especially taking some of Liv’s commentary into context, it feels like what the pitch might’ve been to whoever the fuck produced this was. I want to do American Pie, but I reduct it for Crip culture because a lot of what people are complaining about is what people in the nineties were complaining about with American Pie, where you’re being outwardly offensive and most people won’t find it funny, but the niche will kind of thing. The American Pie Band Camp film basically invented that for when I was a teenager, and then he saw things like I keep thinking of The Ringer just because the concept is similar. The Ringer was about Catherine Hegel, I think it was trying to train Johnny Knoxville to be in the Special Olympics, and it has a lot of similar overlap jokes to what was predictable in this film.

The Ringer was terrible, but at the time when The Ringer came out, I found that film funny, and I think if I watched it again, there would still be parts I would laugh at, but I’m having trouble rectifying how you go for the kind of American pie larger than life being intentionally offensive, being for a niche and foreign in-crowd and still doing so much wrong by that in-crowd in ways that I don’t even think the ringer achieved. I think because the writing, but B, the intention of the ringer was to kind of try to say, you see how shitty we’re being and the intention doesn’t feel the same here. It feels more like, fuck all the abs able bodied out there, and also we can go fuck ourselves too.

Jeff:

Yeah. I think one of the reasons I love this review and by love is, I mean this not in the way that love works as a word on the opposite of love is this notion of in back-to-back sentences. The person is like, it’s not cool to use the R word and then is like, but I also thought that the script was R word, and I think that that’s exactly what this movie is doing too, where it’s like it’s saying, haha, I’m saying this bad word, but I shouldn’t be saying it and it’s a bad thing and you shouldn’t do this. But then I’m also going to lean into these other things very naturally and very subtly, which I’m not even thinking about because I’m not actually a part of this broader community. I don’t see that I’m doing weird things that are weird.

sar:

To be simplistic, it feels like when your mom tells you that the difference between when a joke is funny and when it isn’t is if everyone else is laughing and this film feels like it’s laughing at Crips instead of with Crips. And a lot of the other examples we’ve been naming of films in similar veins feels more like a width. So when the Crips have stopped laughing, maybe that’s what’s generating all this discomfort because it’s no longer funny,

Liv:

Which is so interesting because how often do you see a movie where a third of the cast is disabled?

sar:

Yeah, they all find it funny. I can’t explain that.

Liv:

I’d be like, hell yeah, Titus, hire your friends. Oh my God. Well, no, I’ll save that joke for when we do the plot. But there was this one particular joke that I actually really thought was very funny, and it’s the one joke in the whole movie that I thought was funny and it’s uttered by a disabled person, and I was like, oh my God. In another context, this would feel really empowering, and I think Titus really wants it to, but I don’t know. He just went so far off track and I don’t know how any of his actors didn’t clock this. I have so many questions about the cast of this movie, and I don’t doubt that they approved it. I don’t doubt that he didn’t say anything in the script that his cast was uncomfortable saying. I just have questions about the dynamic there. And yeah, I have so many questions about how those jokes landed for the people who had to say those jokes. I don’t know, because there isn’t even a lot of the disabled characters making fun of themselves, which I wouldn’t really mind. I make fun of myself all the time. My humor is very self-deprecating. The character of Garrett Fowler spends most of his time making fun of the disabled characters in this film, which I think is its major problem

Jeff:

And spends the majority of the time talking. The disabled characters actually have very few lines in the film except for Alvin. Very few. It’s predominantly Alvin has a few lines, but a lot of ’em are defeated lines too though, right? It’s like how many times are we going to get the hustler poop choke? Literally a billion times times

Liv:

The martial arts scene happens twice. They do literally the same joke. This is what my point, it happens three times. Three times, yeah. This goes to my point about the movie being padded. The movie I felt was at least 15 minutes too long, and that was a big part of it. We do get that joke three times. And also the fact that the actor playing Alvin is a non-disabled actor and gets much more screen time than any of the other actors who are actually disabled. I have thoughts about the math on that, but okay.

Jeff:

Now unfortunately, all of us, we are silly people and we don’t understand art. Like JA zero 13 does on IMDB, Ja zero rated this 10 out of 10 titled, I’m not making this up, I needed this movie.

sar:

You know what? He’s part of that cra. I am not surprised by that.

Liv:

Fascinated to hear this take. Yeah, really can’t wait to hear this.

Jeff:

Definitely not leaving any spoilers behind because I’d rather have people watch this for themselves. I just have to say that since we’re not going to see any Al Bundy down humor anymore, our humor like this movie provides on encounter the fact that our delicate, thin-skinned little snowflake culture that we’ve cultivated will no longer allow us to have a laugh. I’m considered disabled. I feel that every once in a while we have to enjoy a little bit of dark humor or even humor that is completely inappropriate. This whole movie is completely inappropriate, but it’s intended to be. We just need to be able to laugh at ourselves more. If we can’t learn to do that, then we’re already more disabled than we think.

Liv:

I hate that. I agree with that on its face. I actually agree with that, but I also feel like gallows humor only works if you’re the one that’s standing on the gallows and Titus is not standing on the gallies. So I think this movie would be very different for me. Number one, if it was made, if the script was actually funny, which I don’t think it is, number two, if it was actually directed and written by a disabled comedian, if Josh Blue or someone got behind this, I would have infinitely more grace for this film because I don’t think that these characters are laughing at themselves. I think the actors are laughing at themselves, which good for them. If they are, I hope they are. I don’t think the characters are laughing at themselves. I think Garrett Fowler is laughing at the characters the entire, and what’s interesting is not only Garrett Fowler, the Christopher Titus character, but all of the non-disabled characters are laughing at these people. And so you kind of can’t tell the difference between the main character who is supposed to grow and change and learn that these people are effective at this job and the random other side characters who are making fun of them just because they’re ablest assholes. It’s like, I can’t tell the difference because you’re all saying the same things. I don’t.

Jeff:

Sarah, what do you make of the fact that we have now had another reference to Snowflake culture in the reviews of an IC movie?

sar:

It keeps coming back. It don’t stop coming and it don’t stop coming. I actually thought what was more interesting, and I think it’s the same conversation if you’re going to do the Republican Democrat wars, is that he references Al Bundy by name, which was the kind of married with children character who was this charlatan shitty husband, mid eighties absent father type figure. That was kind of a prototype for modern characters like Homer Simpson. And I think the relation beyond, oh, why can’t I be offensive anymore, is that it’s kind of the same thing I was trying to stumble through at the beginning of the podcast where I’m saying I really do get that in groups like people who find Al Bundy funny, which I did, especially as a teenager, have a right to exist. And then what you have to measure is who loses out as a result of those groups equal right to exist in this kind of myriad of kaleidoscopic cultures where you’re in inappropriateness is always coming at another group’s expense, but you can measure the kind of success of that by who’s laughing or how many groups are laughing.

So a super modern example of that would be someone like Bill Burr. Bill Burr takes tons of ingroup to task, but he does it in a way that for a modern postmodern audience is still funny. But I think he achieves the humor in that he’s just as willing to a take the brunt of the humor. He uses himself as his main subject, which I think is what Liv is getting at, but his inappropriateness doesn’t seem to have as high a cost to the other ingroup, and it makes it seem a little more bearable. Whereas people like Al Bundy, you go back and watch those episodes and it does seem like there’s a tangible cost there.

Jeff:

Yeah, I mean maybe it’s just like punch it up, punch it down thing. It’s a lot of things.

sar:

It’s the generation.

Jeff:

It’s a lot of things.

sar:

Your figures were coming of age in it, so I keep referencing American Pie, but people 10 years older than me might be referencing married with children.

Jeff:

Yeah. Now, the other thing I want to know, do you have any idea what they mean by Al Bundy’s down?

sar:

I think they mean offensive.

Jeff:

I have no idea. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Yes. Like lowbrow. Yes. You think maybe. Okay. Yeah, that one I was like down Down syndrome humor or..? Yeah, I had no idea. I couldn’t piece that one together, but I’m glad that Jerzio found this film. They found the film that they needed.

Liv:

Thank you. This is a delightful thing for me as an artist, knowing that your piece of art will find the audience that needs it. I’m saying this completely without irony. I worry about what if what I’m putting out doesn’t matter and doesn’t make an impact, and no, your work will find the people that actually really need it. And this review, absolutely, 1000% proves that, which is such a lift up for me as an artist. I feel very inspired by that.

Jeff:

Yeah, find your Jerzio13. That’s all you need to do. Find your Jerzio13, everyone special unit. Is this a watch? Is it a pass?

Liv:

God, it’s a hard pass. It’s a thing that I want to expose my other friends who are big time tightest fans to, because I want to show my artist friends that we don’t have to hit the mark every single time. It doesn’t have to be good. You can still put work out into the world and have it not hit. But for regular people who I don’t think are going to really get the joke that is this movie, which is not to say that there are jokes in this movie. I don’t think that there are. But the joke of the film itself conceptually, no, it’s a hard pass. I wouldn’t subject anyone to this.

sar:

I mean, I totally agree that it was genuinely hard to watch, but I think hearing the reviews has made me a lot more thoughtful of the kind of questions it’s asking, and so far as what’s the difference between this and why we canceled Jerry Seinfeld but didn’t cancel Bill Burr kind of thing. And the longer you kind of fight and twist around with that argument, the more your own kind of kaleidoscope emerges that there’s just so many individual circumstances that feed into the whole genre of humor and especially parody humor, that you’re just going to be so polarized to some elements that some people are going to be less polarized by and vice versa. So is there a way to actually come to a coherent conclusion on, was this for anyone or can I cancel this or not cancel that? I don’t know. I am thinking pretty hard about a film that I really didn’t enjoy

Jeff:

Right now. You as audience, if you have not watched this movie yet, and I can’t imagine why that would be, you still have time to watch it because we are going to wrap up our episode here today. We’re not going to dive too deep into the movie, but if you want to hear us do that, or if you would rather hear our opinions on the film and not have to subject yourself to it, you are just going to have to tune in again next week. So thank you. I’d thank you, Liv, for being here.

Liv:

Thank You. Thank you so much for inviting me.

Jeff:

Absolutely. And we will see you again next week when we dive deeply into Special Unit

 

[Mvll Crimes theme song transition]

Jeff:

And thus concludes another episode of Invalid Culture. Thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it or not. Either way, please take a second. If you haven’t to subscribe to our podcast on whatever platform you’re using, tell a friend, and better yet, do you want to be a victim on the podcast, go onto our website, invalid culture.com, submit your name. We would love to terrorize you with a bad movie, have a bad movie of your own that you think that we should watch. Again, jump on our website, invalid culture.com, submit it, and we would love to watch the trash. Be sure to tune in again next week for part two where we will start to dig into the movie and find out whether or not it wins the coveted Jerry Lewis seal of approval

[Mvll Crimes theme song]:

With strangers on the internet. Everyone is wrong. I just haven’t told them yet.

Transcript – Part 2

Jeff:

Hi friends, Jeff here. This month’s film and by extension, the next two episodes come with a big content warning ahead. You will hear on several occasions a harmful word colloquially referred to as the R word that has been used to invalidate disabled people for a very long time. There’s also an above average number of swear words in these episodes kind of related kind of not. While we have tried to avoid using the R word when possible, there are moments in this podcast where it couldn’t be avoided, and for that we are sorry. If you are not in a space right now to hear this type of content, this film and next two episodes might not be for you. That’s okay. Don’t worry. You’re not missing anything by taking a little break. Before we go on, we also felt that it was important to note that contrary to what folks may argue, the R word is absolutely connected to histories of medical labeling that have been used to invalidate the personhood of disabled people, and it is these histories that animate its use to this present day.

You cannot refer to someone or something as an R word without evoking this connection and perpetuated the belief that people with cognitive disabilities are less than saying, I didn’t mean it that way. Doesn’t change this what you mean pales in comparison to what it means to others and maybe even more importantly, what it presents as natural or uncontested willfully. Continuing to use this word makes you at best, complicit in ableism and at worst, a failure of a human being. Our languages are filled with millions of colorful ways to disrespect people, so maybe let’s commit to using words that don’t rely on de-legitimizing metaphors of our brothers and sisters, just to make a joke. Be nice to each other even if this podcast is really not about nice things. You are listening to invalid Culture, a podcast dedicated to excavating the strangest and most baffling media representations of disability. This podcast is all about staring into the abyss of pop culture adjacent films that never quite broke through because well, they’re just awful. So buckle up folks. The following content is rated I for invalid.

[Mvll Crimes punk song “Arguing With Strangers” plays as theme music]:

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.

Jeff:

Welcome back to another thrilling episode of Invalid Culture. As always, I’m your host Jeff Preston, and I’m joined by my host victim Sarah, how you feeling?

sar:

Better than ever. How are you Jeff?

Jeff:

I am ready to become a cop.

sar:

Really? Today?

Jeff:

I already am, I think actually.

sar:

Are you Officer Sunshine?

Jeff:

I am actually Officer Happy, I believe is who I am personally. Yeah, and we’re not alone. We are of course joined once again by guest victim, Liv, how are you doing, Liv?

Liv:

I’m doing great. I am queer and disabled, so I am doubly heroic according to the rubric of this movie, so I am feeling my powers. I’ll let you know what kind of powers I get as a result of this intersection.

Jeff:

I think that makes you like a Navy SEAL. I think you’re special forces as a result. I think that’s the hierarchy. It’s like, yeah, I think that’s how that goes.

Liv:

I could just go to the army right now and tell them to let join because I’m a hero and they would let,

Jeff:

According to the Disability Fairness Act says that you must be allowed to join the army. I just want to put this out there. Army recruiting officers, please do not start recruiting disabled people. Leave us alone. We have enough on our plates, please. Thank you. So you might be wondering what we’re talking about and that’s okay if you do because you probably have never heard of a film called Special Unit. That is the movie we’re talking about this month. It is a Christopher Titus joint about a police unit composed of disabled people. So I’m sorry, can we talk about this movie? Are we ready?

sar:

Born ready.

Liv:

Yep, I’m here. I’m so glad that I’m not the one who has to recap the plot because I’ve largely forgotten most of it, so I’m grateful.

sar:

Pretty forgettable.

Jeff:

This was a bit of a struggle for me, I got to tell you, but here we go. Here is a special unit on a hundred, sorry, a one hour and 44 minute film broken down into three acts. Okay. Our film begins with Garrett Fowler, undercover cop slash alcoholic slash skull ring enthusiast getting in a little bit of trouble at work. A drug sting has gone terribly wrong in which Fowler decides to repeatedly shoot his partner in an attempt to maintain his fake identity as punishment for his incompetence and as part of a decade long revenge subplot of his ex-fiance, now current mayor of Van Nuys, Tara Small Fowler is forced to assist the force in complying with their obligations under the Disability Fairness Act, which requires the LAPD to hire disabled police officers. After a rocky hiring process and several unsuccessful attempts to get out of the job, Fowler eventually decides on four candidates Mac the wheelchair using conspiracy theorist who sometimes dresses like an army guy, Sophie, the little person with a short fuse, Morgan, the stuttering, but adept detective who apparently is getting into knives and Alvin, the autistic savant who quote knows everything, is an expert at hand-to-hand combat and has developed a scat fetish from Reading Hustler Magazine.

Liv:

It actually starts as a relatively competent cop movie. I feel the first, I don’t know, five minutes where that car is rolling up in the rain to the Everlast score, which I feel the need to bring up at the top of the episode so I don’t forget, Everlast was the guy who wrote all the music for this movie, which makes the score actually largely good. I don’t know how I got involved. I really think the music is great, so it actually, it starts off relatively, yeah, very atmospheric and there’s a cop car rolling up in the rain and Everlast is playing and it’s okay. I would get behind a shield episode that started like this for sure. It took me a minute to actually realize that the character of Garrett Fowler was crooked. It took me a little bit into the movie to realize that that was the point, was that he actually is dirty because it was like, oh, I get him shooting his partner to try and maintain the undercover ness of it all, but then it’s like I got a little bit like the wires crossed with what Fowler is doing and why at any given time, and I don’t know enough about how cops work to criticize any of it really.

Like, yeah, maybe this is how it all goes. Maybe there’s a reason why they can’t fire him. I dunno. They didn’t really come up with a reason why they can’t be fired

Jeff:

Tenure, I guess? They have police tenure I guess Okay. Before we go too far, I have to say this because it has been bubbling up and now dear listeners, I am a Canadian, I live in Canada, as does Sarah, so we might not know anything. I am 86% sure that the mayor has no influence on the police force whatsoever and that there is literally an elected person in the states who controls the police force called the sheriff.

sar:

Sir, I watched eight seasons of Dexter and the mayor was absolutely in charge of Miami Dade County.

Jeff:

Why was Tara Small, the mayor, why was she not the police chief?

sar:

Because the police chief is in good with the mayor. They’re the same role, they’re the same. I don’t know, it’s probably, I see that a lot in kind of buddy cop movies or even stuff like Brooklyn nine nine. There’s some really weird interactivity there between city hall and police

Jeff:

And that could happen, but it does seem weird that he seems to report to the mayor and the mayor also just happens to be his ex-fiancee from Yeah, I don’t

sar:

Think he’s reporting to the mayor. I think he’s reporting to his ex.

Jeff:

Yeah, well, yeah, sure.

Liv:

Which in and of itself, I wish as the resident American, I could actually clear some of this up for you guys, but I really, everything I know about the police I have learned from television shows, so I cannot actually, I don’t have any real insight into whether or not there’s a huge conflict of interest going on. The idea that they were going to get married at one point feels like a huge conflict of interest to me for their jobs. I don’t know because then isn’t the Billy Gardell character is he the sheriff?

Jeff:

I think he’s the captain. He’s the captain. He’s like middle management of the police for some reason. Yeah. Okay. Sorry that I could not let that go. The entire time I was watching this movie, I was like, why is the mayor essentially running the police department? Okay, that one,

sar:

There’s so many things we could shit on for this movie. I would not actually do that argument specifically with this movie because that is a huge buddy cop cop film, cop TV show trope that A, nobody is running the police force or B, completely inappropriate parties are running the police force. IE Batman, IE Dexter, IE Brooklyn, nine nine, okay. What I’m saying is Christopher Titus did not make up that trope. I don’t want to blame him for that one.

Liv:

There’s plenty to blame him for. We don’t need to blame him for that. We can take that away. I was so completely baffled by every single one of that actress’s performance choices that I totally missed the why is he reporting to her angle of it, because I was like, did he pick the worst actresses that he could find on purpose to play both her and her secretary? I don’t understand.

Jeff:

Well, so the mayor, the Tara Smalls character, and I’m blanked on her name now, but she is in the TITUS TV show. They actually have a past relationship and a lot of fans loved the fact that she was going to be in this. Apparently that was something that came out. I have no idea why I know those things, but I do now. Well, let’s talk a little bit about the characters. How did we feel about the hiring montage in which we got a taste of disability, raw and uncut?

Liv:

This is actually the only scene that I liked was the hiring montage. This was actually, there were no, I’m a liar. There are two scenes I actually thought were insightful in any way, and this was one of ’em, maybe not, as you said on the previous episode, Jeff, I think that Titus is a blunt instrument trying to talk about disability hiring practices, but I do, this was actually the one scene where I laughed because of the joke. I can mount a gun to the back of my wheelchair and control it with my mouth. There was this one particular disabled doctor, which happens to be my zombie apocalypse plan, so good on Titus for actually knowing that that’s what I plan to do, the zombies ever made manifested. I also love the split screen, both of the paralyzed gentlemen saying, yes, my dick still works. That I also was like, oh, that’s a real thing that’s relatable that are you working or are you fucking, are the two major concerns of the bloody public for disabled people that they meet randomly? So that was actually the only scene that I happened to was the hiring montage. Although the word offended is used too many times, the amount of characters actually saying I’m offended is very, okay. Okay, Titus, we get it. We understand what you’re going for here.

sar:

Jeff, do you think the gun on the wheelchair was an intentional or unintentional reference to Mr. No Legs?

Jeff:

I think it was fully intentional sequel. I would not be surprised if Christopher Titus has seen Mr. No Legs.

sar:

And he was like, we need one. We need the son of Mr. No Legs on the police force.

Jeff:

So what about the four candidates? How do we feel about our gruesome for some that gets drawn together in the end?

Liv:

Let’s just start at the start, right? I feel like these are all, with the exception of Morgan, I don’t actually think that I’ve seen a particular stereotype that Morgan, our candidate, which is with what is actually very clearly supposed to be CP, is based on, but the angry short little person seen that the character, the actor who plays Alvin is very clearly doing a rain Man, we’ve done that. They reference it in the movie. It’s like you’re not bringing anything different to the table with any of this. You’re not widening the scope even of stereotypes. To use the conspiracy theory vet thing, I have not seen with a disabled character before, but I have seen the conspiracy theory vet, which is a type of disability, and then the wheelchair user vet, which is a type of disability, and so they kind of just mushed it together and made a different stereotype and also if they had just used real conspiracy theories, I think all those jokes would’ve been much funnier. All those jokes where that character is talking about his beliefs. I think if they had just talked about Q anon for entire, that’s his whole shtick. That would’ve been so funny to me. All the made up conspiracy theories just fell so flat. I don’t know why they couldn’t manage to pull off that joke, but I don’t really think he’s doing anything different with these four characters. I don’t think we’re seeing anything that we haven’t seen.

sar:

Actually, and I wouldn’t have said this yesterday, but I’ll say it today. I actually like where he was going with the gang of hyperbolic stereotypes. These are the nth degree kind of disability superheroes drawing on the whole superhero cri culture thing to the nth degree lives totally right that one of those characters was clearly just rain man, just kind of thing. And I think what he’s doing with that, and it didn’t translate, was that these are all vehicles to making the point about their positioning in the narrative. He’s trying to make this wider point about Rainman didn’t have any other disabled characters in it. We were all just feeling bad for Rainman. So when he was saying, or when Christopher Titus in the last episode was saying, I made them the heroes. He was doing it in this kind of hyper positional way where he takes a bunch of these hyperbolic stereotypes of familiarity to able-bodied people and he positions them as not only the soul disabled person in the room. He takes that right away, but he also makes them actually heroic in that they took an American industrial problem, like endemic school shootings and they had the disabled people in whatever, hi jinx, funny ish way they came up with it. They did heroically save the students. So the fact that they themselves, the characters can be easily broken down as like, oh, these are shitty, tired, stereotypical characters that aren’t accomplishing anything for disability culture. I’m willing to give him the credit that he did that entirely intentionally. I think he was making a narrative point.

Jeff:

Yeah, I think he was trying to do that, but it was one of those things where it’s like he introduces the stereotype but he never subverts it. Not really,

sar:

No. He makes no attempt to subvert the hyperbolic stereotype. They play straight into it,

Jeff:

And I think that’s the issue. I wonder if he was also concerned that he didn’t want to do the whole, they’re introduced to stereotypical and then you learn that there’s so much more that they have a heart of gold and

sar:

And the inverse take for that, and I agree with that, but I think the inverse is some people just really are hyperbolic stereotypes, right?

Jeff:

Yep. Me. It’s me!

sar:

People watch movies with me and they’re like, wow, Sarah really is kind of a rain man resource for random film and cinematography facts. Isn’t that fucking weird? Yeah, I’m not very original. Some people are just fucking like that, and that’s why stereotypes sometimes die hard.

Liv:

This is one of the things that I think is kind of muddled about the film though too, because in the previous episode I made the point that I don’t think that Titus quite knows how he feels about his own characters, and so that makes the film a little muddy. The thing is, this is especially with the Alvin character, but also with, and God, I wish I could remember this character’s name, the character played by Mack who is the wheelchair using veteran, they are actually super crips, so Titus is trying to make this point about regular disabled people can’t get jobs. I think a police unit was a bad way to make that point because you do actually need a special set of skills. I don’t know how skilled you need to be to be a police officer, but I would assume that there are things that one needs to do in order to get that job, and so you’ve got Alvin who is a resource and who knows martial arts and who has all of these skills, who is an amazing marksman, all skills that would make him an invaluable asset to the police force in this context.

You’ve got Morgan who was a crime scene investigation whiz, which I wish we could have gotten a little bit more into why Morgan’s character knows so much about crime scene investigation. What was the other tip? You have the veteran character, Mac, I believe his name is who is a tech nut and who is able to hack things, so it’s this muddled point about, well, they’re not heroes, but they are, well, they’re not super Crips, they’re just regular people, but they are, well, we should treat them exactly the same way as everybody else, which apparently means calling them by slurs for their own identity that we would not use for other. It’s so muddled as to whether or not what this movie actually believes about. Well think

sar:

It’s unintentional, but I think the muddling is actually really interesting because we actually don’t know where to draw that line when we have 7,000 Twitter arguments about who gets to be a super Crip versus a normal Crip or an AB versus all the quid pro crow sub variance that goes down like six or seven levels. When you try to actually position yourself in a matrix like that, it gets really hard, really fast. I don’t think Christopher Titus meant to give this nuance to commentary at all about the positioning of disabled identity, but I think he kind of achieves it as a byproduct from having these hyperbolically stereotypical characters who then conform to different agencies of either being crip or being good at being a cop or having special skills that lend itself to multiple lenses in this kaleidoscope all happening at the same time while also being totally recognizable as characters to people who haven’t encountered these beings in real life. I think that’s genuinely interesting.

Jeff:

It kind of reminds me of, I think it might’ve been Leonard Davis, but I don’t remember a disability studies scholar.

sar:

Okay let’s do Leonard Davis.

Jeff:

I think it was Leonard Davis, and this notion of disability needs to be counterbalanced constantly, right? It’s like they have value

sar:

The End of Normal

Jeff:

Yeah, they need to have this counterbalance and that’s happening in this film, and it’s like that think that’s a sin of the film, which I think undercuts his argument of, well, I made them the heroes unlike others, and it’s like, well, wasn’t Forrest Gump the hero? Isn’t Daredevil the hero? Well, he was,

sar:

But he’s a singular hero.

Jeff:

Well, sure

sar:

Put the whole movie is vocalized on Forrest Gump and how fucking disabled Forrest Gump is, right? That’s like the premise of the film.

Jeff:

Of course, of course

sar:

Christopher Titus is saying, what if the premise of these people isn’t that they’re still disabled, but they’re all teaming up together using something more than they’re disabled?

Liv:

The question that I kept coming up against, and I think this is a really, really good, the fact, Jeff, that you pulled out, Christopher Titus is very singular definition of the R slur, which is you are behind where you should be, but you have an ability. I think that’s really what he’s going for with these characters in this film. They’re behind in some ways and they’re very, very advanced in other ways that make them suitable for this task, which I don’t know if that necessarily works for me. Like, okay, are they regular people or are they not regular people? What are you going for here? Are you trying to say that we should treat them as we would treat any other person, or are you only the ones that can get us what we need

sar:

In a certain context? Yeah, I think that’s what Jeff’s saying. He’s saying they’re both and

Jeff:

Yeah, and that’s all they are ultimately, right? They aren’t anything more than that and arguably and okay, let’s move forward on it because I have another point that I want to bring up for us. Sure. So despite Fowler’s early reservations, and I’m going to call them the special unit, they aren’t actually even a name in the film, but the film is called Special Unit, so I’m adopted it. The special unit provides their metal by immediately uncovering that Fowler is a dirty cop who has been accepting bribes all over town for years, something that will get him an extended jail sentence if convicted. The movie repeatedly tells you how many years in jail he will get for this. Fowler decides to cut a deal. He will teach them how to be real cops in exchange for them not reporting. Him. Training goes well with the cast of characters revealing that they all have special abilities, as we were saying, although in my opinion, it’s really only Alvin’s power that is relevant in any way. A romantic seed plot also emerges in which Morgan and Sophie begin to have feelings for each other, but it’s totally inconsequential to the point of the film. It may have only happened in a dream that Fowler had and it’s never addressed again.

Liv:

Yeah, no, I literally wrote it as a dream sequence. It’s literally a dream sequence. It’s a dream sequence sequence after which we get our third vomit joke of the movie because the idea of two disabled people in a sexual relationship with each other, it is so disgusting to the character of Fowler that he needs to vomit. Once he has thought of that, it’s fantastic. Yeah, good work.

Jeff:

So after determining that the squad is ready for street action, they’re assigned their first mission, which is to go to an elementary school and deliver a presentation, but oh, no. During the presentation, a drunk and angry father stumbles into the school with a loaded rifle planning on, I think killing his children, unclear. The school shooting is narrowly averted by the quick actions of the special unit who neutralize the threat after firing wildly into a gym and demotivated the children on the dangers of realities of America. The team is then celebrated at a press conference with the mayor where they’re made to wear costumes to hide their identities for some reason, and Fowler makes plans to get back together with his ex-fiance, the mayor.

sar:

Absolutely. I think the only relevant plot point for all of that was the sequence where they stopped the school shooting. Most of the plot, if you’re interested in talking about film or disability theory, is pretty much completely irrelevant, so I’ll just zoom right in on that. I think the most interesting part of the middle of the movie, besides the actual framing of the sequence, which largely leaves the actual violence element out of it, which I thought was interesting, the Fowler says at one point, I’m an asshole and nobody’s building me a goddamn ramp, which was a legitimately funny line, and I counted five lines that I laughed out loud at that were scripted to actually be funny, but B, it kind of gets at the heart of what this movie is trying to do, and when you put it back in relation to our whole conversation, it really is about normalizing a lot of things, but also doing that in the kind of pseudo American pie way where American Pie was trying to say, I think we should be allowed to put a woman in this movie who has a super revealing outfit and everybody doesn’t faint at the movie theater about it.

This movie’s kind of doing, I want to be able to say the R word and make fun of disabled people and everybody not get precious about it in the same way, and he’s taking that preciousness to kind of an extreme with like, okay, watch them literally save children from a school shooting. But the point is actually kind of relevant because we were naming all these examples, even when we were talking about the stereotypes where we are super precious with the disabled characters, it comes conceptually as a kind of default orientation when you’re talking about anything around EDI theory that you have to kind of handr a little bit and think about your word choice and your font choice and your sound choice and whatever the fuck and the truth is, even when everybody’s trying really hard to make position statements or FIM land statements or all this thing, we didn’t build the ramp. We just really wanted to sound like we might someday the ramp still not there.

Jeff:

Yeah. I also feel, and Sarah, correct me if I’m wrong, your question was why did the movie not end here? Why was this not the end of the movie?

sar:

Pretty much? I think the entire third act was irrelevant. The movie set out what it wanted to accomplish, and then they just put in a bunch of deleted scenes that didn’t really mesh or cohere with the original plot line, and they were like, boom, feature film.

Jeff:

Now I need to know because it’s driving me absolutely up the wall. Was the dad going to hit with his children or was he there to kidnap them?

sar:

We dunno….

Liv:

I think he was there to kidnap them, but that’s only because I’ve read another book about disabled people where there’s a father who kidnaps his children with a rifle. I literally was just going off of a different book that I don’t think is probably read, but I was like, oh, I’ve seen this scene before. But yeah, there’s no real clear idea.

Jeff:

The stakes go zero to a thousand in this moment. All the other stuff is like, oh, petty kind of whatever. Oh, it’s a drug deal. Oh, it’s taking bribes, it’s crashing cars. It’s all this really petty stuff. And then it’s like, Hey, what if a dad has killed his children on camera? Let’s do that. I was like, where? Whoa, that is an escalation.

sar:

This is going to give it more credit than was probably actually thought of. But if one of your main orientations with the dialogue is to try to get at the preciousness of how disabled people are treated, you could do something like do a super non precious shooting event to try to invert that dialectic and have a super serious gun laden confrontation as a way to interrogate that preciousness. Do I think that was intentional? No. Do I think that landed? No. It comes off as pretty random and a lowbrow joke in American culture. One that I agree with, I think the characters themselves crack a couple jokes about is this how we’re preparing the children of America? And that was kind of funny.

Jeff:

I’ll give him that one.

Liv:

I did laugh at the scene of all the children marching for the drill as they’re called for the active shooter drill, and they just know exactly what their places are. I thought that was very funny. I did laugh.

Jeff:

Yep. I got to say, I honestly think it would not shock me at all if this was actually the pitch where the pitch was, Hey, there’s going to be the school shooting. It’s this critique of American gun culture. Disabled cops are going to be the ones that overcome it, and then you build out the movie around that. That is a completely plausible reality. I have no evidence that that’s what happened.

Liv:

You can see the TV TV pilotness of it all in that scene.

Jeff:

Absolutely.

Liv:

It makes so much sense to me that this was originally going to be a pilot for television because you can see that’s the pilot. That scene is the pilot.

sar:

It plays like a less memorable episode of Criminal Minds, which is not a complement.

Jeff:

Right. No. Well, it’s in some ways, but no. Yeah, and I will say too, before the shooting happens, it also has, I would argue the closest thing to critique or critical satire in which the school teacher immediately devalues the police, the disabled police officers they brought in the school.

sar:

I did love the super liberal school teacher’s character

Jeff:

And that was maybe the only effective part of this entire movie.

sar:

I think that character proves that Christopher Titus is funny and I just need to watch something that he didn’t write two hours of not that funny material for because that character had just enough nuance into the realities of super EDI doesn’t build the ramp liberal education advocate where she just is so offensive but has such an air of confidence about that offensiveness that I was like, she’s perfect. If everybody was written like that, this might’ve actually been a good movie.

Liv:

We’ve all met that person. We’ve all met that person multiple times. I want to roll back a little bit because actually the scene before that one is the actual only scene that I actually thought was insightful and funny, which is the scene where they’re all attempting to enter the school and Mac is talking about, they’re all talking about how much school sucked for them, the characters who were born disabled or are speaking about their traumatic experiences at school and Mac, who is a disabled via, I assume combat is talking about No school was great. I was a homecoming king and I ran on the track team and I both had sex with my English teacher and my French teacher school was awesome. And then he can’t get up the stairs to get into the building and Morgan goes, call your English teacher and just walked away.

I cried. I thought it was so funny. I really thought that was extremely nuanced. Talking about the kind of hierarchy in disabled community, which is a thing I think about a lot. There’s a real hierarchy of who gets to be spoken about and who gets to share their experiences and who gets to be kind of the face of the movement and who gets the most opinion space. And I really thought there was a real moment there where I was like, oh, Titus is really on to something with that because you see the disabled characters having their own kind of internal struggles with each other and how they’re different and how their experiences have been different, and they’re not all just lumped together as it’s the disabled minority against the able bodied majority, and we all got to be in this. So you see them having this little kind of tip outside and then they get in and they have to confront the school teacher, and it’s all just like, we got to leave that shit at the door.

We got to, we’re all in this together because this lady is here asking if we can dance. We got to leave our petty squabbles and our differing opinions outside in order to confront this larger problem of this person’s perception of us, which I thought was so as an activist that that’s what I’m doing day to day to day. We have so many problems in the disability community with intersectionality and with really embracing all of the differences of each other and really being there for each other. And then it’s kind of like, but we got to get the ramp built, so we got to put the table that shit and we’ll worry about it later. And so there’s a lot of in-group problems that exist that we just don’t have time or it’s inconvenient for us to get to those issues amongst each other because we got to deal with people like that school teacher who I’ve met at least five times in my life. So I actually really thought that scene, I was like, Ooh, that’s really got something there. That’s really, I’ve been there. Okay.

sar:

Jeff, were you the cool child of your high school?

Jeff:

No, I was a disabled kid. I was not able to sleep with any of my teachers as a result.

sar:

I didn’t get to sleep with any of my teachers either. Does that mean that I can join the club?

Jeff:

I think you were disabled in high school, you just didn’t know it.

sar:

Oh, a hundred percent. That’s true. I was in denial at that point.

Jeff:

That was the issue. Now I’m with you guys. I honestly think this was the best part of the movie. And this brings me to, I think the central thing that I feel about this movie, which is that a majority of the movie is not about the disabled characters at all. It’s about Fowler. It’s about his relationship with the captain. It’s about him trying to become a better person. Fowler is the main character. The movie is at its best when the disabled characters are the stars of the moment, and they’re almost never the stars of the moment. Very rarely are they allowed to be the star

sar:

Couldn’t imagine that there would be a vehicle for that unit to exist without him. And a that’s probably true. So there’s that argument, but if you put that aside for a second and you go to argument B, what would this movie have looked like without Christopher Titus’s character? I dunno if it would’ve been the kind of ramp building utopia that we imagine, because Titus, especially in the latter half of the film, actually does quite a bit of advocacy for the characters who are being rejected at every turn. So there is a tangible arc of him doing nothing but calling them the R word and saying they’ll never be cops to an hour later telling all of these people with legitimate power. No, you should really give these people a chance. I’ve learned a lot here, and he’s trying to kind of simplistically apply these lessons in his now feverish Crip advocacy for his special unit team. So I don’t know if I agree he’s got too much screen time in a movie that’s supposed to be about disabled people as heroes, but in order to play out the fantasy that the disabled people have all that time, you kind of need his character, at least right now.

Liv:

Yeah, I agree. 1000%. Yeah. Yeah. I was actually going to say that this falls into another trope that I hate, which is the disabled people involved make the non-disabled person a better person via their just existing as. I hate that shit. But no, it does need to be there. And it is actually, I would say a surprisingly concise example of a character arc. It really does the growth and change part of it. I’m like, oh, yeah, okay, yeah, it’s there. It’s in there. So I think he kind of does need to be there, but again, I find it gets undercut in the second and third acts because he never stops calling them idiots. He never stops underestimating them. He never stops being, they don’t become his friends in any real way. So for me, it’s hard to tell the difference between Fowler and the character of his ex-fiance or Fowler and the character of the school teacher. We’re supposed to kind of set Fowler up with the special unit in opposition to these characters. The last line of the movie is literally him calling them idiots. And I’m just like, that undercuts your arc a little. I wouldn’t say that necessarily he has to be getting it perfectly right all of the time by the end of the movie, that would be unrealistic and would be precious. I find that wouldn’t be correct, but I don’t really feel that he develops relationships with these characters at all. By the end of the movie,

Jeff:

She literally vomits at the thought of them having sex.

Liv:

He vomits at the thought of them having sex, literally both my favorite and my least favorite scene in the entire film because it was about disabled people having sex, which is one of my favorite things ever so rad. And then it just,

Why did we need that joke? Why did we need that joke? I would’ve been okay with it adding absolutely fuck all to the plot if they had just left that scene in there. And no, he vomits at the thought of them having sex. He insults them at every turn. He says that, oh, I think you guys are definitely going to get me killed, but I’m still impressed with you, and so we’re supposed to be proud of him or something for going up against other ableist people. And I’m like, yeah, but you’re doing the same. And I think it would be different if the tenor of the jokes were a little bit different. If the Titus character was doing it in a different way, I wouldn’t feel like this is kind of all the same gag over and over again, just coming from different people. So I get the arc and I think he doesn’t absolutely need to be there, but I don’t know if the growth of the character for me quite sticks the landing. He does need to be the protagonist.

sar:

That’s where the tension, and we were talking about this a little in the last episode. I think that’s where the tension comes in between. He’d really like to be an advocate, but he also doesn’t want to do the preciousness thing. And oh, now I’ve learned this and this is how I’m going to speak to people that I’ve met, that met Meet X archetype, and how your voice kind of softens and you start talking about this and doing the land back statements and all this other stuff. And I think this movie was a really clear, intentional critique of that where he’s saying, I want to do the conversation that Jeff and I are having when Sarah gets in Jeff’s car because I’m not giving land back statements when we’re talking with each other. And I don’t even really think I’m putting anything on when I’m talking with him on the podcast, but I do feel that there are different personas you embody depending on your level of comfort. And that’s what we were getting at with the kind of in-crowd, outc crowd ideology. He made it really clear he wanted to do the private conversations that disabled people are having in the car with each other where they’re calling each other names and riffing. And I make a lot of really unfortunate jokes about my own suicide that I regret, but I still do, right?

Liv:

Yeah.

sar:

I’m aware that that’s wrong, but that’s still a joke. I make enough that people have started coming up with spray bottle jokes in return for when I start cracking those jokes. So there’s kind of a level there of the preciousness and the Darkness and the Al Bondness and the Louis c Canis that he’s trying to tap into. And if you’re not in his specific crowd of people that this resonates with either because they know him personally or they’re of a generation where this is funny or they’re of a geographical location where this is funny. We don’t meet all those circumstances and we are finding it polarizing unfunny. And I guess our commentary is, is there someone who meets all that criteria? But clearly there is his 16 friends find it funny and they found it funny enough to sit there and produce it.

Liv:

Yeah, I actually really, I want that movie though. I want that movie of the group of disabled friends kind of just being mean to each other and riffing. And I think that might be the commentary, Sarah, that you are making about, there’s so much of the Christopher Titus character in this movie and he doesn’t really need to be there, but I don’t know if a buddy cop comedy was the right genre for the movie that Titus is trying to make, which was

sar:

He trying to police? Funny. Oh, very nice.

Jeff:

Oh no,

sar:

I’m done. I’m out.

Jeff:

I cannot believe that we are this deep in, and that happened for the first time.

Liv:

Incredible.

sar:

I love it.

Liv:

I’m so honored to be here for this moment. This is so good.

Jeff:

So just like our podcast, this movie also needed to go a little longer for reasons that don’t make any sense. The movie does continue after this special unit saves the day that undercover sting from the beginning of the movie. Well, those bad guys are back and they’re now unhappy that Fowler is no longer going to be on the take. So a bunch of crime stereotypes sort of racial team up to kidnap Fowler, the special unit then flies into action attempting to track down Fowler’s whereabouts and rescue him. After arming up and make it a plan, the team will burst into the hostage scene. They will kill slash detain the bad guys and save Fowler. The ragtag team has grown into a real police force, and with that, the movie becomes mercifully to a close and that my Friends is special unit. There are lots of ways to measure the quality of a movie, but here at Inval culture, we have a completely empirical, scientifically validated methodology that we used, which we call the invalid culture scale. This game works a little bit like golf. The lower the score, the better it is, and we will determine whether or not this film wins the coveted Jerry Lewis seal of approval. So our first question, on a scale of one to five, with five being the least accurate, how accurately does this film portray disability?

Liv:

Like a 4.7? Can I do point gradation?

Jeff:

We have no laws

Liv:

Because here’s what I’ll say. I do think there are a couple of moments where I was like, oh, okay, that feels real to me. As I mentioned, the scene before they go into the school where they’re talking about their various experiences felt very real to me. The hiring process scene both in what happens and also in what it represents as trying to get hired as a disabled person, that felt very legitimate to me. The problem me with this movie is that I don’t think the win is that disabled people should become part of the militarized police system in this. I don’t necessarily think that that’s the happy ending where what we really want is to be a part of the system that could kill us at any moment. Obviously, Titus doesn’t really have a good grasp on, there’s a scene where Alvin has a meltdown and Titus shouts shoot him, and I’m like, oh, clearly Titus doesn’t have a good grasp on the police statistics of people having mentally disabled people having meltdowns who get murdered by police in this country. Cool, good.

So I don’t think that The Wing is, the crooked cop doesn’t go to jail, and the disabled people get absorbed and assimilated into the complex that hates them and kind of wants to kill them. I also, actually, I’ll give another half point for that montage. At the beginning, I really liked that montage over the opening credits about how difficult it is to get a job as a disabled person. So I’m going to give it a 4.7 out of five because there were a couple of little moments where I was like, okay, I think he’s got it. But for the most part, no, I don’t want to be a cop

Jeff:

Fair.

sar:

I think I’m going to go straight down the middle and I’ll tell you why I’m going to go 2.5 because I think I, Liv said there are about a thousand reasons why this movie is incredibly inaccurate to anything I’ve seen of the disabled experience. And obviously I can’t speak for everyone or anything at any time in every geography, but what I do think is that it’s extremely accurate to his Crip community and he never promised a movie that was going to resonate with everyone, and I think he’s actually made it very apparent that he wasn’t even going for that. He’s doing the Bill Burr thing of if this isn’t your thing, fuck off, and this is for us. I think the problem is that the US interpretively is really hard to quantify. You can’t quite tell who he wanted this to appeal to and who he wanted to be offended by this. And I think especially a lot of disabled people will find themselves in this kind of liminal space of, I’m pretty sure this is for me, but I’m feeling really uncomfortable right now, so I’m giving it a 2.5.

Jeff:

Yeah, so I’m actually splitting the difference. I had it down as a 3.5 almost exclusively because of the Elvin character. The Elvin character is the embodiment of everything that is wrong with how we tell stories about autism. Literally everything from the savant knowledge to the, I will hurt you if you touch me to the quote, our word strength stereotype, but this notion that people that touch with disabilities have some sort of superhero strength or something. But Alvin Tot was like everything wrong, everything wrong with that representation. And so while he maybe didn’t lean into stuff as much when it comes to the wheelchair user or the little person or cp, the Alvin character is just so brutal and not played by a disabled character. Maybe that’s why it’s so brutal. Maybe the other characters did play out better because they were disabled people there. They’d be like, ah, this doesn’t really track. And so maybe they should have hired an actually autistic person to be Alvin and maybe that would’ve been better. So I don’t give it a 3.5 largely because of Alvin. Okay. Our next question, on a scale of one to five, with five being the hardest, how hard was it to get through this film?

Liv:

I’m going to give it a four because it didn’t become painful until it got padded. I wasn’t fully, I really want to turn this off until after this school shooting scene. At which point, as we discussed, the plot just meanders and it doesn’t need to be that long. And at that point I was like, okay, I can’t know if I can do this. It was only really the last half hour that I was like, I really don’t know if I can make it through the last 30 minutes of this movie, because I feel like at that point I had gotten the movie. I was like, okay, I got it. I understand what we’re going for here, so I think I’m going to give it a four. Because it was the only in the last 30 minutes that I was just like, alright, I can’t with this. It’s gone from being unfunny and kind of boring to like, okay, now I’ve been doing this for almost two hours and pausing to take notes too. So it was even longer than two hours because I was pausing to write things down.

sar:

I’m going to give a five and I think I might’ve given the last couple movies a five. So this is not between Pandemic, it’s not a good season, but I found this really legitimately hard to finish. That’s my only criteria.

Jeff:

So I’m also going to give it a five. I was going to give this about a three and a half until after the school shooting, and at that point I literally wanted to put a fork in my ear. I was ready for pain, I just wanted to feel something again. And so I’m punishing this movie for the back half with a five. On a scale of one to five, with five being the maximum, how often did you laugh at things that were not supposed to be funny

Liv:

With five being the maximum? Yeah, I’m going to give it a one. Maybe even a 0.5. I didn’t laugh at. I think the only thing that I laughed at that maybe wasn’t supposed to be funny was the Alvin character Cold cocking Christopher Titus’s character in the Face, which I don’t necessarily know if it was supposed to be funny or not, but Punch Enable Us today. I dunno. I just feel like that we could have gotten, I did laugh at a couple of the actual jokes, but that was the only, I think it’s unintentional joke that I laughed at. Oh no, actually there are two. I also laughed unintentionally at the, he’s doing Pulp Fiction scene.

sar:

That was funny. That was a funny line.

Liv:

I was actually thinking about how much I believe that most of Quentin Tarantino’s filmography is just him wanting to say the N word with impunity and he can’t say it, so he makes the actor say it like a whole bunch. And that was a thing that I was going to bring up in reference to Chris Titus, just really wanting to say the UR with impunity and also the word mons for some reason, which comes up quite a bit, which is not a word I’ve ever heard, but okay.

Jeff:

Really? Oh, that’s an ooold school

sar:

Oh man, that was a popular one at my high school.

Jeff:

Yeah, that’s an old school mix of…it’s a tasty one because it’s got both the racism and the ableism going for it.

Liv:

AND the ableism

sar:

it’s a twofer.

Liv:

I did laugh at that unintentionally because I was thinking about Quentin Tarantino throughout the entire film and thinking, oh, Titus thinks he’s Tarantino. And then there is a full absolutely unnecessary pulp fiction quotation that goes on for way too long in the third act of this movie. And so that I left out intentionally,

Jeff:

I got to say the thought of Quentin Tarantino remaking this movie sends a shiver down my spine. Oh God. Because while I was not offended particularly by this film, I think if Quentin Tarantino remade it, I think I would be offended. Yes, agree. I think she would offend me.

Liv:

As I said, I was more offended by the cop again than the ableism actually in this movie. And I think that if Quentin Tarantine, this is something I’ve often said about Jos Whedon. I was trying to write a paper about disability representation in Buffy, and I realized there isn’t really a lot, and I’m kind of grateful for that because then I would actually have to find out what Joss Whedon thinks about disabled people, and I’m grateful that we’re spared from whatever his thoughts are on that. That’s me with Tarantino. It’s like, oh, we definitely have his thoughts on race. We don’t need his thoughts on ability at all. Oh man.

sar:

Yeah. We need to know less about celebrity opinions just in general. I am not waiting for my favorite celebrities to weigh in on genocide and their Instagram stories, anything. I really am not holding my breath for it. Okay. I want to go two point again and I’ll tell you why. Because if I was only speaking for me, obviously it would’ve been whatever the least funny is. But I think what this movie is trying to do around inappropriate versus appropriate humor and precious or anti canalization of what a script could be is actually really interesting. And this would’ve been a great in-class discussion, and I would not play this movie in class just to clarify, but if I did…

Jeff:

But why not?

sar:

Play any clip at random in one of your classes next semester? I dare you.

Jeff:

And I will get fired. Five hundred percent fired.

sar:

Yeah. You’re willing to sacrifice my career. No problem. Okay. I think what he’s doing around what gets you canceled or what you can and cannot say about disabled people is actually really interesting. Even if part of it is unintentional and we personally don’t find it funny, I am willing to believe there are communities, and there are Crips out there who probably found this movie funny, and I think if I were to take a stab at it, they would be 50 to 65 years old Republican white males from middle to South America. I think that’s where they are and what they do, and cops will love this, et cetera. There’s certain demographics that this is hitting for, and I think a lot of the references in this movie are quite dated, not only because Chris Tez is not a young guy. I’m quite a bit younger than he is, but if you had made those jokes 15 years ago and I watched this movie, I think I would’ve laughed more. I think I would’ve felt shitty about it, but I think it would’ve been funnier. And I think a lot of us have trouble admitting that. Yeah.

Liv:

Yeah. That would’ve been pre my radicalization, so I think would’ve left. I think if I was in college and I saw this, I probably would’ve thought it was very funny. Yeah.

Jeff:

I can actually answer this question. The reason you feel that way is because Christopher Tyson have been trying to make this movie for 10 years. So the script was probably written in 2007, 2006, and that makes so much more sense.

sar:

It really does. If you release this movie in 2006, I think it has the very American pie syndrome of you watch it now and you’re like, wow, I hate culture. You’re like, this is what’s funny at the moment kind of thing. And I’m willing to give it that credit. Just because it’s not funny to me doesn’t mean I don’t think there’s an audience for this movie. So I’m giving it a 2.5.

Jeff:

So I gave it a one because I didn’t laugh at the movie. I didn’t find it funny, shocking, particularly really funny, but this is like I’m complimenting the movie on this. There was nothing in it that was so absurd or silly to me that I laughed at it when I wasn’t supposed to laugh. Right. There have been a lot of movies that we’ve done, and that’s really this question is really trying to target those when films are not trying to be funny. They’re trying to be sincere, or they’re trying to be schlocky, and you just have to laugh. So absurd. This movie never actually transcended into that territory, which is possibly a compliment, possibly an indictment of the quality of this movie because I think that’s what it was trying to do, and it just never landed at it. So I am going to give it a one. Okay. Our last question, my personal favorite, on a scale of one to five, with five being the most, how many steps back has this film put Disabled people?

Liv:

Oh, this is the hard one for me, this is the really, really challenging one. I’m going to give this a 3.5 because number one, I don’t think that many people are going to watch it, so I really am not that worried about its cultural reach in the way that I would be something like a mile of foot, which everybody saw. So there’s that. I feel like I’m safe from the impact of this movie in a lot of ways, but I also, I want to give it kind of a middling rating because even after this, I do still have a lot of love in my heart for Christopher Titus, which I was really afraid that I was going to walk away from this movie and be like, I can’t support you anymore as the person who made this movie. I can’t in good conscience pay money to go see you. If this is the way that you think about people like me. And I actually really don’t feel that way coming out of this movie. I don’t actually feel like it sets us back.

sar:

I give it a two and I give it a two for a lot of the reasons I’ve already said. And so far as I think there is an audience for this movie, even if that audience isn’t me. And even if it didn’t resonate with me, it clearly resonated with other people, particularly people of X or boomer generations who I think might have more to say about this film than I do. I think the other thing to keep in mind was that he did use a crypt team and his mother was schizophrenic, and I think that’s really relevant when we’re talking about how he developed and produced this movie, and therefore its legacy in the culture because he is speaking from lived experience, expertise, and just because that expertise doesn’t match mine doesn’t necessarily mean, I think it’s not worthy of being part of the cultural cannon.

I think it tries to do, I would give it if I were recommending it in real life, like TG rating, kind of like PG parental guidance, but you need T theorist or therapist guidance after this film So if had someone like me or Jeff sitting there with you like, oh, that’s actually really funny because the point of the genre of parody is to do this and dah, dah, dah. That’s really annoying, but it actually makes the movie speak for some of the points that it’s not getting across. Or if you’re really struggling with your disabled identity and you’re feeling like you relate more to Garrett than the actual disabled people, that’s when your therapist comes in. Right? Because now you’re working on a lot of those self hateful tendencies that I think this movie is trying to make fun of and it’s just not landing two.

Jeff:

Yeah. Okay. I was the outlier a little bit on this one. I gave a four. And it’s not that I disagree with anything that’s been said, but I’m giving it a four not because of what I think Titus was trying to do. I think we have a good idea of what Titus was trying to do. I’m giving it a four because of what I think most average viewers will take from the film, which is that it’s fine to throw around slurs that you’re just being funny. That’s true. That disabled people all have unique gifts that accommodate or make up for their lack of abilities, that it’s gross when disabled people hook up. And also that disabled people hook up together. That it has to be like an interability relationship can’t be, or an internal ability can’t be outside of the community. I think that there are a lot of things that are running underneath this movie that I think a lot of people will understand and see because it’s hegemonic, but this is the hegemonic belief of who disabled people are, what we’re capable of, what we should be like. And so I’m going to give it a four, even though it wasn’t the intention. I think that people who watch this film and enjoy it, yikes. I don’t know that I want to be friends with that person, frankly.

So we have tabulated, we have calculated, can we get a drum roll? We don’t have a drum roll. I always say that we literally don’t have drum roll. On the invalid culture scale with a score of 38.2. We rank special unit as a crime may have been committed, the second highest score on our spectrum, which feels fitting.

sar:

Yeah. Honestly, I agree with that.

Jeff:

A crime may have been committed when they made this film.

sar:

Luckily we have a special unit here to address that because they’re cops.

Jeff:

Yeah, perfect. They could arrest themselves just like the cops do, right Whenever they do something wrong?

sar:

We have investigated ourselves and we have found no wrongdoing once again.

Jeff:

There we go. Okay. And that is our episode, my friends. Liv, thank you so much for coming and putting it up with us.

sar:

We love you.

Liv:

This was a gem of a time. Thank you guys so much. I can’t wait to come back.

Jeff:

Yeah, absolutely. And for our listeners who want to look at legitimate art, where can people find you on the internet?

Liv:

You can find me at livemomonpoems.com. That’s where my website, where all of my stuff is located. And you can follow me on Instagram at mammoneliv. All one word. No underscore. And you can also follow me on Facebook. I’m on Facebook and I’m very, if you want to hear that, just dates how old I am. But I’m very charming on Facebook if you want to reach out to me there. I think my statuses are very, very charming.

Jeff:

Oh yeah. Millennials and xillenials come and hang out with us on Facebook. Gen Xers two, we’ll extend the invite to Gen X.

sar:

Oh, that’s nice.

Jeff:

Boomers, I don’t know. Go back to MySpace. Alright my friends. So that is our episode. We are now going on a summer break because there’s only so much punishment someone can endure before they have to take time off. So Sarah and I, we will be going out into the woods. We will be watching. Okay. No, I was going to say we’ll be watching legitimately good movies and no, that’s not the case. I’m going to continue to feed Sarah the worst movies I could find.

sar:

That’s never once been the case.

Jeff:

Nope. So we will see you guys when we are back in September. It is our back to school edition of Invalid Culture and we have a doozy of a film lined up. So hopefully you all have a lovely summer or if you’re down under, I don’t know, have a good winter. I don’t know. I don’t feel sorry for you.

[Mvll Crimes theme wraps the episode]