The Power in Perception

A short film by Rachel Roitman for a class at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

For my remix project, I decided to focus on disability representation in the media. With this remix, I wanted to inform the audience that representations of disability are often inaccurate and damaging, leading to false stereotypes and lowered agency for people with disabilities. When roles are written by and for people with disabilities, representations become more authentic and complex, specifically compared to surface-level characters who perpetuate harmful disability tropes. All of my editing was done using Adobe Premiere to make the video as engaging and clean as possible. Techniques included using appropriate background music, integrating voice-overs to push the storyline forward, inserting diverse media examples of disabled characters, showing definitions of tropes, and smoothing out audio and video transitions.

Despite 27% of US adults having a disability, only 2.3% of speaking characters were depicted as having one in the 100 top-grossing films of 2019. Data from the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative. This also does not differentiate between disabled and non-disabled actors playing disabled roles.

I instantly knew I wanted to focus on this subject in some way, but wasn’t sure the angle to take on it. Growing up with a physical disability and other intersectional identities, I had a complicated relationship with the media, as I virtually never saw myself accurately depicted on screen. Over the years, I’ve mentally curated a list of films/tv shows/books/etc. which depict disability (both well and poorly). A trend emerged where I almost always thought positively of stories played/written by actual disabled people and negatively of those that weren’t.

For the remix, I started writing down every portrayal I could think of, knowing I wanted to contrast ‘good’ and ‘bad’ ones. I also wanted to highlight disabled activists, who could get my point across through articulate voice-overs, since it is a slightly niche subject for the general public. Some brainstormed themes included intimacy, inspiration, pity, disgust, and the need to ‘be healed’. I decided to focus on fictional characters and the power of disabled youth being represented as funny, dynamic people. What a concept!

Jillian Mercado, who plays Maribel on The L Word: Generation Q. Photo via Tommy Hilfiger.

After exhausting my mental list, I researched missing elements I wanted to cover. There were depictions that, sadly, shocked me. For example, I found a clip from The L Word: Generation Q, where a main character in a wheelchair has sex with her able-bodied boyfriend. I had never seen genuine disabled intimacy shown before, let alone it being a hot disabled actress paired with a partner desiring her and silently, nonchalantly meeting her needs. It was so… normal. Even I needed that reminder.

This is exactly why I wanted to do this project. Representation matters, and we need to get it right.

Works Cited:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uXvY4DS-rimY7ZrNRsw3AgKqcc8iJnGOunLKVeAU1F4/edit?usp=sharing