Is Roger Ebert a disability activist?

Melissa McEwan at Shakesville notes that Roger Ebert has just released a statement in his home paper the Chicago Sun-Times about his fight with cancer and the ravages it has taken upon his body. McEwan calls him a "disability activist" because he details the issues of his physical health and comments that illness is too much hidden in our society:

I’ve long admired his work: the way he critiqued films, his talent for writing about them, and his frank unpretentiousness about the whole process. I respected him as a film critic. I didn’t expect to respect him as a disability activist.

I generally agree with McEwan about the quality of Ebert's reviews. She says:

He’s my go-to reviewer and has been for so many years that I can tell by his reviews whether I’ll like a movie, irrespective of whether he did. I know on what we agree and what we don’t, and he rarely surprises me—and that’s not a complaint.

Until the release of Million Dollar Baby back in 2005, I, too, considered him my premier go-to movie reviewer for the same reasons she states. And I don't discount the public importance of Ebert's recently stating:

I was told photos of me in this condition would attract the gossip papers. So what?

I have been very sick, am getting better and this is how it looks. I still have my brain and my typing fingers.

…We spend too much time hiding illness. There is an assumption that I must always look the same. I hope to look better than I look now. But I’m not going to miss my festival.

I appreciate the pictures included in Ebert's report on his health and upcoming film festival too. Like many, I've been wondering how he's doing, and thinking of the grace with which his old partner Gene Siskel kept up work during his own decline from cancer. I suspect disability will be much more in the public eye as celebrity Baby Boomers age and face these same public image challenges.

But. I don't see the specifics of a disability activist that McEwan does in Ebert's announcement. What I see is a man with a very public job who has found himself at the point where he is visibly disabled and must now manage that in his public life. He's outed himself because he had no other choice. If he didn't address it head-on -- as most of us faced with visible disability and a public curiosity that rarely offers privacy for bodily difference are forced to do -- he couldn't get on with the business of movie reviewing.

Now, he did it head-on with a grace and good humor that I admire, and I hope that this will help him ease the public fear and patronization that could make his job as a respected movie critic hard or even impossible. But being left without the privilege of the physical anonymity of the nondisabled does not suddenly make Ebert a disability activist.

Disabled folks will remember our clashes with him about Million Dollar Baby, and how our concerns for the film's gross inaccuracies of quadriplegia were sidelined by the conservative v. liberal debate about the sanctity of life (notice how About.com files this debate under "Parenting Special Needs" in that latest link). Our anger at Baby producer/director/actor Clint Eastwood, a man who has dedicated considerable private energy to dismantling the ADA, was mostly ignored in favor of the battle of Ebert v. Medved.

I was brand new to blogging back then, but I posted about Million Dollar Baby here and here. You can also read about the disability rights issues around the movie in this old op-ed by Not Dead Yet's Diane Coleman, and this press release by NDY:

Not Dead Yet has been joined in condemning the film's "better dead than disabled" message by the National Spinal Cord Injury Association and the American Association of People With Disabilities, the nation's largest nonprofit cross-disability member organization.

Bill Henning, Executive Director of the Boston Center for Independent Living, is concerned about the denial of independent living in the movie. "I'm disappointed, if hardly surprised, that 'Million Dollar Baby' apparently ducks consideration of services that would have enabled Maggie to live a meaningful life. For thirty years we've helped thousands of disabled Massachusetts residents to live and prosper in the community, but Eastwood had to resort to a 'Hollywood ending,' one whose fundamental tragedy is not the actual storyline but its utterly false statement that a disabled life is not worth living."

"Imagine" added Kelly, "if in the boxing scenes, it was obvious that all the punches missed their targets by three feet, yet the characters fell down and suffered injuries anyway. The film would be laughed out of the theaters and disgraced in the academy. Well, The Mayo Clinic reports that there are up to 200,000 people living in the United States with a spinal cord injury, not one of whom seems to have been consulted for the making of this movie. The question is how could audiences and critics not even notice Clint Eastwood's cartoonish, negative depiction of the rehab experience?"

In January of 2005, as the Oscar ceremony from which Baby took home four awards approached, Ebert took aim at protests to the movie and at film reviewer Michael Medved and other conservative commentators for giving spoilers to the film:

In the case of some films, however, even to hint that there is a surprise is to reveal too much. In my review of "Million Dollar Baby," which I consider the best film of 2004, I wrote: "It is a movie about a boxer. What else it is, all it is, how deep it goes, what emotional power it contains, I cannot suggest in this review, because I will not spoil the experience of following this story into the deepest secrets of life and death."

.... The decision of Maggie and her trainer is not a surprise to the readers or listeners of two right-wing commentators, Michael Medved and Rush Limbaugh. They have revealed every secret of the plot. Limbaugh even chortled as he "apologized" for an earlier broadcast. Just as the movie was opening, Medved appeared on Pat Robertson's "700 Club" to describe the plot in great detail. The outcome of the movie does not match their beliefs. They object to it. That is their right. To engage in a campaign to harm the movie for those who may not agree with them is another matter.

I'd like to put aside any arguments about the general and persistent asshattery of Medved, Limbaugh and Robertson here because it's repeatedly taken attention away from the specific concerns of the disability community (on this issue and quite a few others). I want to look at the ableism in the idea that spoiling a movie is shameful behavior.

If the movie's last half had been about a sudden violent rape leading to the main character's death, or if she'd been a woman of color and killed by a racist act, or even if she'd actively committed suicide over despair relating to her working class upbringing, I do not believe Million Dollar Baby would have been hailed primarily as "a boxing movie" with a secret ending too precious to ruin. If Eastwood had not been the powerhouse celebrity behind the film, it would not have had the caché to elicit such need for silence on how the film ends. (If Eastwood had not been involved, the irony wouldn't seem so deadly to those of us who need public ideas about disability to be less about us choosing to die.)

I agree there's special pleasure in seeing a movie for the first time and letting its surprises unfold. And I'll concede that probably Ebert considered it his professional obligation to lobby in favor of that pleasure. But that pleasure does not trump silence when the result is audiences leaving a film with such a dangerous message, sold through misinformation about actual life as a quadriplegic, actual solutions for the challenges associated with it, and no alternative information available to the general public to even learn otherwise.

Ebert himself has occasionally let the issue of accuracy about Catholicism in films be more important than morally-neutral movie reviewing. On the film Stigmata:

It is also not possible, according to leading church authorities, to catch the stigmata from a rosary. It is not a germ or a virus. It comes from within. If it didn't, you could cut up Padre Pio's bath towels and start your own blood drive. "Stigmata" does not know, or care, about the theology involved, and thus becomes peculiarly heretical by confusing the effects of being possessed by Jesus and by Beelzebub.

And a longer excerpt from his review of Priest, which I find has some parallels to what disability activists argue about the inaccuracies in Baby (bolds are mine, but amuse yourself with the language irony in the first bolded sentence):

I am aware that the touchy-feely movement is so well established that no commercial film could seriously argue for celibacy. What I object to is the use of the church as a spice for an otherwise lame story; take away the occupations of the two central characters, and the rest of the film's events would be laid bare as tiresome sexual politics. The most obnoxious scene in the film is the one where the young priest, tortured by the needs of the flesh and by another problem we will soon get to, lectures Christ on the cross: "If you were here, you'd . . ." Well, what? Advise him to go out and get laid? The priest, named Father Greg and played by Linus Roache, picks up Graham (Robert Carlyle) for a night of what he hopes will be anonymous sex, but later Graham recognizes him on the street, and soon they are in love. This is all done by fiat; the two men are not allowed to get to know one another, or to have conversations of any meaning, since the movie is not really about their relationship, but about how backward the church is in opposing it.

Instead of taking the time to explore the sexuality of the two priests in a thoughtful way, "Priest" crams in another plot, this one based on that old chestnut, the inviolable secrecy of the confessional. Father Greg learns while hearing a confession that a young girl is being sexually abused by her father. What to do? Of course (as the filmmakers no doubt learned from Alfred Hitchcock's "I Confess") he cannot break the seal of the confessional - a rule that, for the convenience of the plot, he takes much more seriously than the rules about sex. This dilemma also figures in his anguished monologue to Jesus.

Once again, the church is used as spice. (Can you imagine audiences getting worked up over the confidential nature of a lawyer-client or a doctor-patient relationship?) But here the movie leaves a hole wide enough to run a cathedral through. The girl's father confronts the priest in the confessional, threatens him, and tells the priest he plans to keep right on with his evil practice (we don't simply have a child abuser here, but a spokesman for incest).

What the film fails to realize is that this conversation is not protected by the sacramental seal because the sinner makes it absolutely clear he is not asking forgiveness, does not repent and plans to keep right on sinning as long as he can get away with it. At this point, Father Greg should pick up the phone and call the cops.

The unexamined assumptions in the "Priest" screenplay are shallow and exploitative. The movie argues that the hidebound and outdated rules of the church are responsible for some people (priests) not having sex although they should, while others (incestuous parents) can keep on having it although they shouldn't.

For this movie to be described as a moral statement about anything other than the filmmaker's prejudices is beyond belief.

Those bolded phrases above could just as easily be me or another disability activist on Baby saying:

"What I object to is the use of assisted suicide and the trope of 'better dead than disabled' to spice up just another boxing movie."

"Instead of taking the time to explore living with quadriplegia in a thoughtful way..."

"The unexamined assumptions about disability in Baby are shallow and exploitative."

"For this movie to be described as a moral statement about anything other than Eastwood's prejudices about disabled people is beyond belief."

In fact, disability activists staged protests of the film in 2005 and did say similar things. And Ebert's response then included citing how he has disabled friends, once dated a disabled woman, and has enjoyed and featured a film or two about disability over the years. It's not that Ebert doesn't believe in protesting or objecting to political issues in films. Interestingly, he even objected to the "fascist" nature of Eastwood's Dirty Harry back in 1971. He just hasn't found disability issues compelling enough to support in the same way as Catholicism or the Bill of Rights.

Roger Ebert is a lot of fine things, especially in this latest report on his own physical health, and he may be or become a disability activist yet. But his simple statements outing himself do not themselves reveal him as a disability activist, especially given his public preference for not spoiling movie surprises over offering the facts about disability issues just two short years ago.


Visual description of the photo: Provided caption: "Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert shows his thumb and his spirits are both in fine shape Monday at his home. Photo by Dom Najolia of the Sun-Times." (I think it's worth noting that if Ebert does still have a trach to help him breathe, he's hiding it for the camera in this photo. And buttoning your airway behind a shirt isn't the best way to get air. One step at a time, I suppose.)