Here We Are

Hello Lovelies! I don't know if any of you have seen the movie "Me Before You" from 2016, but I wanted to talk about it. Personally, I have mixed feelings about the premise. Sam Claflin's character in the movie has only become wheelchair-bound and paralyzed "recently" in the movie. I'm thinking that makes the disability and his immobility more digestable for general audiences, butI do have problems with it. For one thing, why not portray an individual who's had to deal with life in an inaccessible world his whole life? Why is it so much "kinder" to have an injury or illness to blame for disability? Does EVERYTHING have to have a reason? A "palettable" reason? Which leads me neatly into the second issue I take with this movie, that the paralyzed man falls for his able-bodied caretaker. Yes it's probably very likely that the guy needing help would develop feelings for the girl who cares for him. God knows my own fiance was a paraplegic (from the waist down) man who I always said I was a "care abouter", not a care taker. So it's not impossible to imagine a woman finding a sweet man with physical challenges just her type. But personally, I think that adds a layer of obligation to the relationship, if only because I've kinda felt it. The love between me and him was real. It was intense. It was all I could ever want. BUT...there were times when I told myself "if I don't love him, who will?" Which I know in hindsight is extremely sad and wrong, but I wasn't in the psychological possition to leave him at that point. I was still so traumatized by my own life until that point that I absolutely could not say no to someone who loved me, even if part of me had the tiniest shreds of doubt about him. So I told myself over and over again that I loved him, and the VAST majority of the time, this was true. I did. But once in a while we did disconnect, and I did have to admit I wass with him partly because I felt like I had to be. And so I wonder if the caring woman who ends up with the paralyzed man in "Me Before You" was REALLY with him because she loved him that much, or just because of proximity to him and a sense of obligation or sympathy. I don't think most of the audience would find the relationship that complicated. To the outside world, they probably just made a cute couple. Which is how I feel I was perceived in my own relationship with a disabled man, even though our connection and the things we had in common went much deeper than that. The rest of the world would most likely not read that much into it. It's just me:) The final bone I have to pick with this movie, and probably the whole entertainment industry, is most likely one picked by other actors with distinguishing characteristics; qualities that make it impossible to put them into roles other than who they are. An example would be Scarlett Johanson playing the lead in a live-action adaptation of the Anime movie, "Ghost in the Shell." As an unquestionably stunning actor with many roles to her credit, this is a woman who could probably get any movie part she wanted. As most of you know, Anime is a genre of entertainment centered on and around Asian actors, so you would imagine that only those actors could (or should) be cast in those roles. With the final product being Johanson, it seems this is not how the casting director or the producers saw things. And that meant there was at least one role out there WRITTEN for an Asian that an Asian could not have. So that brings me to able-bodied actors playing disabled peoples' roles. As in "Me Before You", the main character was portrayed by a man who could certainly have gotten any role he chose to pursue, with his good looks and his talent. Alas, a man with just as much talent who happened to have an actual disability wouldn't necessarily have an equal shot at getting a part in this movie; it had already been cast with Able actors:( And this is just one example. I see it in movies more and more. With the notable exception of the Oscar-winning "Koda", in which most of the principle roles are filled by the legitimately deaf, representation has become a little bit unrealistic. YES, there are people with physical or mental challenges being portrayed in movies more often these days BUT--a lot of that representation is by people who probably don't understand their characters from personal experience, and thus probably don't feel the same way about them as a person who could actually relate to them in a tangible way would.