Hello my lovely readers and welcome to the first proper instalment of #WordyandWheelyWednesdays in 2017.
As seems to be becoming a habit on this blog, tonight's subject isn't what I had planned to write about in this post. However, it is nevertheless rather fitting since, over the last two months or so, I have had very little time or headspace for anything other than my thesis. This post's topic is intimately connected to my thesis - albeit in a way that may not at first be obvious.
Once I had submitted my big deadline at the weekend, I chose to celebrate, like many other people on this side of the Atlantic with the privilege of internet access, by catching up on the results of the Golden Globes. Also like many other people (I imagine), the first thing I watched was Meryl Streep's speech upon the acceptance of her Lifetime Achievement award, because it was the speech that had created the most buzz on social media.
I was intrigued to find out how this actress, for whom I have a great deal of respect and admiration, had managed to use her speech as a form of political commentary, because for me that is the point of the performing arts - and when they are at their most powerful.
It is at this point that I diverge from the mainstream response by the left-wing arts sector, in that I wasn't particularly impressed. Not by the fact that she succeeded in calling out the President Elect of the USA without mentioning his name (that was clever!), but by the primary example she employed as a tool to do so - his mockery of a disabled reporter during the 2015 campaign.
Streep called this the greatest performance she had witnessed this year and said that it particularly affected her because it wasn't in a movie but in real life. She also criticised the way in which the balance of authority had been manipulated by someone who far outranked Serge Kovaleski 'in privilege, power and the ability to fight back'.
Whilst I do not condone the incident at all, as a young woman with a disability currently writing a thesis on casting practices, I was struck by the choice of words here - and, actually, by their irony. For, although I do not have a great deal of knowledge concerning the specifics of the impact of the impending presidency on people with disabilities in America, the framing of the incident as performance and an abuse of power strikes at the heart of my research.
In a similar manner to the way that Streep's invocation of the 'foreigners' in Hollywood belies the (lack of) racial and cultural diversity in most of the films that are made, her outrage at the mimicry (a word specifically etymologically linked to acting through the Greek mimesis) employed by Trump neglected to acknowledge the fact that many of her colleagues have had their greatest successes through the portrayal of people with disabilities. Moreover, the percentage of awards given for exactly such casting is significant and has increased exponentially since the advent of film making.
Consequently, the combination of this contradiction (and its superficial treatment of disability as pitiable) with her call for the industry to use its power to support the protection of minority groups doesn't rest entirely easily with me, because not all representation is good representation - or even really representation at all.
That's not to say I don't love her still...but now she's another of my 'problematic faves' (who has given me yet more fodder for my thesis).
Alas.
No comments:
Post a Comment