Movies And Disability Essay, Research Paper
Some will reason that a movie, being basically a agency of amusement, can make small to alter a national consciousness. Others, mentioning the power of the medium, will claim that gesture pictures possess this rare and extraordinary ability. These two opposing point of views are about to be put to the trial with a brace of movies that, while different in so many ways, have a figure of cardinal similarities.
The Miracle Worker & # 8221 ; seems to hold been in front of its clip in its accurate portraiture of disablement. The movie shows us that the immature Helen Keller ( Duke ) , blind and deaf from babyhood, was treated as little more than a household pet before the reaching of her instructor, Ann Sullivan ( Bancroft ) .
One of the cardinal subjects is how household attitudes tended to emotionally disable immature Helen. The film efficaciously depicts the household & # 8217 ; s low outlooks of their handicapped girl and gives us a expression into how physical disablements were equated with mental disablements in an earlier epoch.
The portraiture of Helen and the other char
acters is accurate and blunt. The film makers don’t keep back to protect our esthesias, and alternatively supply a no-holds-barred position of the calamity and the victory of turning up and get the better ofing terrible disablement.
By the clip Annie Sullivan came along in 1887 & # 8212 ; about blind herself, haunted by her upbringing in an refuge and convinced that people looked down on her because her parents had been Irish immigrants & # 8212 ; 6-year-old Helen was cipher & # 8217 ; s darling. Frustrated by her inability to pass on, wilful and heedlessly spoiled by people who no longer wanted to be bothered with her, she threw hurricane-level fits that terrorized the family.
Annie taught her to finger-spell ; demolished the barrier for Helen between the motions in her manus and the words, objects and thoughts they represented ; and opened up the universe to her. Or did she? Controversy simmered throughout Helen & # 8217 ; s life over who was making the thought that moved Helen & # 8217 ; s fingers. Annie was the encephalons, her student simply the marionette, one contingent insisted, while another believed Helen had plentifulness of encephalons herself.
