The film crew is silent for once. There’s no joking about hair loss or what their chewing gum tastes like. Thor (yes his name is Thor) from Schenectady (yes) wipes the Zeiss with an old undershirt. We’ll have to get this right. There’s only enough film for one take.
Strangelove takes his slow, simian walk to the director’s chair. He waves his one good hand with its soiled glove–waves for silence but the place is already silent and one poor soul from the sound crew thinks Strangelove’s gesture is a signal to talk and he says that he can hear a whole city block with his new “Ultra Ears” spy gizmo that he recently purchased in Tacoma and Strangelove shoots the man with one of those iddy biddy guns that prostitutes favor.
My job is simple. In this scene I’m the pre-pathologized blind guy who can’t find his way out of his own living room and who is nothing more than a fly on the windshield of life. I do lots of groping and falling. Light the wrong end of a filter cigarette. I wear a food stained tee shirt and I’m several days unshaven.
Our film is being produced by the Defective People Industry which bankrolls “B roll” film footage of people with disabilities for later distribution to “Law and Order” and “CSI” and the tabloid news shows–even the reality shows. People with disabilities are perfect criminals in TV-Land and when they’re not bad guys they serve as reminders of what sub-existentialism will be like for you and you and you.
Sub-existentialism is not yet on Wikipedia but it will be soon. I, Stephen Kuusisto have invented it. Unlike Sartre’s existential world of no exit nausea at the cruel and crude meaningless of ruined civilization, sub-existentialism has no “on board” consciousness of any kind. Its Golem time. Its life inside a tree. Its like being a stone but without any poetry. The sub-existentialist is a mineral blank in a partially mobile body. Its possible that only your eyeballs still move. But really, you’re perfect. You look good Darling.
In turn Strangelove has a good attitude. He’s “overcome” his disability with a superior work ethic and he has learned how to inspire others by attending meetings at “Toastmasters” and by reading the collected works of Leo Buscaglia.
The point is that people with disabilities need to be everywhere presented as lumber and in turn, the Defective People Industry requires a reliable cadre of “the disabled” who can give a great spiel about “overcoming” their “condition”–overcoming it with the help of the DPI of course.
The DPI represents the charity model of disability and no one can argue with the vastness of its size. Oh its big alright.
Poor Strangelove, still Victorian, caught in the Jekyll and Hyde dichotomy of the good versus bad disabled person and playing “it” for all its worth.
Of course I’m just the B roll blind guy who stubs his Winston out in a lamp. The DPI and the “Law and Order” crowd wouldn’t have it any other way.
And surely I’m bitter until I overcome my personal flesh.
S.K.
Planet of the Blind 
Speaking of people with disabilities in the movies, I’m waiting to see somebody talk about the latest movie from Pixar, UP, from that perspective. I’d thought they’d done a pretty good job with “Finding Nemo”, but I was seriously impressed with UP. (The talking dogs were great, too.) If the described version isn’t playing, it does require somebody to describe things, because there are whole sections that are silent. mia
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