Director’s Statement
Just about everyone in the disability community knows that the quickest way to an Oscar is to play a disabled character. Even my hairdresser observed this just the other day as we were discussing Joaquin Phoenix’s recent win for Joker. While the Academy and Hollywood audiences may find these movies and their lead actors worthy of the highest artistic honors, many in the disability community feel they can tell more accurate stories about how society, media and government view and treat disabled people—and for them, these stories are generally not so celebratory.
These are the stories we capture in Code of the Freaks. More than a decade in the making, the film grew out of writer-producer Susan Nussbaum’s desire to spark a conversation in the disability community about the portrayal of disabled characters in Hollywood movies. Years before, as a young woman, Susan became disabled suddenly as the result of an accident. At the time, she knew nothing about disability and had no models except those she’d seen in the movies, like Quasimodo, Baby Jane, and Tiny Tim. Fortunately, Susan soon discovered the disability rights movement and met real disabled people. Yet she continued to witness and experience the harmful effects of media representation of disability. When together we made a series of short documentaries with disabled girls, I came to understand how dual consciousness – the conflict between how others saw them and how they saw themselves –affected their self-image.
To launch our conversation, the group that was to become the Code of the Freaks’ creative team hosted a salon series in community settings around Chicago, presenting montages of Hollywood clips featuring disabled characters organized in themes – blind men and women, magical creatures, the kill or cure option – and filmed the discussions. The impassioned reactions of our audiences encouraged us to develop this film.
We wanted to make a movie that would give viewers tools to better understand what they’re watching. We called upon disabled artists, writers, scholars and activists to confront the dilemma of the disabled body onscreen, and present real-life alternatives to the stock characters and tired plots that exoticize, idealize, ridicule or demonize disabled characters.
Movies have the power to shape the beliefs and behaviors of non-disabled people toward people with disabilities, and of disabled people toward themselves. Movies build astonishing fictional worlds where they hold us captive on two-hour journeys, worming their way into our psyches. They shape our expectations in ways we’re not always aware of – especially in cases where the films provide our only references for unfamiliar experiences. We love movies and it’s a powerful love that can be mesmerizing. But the consequences can be toxic.
Salome Chasnoff, Director
Writers’ Statement
When we first started working on Code of the Freaks, none of us imagined a decade-long project that would put us in conversation with so many amazing artists, activists, and scholars. We set out to make a film by disabled people, for disabled people to capture the conversations that we and those within our communities were so desperate to have, hoping that these conversations could also have a wider audience and reach. As writers, educators, and activists, our aims were simple: to curate a collection of mainstream disability representations and raise the voices of the crip community’s critique. We spent countless hours in Susan’s living room, Carrie’s office, and on the phone from our respective couches when we were too sick, tired, and/or pained to meet in person imagining what this film could be. The final product is more than our individual and collective imaginings, and we hope that it sparks the kinds of animated discussions that gave birth to it.
Code of the Freaks enters a conversation about media representations that is, in many ways, much different from when we started the project. Activism around inclusion has begun to reach the mainstream film and television industry, with high profile actors from Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, and Mark Ruffalo recently endorsing demands to hire more disabled actors, writers, and directors. At the same time, frustratingly little has changed in the types of disability storylines that mainstream film and television produce. With few exceptions, disability still functions as a storytelling device, an inspirational trope, and a vehicle for a non-disabled character development. These images, in turn, continue to perpetuate disability oppression in their erasure of the full lives disabled people live and their propagation of harmful stereotypes that disabled lives are less valuable and/or less worthy of living. Code of the Freaks, then, extends conversations about representational authenticity to provide audiences tools through which to critically engage with past, present, and future depictions of disability on screen in order to put these images within the context of the structural oppression that disabled people face. It is our sincere hope that as the media landscape continues to change, the complex and sometimes contradictory voices captured within our film offer insights through which to understand, evaluate, and challenge these representations in ways that fight for the liberation of disabled people and that make room for more depictions of the uniqueness and vibrancy of disabled people’s lives.
Susan Nussbaum
Alyson Patsavas
Carrie Sandahl
