Content warning: This article contains mentions of suicide.
When I was undergoing treatment for leukemia, I couldn’t bear to watch a single movie. Sitting on my hospital bed, my laptop was always tightly closed and stored away on the other side of the room. Instead, I spent time with my sister in relaxing games of Scrabble.
My reluctance to watch movies wasn’t because movies are a waste of time, nor was I against watching a good film in general — it was because of what the movies were often about and how they affected me. Imagine coming back to your small, empty hospital room after finishing a round of chemotherapy. You’re emotionally and physically drained, only craving a simple distraction. You open Netflix, but all you see is movie after movie that uses cancer as an ingredient to spice up its plot.
Yeah. Not a good feeling.
The characters in these movies either pass away from their condition, fall hopelessly in love to make the character’s condition seem all the more tragic, or do both: fall in love and then die. As someone who has lived through the conditions that these movies so offhandedly abuse, these carelessly reductive movies cannot entertain me.
After successfully beating cancer, I am now a proud survivor. Still, I don’t want to see these kinds of films anytime soon or ever again. When the credits roll, I’m left with a bitter taste in my mouth and a single thought swirling in my head: “The main character had cancer, and she lost the battle. What if that was me?”
Approximately one in six people in the world live with a disability, so it’s safe to imagine that many others would be as irked as I am when they see their own experience exploited for cinematic entertainment.
A disparity between representation and reality
Torontonians like myself know that the city always gears up for the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). The 11-day festival includes movies of all genres, produced by companies from all over the world — including the exact movies that I avoided when I was undergoing treatment.
TIFF is not shy about showcasing movies depicting characters with physical illnesses or disabilities: the film Miss You Already, for example, premiered at TIFF in 2015. This dramatic romantic comedy follows the struggles of Jess and Milly, who are childhood friends. While Jess is trying to have a baby, Milly is diagnosed with breast cancer. The diagnosis sends shocks into Milly’s world and she goes through a form of cancer treatment: chemotherapy.
But that’s where things go wrong.
Although Milly experiences a relatable whirlwind of emotions of sadness, frustration, and rage, her way of living and acting as a cancer patient undergoing treatment is overly dramatized to the point where it is difficult to connect with her — even as a former cancer patient myself. Milly becomes as impulsive as a rebellious teenager: she gets drunk day and night and repeatedly cheats on her supportive husband, the father of her children.
Movie characters with cancer like Milly who are depicted as reckless and single-minded perpetuate a disparity between representation and real life, alienating the audience living with a physical illness or disability. Miss You Already uses a cancer diagnosis as a tool to instigate one big adventure for a character rather than to accurately tell the story of a cancer patient. But this isn’t unique to Miss You Already, as many storytellers in the film industry seem to prefer to exploit an experience for dramatic effect and entertainment over valuable representation.
Assistant Professor Chavon Niles at the Department of Physical Therapy in the Temerty Faculty of Medicine, who researched critical disability studies, shares a similar sentiment as mine about cultural misrepresentations of disability. In an email to The Varsity, she explained, “When the media predominantly portrays disability through a negative or limited lens, people with disabilities may feel that their experiences are misunderstood or devalued by society, leading to feelings of isolation and disconnection from social life.”
“This isolation,” continued Niles, “is further compounded by the fact that many fictional stories and visual media fail to represent the structural barriers and discrimination that people with disabilities face daily.” Instead of exploring the complexities of life with a physical illness or disability, Niles argued that many films accentuate the character’s tragedy by showcasing their bad decisions and fatal endings.
Milly does not experience any character development in Miss You Already, staying entirely one-dimensional from beginning to end. She receives her cancer diagnosis early on in the movie, and the rest of the plot simply relies on her diagnosis to shape her as a character. Milly’s story is told from a negative lens because it subjects a cancer patient’s experience to a string of terrible decisions and a tragic ending: death. Miss You Already sends a message that cancer patients are defined by their diagnosis and that all the decisions they make and the actions they take in their lives are an extension of their illness — right up to their untimely death.
Another film that misrepresents life with a physical illness is Blackbird, which premiered at TIFF in 2019. Blackbird is your typical family drama. The mother, Lily, is going through a hard battle with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a terminal disease that affects the nervous system. She brings three generations of her family together one last time before taking her own life.
In the final family gathering, the audience witnesses an explosion of family secrets that have been simmering for quite a while. From Lily disclosing that she encouraged her husband to enter a romantic relationship with their family friend to Lily’s daughter revealing that she has been suicidal and admitted to a psychiatric hospital, problems surface and arguments erupt with the trigger being the nearing end of Lily’s life.
While tensions and stress levels can arise when a loved one is about to take their last breath, the dramatic family gathering and exaggerated subplots for cinematic entertainment distract from exploring the emotional experience of a character battling with ALS. By the end of the movie, audiences will remain ignorant about the reality of ALS and how it impacts a person, with little attention paid to depicting how Lily felt or how her illness impacted her.
Assistant Professor of cinema studies Rakesh Sengupta elaborated on the disparity between representation and reality in an email interview with The Varsity. He said, “I feel this [disparity between representation and reality…] can lead to diminished empathy and understanding among audiences. The absence of realistic representation also impacts the visibility and participation of disabled actors and creators in any film industry.”
Poor cinematic representation for entertainment’s sake does more harm than good, especially to young audience members like myself who deal with or have dealt with a physical illness or disability. Blackbird, for example, barely touches on an ALS experience, making it practically invisible under all the extravagant family drama and reducing the illness to the start of a tragic ending. This shows how representation can ironically endorse invisibility if done improperly.
“We must remember that young audiences are in a critical stage of identity formation and are particularly susceptible to the messages they receive from [the] media,” wrote Sengupta.
After watching Miss You Already and Blackbird, I remember the grand escapades and the dramatic family secrets so much more than the actual diagnoses in the stories. This sends the message that the experience of someone with cancer or ALS is not worth exploration and is rather a way to embellish the story.
Romanticization with consequences
When making a movie about people with physical illnesses or disabilities, storytellers take on the responsibility of accurately representing the affected people and their experiences. However, instead of drawing from the richness of real life, they take the easy route of combining a tragic love story with a tear-jerking ending for more viewership. The result is toxic romanticization.
Me Before You is a popular and perfect example of a book and film that captured the audience’s hearts and brought even hard-hearted people to tears. This movie takes the romanticization of a disability to another level and then ends in blunt pessimism.
The movie follows Will — who became both quadriplegic and pessimistic from an accident two years ago — and his new and quirky caregiver, Lou. The more Will spends time with Lou, the more her optimism rubs off on him. They end up falling in love — no shock there — but ultimately, love cannot save Will. He still chooses to die, believing he cannot live a fulfilling life while paralyzed.
Not only does Me Before You portray the life and death of a person struggling to reconcile with his quadriplegia through a romantic lens, but it also sends a dangerously fatalistic message about living with a disability.
Niles also addressed the dismal effect Me Before You can have on young adults: “[The] narrative… where the disabled character’s life is depicted as not worth living… sends a harmful message that can deeply influence how young adults with physical disabilities perceive their own value and potential.”
Despite surviving a motorbike accident and falling deeply in love, Will decides that life with a physical disability is not worth living. I see this compelling audience member with similar disabilities toward hopelessness and thoughts of self-doubt: “Is my life worth living?”
“This internalization can lead [young adults with disabilities] to a lack of self-confidence, social withdrawal, and a reluctance to pursue ambitions or advocate for their rights, perpetuating a cycle of marginalization and disempowerment,” Niles wrote.
Movies for teens also shamelessly use physical illness and disability to amplify the emotional impact of their romantic plots. The teen flick Five Feet Apart follows Stella and Will, who are both diagnosed with cystic fibrosis — a genetic disorder that damages the lungs — and must keep a good distance from each other to avoid spreading harmful bacteria between them. Unsurprisingly, they develop an instant romantic connection and proceed to do exactly what they shouldn’t if they want to survive.
Stella and Will are patients at the same hospital, but despite being under the care of nurses and doctors, they manage to leave and go on rebellious adventures together. During one of their rebellious adventures, Stella falls through a frozen pond, and Will performs mouth-to-mouth CPR, dramatically breaking the distance that their shared illness requires them to maintain.
By the end of the movie, Stella finally receives her long-awaited lung transplant, but it’s unclear if Will is still alive since he is ineligible for a transplant. He confesses his love to Stella and vanishes forever.
Five Feet Apart uses cystic fibrosis to tug at the same heartstrings that quadriplegia does in Me Before You. The characters are reduced to their physical condition, with romance as the only thing that draws them out of it.
While I am an avid romance lover, using characters with physical illnesses or disabilities in love stories to provoke viewers to feel dispassionate. Stella only shows interest in being more than her illness when her love interest is by her side or after her best friend Poe passes away from cystic fibrosis. This suggests that people with a physical illness or disability need a big emotional event, like falling in love or experiencing loss, to live life to the fullest.
Ayala Sher, a second-year history and studio art student at UTSC with a non-visible physical condition, shared concerns about cinematic depictions of physical illnesses and disabilities. “I really dislike when a disability is reduced to a plot device,” she said. “For example, someone’s mother might experience cancer, and that’s used to teach the character that life is important… that just feels quite disrespectful.”
Sher believes that romanticizing and misrepresenting an illness or disability in a movie can have harmful consequences. “I have quite mixed feelings because less accurate portrayals can be… frustrating at best and offensive and harmful at worst,” said Sher.
“At times, films can reduce the character to their disability, so that character might not have any traits outside of their disability.”
A call for better, more nuanced cinematic representation
Movies have social and cultural influence, and when they dramatize and romanticize physical illnesses and disabilities, they can reinforce barriers and discrimination. As we live in an era of expanding mass media and increasing film production, it is crucial to nurture better cinematic representation. Without better representation, more disabled people could be negatively impacted, especially given that the number of Canadians with disabilities increased by 4.7 per cent from 2017 to 2022.
Jheanelle Anderson, a research assistant at the Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work, believes that the feelings of isolation and pessimism experienced by many people with disabilities are due to societal culture. “I don’t think people with disabilities… isolate themselves from social life purposefully,” she said in an interview with The Varsity.
With both apparent and non-apparent disabilities herself, Anderson knows firsthand how society imposes limitations on people with disabilities. “The environment itself is so inaccessible in multiple ways, whether it’s structures [or] attitudes.”
The cinema is one environment that endorses inaccessibility through flawed representation. As a result, real, living individuals may begin to see themselves in an equally flawed light.
However, some movies do successfully deliver genuine stories, and the TIFF film I Am: Celine Dion (2024) is one of them.
I Am: Celine Dion takes the audience on an epic journey through the “My Heart Will Go On” singer’s life and her experience with stiff-person syndrome: a rare neurological disease that causes stiffness and spasms. It highlights both the ups and downs of an individual battling an illness while juggling family life and a career as a singer. By opening up about her personal struggles and courageously including footage of herself experiencing an unexpected seizure while filming, Dion offers a raw, behind-the-scenes look at life with stiff-person syndrome.
This movie excels in representation not merely because it is autobiographical, but because it offers unfiltered portrayals of joy, sadness, and anger. While the film showcases the happiness Dion’s family and career bring her, it also confronts audiences with the numerous ways a physical illness can affect a person’s personal and professional life.
Real, rich, and complex cinematic representations portray the good and bad aspects of living with a physical illness or disability and place a sincere focus on that character. Rather than existing solely for dramatic effect, the character reveals the diverse challenges faced when an illness or disability alters one’s life: confronting the intense desire to pursue passions without limitations or discrimination, as well as the ability to enjoy life — just like anyone else.
People with disabilities often experience higher levels of mental distress compared to those without disabilities. In fact, 17.4 million disabled adults have been reported to have recurrent mental distress, according to a 2018 study conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Government agency. The films currently playing in cinemas may not be alleviating this issue.
We need to call for a more nuanced and accurate cinematic representation of disabilities and illnesses. We need to see that we are valued and worth living. We need acceptance and empowerment. Our lives are rich and our struggles complex. We are real people with emotions, feelings, thoughts, and beliefs. Stigmatization and romanticization in movies impact us deeply, and no one should be okay with it.
Anderson puts it this way: “It’s really a journey of acceptance and a journey of unlearning messages that you’ve been told. Representation is important, and the kind of representation that disabilities get, is just as important.”
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