Popcorn Disabilities: The Highs and Lows of Disabled Representation in the Movies

You can learn a lot from the movies-about sex and relationships, about business, about history.Sure, there’s a fair amount of fantasy, wish fulfillment, and glorious hair to exaggerate everything, but for better or for worse, films remain one of the most important ways that viewers around the world learn about other people and cultures. And almost since the dawn of the medium, movies have shaped the public’s understanding of and assumptions about disability. As a film critic and disabled person, Kristen Lopez speaks with particular authority on how disability is represented-and too often misrepresented-in movies.Popcorn Disabilities is her impassioned but nonetheless fun and engaging survey of how Hollywood has dealt with disability over the last century.As she reveals, even when they’re not just narrative props to help out an able-bodied protagonist, disabled movie characters are overwhelmingly white, affluent, and conventionally attractive, obscuring the variety of disabilities and t