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I’m so happy to participate in this year’s Disability in Film Blogathon. The blogathon in a nutshell: A bunch of us who love to talk and write about disability representation in film are all posting on our blogs at the same time in honor of Disability Employment Month. I picked a film with disabled characters but not disabled actors so we remember the lost employment opportunities for disabled actors. And it also is a super awful and terrible movie. So, I’m glad no disabled people I know and admire had to go through the horror of starring in the “romantic” comedy “50 First Dates.”

Here’s an image advertising the blogathon and showing the cripping up portrayals from “The Miracle Worker.” Helen Keller is the actual star of Helen Keller’s actual life. Despite the fact that we talk about “The Miracle Worker” as the story of Helen Keller, it’s obvious from the title that the movie is about Annie’s miracle work, not Helen.

In “50 First Dates,” the disabled person is also a prop in the protagonist’s story. In this case, Drew Barrymore’s character, Lucy, has a TBI. She’s a prop in the life of Adam Sandler’s sexual predator character. Whatever his character’s name is. He’s so disgusting that I can’t be bothered to look up the character’s name for this blog and am glad I forgot it. But there’s so much about that film I can’t forget because it’s so detestable.

Like most fiction and non-fiction films about TBI, “50 First Dates” focuses on white main characters. The film is set in Hawaii. And despite the fact that Hawaiian actors exist (including a few who are in the movie), the white actor Rob Schneider wears brown face in the film as the character Ula. He also sports a fake cataract so that he can pull off some hackneyed, not-believable blind guy gags because the racist casting here just wasn’t enough for them.

“50 First Dates” is everywhere. Unfortunately, you’ll find it at the top of the recommended movie lists from many state Brain Injury Associations and Alliances that they give to families when someone gets a TBI. Their intention is for you to be at home and watch some films to get acclimated to what life might be like when your loved one comes out of the hospital. Except that Lucy is like no TBI survivor ever. So, I’m not sure how watching this is informative. She somehow only has one impairment, and it’s a memory impairment invented by the film’s creative team. It’s not even any kind of memory impairment that makes any sense because she only forgets while she sleeps. Also, seriously? A life-threatening TBI, and all she has is a problem with her memory? Worse yet, the beloved Roger Ebert says this about Adam Sandler’s acting: “He reveals the warm side of his personality, and leaves behind the hostility, anger and gross-out humor…. Lucy is surrounded by a lot of support (her loving dad and the staff at the local diner)….”

Let’s look at Adam Sandler’s character’s warmth and Lucy’s support. Every day he flirts with her, and every day, she’s forgotten she met him the day before. Despite her disinterest in him, when he finds out she’s got a memory impairment, he doubles down on his pursuit of her, invading her space, stalking her, and coming up with increasingly escalated attempts to woo her. He even pretends to be dyslexic to get her to help him read the diner menu. Aha! Because taking advantage of her TBI disability to refuse to accept “no” for an answer and jokes about Ula’s blindness weren’t funny enough. Before this predation even started, Lucy’s brother and father had fully isolated her from her pre-injury friends and manipulated her world so that she thinks it’s the same day, day after day. She doesn’t know time is passing, and so she doesn’t mourn her lost life. Um, except she didn’t lose her life. She’s alive. The men in her family stole it from her by manipulating her into thinking time was never passing and that she didn’t have a disability.

If Lucy weren’t cognitively impaired, we’d see her family as abusing her and Sandler as being a predator. But Roger Ebert finds Sandler’s character warm because it’s supposedly charitable and/or a sign of innocence and sweetness to be attracted to a disabled person. And he views her dad as loving because Dad’s hiding her disability from her and sparing her the awfulness of knowing she has a disability. I can’t help but wonder if Roger Ebert would’ve had a different take on the humor in manipulating disabled people if the movie had come out after he permanently lost his ability to speak.

Lucy is the object of a romantic conquest and is shown as someone with absolutely no agency. That’s the dominant narrative that non-disabled people have about us inside and outside of movies, which is why expert movie critics like Roger Ebert could watch this garbage and not notice that it is in fact not only garbage, but it’s the also the dumpster on fire that the garbage is in.

I’ve seen amateur reviews of the film touting it as “a very sweet and original love story” and that Lucy has a “rare brain disorder.” I guess that second one makes sense if you think that the cause of her brain disorder, a TBI, is rare because 282,000 people are hospitalized with one each year. I’d say that calling that rare is as ludicrous as calling this very sweet and original as a love story.

In case you’re interested, I’m not linking to the (not surprisingly) uncaptioned trailer because my goal here is to encourage you to not waste your precious life by spending time with this cinematic travesty. You will not get those minutes back.

I can tell you first hand from my own life and from the lives of my friends and acquaintances with TBI disabilities that there can be, for some people, quite a lot of humor in life with TBI. My first two films were comedies about how messed up my life was. No problem. My life, my screenplays, my comedies about me. But that’s not the same as writing a comedy based around the idea that a woman is not allowed to say no to a man. Sure, this film came out before #MeToo took off as a mainstream movement and before #TimesUp. But really? It was 2004. That’s not that long ago. We all knew sexual predation was vile and abusive back then because it always has been vile and abusive. But as long as the person in the role of prey is disabled, somehow it’s above critique. Not from me it isn’t.

In conclusion! Screenwriters and directors: if the best you can do with disability is use it as a plot device or an excuse for cheap bullshit, skip it. Stick to what you know. Or move over and let some of us who know what this stuff is to put the films out.