What happens when a bunch of teenagers go to summer camp in their height of puberty? They wreak havoc, have a great time, try some contraband drugs, and fool around with each other in a virginity-defying quest for adulthood. What happens if these teenagers have Polio, Cerebral Palsy, Down Syndrome, Spina Bifida or MS? The same thing. Just with a lot more wheelchairs involved in the baseball games and make-out sessions.
That’s the world “Crip Camp” introduces us to – for the first 40 minutes of the film, we are immersed in a wonderfully “inappropriate” summer camp Jened in upstate New York. This camp, founded by parents of kids with Cerebral Palsy, operated for nearly 20 years (approx. 1960-1980 with a second 25-year-run in another location until the early 2000s, which isn’t mentioned in the film) and provided an un-sheltered source of freedom for disabled teenagers, and an opportunity for human connection and growth to camp counselors from all over the United States.
Pity VS Profanity
Many films about disability utilize pathos, pity and pain. They are careful in the treatment of their characters and not to step on any toes – a bit like the THR review of the film. And while there is a lot of that in a disabled person’s life – and in many people’s lives regardless of ability – there’s plenty of joy, profanity and profound insights to be had in a film about disability. And, unlike the THR tip-toeing, it’s massively liberating how the film dealt with disability. Not as weakness or fragility, but as a simple fact of life. These are awesome people sharing hilarious and moving insights in what it’s like to be in their shoes.
I might be stepping on toes here, but in my experience with friends and acquintances with disabilities, none of them want to be linguistically or physically babied or touched with white gloves. There are obvious physical needs that different disabilities come with, but I don’t think it’s productive to be all too sensitive around a person with a disability – it creates the same sort of “separate but equal” impression that sending them off to their own school does. And I think this true equality, making fun of each other and treating each other like we’re on the same level, leads to much more honest relationships.
One of my personal favorites of this level-headed approach in the film was one of the camp alums recounting a story of his first date in the camp, along the lines: “A camp counselor taught me how to kiss the night before. That was the best physical therapy I’ve ever received. And then the next day, I had my first date with this girl at the camp. She touched my … cock. It was wonderful.” I’ve had similar conversations with quadriplegic friends in my personal life. Many disabled teenagers are perverts just like the rest of us.
These are simply not the things you’d expect if you’re an outsider – but they are the common thread that break assumptions and prejudice. When someone curses on screen, you know you can practically trust them, and there’s no need to put on a pity party. The use of humor is brilliantly applied in Crip Camp to remove barriers – whether it’s barriers between disabled groups, or barriers between the disabled world and the other 80-ish% of the population.
You might say, oh please, we all have disabled people in our lives, and things are much better now. Sure, most of us know a number of people with disabilities. They make up about 20% of the world’s population, practically forming the largest minority on the globe – and it’s hard to avoid getting to know 1 in 5 people. That doesn’t change anything about the fact that there’s still no true equity, and while a lot has happened since the Camp Jened era of the 1960s, things currently are still full of employment discrimination and false assumptions. As long as you’re not personally affected by birth, disability is easy to ignore. Well, chances are that 1 in 4 of 20-year-olds will become disabled before retirement.
A line in the film profoundly illustrates this invisible divide. Jim LeBrecht, one of the two directors of the film (along Nicole Newnham) and himself having been born with Spina Bifida, recalls his father giving him advice when he was admitted to a public school: “You’ll have to introduce yourself to other kids. You have to approach them and say hello, because they will be afraid to talk to you.”
As filmmakers from all walks of life, the portrayal of people with disabilities on screen is a challenge – not so much in this film because it’s a film made by the community for the community. For those that don’t quite have good access or understanding of disability, RespectAbility’s “Hollywood Disability Toolkit” is a truly comprehensive 50-page guide to do things better. Unfortunately, the guide doesn’t directly recommend to make your disabled characters swear and talk about teenage sexuality – but that doesn’t change anything about the fact that these are powerful tools to disarm your audiences’ potential “fear of the other”. In the end, we’re all just people that can relate to each other’s human experience.
Record Occupations and Missing Footnotes
The film allows us to follow the teenage troublemakers of Camp Jened into their adult lives, where a number of them become political activists, deeply involved in pushing disability rights issues. Crip Camp focuses on one of the campers with Polio, Judy Heumann, who leads a street blockade in 1970s New York for disability rights and then graduates to West Coast activism, gaining continuous steam for the cause, up to the epic mid-point of the film, where hundreds of people with disabilities stage the “504 Sit-In” in the Health, Education and Welfare offices of the Federal Building in San Francisco. Joseph Califano, administrator of the HEW at the time, was unwilling to sign Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which was supposed to ban publicly funded discrimination against people with disabilities. Judy and a number of other well-organized community leaders took over the building and made history: The sit-in was the longest occupation of a federal building in the existence of the U.S. (which the film doesn’t quite mention in its historical gravitas). Even Drunk History made an episode on this badass move.
The “Capitol Crawl”, where wheelchair users of all kinds shed their wheelchairs and climbed the non-accessible stairs to the highest symbol of U.S. politics, the capitol.
Up to this point, we’re wrapped up in a beautiful storyline of these teenagers-turned-activists, and appropriately traces the tremendous power the 504 sit-in and Judy Heumann’s delegation trip to Washington had with convincing Califano (after holding candlelight vigils in front of his house and following him to public appearances) to sign 504 into power.
The film then takes a bit of a leap of faith in simplifying the history of the American Disabilities Act of 1990, which followed nearly 17 years later. For the uninitiated, this is the act that put wheelchair ramps into place in all public buildings and gave a lot of protection to people with disabilities, opening up countless new avenues of opportunity – “to assure equality of opportunity, full participation, independent living, and economic self-sufficiency for individuals with disabilities.” I wondered many times what stars had to align for the disabled communities to have so much unified political power (as they had 30 years ago) to push through such an incredible piece of legislation. On an international level for example, countries like Austria and Japan have had quite pitiful disability laws in comparison to the U.S., usually lagging behind 15-25 years. The ADA was the first act in the world to give such wide support to people with disabilities, and positioned the Bush Senior-era U.S. as the global leader in disability relations.
The film’s narrative centers around direct action and activism like the Capitol Crawl. While these are cinematic moments and films need to simplify history to fit a narrative in a limited amount of time, it gives us a wrong impression of how history happens.
Work like the professional lobbying of Patrisha Wright, or the institutional recommendations of government agencies like the National Council on Disability were instrumental in shifting the tide in favor of the ADA, and the film unfortunately makes no mention of it. I’m not suggesting that the film is under an oscar-speech-style obligation of rattling down all people that should be thanked for the ADA, or that it needs to dive into the complicated politics at the top that made this happen. It would have simply been a nice gesture to have one of the interviewees give a footnote a la “a lot of other things had to work out, outside of our lead character’s activism, to get a historical bill like this put on the table and signed into existence.” As this film can serve as a role model for future activists, it carries some reasonable responsibility to not accidentally further a naive, romantic narrative of “magical activism and easy social change”.
Social change is incredibly difficult, and the people that achieve it study large scale systems, build powerful alliances and invest decades of their lives to utilize the right time in history in order to make a dent in the universe.
United towards Accessibility
This film is about people from all walks of disability and ability coming together to crush an unfair system and fight for accessibility. Together. United. The way it should be. The stories of Crip Camp and the ADA are rather rare exceptions to the usually fractured communities of people with disabilities. As you can imagine, each community has their own interests and doesn’t always see an incentive to support another community. Yet, politically speaking, individual disabilities usually make up single-digit percentages on a global level, but all disabled communities united form a 15-20% front, the “largest minority in the world”, according to the WHO. The more united this front, the more likely things like the ADA can happen again and re-balance the world.
Watch Crip Camp and get inspired. Join or support an organization like RespectAbility that actively works on re-unifying the disability community for political leverage. As humans, we are better than just shunning our fellow humans because of some genetic variation, accident or other circumstance. There’s so much to be gained from creating an equally accessible world for all – and right now, that’s not the case.
