Audio Descriptions and Switched at Birth

I was recently contacted by two writers and advocates working on pushing digital media to provide audio descriptions for the show Switched at Birth. You can read about their efforts here. Audio descriptions are always necessary to make TV and movies fully accessible, but this show, with its frequent use of ASL, makes them especially important. Also, because it's a show about difference, disability, and identity, the irony of the show being inaccessible to blind individuals is particularly heavy.

Here's what the writers experienced when they first turned on the show:

As the first episode introduced Daphne and Bae there was a lot of dialogue. And so I could follow that story. Daphne’s mother was there and signed while she spoke which was nice. Shortly though it became clear that there were a lot of scenes shot completely in ASL. So there was just silence in those moments. Though I love audio description, and have never been so energized about advocating for it since meeting Robert, I’ve usually done pretty good with shows that have a lot of dialogue. But this was so different as part of a conversation could be going on in ASL and then someone talking in English so it was extremely difficult.

It strikes me that there has to be a better way to get audio descriptions added to a show. We went through this with Daredevil, when the irony that a show featuring a blind protagonist wouldn't be accessible to blind people generated lots of publicity and forced Netflix to make the change (I covered it for Vice). There's something similar going on here, and with sufficient push, I'm sure it's possible to get Freeform's streaming service (ABC Family changed its name; read about the fascinating history of the network here from Jacqui Shine) to add audio descriptions, or otherwise to push Netflix/AppleTV/whoever to do it? I suspect it might have to come from the network, though.

I wrote three pieces about Switched at Birth last Fall, when the show added a Down syndrome prenatal diagnosis plot.

• What Switched at Birth gets Right and Wrong about Families Like Mine (Salon.com, 9/8/15) 
• Down Syndrome, Prenatal Testing, and a Teenage Soap Opera? The Importance of Switched At Birth (The Mary Sue, 9/02/15)
• A "Bechdel-Wallace" Test for the Disability Community (Al Jazeera America, 8/30/15)

For Al Jazeera America (RIP), I wrote:

The producers of “Switched at Birth” also play with sound and hearing. When two deaf individuals sign, ambient sound drops. American Sign Language (ASL) conversations sometimes take place without subtitles, replicating the perspective of hearing people who do not sign. A highly praised episode in season two is entirely in ASL, showing a dramatized teenage version of the real-life Galludet uprising, in which deaf students at Galludet University, in Washington, D.C., staged a sit-in to demand a deaf president. In the show, the students seize control of a deaf-only school in danger of being closed.

In another episode, police arrest Emmett and react violently when he doesn’t respond to shouted commands. The scene is shown both with and without sound. In the former, there’s just a bright light shining in Emmett’s face before officers suddenly tackle him. I frequently write about the violence experienced at the hands of police by people with disabilities, including deaf individuals, but I’ve never seen such a scene portrayed on mainstream TV.

Furthermore, in the break between the seasons (it returns next January), I consulted with Lizzy Weiss, the show creator, and other writers, about the experience of being a new father of a boy with Down syndrome. I have to tell you that there are plenty of scenes coming that make me tear up. There's also one scene in the finale which, at least in reading the script, simply left me breathless in its depictions of disability and agency. Stay tuned, as they say (do they still say that?).

I'm committed to the show. I want it accessible to everyone. But I don't want to get audio descriptions in this piecemeal way, where advocates have to band together and fight, show by show. We need to make it a default. I'm not sure how to get there.

Universal design for TV is TV with audio descriptions.

Breaking Bad and Disability Narratives

I tried to watch Breaking Bad years ago with the rest of you, but as the story quickly unfolded around questions of disability and cancer, I had to stop, for personal family reasons.

Now, the show long over and the spoilers nicely spoiled, I'm trying again (on the treadmill). Disability informs so much of the show in complex, and somewhat troubling ways.

Here's a critique by disability studies scholar Stephen Kuusisito [my emphasis]

It’s hard to like cancer. But aside from the whack-a-mole portentousness of Walter’s diagnosis, the narrative incitement of “Breaking Bad” has everything to do with dark agency: accordingly the show depends on unabashed ableism. By this I don’t mean simple “discrimination in favor of able bodied people” but what David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder call “narrative prosthesis”–disability as a vehicle employed to reinforce normalcy. Narrative prosthesis deflects the abnormal body by dramatizing its unseemliness and presuming its incompatibility with our better natures. This is “Breaking Bad” in a nutshell.

What makes narrative prosthesis palatable? The answer (as Dickens well knew) is the Tiny Tim effect–the cripple must stand for something larger or more urgent “right now” in culture. You might not ordinarily think of Walter White and Tiny Tim in the same room, and if you were inclined to think of Tiny Tim at all in the context of “Breaking Bad” you would most likely imagine Walter’s son Walter Junior who is portrayed as having mild cerebral palsy. This is a clever prosthetic red herring, a ruse on crutches, for Walter is Tiny Tim in the purest sense: he reflects cultural ideas about illness. Why? Because his diagnosis is inseparable from his latent capacity for dishonesty and cruelty–a matter the show labors to prove throughout its first season as we see him despise friends and former business partners and family members who wish to help him. He’s Ahab with cancer and no health plan and a chemistry degree. He’s a figure for our times: smart, ironic, bitter, a little crazy, shrewd, vengeful, oddly nostalgic for his nuclear family, entirely creepy. But while the show strives to make these qualities digestible its larger Aristotelian template is a simple reduction of ableist ideas about serious illness. Everyone will be made ill by Walter. Everyone is rendered a cripple by Walter from his brother in law the DEA agent to his wife to Jessie Pinkman. And this is the oldest and most repulsive idea about cancer of them all. Cancer as metaphor. Intoxicating. Everyone alive with vices. Even the environment has cancer. The houses. When ableism really works its best magic the city is cancer. As Sontag says: “Before the city was understood as, literally, a cancer causing (carcinogenic) environment, the city was seen as itself a cancer–a place of abnormal, unnatural growth, and extravagant, devouring, armored passions.”

So, that's a pretty harsh indictment.

I've only seen the first few episodes, so have no real comment yet, other than finding the performative masculinity linked with ableist dialogue interesting (and pretty sure it was an intentional move on the part of the writers).

What else should I read about it?

Agent Carter > Born This Way

Born This Way was the new Down syndrome reality show that aired over December and January. I wrote a review of it here as basically fine TV limited by its artificial format.

Here, though, is a really detailed essay on the show including, wonderfully, interviews with self-advocates about watching it. Opinions, of course, vary widely, no one is really upset by the show (nor should be), but not everyone is deeply moved or think it's transformative. Here's my favorite interview.

For this article, Ms. Gehringer asked her son directly about the show and forwarded me the questions and answers.

Q: Would you like to hang out with the gang on “Born This Way?”
A: I don’t know. I don’t know if we like the same things.

Q: What did you think when the gal got upset when she heard the words Down syndrome?
A: It hurts her feelings. I would not say it to her.
Follow Up Q: Does it hurt your feelings when you hear Down syndrome?
A: NO! Why would it hurt my feelings? I’m not the same feelings as her. (Under his breath) Stupid question.

Q: What do you think when the guys were talking about dating?
A: (Very reluctant to talk about this with his mom). I don’t know. That guy should respect boundaries.

Q: I thought I heard you commenting about the one guy getting to live in his own place. What did you think about that?
A: I want a house with a yard for my dog.

Q: Do you want to watch more of this show?
A: No. “Agent Carter” is coming back on.

“So there you have it,” said Ms. Gehringer. “Apparently he was much more unimpressed than I thought.”

Hey, Agent Carter is back. Last year, a lot of people criticized the show for its relentlessly white cast (other than a jazz club owner), when New York in the 40s was a diverse city. I think the producers heard, as episode 1 engages directly with racism and segregation and had a handsome black male lead who (spoiler!) Peggy kisses.

Sesame Street and #BoycottAutismSpeaks

In April 2014, Sesame Street announced a partnership with Autism Speaks. Autistic indivduals and their allies quickly organized to push Sesame Street to do better, and not listen solely to a group dedicated to perpetuating the worst stereotypes about autism.

The results are pretty good. From an LA Times article on the process:

Children with autism vary in their traits significantly: some can talk, while others can’t. Many of them are sensitive to noise. Some have trouble keeping eye contact, and many of them experience the world differently, so they’ll touch different objects to explore the sensation of texture. Perhaps because of this range, autism is also extremely controversial. While some organizations, such as Autism Speaks, consider autism a syndrome that calls for research to help mitigate its effects, others, such as the Autism Self-Advocacy Network, simply view autism as an alternative way of expressing oneself.
So by stepping into the fray, and by choosing the traits for one character to represent autism, Sesame Street risked facing backlash.

“Sesame can be a great convener of different interests,” Westin said. “We were able to bring people at opposite ends of the spectrum, pun intended, from Autism Speaks, to the Autism Self-Advocacy Network. Those groups see certain things differently, but what they had in common is they wanted to give families and children tools.” Both groups have released statements supporting the initiative...

Ultimately, after working with these groups and experts from such institutions as the Yale Child Study Center, they decided on these characteristics for Julia: She can talk. She cannot make extensive eye contact. And she flaps her arms when she gets excited. “We chose things we thought would be most helpful and most typical,” Westin said. On top of these markers of autism, Julia is very curious and smart.

 It's good to see that Sesame Street was willing to listen to actually autistic people and create a positive, realistic, autistic muppet.

History and Myth in Game of Thrones

Last year, a reporter at the Chicago Tribune called me to ask, "Was medieval life really the way it's Game of Thrones?" I said yes, of course, nearly everyone had a dragon, was a zombie, or carried around ancient swords made of semi-magical iron.

Screenshot: A dragon looms over a
cowering shepherd. 

depicted during

Ok, I didn't say that. I very calmly and reasonably talked about the way that life for most people was reasonably dull, without major events, and that Martin knew this. His initial idea for GoT was taken from readings on the War of the Roses in late medieval England, and he was interested in the ways that civil war devastated a civilian population. So there are some loose analogies. And there are better analogies to medieval literature, as noted by Brantley Bryant. The Chicago Tribune piece was never published. I wasn't interesting enough for her, but I find the whole way that Martin uses history and legend, and the effect it has in terms of building a massive fanbase, to be fascinating. There's plenty of history and literature infusing Game of Thrones, but to me it's not what makes the world so compelling to so many people.


My friend, and literary scholar Rob Barrett, offered me a clue, and I detailed his and my subsequent ideas over at Vice. Please read the original piece and share it if you like it, as freelancers like me depend on people sharing my work in order to get future gigs. I wrote:

Rob Barrett, who teaches medieval literature at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, referred me back to the Hyborian Age of Conan the Barbarian and writer G. K. Chesterton's loose mixture of history and fiction in The Ballad of the White Horse.

In the introduction to the The Ballad of the White Horse, the poet, theologian, and philosopher wrote, "It is the chief value of a legend to mix up the centuries while preserving the sentiment. That is the use of tradition: It telescopes history." Robert E. Howard, the creator of Conan, read Chesterton's White Horse and set his own stories in a world pulling from legends and history. Note that Chesterson speaks of value. This kind of storytelling has the power to spark the imagination in ways that faithful historical recreation or adopting a specific historical setting for fantasy might not. When history is telescoped, an author takes interesting things from wherever and whenever they want and puts them in service of a new story that still feels familiar. We recognize the archetypes, then follow the plot forward.

The power of telescoping history fuels Game of Thrones. In past seasons, the civil war of Westeros drew from the War of the Roses (from the 14th century) in late medieval England as Martin's vehicle to show the disaster of civil war for civilian populations. The Ironborn invoke the Viking raiders of the ninth and tenth centuries, hundreds of years before the War of the Roses. Like the Vikings, the Ironborn aren't really just raiders but would-be conquerors of the mainland. The Dothraki, now largely out of the story (but perhaps returning later), present a potential existential menace on the scale of the Mongols (13th century). Vaes Dothrak, their city, is not unlike Karakorum, a city that combined the values of nomadic life—tents, open spaces, herds—with the mercantile role of a capital city of a major political power. Vikings, Mongols, and War of the Roses: These elements come from thousands of miles and hundreds of years apart, here telescoped in mythic form to Westeros and Essos. And it works.

I really like this notion of Telescoping History. I'm especially excited, as a Venetianist, for Braavos, which draws on Venetian myth and anti-myth (more the latter, but tweaked to a positive in this fantasy world).

Do you watch? What do you think of the season so far?