Jon22: The Website of Jonathan Dobres

Sometimes I’ll visit Metacritic, pick a movie at random, and read nothing but the lowest scoring reviews. This is equally fun for movies I love or despise. If I loved it and some other guy hated it, I’m curious as to why; if I hated it and some guy hated it just as much or more, well, that justifies my righteous indignation, doesn’t it?

So let’s return to Murderball for one more day, shall we? I touched on something yesterday that I think warrants a little explanation. I said that I liked Murderball because above all else it never slides into easy pity. This is a movie about Quad Rugby and its players—jocks first, quadriplegics last, and a lot of stuff in between. Quite remarkably, the documentary shows off the intensity of the sport and its players without ever pausing to stupidly marvel at the bravery of spinal cord injury victims.

I personally hate it when people with disabilities are described as “heroic” or “brave,” as has happened to me on a few occasions. Don’t get me wrong. A disability, whether incurred through injury, disease or birth, sucks. Everything else being equal, your life is going to be harder than the average able-bodied person’s, and I certainly don’t want to make light of that. Dealing with disability and living your life does take a certain amount of strength and determination. Certainly, dealing with the initial injury, or enduring invasive surgery, or suffering through hours of painful therapy all take bravery, but such adjectives should stop there.

These are words typically used by the able-bodied to describe the disabled, whether out of a sense of guilt, fear, or pity. It is incredibly condescending. Think about this for a second. If a disabled person who leads a reasonably independent life is considered heroic, then what would you consider normal? To simply sink back into one’s limitations? To give up? To not try? To think that defeat is normal? I’m sure this is not the message that most people want to send when they tell someone with a disability that they are very brave, but nevertheless the implication is there. It vastly underestimates the coping skills of the average human being and totally misunderstands what it means to live with a disability.

The lowest scoring review of Murderball that I could find was written by Bill White for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The headline alone should tip you off as to why I have such a problem with it: “‘Murderball’ is just a tame sports documentary despite heroic, strong-willed characters”. White goes on to describe the Quad Rugby players as having endured a “long and heroic journey” to get where they are. No, no, no. Undoubtedly it takes a lot of work to be good at a game as brutal as Quad Rugby. The thing that White is missing, however, is that people like Mark Zupan do not play Quad Rugby in spite of their disabilities. They play the game because this is who they are, wheelchair or not. Joe Soares has what you might see as an insane devotion to the game, but that’s who he is. No matter what kind of body the universe handed him, this guy was going to find a sport to play. His commitment to the sport is amazing, sure, but throwing out a word like “heroism” totally misses the point that Murderball was trying to make. Just how much does Bill White miss the point? Witness his final sentence:

… it does however, offer a hard-edged and unsentimental portrait of strong-willed people who, following misfortunes that would have knocked most people out of the game, picked up the ball and kept going.

Good intentions, I’m sure.