“People or Props Tool” Helps Filmmakers Identify and Cast Off Ableist Narratives About Disability
By casting off prejudice-inducing and ableist film narratives about disability, audiences will begin to see disabled characters as unique individuals who deserve to contribute to every society. Disabled psychologist Richard Amm has devised a tool to make that happen.
Called the People or Props Tool, Amm says that his tool has “flexibility in storytelling while providing guidelines for improved representation.” It has a Quickscore that those developing films can use to assess their scripts and if the script scores poorly, meaning it may cause further prejudice about disabled people, he has People or Props recommendations to guide the film development team.
“This tool could be especially useful for sensitivity readers, writers, and funding decision makers within the media industry, encouraging feedback and revisions during the development process, rather than serving as a rigid, prescriptive list,” he writes in a recent research article, “Development of the People or Props Tool Integrating Prejudice Reduction Psychology Insights to Improve Representations of Disability on Screen,” in the International Journal of Disability and Social Justice.
Amm, who lives in England, also tries to make disability research available to the general public through the organization he runs, the Disability Action Research Kollective (DARK). He created a DARK zine about his People or Props Tool as well.
Amm says many times nondisabled screenwriters and disability charities, filled with nondisabled people, make the decisions on how to represent a disabled character in a film. And the tool is trying to right a wrong in film school curricula. Many film schools still use a book called The Definitive Guide to Screenwriting, which gives ableist advice to future filmmakers to show a character’s “physical difference… as a method to visually convey moral difference, such as adding a limp to a character to suggest ‘being an emotional cripple,’” Amm writes.
Amm saw how prejudice worked because he grew up on a farm in South Africa both during and after apartheid. South Africa’s authoritarian white-minority leaders did everything they could to segregate and disenfranchise Black Africans, who represent the majority in the country. He says he saw “how the state would dehumanize groups of people, [and I had] awareness of that. [This] was something that has informed my work.”
Amm also saw that mass media perpetuated prejudicial beliefs about Black Africans. “The role of the media is often to demonize the marginalized,” and make them believe it is “their fault,” he says. But the apartheid regime did not want media content that fostered sympathy towards Black Africans either. He says, “there was a very clear understanding that media can teach people empathy.” The apartheid government even banned the 1877 novel, Black Beauty, in 1965 because it had the word “black” in the title. It is one of the best-selling novels of all time and is actually about a horse, not a human.
He began to see the impact of media on disabled people when his own disability became apparent. Amm has a rare form of muscular dystrophy, type 2A, so he did not experience any disabling effects from it until he was a young adult. As an avid film buff, he began to notice the negative themes about disability in movies. But his own life experiences countered those negative tropes, he says. When he began using a wheelchair at age 30, Amm found freedom from pain and from dangerous falls.
“As walking was getting progressively harder, I knew that I would eventually be a wheelchair user. And everything I’d seen [on film] about what it was like to be a wheelchair user up until that point was that it was a fate worse than death,” he explains.
Amm studied prejudice reduction within psychology for his undergraduate degree, and he added mass media research to that to develop the People or Props Tool for his graduate degree. In his research, he found the United Nations’ Intersectionality Resource Guide and Toolkit, which gave him the idea for a film toolkit about disabled characters and disability themes. According to the UN, the Intersectionality Resource Guide and Toolkit helps people “apply an intersectional approach to their work. It aims to provide conceptual clarity, a practical framework and tools for reducing compounded and intersecting inequalities faced by people experiencing diverse and compounded forms of discrimination.” This UN Toolkit is part of the briefs on women and girls with disabilities series.
The late international disability rights leader Judy Heumann investigated the importance of disability representation in the media in 2019. “The disability experience ought to be an intrinsic element of the media’s representation of society,” she wrote in her study as a Ford Foundation Senior Fellow, Road Map for Inclusion: Changing the Face of Disability in Media. “The time has come to seriously and comprehensively take steps that will move us from the margins to the main stage.”
In an interview with the Ford Foundation, Heumann said that people with invisible disabilities, especially, will be able to embrace their disability identity with more and better media representation. “That’s why media is so important: it creates dialogue. We don’t have to agree with everything that’s being presented, but when nothing is being presented, it makes it hard for people to learn about who we are—and who we’re not. It’s the same thing with any other group, whether that’s Muslims, or people of color, or immigrants or LGBT people.”
To construct his toolkit, Amm joined an understanding of prejudice reduction psychology with interviews of about 30 disabled media experts. The experts helped identify the negative film themes about disability that needed to be changed.
One disabled expert Amm interviewed explained that in films, “nearly all portrayals are negative. [There are] lots of harmful tropes including the disabled villain, disability as a burden, disability as a plot device – usually the impact a family member or other loved one’s disability has on a non-disabled protagonist, better dead than disabled, disabled super villain, the lovable childlike disabled person (usually with a social or intellectual disability), and I can go on and on. They come from a place that doesn’t truly understand disability. They paint disabled people as helpless burdens on society that don’t deserve to be in this world. They paint disability as something worse than death.”
Nielsen Media Research in the US, which measures media audiences and their behaviors, surveyed disabled Americans in 2021 and explained that “media has a powerful role in educating audiences about disabilities, both visible and nonvisible. But the representation gap is glaring… survey findings reveal that when a story or character shows disabilities, audiences who live with disabilities say the portrayal of their identity group is inaccurate.”
The goal is for films in development to use the People or Props Tool to assess if a film is reinforcing prejudicial themes about disability. Amm says that a disabled screenwriter for a science fiction film about prosthetics has been using the tool this year as they developed their script. But he adds, “the People or Props Tool is in no way intended as an appropriate substitute for meaningfully involving disabled people in media production.”
Amm says that the tool could be useful for any film studio or organization funding a film “to judge whether or not a script should receive development funding. Rating systems may allow parents to pre-screen films for disabled children, which may reduce internalized ableism that may otherwise harm psychosocial development. Having an overall framework for what increases prejudice may also help counter propaganda efforts, by clarifying and bringing attention to the methods used to dehumanize marginalized groups within society.”
Three countries produce the most films each year: India (Bollywood), Nigeria (Nollywood), and the United States (Hollywood). Disability and Media Studies scholar Ngozi Marion Emmanuel, who is originally from Nigeria and is currently faculty at Birmingham City University in the UK, studies disability representation in Nollywood films. She says the People or Props Tool could be useful in the development of Nollywood films for writers so they “can self-regulate themselves to ensure that disabled characters are not cast as props in their films,” she says.
Nollywood production companies could use the tool to score scripts “to ensure that they do not rely on harmful tropes and stereotypes” about disabled people in films, she says. “I think the production level would be most critical for Nollywood, as an awareness that production companies are serious with disability, and how it is portrayed onscreen can force writers to adapt their scripts in a more meaningful and empowering way.”
Emmanuel hopes that Nigeria’s National Film and Video Censors Board (NFVCB) integrates the People or Props Tool Quickscore “into film classification and review processes. This way, films that rely on stereotypes or harmful tropes can be flagged as such. This impacts both the audience and the marketability of the films themselves.”
Emmanuel sees financial benefits for Nollywood to eliminate harmful disability narratives: “If used in Nollywood, the Quickscore could also help the industry with global financing and international partnerships/collaborations especially, as we are keen (and heavy) on collaborating with Netflix and Amazon Prime.”
From her extensive research into disability representation in Nollywood films, Emmanuel has developed a new representation model grounded in Nigerian culture called the Bad Belle Model. She says it manifests when “disabled people are regarded as victims of other people’s malice. Within the Bad Belle framework, it is believed that people are capable of making one another disabled should they choose to. Reasons why one can make another [person] disabled include feelings of [a] grudge, envy, jealousy, or just simply on a whim. The belief in Bad Belle is so pervasive in Nigerian cultures and media, that it often translates to disability shame and exclusion of disabled people.”
In the US, Hollywood is making a few positive changes by hiring disabled people as actors, writers, and consultants, but primarily for television, not film.
Lawrence Carter-Long, who is Director of Engagement for ReelAbilities International, is a respected authority on disability in film. He wrote for PBS in 2020 that Hollywood has a long history of ableist representations. “Even the earliest silver screen depictions of disability tended to sow more seeds of doubt and suspicion than attempting to illuminate an unfamiliar, but parallel experience or break new ground,” he writes.
Carter-Long says disability in film has long been presented as a kind of “other.” Disability is “to be viewed at a safe, comfortable distance, subject to existing, dominant structures of paternalism and objectification. Beyond those safe zones lies greater authenticity.”
I see authenticity as key as well, and it fits hand in glove with the People or Props Tool. “We need to shift our focus to authentic disability representation that encompasses active participation from the community of people with disabilities. We must support disabled media creators with accessible and inclusive media production at all levels. They know how to tell their stories the best,” I wrote for the forthcoming book, Disability and Digital Technologies.
Carter-Long’s hope is that “the next [film] wave will mark a transition from disability as subject or object into largely uncharted terrain – where disabled filmmakers are given increased access to turn the camera on themselves and on the world surrounding them. Ultimately, shining a light on fresh perspectives and untapped insights.”
Amm explains that authenticity in film reduces prejudice against disabled people: “Authentic representation is a powerful tool of prejudice reduction, and casting disabled actors to play disabled characters is one key strategy to promote authenticity. Authentic casting also increases audience empathy by aligning their understanding of the disabled character with a real, visible disabled person: the actor.”
All films that include a disabled character or disability theme should include disabled people in all aspects of the production, and in the film development process. The People or Props Tool can signal to screenwriters and filmmakers that their script is going down an ableist path of reinforcing prejudice against the 1.3 billion people with disabilities worldwide.
Feature image by Tima Miroshnichenko: A dimly lit empty cinema theater with rows of red chairs facing a projector screen.
