A few months ago I was asked to write something about how cinema has addressed disability over its hundred and more years of existence. I did. I reread it to prepare this other article. It seems like a whole century has passed.
I write on the day of 919 deaths, March 27, 2020. A date that many, unfortunately, will remember well. And I realize that when, hopefully soon, knowing that the time will be what is necessary and not what we wish for, all of this is over, we will be different.
"The others are us," that is how my article began, which introduced the "Special Cinema and Disability". I meant something entirely different, but now it is truly like that. Whoever until two months ago considered themselves normal will emerge from this situation changed, emotionally and psychologically mutilated. We hope, however, also more aware of what it means to be confined, isolated, often ignored, avoided, not always deemed worthy of human contact. There will be many stories to tell, and however positively one can live in such a situation, few will be fully happy.
It will be interesting, then, to look back, to scroll through images that we have seen for so long with charitable benevolence, always thinking we were immune to everything, that we could not become ill, could not have accidents, certain that everything would go smoothly.
It did not work out that way. Many have said that Coronavirus is in some way a social equalizer. That is not true; one must always reckon with those who can make this balance tip in their favor thanks to heavy bank accounts. But the wounds we will carry inside, those will be difficult to heal, if not impossible, and material wealth will not serve to ease them. Wounds different nonetheless from those that every day so many men and women show to the world, more or less visible, but always tangible, without fighting battles, winning wars, but simply living, day after day.
So, the militaristic language toward illness, which has become for reasons unknown almost obligatory when addressing the topic, is a genre language, cinematically speaking. And yet Awakenings, My Left Foot, or The Elephant Man are not war films. They are stories of men and women who face the life that was given to them, with dignity and dedication, as we all should. And like everyone, they can be more or less likeable, generous, good or bad. In any case, they are human beings.
Yes, we must think about this when we start going back outside and finally feel free. We must think that many people may not have even noticed what happened. And others will be happy, but also somewhat sad, to finally see their loved ones return to normal daily routine. Because this tragic abnormality, many have finally had the opportunity to share it, with those loved ones who have been able to give love to someone who, from a bed, from a wheelchair, can never escape. To give it, and also to receive it.
Future cinema will speak of this piece of History. And it will do so by telling, within four walls, of loves that bloom or wither, of comedies of misunderstandings on social media or of inevitable existential dramas, thrillers and horror about the psychopathologies of isolation. All works that will send the same message: nothing will be as it was before. We will not be as we were before.
Yes, but we who? Because for so many others, instead, nothing will have changed and no one will remember it.
I notice it even in myself, only rereading what I wrote a few months ago I cannot recognize myself in those lines, and perhaps not even in these.
We must therefore enter the idea that there is a before and an after, also for the narrative of disability on the big screen. Stories much closer to that of Dafne, one of the best Italian films of last season and recent years, exceptional in telling the importance of exchange, emotional, experiential, to understand one another, to understand that adversities can, indeed, must be overcome together. But this is not a feeling that arises spontaneously. It must be simplified, conveyed, and grafted. That is what stories are for. And they will have to be indelible, like the images that accompany them.
Like those that pass before my eyes as I write, of the Holy Father alone in an empty St. Peter's Square. A snapshot of overwhelming power, cinema in its purest state that tells the disability of an entire planet and a man, regardless of what he represents, who fulfills the mission that has been entrusted to him. It could have been a nurse, a stretcher-bearer, one of the many young people who supply the homes of the confined. One day their stories too will be told.
So, let us also find a different narrative for those who until today have been portrayed too often as another piece of society, especially because few found the time and the right way to communicate with them. Now we have all had the time, the way comes by itself. The cinema of the day after must pass on the how. It will be very important, but not for exceptional cases and extreme conditions. But every day. In real life. Normal. For everyone.