About the Author: My name is Erik Lamens (°1965), and I’m a filmmaker, a Person Who Stutters (PWS) from Belgium and President of the Belgian Stuttering Association BSV. As a child I had a very heavy stutter. I was bullied at school and at home and felt all alone in the world. I made a film about this period: ‘To Speak’. It won 17 awards and was shown on TV in 15 countries: https://vimeo.com/44418974  While getting older, my speech improved. Now I am almost fluent.

How do non-PWS people think about us? What do they know about stuttering? How do they know about stuttering?

‘Stuttering in Movies’ is a big, international project that could be of importance to the stuttering community. It analyzes how PWS and stuttering are portrayed in movies. 

My girlfriend has an autistic child and when I met him, I realized all my assumptions about autism were completely wrong. I asked myself why and the answer was: I got my information mainly from movies. ‘Rain Man’ was the first major movie to have an autistic character. But Dustin Hoffman is playing an Asperger autistic person: he’s very intelligent, weird and socially clumsy. 

My stepson is not highly intelligent, he’s very good with emotions (there is much love between us) and he’s socially not clumsy at all. So I was wrong, completely wrong. Just because I saw a movie with an autistic person and imagined that I knew about autism. 

So I wondered: what about stuttering??

Roughly of the world population stutters. So let’s say 5 to 10% of the world population have a close contact with a PWS. But what about the other 90%? Where do they get their information from? 

Part of the answer is: from movies. Movies are the most ‘consumed’ art. Hundreds of millions of people see movies every day. And movies are perfectly suited to portray stuttering behavior, much   better than other arts like painting or architecture. 

Adam Sandler, one of the biggest movie stars, made 3 films with stuttering characters and he always made fun of them. So lots of people must think: this is an okay way to treat PWS. There is also Golmaal (Indian movie) who treats a stuttering character in a very bad way. 

We formed a team and started working. A team of 10 people from different countries. 

We have a list that contains 400+ movies of all time that are said to have stuttering in them. Not all of these movies have stuttering behavior in them. This is already showing people who don’t know stuttering, often mistake a person who once stumbles over his words, for a stuttering person. 15% of the movies featured in ‘Stuttering movie’-lists, have no stuttering behavior in them. 85% do. 

We’ve seen 230 movies now. We have analyzed them. We answer to 65 questions (divided into 9 sections) covering all aspects of stuttering:

• male/female, kind of role (lead, important character, small character, extra)
• is the general attitude respectful or not? 
• is the information about stuttering & therapy correct?
• do they follow therapy? If yes, is it a realistic therapy? Does the stuttering improve? 
• Are they bullied? If yes, what happens to the bully, are they punished, encouraged or ignored? 
• Attitude of the other characters: do they accept the stuttering or not? How do they react?
• Reactions to the stuttering: we noted every reaction in all of the 230 movies, from raising an eyebrow over not understanding to bullying & turning your back and walking away, ignoring the stuttering. Dozens of different reactions were noted. We put them all in percentages and again, the results are not what you expect. 
• Why is the stuttering in the movie? How is it used? Is it a joke, is it used for dramatic reasons, historical accuracy…?
• and many more…

This results now in a big database with over 12.000 bits of data (230 movies x 65 questions). We can make lots of deductions from here. 

Over time, we can also draw lines in how stuttering was portrayed in the past (going back to 1925) until now. Is it better? Is the info more accurate? Has the knowledge of stuttering improved over time?  

Lots of interesting data come out of the analysis and it is not always what you expect. People who stutter often think that stuttering in movies is used mainly as a joke, to get a good laugh. But is that true? We measured it movie by movie and the results are very surprising. 

The most use: in 31% of the cases the stuttering is used in a dramatic way, to serve the story. 

The second most: in 27,5% of the cases there is no use at all. The stuttering is just there, no one makes a remark or joke. 

Number three is sign of weakness (16,4%). 

And only in fourth place: joke or gimmick (14,3%).

So, of all the analysed movies, in only 14,3% the stuttering is used as a joke. We often have the impression this is much much more. 

The results of the project can also be used for other purposes like making lists of ‘movies to watch’, ‘movies to avoid’, ‘movies for children’ etc. 

In the future we will make all info available on a permanent website. 

We will present all info + film clips to illustrate the use of the stuttering and the PWS. 

The whole idea is to give it all back to the stuttering community. 

I guess PWS are always treated in the same way, like we are some kind of homogeneous group, like “you can finish the sentence of someone who stutters” or “they must be an idiot because they can’t speak properly or even say their own name” or “something must have happened in their life so they started to stutter”. 

Art imitates life, so we note all reactions to stuttering in the 232 movies we saw and analysed. Our research shows how people think we can be treated and it’s often wrong as one size doesn’t fit all.