Question for PWS
Hello! Our names are Jessica Kozar, Emily LeVan, and Lele Kelly. We are 2nd Year SLP graduate students at UofSC. We recently read an article about how stuttering has been presented in film and television. Our question is: What are your thoughts on how stuttering has been portrayed in film and television? In your opinion, how could stuttering become more normalized in film and television?
Thank you for these excellent questions, Jessica, Emily, and Lele!
For many decades, I and many others who stutter who I knew, were really upset about the portrayals of stuttering characters in film and television. There were practically no positive or realistic portrayals of people who stutter in these media.
Popular films showed stuttering as something to be laughed at or ridiculed, or something to jack up the humor with (“A Fish Called Wanda”); or as something that suggested a psychiatric or personality abnormality (“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”); or as something that implied incompetence at one’s profession (“My Cousin Vinny”).
At the same time films started appearing that depicted positive and realistic portrayals of other disorders and disabilities – such as autism, blindness, deafness, and mobility impairments. The differences in the way other disorders/disabilities were treated, and the way stuttering was treated, were simply jarring.
“The King’s Speech” started changing all that. For the first time, a very widely watched film treated stuttering in a positive and realistic (not to mention historically accurate) manner.
Personally when I watched earlier films with stuttering characters, I felt really belittled, coming out of movie theaters with a reaction of disgust at the way stuttering or people who stutter were treated. When I first saw “The King’s Speech”, I felt like a king!
I’m less familiar with television depictions, not having been a TV fan for many decades. But I do remember shows in which people who stutter were portrayed as having psychiatric or personality problems.
My hope is that in the future, stuttering can be portrayed in films and television as something that “just is”. Characters can just happen to stutter – stuttering need not be central to the plot, and the stuttering does not have to have any particular significance in the film. Such portrayals would go a long way towards general acceptance of stuttering in society, as something that “just is”.
Hi
I’d wish that we could see documentaries not (only) about people who find a miraculous cure, but about what life is about for a PWS. The movie The King’s Speech is so great, because it not only showed a prince who stutters, but also the reactions of people. The strength of the movie is not him being fluent and living happily ever after, but the reply to the question why people should listen to him “BECAUSE I HAVE A VOICE”. In tv shows PWS are being applauded for being amazing when the only thing they do is stuttering. Why not have a PWS reporting from the Paralympics. But this is also something for us, to join a game show and just stutter on. To be in that morning sofa on TV and talk about stuttering and the new Declaration of the Right to Stutter.
We need stuttering to be normal. A variety. I’m watching a series. I see a doctor operating from a wheelchair with an adjusted operating table, a short person as a nurse. Why not just have someone who stutters on the screen, not because of the focus on stuttering, but because we’re simply a part of society. As Paul already mentioned, we want stuttering to be something that *just is”. My paper in this online conference is about just this. Do have a read.
Keep talking
Anita