Enjoy a classic horror movie this Halloween
Your life is mundane. My life is mundane. If it wasn’t, then I guarantee you it would be both short and stressful. We all become acclimated to our daily life. If we didn’t, if every day was some unforeseeable trial, our physical and mental systems would never have time to recover.
That is not to say that there are not extraordinary things about you and your circumstances. I can also guarantee that there are things about you that are more interesting than the drivel that ends up in movies, even good movies. Most people carry their extraordinary qualities inside them and we’ll never know their talents or their pain. It’s funny how the inner light of kindness often travels with burdens about which none of us will talk.
A few of us are extraordinary physically. The world celebrates incomparable beauty and indomitable athleticism, then cringes at disfigurement. The world is a cruel place. It will not change.
A new charity is making a spectacle of themselves. Changing Faces has sent a letter to the big streamers leading up to the horror movie binging season. Pointing out that people who have “…scars, marks, burns or conditions…” find Halloween “…particularly stressful…”. As a matter of temperament, I object to charities claiming the mantle of protection over an entire class of people and when they do my knee jerk reaction is to dismiss off-handedly anything they say.
Then I thought again. People with disfigurements really do have to deal with stares and children pointing at them. One has to wonder which is worse: an immediate look of shock when you meet someone new, the “I’m not staring” eye flicks in your direction, or the pity.
Then I read their letter in a Variety article.
It relies on the tired old trope that tired old tropes will corrupt our modern sensibilities.
Did anyone walk out of Lon Chaney’s The Phantom of the Opera with the idea that deformed guys were out there seducing and abducting singers left and right? No more than anyone walked out of Bela Lugosi’s Dracula thinking that Eastern Europeans were out there seducing virgins and turning into bats.
Of course, the real nut of the thing is this; it’s all a grift. Their letter to the streamers and broadcasters ends with three simple things that can be done to demonstrate support and two of them lead you back to the fundraising arm of the charity! The other thing is to add yet another on-screen disclaimer, this one that people with disfigurements are necessarily bad people. A message that almost all of us get when we’re preschoolers who embarrass Mom by pointing at someone who looks different.
Campaigns like this tell you that, “Sure you would never think like those people, but what about all the people that aren’t as smart, savvy, and cosmopolitan as you; you smart, savvy cosmopolitan. Those people might be getting the wrong message.” They lean on your kind heartedness to raise money by your fear that somehow someone is out there being unkind. And you know what, there are people right now being unkind. There are kids making fun of people with disabilities, and drunk guys being belligerent to the unfortunate, and there are mean girls making life miserable for the outgroup. Donating to some charity is NEVER going to help that.
Be kind to the people around you and enjoy a classic horror movie this Halloween.
