The creative team behind the film, and the supporters of it, insist that there was no offense intended. The film is a satire, and the target of this particular subplot was non-disabled actors who mine the lives of people with intellectual disabilities for the awards glory it brings. Being outraged by the slight to people with intellectual disabilities in Tropic Thunder is missing the point by a mile, they believe. Why are advocates not offended by the simplistic portrayals in those serious films?
In an interview with MTV.com, Stiller and his co-writer, Etan Cohen, described their motivations:
"Some people have taken this as making fun of handicapped people, but we're really trying to make fun of the actors who use this material as fodder for acclaim," co-writer Etan Cohen echoed to MTV. "The last thing you want is for people to think you're making fun of the victims in this who are having their lives turned into fodder for people to win Oscars."
The joke, then, is really on people like Dustin Hoffman (Rain Man), Sean Penn (I Am Sam) and Tom Hanks (Forrest Gump), actors who do more harm than good by denying the painful realities of the illness and instead paint their characters as too sunny or bright, Cohen said.
"Movies about the mentally retarded is something we talked about for a long time. My grandfather was adopted by a mentally retarded man, a man who shouldn't have been allowed to adopt a kid," Cohen revealed. "When he saw 'Forrest Gump,' you never saw a guy angrier than him. It was not such a picnic to be raised by that guy."
The film's defenders say that, within the context of the film, it's clear that people with disabilities are not the target of these jokes. To claim otherwise is to take the scenes much too literally, and in a way that is inconsistent with the film as a whole. Attempts to sanitize or restrict humor through boycotts, they feel, is a case of political correctness run amok.
Advocates for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities -- including the Arc, Special Olympics, the National Down Syndrome Congress, and the Autistic Self Advocacy Network -- say that the filmmakers may have meant for the joke to be on the likes of Hanks and Hoffman, but the pervasive use of the R-word, and other words used to describe a character with intellectual disabilities, cause the humor to be hurtful whether it was intended to be or not.
Just how many of those words are used? Patricia E. Bauer, who has been writing about the controversy from its onset on her Disability News blog, made the following count after a screening of Tropic Thunder:
Number of repetitions of the word "retard" or its variations: At least 16 in the "full retard" scene alone, not counting the uses of words like "idiot," "moron," "moronical," "imbecile," "stupid," "dumb" and "the dumbest M*****F***** that ever lived." All are used to describe the character of Simple Jack, who is described in an introductory segment as a "mentally impaired farm hand who can talk to animals."The stars of the film admitted in an Entertainment Weekly interview that they removed an instance of "the N-word" from the script because an African American actor told them they had crossed the line. If that could be done without compromising the satire, why would a reality-check on the use of the R-word have been so unthinkable?
Advocates suggest it's because people with intellectual disabilities have little or no presence in Hollywood. They're not on movie sets to tell directors a line has been crossed, and they're not in the social circles of writers and producers to demonstrate themselves as neither saintly nor painfully ill but complex human beings deserving of respect. The fact that nobody thought a slur against this group was anything to be concerned about is pretty offensive all by itself.
Tropic Thunder opened at the top of the box office, with $26 million on its opening weekend. Whether the protests dampened that total slightly or increased it by bringing publicity to the film is up for debate. And whether the protests heightened awareness of an offensive word or just made disability advocates look like humorless figures of fun themselves is probably up for debate, too.
Still, people with disabilities and their families and advocates believe that the word is too incendiary to let go without protest, and are speaking up to share their stories of how damaging the word can be. They worry that kids in school will miss the satire and sling the film's catchphrases at their classmates with special needs. They worry that progress that has been made in community inclusion will be set back by the permission they believe the film gives for intolerance. They worry that parents receiving a prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome will take this film as further proof that the world is no place for a child with developmental disabilities.
No doubt, none of that is what the filmmakers intended. Unfortunately, words have consequences that cannot always be predicted. In the coming months, as school starts and the trends among teens and young adults become clear, we may have a better idea of whether the film's R-word catchphrases catch on. The attitudes that let that language loose on film in the first place, though, are going to be of concern regardless.
