Popcorn Disabilities: The Highs and Lows of Disabled Representation in the Movies

You can learn a lot from the movies-about sex and relationships, about business, about history. Sure, there’s a fair amount of fantasy, wish fulfillment, and glorious hair to exaggerate everything, but for better or for worse, films remain one of the most important ways that viewers around the world learn about other people and cultures. And almost since the dawn of the medium, movies have shaped the public’s understanding of and assumptions about disability.

As a film critic and disabled person, Kristen Lopez speaks with particular authority on how disability is represented-and too often misrepresented-in movies. Popcorn Disabilities is her impassioned but nonetheless fun and engaging survey of how Hollywood has dealt with disability over the last century. As she reveals, even when they’re not just narrative props to help out an able-bodied protagonist, disabled movie characters are overwhelmingly white, affluent, and conventionally attractive, obscuring the variety of disabilities and the experiences of those who deal with them. But she also explains where films have gotten it right and how the power of the medium can continue to be used to enlighten and educate in the future. From little-remembered gems like Tod Browning’s Freaks-one of the earliest well-intentioned attempts to show disabled characters as complex, three-dimensional human beings-to contemporary films like Coda, My Left Foot, A Different Man, and many others, it challenges popular assumptions about disability while never losing sight of movies’ unique power, influence, and potential as a tool for social good.

Kristen Lopez is a Film Editor at TheWrap and former TV Editor at IndieWire. She has worked as a journalist and pop-culture essayist for nearly two decades, and her work has appeared in Variety, Forbes, MTV, Roger Ebert.com, and The Hollywood Reporter. Some of her more memorable (or controversial) articles on disability include her discussions of how The Shape of Water broke down barriers with regards to sex and disability, Joker utilized mental illness as a punchline, and Shazam promoted one’s ＂best self＂ as being able-bodied. She is the author of But Have You Read the Book, from TCM/Running Press (2023). She was nominated in 2021 for a SoCal Journalism Award for her reporting on IndieWire about the lack of a ramp at the Emmys. In 2018, The L.A. Times spotlighted her in an article about marginalized critics. Kristen is active on social media, cultivating 10.3 thousand followers, many of whom routinely engage with her on disability in entertainment. She is based in Los Angeles.