March is Cerebral Palsy Awareness Month, which means I’m on the hunt for work spotlighting disabled stories. Cerebral Palsy is one of the most common disabilities out there, yet finding ourselves in media is deceptively difficult. Could be because of its range in degree of severity, could be because it isn’t curable, only treatable. Could simply be that people don’t really understand much about it. Whatever the reason, it’s why documentaries like director David Zucker’s YOUR FRIEND, MEMPHIS, making its world premiere at SXSW Festival 2022, are so important.
It’s difficult to explain to someone who does not live with CP the different ways it impacts your life. In most cases I’ve seen—including my own—you have a pronounced limp and balance issues that mean either needing help from people or assistive devices or accepting the terrain as an obstacle to be battled. Conquerable, but slowly. Occasionally it’ll also have an impact on the way you speak. In more severe cases you navigate the world from a wheelchair. Whatever the degree, the most important thing in living with it is your attitude about it. An attitude like Memphis’s, where anything is possible with enough drive, determination, and belief, is essential for not getting beat down when the more frustrating factors rear their heads. In that regard, YOUR FRIEND, MEMPHIS is an important slice of life, debunking the somehow persistent societal idea that disabled people should be either miserable or incapable of accessing the world.
The other biggest factor for building yourself a strong foundation as a disabled person is to have a strong support system. It matters both how you talk about yourself and how those closest to you talk about you, and here is where MEMPHIS grows nuanced. Everyone’s experience with disability is different, which is why platforming as many stories as we can is so important. Memphis’s parents’ perspectives are entirely unique from my own parents’ and ones I’d never really thought of before. Where my mother is the strongest base I have for believing both that there are realities about my CP I must adapt to and that I can do whatever I want with my life in the process of molding it to what looks like access for me, Memphis’s parents seem to take a very all-or-nothing approach, as if they aren’t entirely certain they understand their son’s condition enough to find a middle ground in it. In most respects they aren’t actively harmful about it, and they do step in when he needs them the most, and so there’s nothing inherently wrong with their approaches; they’re just people with their own concerns and, in his mother’s case, mental illnesses, to contend with while navigating the world of caring for a disabled son. It’s an interesting side of the story not too often told, and told without the sheen of making something prettier or more palatable than the reality.
Perhaps the most important—and personally frustrating—element of MEMPHIS is the societal. The pieces put in place to help disabled people often do their damndest to work against us. From DARS being unhelpful in the pursuit of a job to the specter of SSI denial, these tools people argue are there to help us often leaving us flailing instead. Either we’re confined to a space where we give up our autonomy, like a group home, or we struggle without the support we’re hypothetically promised by the system because we’re not “disabled enough”. It only takes up a small part of MEMPHIS’s runtime, but these systemic failures are part of what drive the entirety of his decisions and lay at the root of his parents’ anxieties—for better or worse. If there were a part of this documentary I would want able-bodied people to take away from the experience it would be both that people with CP are just as capable and that we’re just as capable almost in spite of the system so many argue favors us. We are not favored by anything, even that hypothetically in place to even the playing field. Instead, we are having to constantly prove ourselves either not too disabled or disabled enough to warrant help when the truth is even the sliding scale of it is bullshit. We should not have to justify ourselves to get help we need in either direction. We should not have to justify ourselves so we’re socially palatable and we should not have to do it to be given assistance in whatever form necessary.
YOUR FRIEND, MEMPHIS is an exceptional film because it leans into the messiness of reality. Memphis makes just as many stupid mistakes as anyone else because of his sheer naïve belief that everything will work out without him having to prioritize survival work (a job, filling out paperwork to pause student loans, being able to afford housing in LA) with the work he loves (filmmaking) on an equal balance. But it’s his life, and he’s given the space and the tools to live it however he wants; he puts in the work where it matters to him, he struggles and delights and gets his heart broken. Everyone is given an equal spotlight without judgement, allowing for a view into the reality of living with CP not often seen in media. It’s a tender, joyful, heartbreaking, true story of finding your way through your 20s with an open heart, an open mind, and just enough drive to push yourself beyond the limits of anyone else’s belief in what you can do, and for that, MEMPHIS is vital viewing.
Tags: David Zucker, Disabiity, documentary, Film Festivals, SXSW, SXSW 2022, Your Friend Memphis
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