New Zealand Rehabilitation Association, Inc.

Over the last five or six years it has become increasingly apparent to me that as a health professional I have had too little education in the history of the disability rights movement. My formal training as a physiotherapist focused on assessment, treatment and management of impairments and disability, but little on theory from the growing field of disability studies. It wasn't until I undertook postgraduate study that I began to read work from leading thinkers in disability studies such as Mike Oliver, David Pfeiffer and Tom Shakespeare. It is only more recently that I've come to appreciated that this is a relatively recent history we are talking about here; one which is still evolving - the most recent development of course being the signing of the UN Convention of Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which only just came into being last year.

So it was with interest that I took the opportunity to view ‘The Music Within' on DVD this week - a movie about the life of Richard Pimentel, the man attributed with pushing the Americans with Disabilities Act into law in 1990. Richard, so the story goes, was a young man with a shakey start to life, who signed up to fight in the Vietnam War to gain ‘life experience'. There he sustained profound hearing loss when a stray bomb hit his bunker. On returning home, Pimentel returned to University (or ‘college' as they say in the US), to meet up with Art Honneyman, a smart, funny, crass guy with cerebral palsy. As it turned out, Pimentel, who had lost all his hearing except for one obscure part of his register, was the only one who could understand Art, who had a severe speech impairment, and the two partnered up as translators for one another. A seminal life lesson is learned however when Art and Richard are arrested for refusing to leave a pancake house when told by the waitress that Art is disturbing the other patrons by his unsightly appearance. Apparently at the time there was something called the ‘Ugly Laws' in America, which made it a felony to disturb other people in public by being diseased, maimed, mutilated or deformed! (The last of the Ugly Laws was only repealed in Chicago in 1974, incidentally.) This of course set the scene for Pimentel to get active with doing something about discrimination against people with disabilities.

The movie itself is an easy watch - funny, engaging, and often light-hearted. It does risk coming across as a little predictable or perhaps twee in places, and the overall impression from reviews at Rotten Tomatoes, is that you're left with the feeling that the movie could have been so much more. One thing that has been bugging me ever since seeing this movie is one particular scene in a bar. Pimentel after several years of trying and disposing of hearing aids that make no difference to his hearing eventually reaches a point in history where technology can compensate for his tinnitus and his hearing loss appears to be resolved. However, in an argument with a man in a bar about disability rights and how much it is likely to cost to make the bar accessible (sounding like a public education video now?) Pimentel throws his brand-spanking new, super flash, latest tech hearing aids down on the bar. It then appears that he leaves the bar without them, but it is unclear however whether this is an intentional rejection of the able bodied world or just a continuity error in the editing. Still, as someone relatively new to the history of the disability rights movement, this movie filled in some gaps.

Another aside: It is also interesting to see Art Honneyman being played by an abled bodied actor, Michael Sheen. As pointed out by Mat Fraser, in his angry crip rap, you wouldn't get a white actor ‘blacking up' to play a Black American roles anymore (i.e. since about 1930!), why don't we have actors with cerebral palsy playing people with cerebral palsy? Hmm...

Post script: Richard Pimentel is still active in the disability advocacy world and a Senior Partner of Milt Wright & Associates, Inc. More video footage of Pimental, the man himself, can be download from the Milt Wright & Associates, Inc. webiste.