This paper explores the differences and similarities between two different movies created about children living with disabilities and the trials they face. In each movie, however, vary in the type of disability. In the movie Lorenzo’s Oil (1992), Lorenzo Odone, is faced with a disease that did not have a cure at the time but many scientists were running research studies and tried to help the Odones. On the other hand, in the movie, The Other Sister (1999), Carla Tate, a young woman living with a mental disability, has ambition to become independent and seeks love. This paper examines Lorenzo’s Oil (1992) and The Other Sister (1999) and the way each movie portrays the story of having a child in the house suffering from a disability. Lorenzo’s …show more content…
Oil vs. The Other Sister More than often, people find themselves encountering situations where they wish to hide from the truth or tell white lies to cover themselves. Having a child with a disability grow up in a home can cause a mix of emotions onto the family. It is important for one to have understanding of the the struggles and triumphs of a family that has a member with some degree of a mental, physical or emotional disability. Previous research has expressed that 19 percent of the population is living with a disability and that more than half of them reported that their disability was severe. (U.S. Census Bureau) For example, in the movie Lorenzo’s Oil (1992), Lorenzo was a normal little boy when his parents, Augusto and Michaela Odone, started to see rapid change in his hearing and mood. The family was living in the Comoro islands when his parents relocated to the United States. Lorenzo was then diagnosed with adrenoleukodystrophy (ALD), a disease that is fatal within two years. No doctors were able to treat the young boy which is when his parents began their mission to find a successful treatment for their child. Doctors and scientists were skeptical and didn’t agree with the parent’s idea for treatment but this does not stop the Odones. By contrast, in the movie The Other Sister (1999), Carla Tate, a young woman living with a mental disability, faces adversity caused by her mother, Elizabeth. Carla wants to live a normal life while her mother acts as if she is embarrassed of her and refuses to allow Carla to go off into the real world. Carla’s wish is to go off to school and earn a degree so that one day she can have a job, live alone, and most importantly fall in love. Mental disabilities are not always life ending, many people live regular lives. Lorenzo was bedridden while Carla was able to do the things a normal child strives to do. Carla’s mother attempted to hide the struggles of having a mentally disabled daughter which backfired whenever Carla would throw a tantrum or wander off not completely aware of what she was doing. The family also has another family member living behind her mothers “perfect walls”, Carla’s sister, Heather is forced to hide the fact that she is gay. The Tate mother is afraid of judgment from the elegant community they live in. Carla does not want to be apart of the society her family lives in; she craves independence and wishes for freedom to blossom and become who she wants to be. There is no cure for the mentally handicapped, it is something that makes the personality of someone. On the contrary with Lorenzo’s fatal destiny; through extensive research in libraries, the hopeful parents questioned doctors and reviewed experiments on animals in order to understand what the disease was doing to Lorenzo’s body and what medicine could be given to him to aid it. Support groups were while interested in the discovery waiting to happen, they were indeed very skeptic. The Odone family was criticized and doctors told them that they were not helping their son and they should just give up and give him comfort. In the face of the countless obstacles and criticism, the Odone parents continue to fight until they come upon an oil to add to their son’s diet and begin the search to get their hands on a bottle.
Finding a chemist who is willing to take on the task of creating the correct formula for the oil was deemed impossible. An elderly chemist responds to the requests from the Odones and agrees to try to create a bottle of the oil for the young boy. The oil arrived and turned out to be successful in treating Lorenzo’s ALD. Towards the end of the movie, Lorenzo shows great progress and is able to swallow by himself and can communicate by blinking. As for any movie, happy endings are more common than not; Carla was successful in talking her parents into allowing her to go off to college where she met another mentally disabled student, Danny. The two students quickly bonded quickly fell in love. Danny lived alone in an apartment which fueled Carla’s desire of freedom. Elizabeth, who clearly didn’t want her daughter to have any freedom, quickly became overbearing and did not want Carla to have anything to do with Danny anymore. Eventually, Carla talks her mother into getting her an apartment and her relationship with Danny
accelerates. The two movies, while both similar in showing how society responds to the mentally disabled, explains two different stories. The moral of both of the movies is to never stop believing, and to never give up. Lorenzo’s oil shows a family who will go to the ends of the earth to help their son. Carla has a goal in life and she will not let anything or anyone get in her way, however, she is in control of her own destiny. Lorenzo is relying on his parents and his doctors to help him, he is incapable of doing anything except keep his will to live. Both parents break out into firing fights due to stress and the unknown. Lorenzo’s parents argue because they both want the same thing, but time is running out for their son and they cannot waste time. Carla’s parents begin arguing because they want different things for Carla, her mother wants her to be tied down for the rest of her life while her father wants to give her the opportunity to flourish. While the movies are indeed different, they both portray the inside life of families who truly do love their children and the struggles they pass through.
While the novel Of mice and men and the film What’s eating Gilbert Grape have different plots and settings, the themes of the two stories are very comparable. The stories depict how taking care of people with disabilities is very challenging and the problems they encounter in their day to day activities. Gilbert (What’s eating Gilbert Grape) has the task of taking care of Arnie his brother and George (Of mice and men) takes care of his childhood friend Lennie. Both of this characters Arnie and Lennie have mental disabilities and rely on their caregivers in life. The responsibility of taking care of Arnie and Lennie is frustrating but George and Gilbert still love them. This paper aims to compare and contrast the novel Of Mice
Even though the story “Pharmacy” takes place from Henry Kitteridge’s perspective, there is a lot of personality that shines through in Olive’s character. She starts this story being mild-mannered and only making subtle remarks about different things that were happening. However, by the middle of the story Olive is shouting “all I do is cook and clean and pick up after people. People just waiting for me to serve them, with their faces hanging out” (Strout 13). Olive ends up in constant fights with both Henry and her son, Christopher. Seeing these relationships degrade made me feel as though I were watching this happen to real
All these and more evidences used in the book support Peterson’s thesis and purpose—all of them discuss how having a disability made Peterson and others in her situation a part of the “other”. Her personal experience on media and
Nancy Mairs, born in 1943, described herself as a radical feminist, pacifist, and cripple. She is crippled because she has multiple sclerosis (MS), which is a chronic disease involving damage to the nerve cells and spinal cord. In her essay Disability, Mairs’ focus is on how disabled people are portrayed, or rather un-portrayed in the media. There is more than one audience that Mairs could have been trying to reach out to with this piece. The less-obvious audience would be disabled people who can connect to her writing because they can relate to it. The more obvious audience would be physically-able people who have yet to notice the lack of disabled people being portrayed by the media. Her purpose is to persuade the audience that disabled people should be shown in the media more often, to help society better cope with and realize the presence of handicapped people. Mairs starts off by saying “For months now I’ve been consciously searching for representation of myself in the media, especially television. I know I’d recognize this self becaus...
In the book, The Short Bus, Jonathan Mooney’s thesis is that there is more to people than their disabilities, it is not restricting nor is it shameful but infact it is beautiful in its own way. With a plan to travel the United States, Mooney decides to travel in a Short bus with intentions of collecting experiences from people who have overcome--or not overcome--being labeled disabled or abnormal. In this Mooney reinvents this concept that normal people suck; that a simple small message of “you’re not normal” could have a destructive and deteriorating effect. With an idea of what disabilities are, Mooney’s trip gives light to disabilities even he was not prepared to face, that he feared.
Disability, a physical or mental condition that limits a person’s movement, senses, or activities. Lisa I. Iezzonis’ reading “Stand Out” depicts a rather stimulating framework of how the disability is seen and treated. The relationship between health, illness, and narrative in this reading marks the idea of discrimination of disability through her own life events by separation of identity, people. The author employs repeated phrases, metaphors and perspectives to display this. The form of literature is written and told in the form of the first-person perspective short story but in storytelling form.
What makes Grease and Footloose an all-time classic musical film to watch is the way they easily appeal to teenagers then to teenagers now. The catchy tunes, stunning john Travolta in grease, same relatable plots in footloose, along with the wild dance moves in both movies is what makes these two films ironically very similar. Both of the main protagonists in this movie move to new areas, where new influences effect not only their teen romance, yet as well as affect their ability to avoid unwanted people and the sense of being and outsider. However, grease and footloose are taken place in a high school setting where the relationships of each individual is changed due to the social influences brought by their peers. The relatable struggle of peer pressure in today’s society is exactly the same struggles portrayed in the past and in which is shown vividly in these to movies. Peer pressure was inevitable to all the characters; grease showed how the negativity of peer pressure effected Danny and Sandy while Ren and Ariel in footloose showed how peer pressure can have a positive influences throughout their relationship.
Disability is a ‘complex issue’ (Alperstein, M., Atkins, S., Bately, K., Coetzee, D., Duncan, M., Ferguson, G., Geiger, M. Hewett, G., et al.., 2009: 239) which affects a large percentage of the world’s population. Due to it being complex, one can say that disability depends on one’s perspective (Alperstein et al., 2009: 239). In this essay, I will draw on Dylan Alcott’s disability and use his story to further explain the four models of disability being The Traditional Model, The Medical Model, The Social Model and The Integrated Model of Disability. Through this, I will reflect on my thoughts and feelings in response to Dylan’s story as well as to draw on this task and my new found knowledge of disability in aiding me to become
Jeff Nisker’s text, Calcedonies, is a play that deals with the lack of social services available to persons with disabilities in Canada (Nisker, 2010, p. 418). This play also uses Scott McCLoud’s (1993) notion of “amplification through simplification” (p. 30), to heighten the ill person’s lived experience by going beyond the written page to subjecting the audience to ‘sensorial impacts’ (Nisker, 2010, p. 418). The sets, facial expressions, music, costumes and other theatrical strategies help to convey the ill person’s emotions so that the audience can better understand their feelings. Module 3 in this health humanities course is about ‘Bodies on Stage’, and the lecture in which Nisker’s play was an ‘optional reading’, is a part of this module.
He then finds his long lost 14-year-old daughter, Angela, and challenges his disorder while developing a close relationship with her.
District 9 is a film that takes us into a realm of a different world from the one that we know now. It combines extraterrestrial life with immense science fiction to illustrate a story we could only imagine to ever actually occur. Although it was created for entertainment purposes, the motion picture can be compared to many different types of individuals and situations. District 9 displays many underlying concepts throughout the movie about racism, prejudice and discrimination. While studying and analyzing the plot and characters, these concepts became more translucent to me, the viewer. This paper will discuss the treatment of District 9 residents and equate their treatment to people with disabilities.
This article mainly examines ways in which parents can deal properly with the news of being told that their child has a disability. There are a few stories in the article which emphasize the way the parents felt when they found out about their child’s disability. In most cases, the parents felt shattered, overwhelmed and completely shocked. The article explained that parents have an expectation of having that “perfect” child and when one is told that the child is not so perfect, their dreams and their lives become devastating. The reading examines ways in which to build a support system as well as ways in which to keep a balance in your life. The author indicates the importance of keeping a positive attitude when in this situation.
Sometimes, an alcoholic can be abusive. In Arnold Josephs case, it is nonetheless. When Arnold realizes that he accidentally starts a fire that kills Thomas’s parents, alcoholism seems as the only thing in which he can turn to and try to resolve his problems. After a few years, Arnold’s alcoholism takes a toll on the household. Victor’s attitude toward alcohol is greatly affected as he sees what it did to his father. Arnold eventually left the reservation due to him not being able to manage his emotions. Even though it may seem that Arnold was being selfish, in reality, it was quite the opposite. Arnold saves the two by not submitting them to a life of fear by leaving town. In the end, alcohol rescues Victor from living in fear.
In the movie Lorenzo's Oil, directed by George Miller we see the struggling life a of a mother and father whose child gets diagnosed with an extremely rare disease known as A.L.D. or Adrenoleukodystrophy. We watch a family, the Odones, intense battle with this disease to keep their son alive through emotional and physical struggle. We witness as in inspirational conflict that gets resolved through the attributes of this boy's family, and the guilt that is experienced from the mother who passed the genes onto her son. With all this help and the help from the boys family and the determination along this troubled journey the cure was eventually discovered.
We often sympathize with the disabled and give praise to their achievements, but we understandably overlook the caretakers who provide the devotion and care to enlighten the path to success for them. A parent is often the devoting caretaker who takes to the precautions when tending to children and thinks thoroughly before any situation occurs. Welcome to Holland, an applicable metaphor that alludes to what the birth of a disabled child means. Emily explains the experience as an awaiting trip to Italy, being prepared and excited. Only suddenly does realization appear when the flight lands in Holland, a place that is unfamiliar, yet lovely and appreciation is discovered after observing Holland’s unique features. Although it is more work rearranging