3:26am June 27, 2014

Missing Belle, Missing Representation

So, I’ve been seeing those trailers for Belle, albeit mostly without captions.

And I’ve been seeing people get excited about it because it’s representation! Of a female lead! On her own, not attached to a male lead as the love interest! And, a black woman! Which you almost never see. And I had been excited too and looking forward to going to see it in the theater.

And then recently I saw yet more posts about it on Tumblr with people saying we should all make a point of going to see it. And I was thinking, Yes! I should find out when Belle is going to hit the theaters so I can be ready for it! So I googled it. (Well, via bing.com, but somehow “binged it” doesn’t quite work…). And found that it will be coming out … in early May. Which was weeks ago.

Dismayed at this realization, I tried to figure out how I had completely missed the launch. So I went to http://captionfish.com which is where I always look up all my movie listings because, as a deaf person, I can only understand anything that is happening in movies if they have captions. And not all movies have captions, and the ones that have captions at all are not captioned at all locations. BOTH the movie studio has to produce the captions AND the theater has to install the specialized equipment AND specifically obtain the version of the movie that comes with the captions (and not the version without). So for deaf people and for people with auditory processing disorder in the U.S., we rely on http://captionfish.com to lead us directly to captioned showings of captioned movies without having to weed out the zillions of other showings without captions. (There’s a roughly equivalent website for the UK, though I forget now what the link is.)

I looked at http://captionfish.com … I don’t remember what it was showing a few weeks ago in early May when Belle first came out. But I know Belle was not listed at any of the theaters I most commonly go to, or else I would have seen it there, because I check every week. What it was showing this morning was that there is only ONE theater anywhere within 60 miles of Washington DC that shows Belle with captions. And that’s at some theater at Hanover Maryland about 24 miles away. I don’t drive, so driving there isn’t going to happen. I double checked at wmata.com, but just as I feared there doesn’t seem to be any DC Metro transportation (subway or bus) that goes out as far as Hanover MD. In fact, google maps tells me that Hanover seems to be nearer to Baltimore than it is to DC.

I tried investigating the MARC, but their website is not nearly as “user-friendly” as the wmata.com website: It looks like there might be some Marc train going somewhere to Hanover, but I cannot understand from the MARC site what station I need to get on at (is Union Station really the best location? Or is there some other MARC station I should try to get to?), and I don’t understand what station I would need to get off at or how to get from that station to the theater. I grasped that the ride would be more than an hour, not counting the probable 15 or 20 minute trip to reach what I THINK is the nearest Marc station to home, plus whatever time it would take to get from the Marc station in Hanover (if it is in Hanover and not just near there) to the theater. Annoying but doable. I also managed to grasp that the MARC train only goes once an hour or so … annoying but okay, I could turn this movie expedition into a full day trip if I have to.

But then, after becoming thoroughly confused and frustrated at the difficulty of finding really essential details at the marc website, I discovered that the MARC does not even run on the weekends. So I cannot use the MARC to travel to see a weekend showing of Belle.

So. The only way I can show my support for Belle and enjoy this movie in the theater is if I take a day off from work, talk to people who understand how the MARC actually works (because the web site sure doesn’t make it clear), and then spend literally more time traveling to the movie theater than I will spend in it, not even counting the trip back home.

And there are things happening at work, so I’m not sure when my next best chance will be to take a day off or if Belle will even be still showing by that time.

Except that. I just now, after writing the above paragraph, looked again at Captionfish.com. They usually only update their listings for the upcoming week during the day on Thursday. And now I am seeing that the theater in Hanover? The only one to have Belle with captions within 60 miles of me at all? Is apparently not showing it at all after today.

So I have now officially missed Belle. I will never be able to see it in the theater. I will certainly buy the blue ray when it comes out (or dvd if it isn’t on blue ray), but whatever remote chance I had of making a special full-day trip to Hanover just to see Belle is now gone. I don’t know if it’s showing anywhere near me without captions, but there’s no point in looking since I wouldn’t be able to watch anyway. (Well, I could watch it without captions. I just wouldn’t have a single fricking clue what is going on. I think the vast majority of my followers already grasp this point very well: although I’m pretty sure most of you are hearing, I think most of you do have at least one disability even if not all the ones I share. But I have run into SO many hearing people looking at me all confused and wanting to know *why* I “cannot watch” movies without captions. So I keep having trouble turning off the voice saying that I not only have to explain but have to explain why it isn’t actually a choice and why it is not appropriate to interpret my NEED for captions as a whimsical “preference” … no I don’t simply *like* movies with captions, I *need* them, there’s a difference! And I know most of the people reading this already know exactly what I mean and don’t need this explanation, but I keep feeling like I have to give it even though explaining rarely seems to work even when people *do* need it, so this is wasted effort no matter who reads it.)

And I am just so sad and frustrated at this. Why couldn’t they have captioned Belle at ALL theaters? Why did they have to caption Belle at so few locations? There are SO FEW movies with good, strong female leads AT ALL. Especially movies where the female lead is not just an appendage to the male lead. And there are even FEWER movies with women … who aren’t white, thin, conventionally attractive, middle class, cishet, non-disabled women. As a deaf woman who almost never sees deaf women representation ANYwhere, I get excited by ANY woman who differs from that so-called “default” of white, thin, middle class, cishet, nondisabled woman (when women exist at all independently of men.) So I had been so excited about Belle and planning to make a point of going to see it at least two or three times during its run (even though I usually only see a movie once, or rarely twice, if I bother at all before it hits blue ray). And now … this let down.

AND. This is how *I*feel at missing Belle. And I’m not even black. Now imagine how I would be feeling if I were a BLACK woman needing captions wanting to see Belle.

I don’t know about you, but when I try to imagine if I were black and felt that much more connection to the idea of this movie, it makes me want to go hit all the movie producers and all the owners of all the movie theaters in the DC area for not making it possible for a non-driving person in DC needing captions to go see Belle. And it makes me want to cry. And not necessarily in that order.