I am just on my way back from watching A Theory of Everything. I had been in two minds about going to see it, given its controversial use of a non disabled actor playing a disabled man. Yet, having touched upon cosmology in my recent conversations with Lyn, I thought I would go see it. Now that I have, however, the actor has become the least of my concerns.

I have never felt so torn about a film. At the same time it struck me as a delicate portrait of one of my heroes, and a piece of pity porn of such enormity that it made me want to vomit. At times the emphasis on disability and pity became so gratuitous that I almost walked out; the lingering shots of Hawking struggling to get up and down stairs as his condition worsened being a notable example. It was so cloying and cliche that, at points, I despaired the film had ever been made. Things were redeemed, though, when upon receiving his first communication aid, they remarked with disgust at hawking now having an American accent. There were also a few good shots of Cambridge, including a couple of the quad where this piece of Hawking-related awesomeness was probably filmed.

The various controversies surrounding him aside, hawking has long been one of my heroes. Yet this film has me torn in two, and, I must say, extremely perturbed. Part of me is glad it was made, yet another part deeply objects to it’s pitying, wallowing, anti-disability overtones.