All That Jazz is, of course, an able-bodied film with its own subtext, and Dave Kehr does offer me what a poet once named Wendy would phrase as, "the shock of recognition," in Gideon's Mephistophelean aspects, but what it offers to a disability thesis is a certain Kantian aspect, that, whatever makes you a hot property, be it Scheider's restrained sex appeal on camera, or a potential political power on the rise, or skills that lend themselves to choreography, none of us have it for very long, and need to make the most of it, even as our biological design breaks down, kills us through our own behavior, though Gideon is a type of an anachronism, the basic fun loving self-destructive addict, one that I'd wager no longer exists, even in Fosse's world.
Schneider too declined and died of blood cancer, maybe not a bad way to go.
For a technical quadriplegic, I was once fairly affluent, however I have to square my father in my psyche as he heads toward dementia, and I decline, but I assert this as a basic truth: I face the prospect of dying in squalor in the last superpower standing because I was a confused 23 year old who wanted love with a passion, took risks toward total independence, and failed, and this is unjust. I no longer know, at 50, how much work I can take on in a traditional employee context, and I can bust my ass fifty ways from Sunday on article pitches, and it might not matter. I cannot force publishers to contract me, and can still fail, as I did with my editor last year.
I cannot even leave section 202 housing like a fucking normal human being. If you want me to readjust my attitude, it is simple, give me hope, and leave your community integration rhetoric in the outhouse, where it belongs.
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