Disabled man's body digitally blurred for TV
Tonight on ABC's Primetime they featured "Adam the Healer," a 19-year-old Canadian who claims to have healing powers. The program talked to him and followed four women who had sought cures through his superpower ability to see and rearrange auras. One of the women is the wife of Canadian soldier, Lieut. Trevor Greene, whose head was split open with an axe while he served in Afghanistan. He was in a coma for three weeks. Sometime after Adam was consulted long-distance, the soldier slowly came out of his coma and now has limited speech ability.
When Adam visited Greene in person, Primetime blurred the entire image of the man in his wheelchair. Not for anonymity, but because he's a "pale shadow" of his former self. Greene appeared to be unable to use his arms or his legs.
Adam wasn't able to stay long with the couple. He was freaked out by Greene's appearance and took the first chance he could to run off. Greene remains in hospital and his prognosis is uncertain, though his wife has faith in both Adam and her husband's full recovery. Her need for his cure probably has something to do with the decision to blur out his video image as a disabled man, though Primetime wasn't completely clear about that.
The most disturbing part of this digital anonymity is that it was presented as an entirely unremarkable and unproblematic response to a severe injury. There's denial here, of course, but what else? What else.
Incidentally, Adam holds workshops for those needing healing, but it says at his website under "rules for the workshop":
6: You cannot bring noisy medical equipment into the workshop.Apparently, he can't or won't rearrange the auras of people with ventilators. And rule number seven is that you can't show up with a persistent cough. So heal thyself a little bit, then go see Adam for the full cure.
3 comments:
I watched the special about Adam and they said that they blurred "Trevor" at his request. So I thought they would have shown him except for his request to remain unphotographed. It was clear Adam was uncomfortable why was unclear.
Interesting information about the limits he puts on his appearances.
I'd missed that then. I thought perhaps his wife had been the one wanting his image blurred. Still, the media accommodated him without any comment -- even an extra line explaining that despite his extreme difficulty communicating at the time, he had spcific wishes regarding how he was presented on video. Or about how completely unaccepting he is of his impairments, as is his wife. She indicated that nothing less than full and complete recovery was acceptable.
So, I in fact did see this show, and I wondered about the wife and Trevor blurring his image. Wondered like, "wow, they are so hating him they are in denial."
But I still think censorship applies here. Self-censorship is still censorship. And we need to examine and own up to the facts of cultural censorship of impaired bodies.
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