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BURBANK, California, June 16, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) — The newly released movie Me Before You features an ultra-rich, ultra-selfish playboy who after an accident becomes severely disabled, and despite having a loving and supportive family around him and a beautiful and loyal girlfriend by his side, kills himself at a Swiss euthanasia facility.
The story comes from a novel of the same title by British author Jojo Moyes. The book became so popular that she has written a sequel, and if the movie is successful, anticipation is there will be a movie sequel as well.
Neither Moyes, nor the actor playing the quadriplegic, nor the director or anyone else working on the film are severely disabled. In fact, author Moyes admits that before writing the book, she had never even met a quadriplegic.
The film features references to a book by Francesco Clark, titled Walking Papers, which autobiographically tells his story in dealing with an accident that paralyzed him from the neck down.
Now Clark is criticizing the movie, joining his voice with a slew of other activists for the disabled, who are offended by the movie's inaccurate depiction of quadriplegics and “dangerous” conclusions that the loving thing for a paralyzed person to do is kill himself.
“I’ve worked tirelessly to show people that being quadriplegic isn’t the end of your life, it’s another beginning,” Clark, an ambassador for the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation, said. “I feel compelled to express that I am angry to be unwittingly associated with a storyline that suggests the only option for those who sustain injuries like mine is death.”
Clark says his autobiography was referred to in Me Before You without his knowledge or permission.
READ: ‘You before me’ is better than ‘Me Before You’
At the movie's premiere in England on May 24, disability advocates raised a banner calling the movie a “Disability Snuff Movie.”
Euthanasia Prevention Coalition Executive Director Alex Schadenberg, whose organization is calling for a boycott of the movie, calls it, “Disability Death Porn.” “‘Me Before You’ perpetuates the idea, that death is better than living with a disability,” Schadenberg wrote on his website.
Alex Zielinski of Think Progress summarized backlash with, “To people who have a disability, this storyline sends the clear and disturbing message their lives aren’t worth living fully.”
Speaking with LifeSiteNews by phone, Schadenberg explained that the film “seeks to change the way we look at people, and purports the idea that those with disabilities are better off dead. It's a dangerous message.”
He explained that the movie portrays suicide as a loving act, and to give up on life a noble thing to do.
The prolife leader added that his call for a boycott simply asked, “Let's not give money to those who made this movie.”
“There's going to be a sequel,” he predicted, and said the way to oppose these malicious stereotypes is to withhold financial support.
Released in the United States on June 3, Me Before You was the third highest grossing movie in the United States on its opening weekend, and has grossed over $60,000,000 worldwide to date.
Disability advocates Not Dead Yet are also criticizing the movie's glorification of suicide. The group's website explains, “Not Dead Yet is a national, grassroots disability rights group that opposes legalization of assisted suicide and euthanasia as deadly forms of discrimination.”
Not Dead Yet’s New England regional director John Kelly, who lives with the same severity of injury as the suicidal Me Before You character, noted, “Book and screenplay author JoJo Moyes admits she knows nothing about quadriplegics, yet her ignorance is allowed to promote the idea that people like me are better off dead.”
“We are not ‘burdens’ whose best option is to commit suicide,” Kelly wrote. “No one’s suicide should be treated noble and inspirational. We reject this discrimination. Our suicides should be viewed as tragedies like anyone else’s.”
Shane Clifton, Dean of Theology at Alphacrucis College and himself a quadriplegic since an accident in 2010, says the movie perpetuates “the myth that those of us with the injury would be better off dead.”
Dr. Clifton blogged, “This is a book celebrating suicide. Worse, it’s a book that presumes that suicide is the only rational response to the experience of living with quadriplegia.”
Dr. Clifton complains that the book's author, Jojo Moyes, “writes a book about quadriplegics and she hasn’t met one. Had she done so she would have discovered a community of people that have the courage to choose to live.”
Cara Liebowitz, an online advocate for the disabled who herself has cerebral palsy, says the worst thing about the movie isn't the suicidal ending, but how the disabled character is portrayed. “The most disturbing part is that this character has no autonomy,” Liebowitz explained. “He's infantilized by his parents, who make all the decisions for him, and society. That's an unrealistic depiction.”
Liebowitz says a change must take place in how the disabled are portrayed on television and in the movies. “It's not about not changing ourselves,” she said. “It's changing how society looks at us.”
Twelve thousand people suffer spinal cord injuries every year in the U.S. alone.