Make Medicine Sick

On disability, access and Apple’s ad “The Greatest”

I was hoping not to write about Apple’s new disability ad. I was hoping the internet would say it for me, that a tweet storm would surround so many of us that most of us would hear about it, even those of us who aren’t on Twitter anymore for political or sanity reasons.

✍︎YouTube Video for Apple’s The Greatest (2022)

I was hoping the reasons would be obvious. Apple’s ad The Greatest (2022) uses the bodies of disabled people to advertise what it calls its disability features, including Voice Control and Door and Sound Recognition. It presents their use of these features as making their very lives possible, allowing them to (for example) wake up in the morning and move through space seamlessly — meaning, without showing their seams in the ways that differently abled bodies often do. Meaning, without showing the ways that they are not quite stitched into a built environment not built with them in mind.

I was hoping someone else might remind you of the social model of disability, which teaches us that people are disabled by barriers in society, not by their impairment or difference. Instead of saying a person is incorrect or needs changing because they can’t get up onto a sidewalk, for example, we know that the sidewalk is what needs changing.

It is arguable that we see this kind of change in Apple’s ad. I will buy (all puns intended) that Apple created some of their new technology features with disabled people in mind. But these features do nothing to change the built or social environment around disabled people; instead they leave it in the hands of the individual consumer to buy products from a corporation that makes their disabilities less obvious to everyone else.

I will freely admit I found this ad beautiful, and even moving at times. But what was beautiful and moving, for the most part, was the narrative of triumph over adversity. I find it disconcerting–haunting even–to watch this triumphant mood performed with the implication that Apple is fixing the problems at hand.

It is irresponsible to imply that one company can take on the responsibility to account for broad-scale institutional failures. Yes, this ad is some form of progress in representation, but it’s a representation that risks absolving social and institutional structures from truly addressing access needs. The people represented in this ad do not have to ask for help because their Apple watches do things for them. Apple stitches the seams together. But they are still seams.

The ad smooths things out, yes, but from the perspective of a non-disabled gaze. The way the people in this ad move is less — dare I say — bothersome. I use that word here because of the ad’s slickness and jaunty tone, which is aided by the soundtrack, a song called I Am The Greatest (2019) by Spinifex Gum, an Australian musical collaboration between the Indigenous ensemble Marliya Choir and Felix Riebl and Ollie McGill of the Cat Empire.

One line from the song repeats many times in this ad: “I shook the world.” To my mind, this ad does not do any substantial shaking of any worlds. Instead, it takes a perceived “shakiness” of disability and sews it up, neatens it up into a normative package. Instead of seeing someone getting out of bed in a non-normative fashion, we see someone lying in bed asking Siri to “set my morning scene,” at which point the curtains rise and we hear the weather being spoken aloud by a digital voice. The person lying in bed then moves their legs off the bed and sits up, breathing deeply and looking out the sunny window.

Or we someone holding up a phone and moving it slowly around a dressing while Siri says “describe images” and then proceeds to do so.

We see a person in a wheelchair say “tap take picture” as they sit in front of a photo backdrop, and then the photo is taken.

Part of the reason why this ad seems so normative in its form and jauntiness is because the camera moves quickly. It jumps from scene to scene and pans widely without, I would guess, tracking at the speed or rhythms of the bodies it is filming. Above all else, this is what irks me about the ad. It looks at these bodies, not from them.

I can hope that disabled people did have a say in how this ad was made and how the bodies in it were represented. I received no response when I reached out to the director and production company who created the ad, so I can only hope. Given all this, I’m trying my best to assume the best, and speak only to my own experience of watching the ad.

Where and how we watch matters. Who is looking at whom matters, as does where the camera sits. We are lucky to already have films by and about the disabled gaze, like Reid Davenport’s I Didn’t See You There (2022), a film shot from the vantage point of Davenport’s wheelchair. When I imagine an alternative to The Greatest, I imagine something like this: a representation from the POV of a disabled body, and a representation that allows in mess and disorientation — as occurs when Davenport’s camera drops to the floor. Mess and disorientation are human issues, not just disabled issues, and they do not need to be hidden away. In an ideal form, media by and about disability can show us this.

I had my hopes, because disability justice is part of a broader public discourse now — thanks to thinkers like Alice Wong, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarsinha and Mia Mingus, and “thanks” to the pandemic’s exposure of public vulnerabilities across a wider swath of bodies and experiences.

I had my hopes, but so much of this is easy to forget. I have compassion for why “able-bodied” people wish to forget their own vulnerability. And that’s why I am writing about this, why I’m writing about an ad, though no one expects an ad to be the fulcrum of revolution. I do think, still, that it can be a fulcrum of conversation.

Let’s talk. Or read, or listen, if maybe you are listening to this read by a voice-to-text tool. Inspired by the ethos of disability justice, I am attempting not only to be transparent about why I am here but about how I am choosing to communicate, offering the frames that bring me here.

I was hoping someone else would write about this because, while I have been steeped in disability justice and theory for years and often write informed by it, I am careful about how I identify with this term. In my most recent book, I write about and reflect from my experiences of chronic illness and pain. I grew up with a disabled sibling, though I wouldn’t have called them that, because in the ’90s we called it “special needs.” My sibling went to special needs schools and programs and also integrated education programs that commingled special needs students with other students.

I hope to write, here, from a commingled perspective. I’m sure some disabled people feel great about this ad, or better than I do, and I do not pretend to speak for them. The ad is not all bad, nor are Apple’s accessibility features innately damaging.

I ended up writing about the ad here because a friend texted it to me the day it came out, and it made me cringe — it made my specific body and mind cringe. Cringe: Not because I am uncomfortable with scenes of disabled bodies, but because I am uncomfortable with a world that pushes expensive consumer products as the way to address injustice, a world that glosses over the disorienting reality of being alive in a human body.

I’m sad for anyone who believes this gloss is the only way, because there is an incredibly vibrant and life-affirming conversation about disability and access occurring already, one that centers the needs and imaginations of the people affected most. As I was writing this piece, I read over the marketing and media coverage of the ad. In an Australian magazine, journalist Liv Croagh offers that “‘The Greatest’ at its most simple is a marketing tool” and the ad is “perhaps a little too on the nose.”

“If Apple didn’t release this ad,” she concludes, “We wouldn’t be forced into a conversation around the representation of disabled bodies.” But this conversation is very much happening. Not simply in academic texts or in ivory towers. Normatively abled people would be “forced” into the conversation simply by moving through their neighborhoods attentively. Or, if moving is not accessible or possible at that moment, by paying close attention to their own bodies and what these systems need to keep going.

As an educator, I introduce access needs on the first day of any given course. Without over-sharing the details of my own body, I tell participants that I myself have access needs. Always I have a few students already familiar with this terminology, and some write me privately to thank me for making visible what is often invisibilized. But most moving to me are those students who have never heard of access needs before but who now take a moment to consider what they actually require in order to be able to show up to the classroom and participate.

Yes, it takes a little bit of adjustment to bring the subject of our bodies into the classroom in a way that feels appropriately boundaried. But I would do students a disservice if I communicated to them that what it means to be an adult is someone with no vulnerabilities, with the capacity to work at high speed under apocalyptic conditions. That is not only unrealistic: it’s ableist and white supremacist.

I’m thinking here of Tema Okun’s work to identify characteristics of white supremacy culture, listing social behaviors and cultural norms (including individualism, urgency, progress over process, and others) of spaces that are dominated by and reproduce whiteness. Okun offers anti-racist pedagogies in the hopes that we “navigate the complexity of our conditioning without losing sight of the inherent humanity in each of us.”

As I learn from anti-racist scholars like Okun, I seek to identify the intersections between white supremacy and ableism so that I can better understand how social conditioning affects how we collectively act or represent. It’s a small start, but I work to cultivate situations where people see someone facilitating their classroom who is human and whose capacities vary.

I do this so that we can be together. I do this thinking of what Mia Mingus terms “access intimacy” — an encounter in which all parties fully understand one another’s needs and “we are able to start from a place of steel vulnerability.”

There are hints of “steel vulnerability” in The Greatest, but for me they come mostly in the soundtrack. While listening along, I was delighted to hear the line, “I’m so mean, I make medicine sick,” which is one of the most subversive lines I’ve heard in a long time. The singer presents themselves as so strong in their personality (not to mention the prior two lines in which the speaker “murdered a stone, hospitalized a brick!”) that not only does medicine not work on the speaker, but their strength of personality reverses the effects of the medicine. The speaker makes the medicine itself “sick,” meaning that the medicine does not functionally conform with the world the speaker has created. It’s the speaker’s world now.

Damn! I honestly can’t believe Apple let this line in here. Because to me the “medicine” so clearly represents the features of the ad’s Apple products that attempt to make a “sickness” go away, i.e. disabilities that the general public considers unsavory. In this line we see a triumph, a voice of refusal that re-makes the world on its own terms.

This piece is part of Immerse’s 2023 issue centering disability innovation in documentary and emerging tech — presenting perspectives from artists, activists, scholars and technologists at the vanguard of storytelling and disability justice. You can find other featured stories and more information about the issue here.

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