So if there are lupies reading this, I assume that I am not the only lupus blog you read, in which case you saw the title of this post and thought "JEEEEEEEEZ this girl is behind the times," but I'm going to go ahead and throw my two cents out fashionably late.
For those who don't know, the movie Love Simple got a lot of attention around the lupus-blogosphere a little while ago. It is a simple (hur hur) romance where Boy is lying to Girl because Boy lives at home with his sick dad. Girl is lying to Boy because Girl has lupus.
The opening of the movie shows Adam bringing a girl home with the logic "I just wanted to get the scary stuff out of the way." But being in his dad's creepy house with his dead mom's Victorian dolls practically spilling out of the living room, and, on top of that, creepy dad-with-oxygen-tank staring from the doorway, the girl leaves. Then we cut to Seta who is sitting in a suspiciously un-busy waiting room with an ugly rash across her face, apologizing to her date. He asks her, "So does this happen often?" gesturing at her rash, and she says "not this bad usually, I just wanted to be on the safe side." But his response is "But how often? Every week? Every month?" and when she comes back out from seeing the doctor he's gone.
So we have set up Reasons for Lying. The Adam character has a harder time getting around the I Live at Home thing and as such ends up being kind of obnoxious for me, because his lies are so constant. It just doesn't feel equal at all. He pretends like he's been to Africa and a year of med school, stuff like that. She just tries to say that the bottle of pills he finds belongs to her friend. I would actually have been a little more interested if Adam hadn't hidden his sick dad. If he had actually be honest about how he felt (he HATES having to take care of him. At one point he says "whatever girl I find better be fit as a fiddle" with regards to having to Take Care of People), though that, I suppose, might've just ended the romance before it started.
I read a few complaints on lupus blogs about the simplification of symptoms but as someone who has tried to portray the disease in writing, I can at least testify to the fact that it's really hard. Because we're portraying people who MOSTLY can carry on a semi-normal life, you don't want to hit every symptom over the head. That over-dramatizes something that's not that dramatic. You want to somehow portray how it affects the person day-to-day without getting in the way of your story, because the disease isn't getting in the way of their life. Too much. So when I write about it I usually pick a symptom or two. Once I did the rash and hair loss, another time swollen knees and fingers, and I try to allude to the other problems without making my characters sound completely crippled.
So they chose rash and fever, and hinted at sun-sensitivity. I think they also hinted at soreness, though maybe you'd have to have the disease to see it. When they first meet and he asks if she wants to take a walk, she hesitates in a way that made me think her knees must be hurting her, and at one point he steals her sun hat and she tries to chase him up a jungle gym but after climbing up one rung of the ladder gets back down and just waves her arms around.
So by normal movie standards, like, if Seta hadn't had MY disease, I wouldn't think this was a very good movie. It was fine, but it wasn't very funny, the script wasn't that good, and even the plot was a little shaky. But one thing Seta said when the two were finally coming clean (and briefly breaking up) was "I've figured out how to stop this from taking over my life; it's everyone else who can't get past it." I was thinking today about how hard it is to know when I'm allowed to talk about it - something that exists all the time, that I think about a lot even when I'm not upset by it, and the other day someone said to me "let's talk about something else, this is depressing." I think we all want to not have to hesitate when we have something to say, whether it's that we're in pain or just to tell a hospital story or spew a weird lupie-fact that ONLY WE KNOW (bwahahaha) without it negatively affecting those around us. When we feel as though we're a burden we're extra sensitive to how others react and we (well, I - let's stop using the royal 'we') can test the water and tell pretty quickly who I can talk to and who I can't. And the ones I can talk to are the ones who don't act like I need taking care of. Seta's best friend has a good no-nonsense manner when she's over helping Seta through a flare-up. You don't get the sense that there's pity behind the help.
So yes, the movie did not give a particularly full account of lupus, the way it would have been able to if it had, for instance, focused more exclusively on Seta. But on the other hand, lupus is an "invisible disease" and to get it across in any way is certainly a start. She didn't feel like a prop or like she was disease-first, person-second, and I commend the movie for that.
(I really will tell you about Mexico sometime. Maybe.)
