Nothing’s Gonna Change My World (I Am Sam, 2001)
I was around 13 when I first watched I Am Sam (2001). I listened to the soundtrack many times on the way to school, a CD comprised entirely of Beatles cover songs. Since then, I have developed into a budding scholar of critical disability studies and adjacent fields, have turned into the kind of person who balks at The Big Bang Theory. So, it seems only natural that when contemplating the wealth of disabled characters swimming in my memory bank, Sam crops up. He was someone whom I retrospectively regarded with a certain level of contempt; defined by a lack of dignity, punished due to the fact that he has the mental age of a seven-year-old (despite having fathered and raised a child virtually singlehandedly). Upon re-watching it, I realised my mistake. The problem does not lie in Sam and his characterisation, nor the movie’s plotline, but in the visceral, hard-to-watch ableism that trips him up every step of the way.
In many ways, I Am Sam is a radical piece of representation, first and foremost for its portrayal of a fleshed out intellectually disabled character, and second in its depiction of him being a father. Such baseline requirements should not be called ‘radical’; the reason I use this word is because I cannot find anything remotely like this in the canon of disabled characters that have peppered the silver screen and curriculum vitae of Oscar-nominees over the last century (most of which, including Sean Penn, are non-disabled). Sam’s overcoming goes against the grain of typical disability narratives of triumph over an internal sense of adversity. His story is instead concerned with how difficult life is in an ableist society. Even pieces of criticism from the time of the film’s release attempt to keep this character pacified and stripped of autonomy, with reviews going so far as to say that the movie roots for the wrong side — Sam’s retention of custody of his daughter — where the viewer’s common sense dictates otherwise. Sam’s recovery is not dependent on changes in attitudes by himself or others, nor does it hinge on his disability being conceptualised as something separate to him a la person-first language. It is instead marked by the acquisition of his dignity — and his daughter — by way of a fight for what is just, for what every human being deserves: the right to provide their child with the utmost love and care that they can, and to retain this right so long as their relationship is healthy and happy.
Sam Dawson (Sean Penn) is an intellectually disabled Beatlemaniac who works at Starbucks. He had a one-night stand with a homeless woman which resulted in a pregnancy; on the day of the baby’s birth, the woman leaves him standing at the bus terminal, catapulting him into single parenthood. He names the baby Lucy (Dakota Fanning) after the Beatles song, ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’, and they are happy. Sam is supported by his neighbour, Annie (Dianne Wiest), and his friends who host weekly movie nights and provide a sounding board for Sam’s parental questions and shopping choices. Lucy, a bright student, regresses as she turns seven due to her fears of surpassing her father’s intelligence, and grows somewhat ashamed of his disability, saying to a classmate that she was adopted. After a wrongful arrest for solicitation and an altercation at Lucy’s surprise party, Lucy is taken into care, and Sam is only permitted to see his daughter twice a week, supervised and stifled. His friends suggest that he contact a lawyer in order to regain custody. The lawyer, Rita (Michelle Pfeiffer), initially brushes off Sam’s pleas, but takes his case out of embarrassment when he shows up at a work function, providing the perfect opportunity for her to prove to begrudging colleagues that she is not cold, and, contrary to popular belief, does indeed do pro bono work. What ensues is a courtroom drama concerned with an ethical dilemma: of whether or not Sam should retain custody of Lucy, whether or not people like him are suitable to raise children at all. It is heart-wrenching in its severity, and ends with Sam being manipulated into the admission that he is not Lucy’s best option. Lucy winds up in foster care, and Sam tries to better his financial situation in order to prove that he is, in fact, a good father. Although reticent at first, the foster family eventually see merit in Sam’s fathering abilities, and do not push for adoption, but are still involved as parental figures in Lucy’s life.
Track 1: Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds
And the Lord said, ‘Let there be Lucy.’ Lucy is the centre of Sam’s universe. The feeling that so many speak of when they first hold their baby seems to permeate every day of Sam’s life with his daughter. She is a diamond in his heart, a source of light in a life that has been filled with unkindness and misunderstanding. When looking at him, she does not see anything other than ‘Daddy’.
Track 2: Two of Us
There is something intoxicating about the montage of Lucy’s early years: idyllic trips to the park, swings a-swinging, a father looking on with pure adoration. Images of single fathers are few and far between, and disabled parenthood is virtually invisible on-screen. Sam’s approach to parenting, one marked by drawing from the resources one has in order to get by, is by no means exclusive to his experience. Yet it is treated as inferior, insufficient to meet the needs of his child. Rita gets a medical doctor with an intellectually disabled mother to testify that she had a brilliant experience of love and support growing up. Sam runs up to the stand and hugs her in gratitude for her testimony. Mr. Turner (Richard Schiff) overrides the success of the testimony, deducing that, since her grandparents took care of her much of the time, that this woman has a qualitatively different — better — experience than that which would be afforded to Lucy. Sam does not have a family to fall back on or a well-paying job, and is ostensibly not smart enough to teach his daughter about menstruation on his own — all of which are ridiculous justifications for what everyone is thinking: that Sam is not worthy of the precarious and difficult task of bringing up a child because he is different from — below — everyone else. Throughout the trial, there are doubts about Sam’s ability to handle parenthood on his own, to which Rita retorts that no one parents entirely alone. We get by with a little help from our friends. When looking at Sam’s journey into fatherhood, one cannot ignore Annie, his agoraphobic neighbour, in her quasi-grandmotherly support of Sam, fielding questions about nappy-changing and crying and sleep, babysitting Lucy when Sam is at work. We also cannot ignore the role of his friends, his work, and his routine in constructing a life that is relatively manageable, all things considered.
Track 3: You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away
Like all parents, Sam can be embarrassing. The difference here is that his embarrassing behaviours occur with little to no regard for the social contract. They are noticeably autistic, indicative of a certain rigidity that people outside such a mind struggle to penetrate. I am sure that when I first watched this, I felt the same thing. Now, though, I find myself able to relate. The reason that I choose not to behave as Sam does when a piece of my routine changes is because I have been able to mask my discomfort by way of teenage angst or total dissociation. When watching Sam, many of us may cringe at his forthright displays of thoughts, feelings, frustrations. Is this reaction due to the almost alien nature of someone expressing themselves as they truly are, because we cannot do that, or because we are afraid to do so? Afraid of pulling back the veil of social niceties and the expectation to adapt to and understand everything that life throws at us for fear of appearing ‘stupid’?
Track 4: Mother Nature’s Son
Who better to raise a child than someone who has raised themselves? We find out that Sam was institutionalised when he and Rita are traversing a whiplash-inducing traffic jam in her Porsche. He never knew his father, and his mother wanted nothing to do with him. One of the men who ran the institution, a stand-in for a father figure, abused Sam, a point which is used against him by Mr. Turner as he hurtles toward a breakdown. For most of his life, Sam was tasked with looking out for himself, to a higher degree than most. In the same way that some children of abusive parents are brilliant parents because they bore witness to what not to do, Sam has a running start on how to look after something precious and small, entirely its own, because he has had to do that for himself. When first coming to grips with being autistic, I thought about the odds of my child being autistic, having higher support needs than me, being someone I could not reach. I have grown beyond these neuroses, for the most part, but they do force me to beg the question: how does one kill the Hans Asperger in one’s head? These unspoken anxieties have no doubt informed my treatment of others as well as myself, my lens of the world and my place in it. And I am at least aware of them. What about those who aren’t? Those who, when watching I Am Sam, pity him, but do not believe in his competence, and, subsequently, the competence of anyone like him?
Track 5: Across the Universe
A major talking point within the trial is that intelligence does not factor into one’s ability to love. There are few things that boil my blood more acutely than conversations around mental age. I Am Sam entertains many such conversations, most notably when the trial comes to a head and Mr. Turner, who notes Sam’s mental age as seven, asks what will happen when Lucy turns eight. My instinctual response to that is ‘Yuck’, followed by rage, for a number of reasons. Firstly, seven-year-olds do not hold down jobs (unless within the context of child labour), pay rent, have sex (willingly), raise children. Secondly, even if they are only referring to IQ (which they are decidedly not), IQ is a poor way to measure someone’s faculties — even if it is built around aggregates with regards to calculating mental age, it should not be a primary source in building a case against one’s ability to parent, or do anything, in fact. Thirdly, mental age is an archaic and reductive way of looking at things. I know this movie is 20 years old, so it can be granted some grace regarding clinical language and appropriate terminology, but the advent of mental age as a measure is not obsolete; it has remained alive and well in the cultural lexicon of intellectual disability and requisite issues around institutionalisation, and I feel that I have a duty to dispel such thinking. Just because Sam cannot answer Lucy’s inquisition into why men are bald does not mean that he is fundamentally flawed, lacking in some intangible measure of acceptable cognitive functioning.
Track 6: Don’t Let Me Down
In order to prove himself, Sam takes on dog-walking in order to generate supplemental income, trying to make money to show the Judge how responsible he is. This, alongside his fear that maybe she is better off without him, results in him not visiting Lucy regularly whilst she is in foster care. Her foster mother, Randy (Laura Dern), berates Sam for his absence, and assures him that she will not see Lucy hurt again. When faced with a visit from her father, Lucy is furious at his absence. She thinks that Sam forgot about her, an insecurity which, I think, also works as a projection of her guilt; she blames herself for the mess they are in, something that is made clear earlier in the film, and thinks herself to be older, wiser, and more responsible than she is. She cries, resists her father’s attempts at placation, allows her seven-year-old stubbornness to be eclipsed by a hug.
Track 7: Golden Slumbers
Many have accused this film of being overly sentimental. I wouldn’t counter that claim, per se, but I would argue that it drives the story forward, and is at times a necessary lens through which to view difficult subject matter. Sam stretches the limits of allotted contact time by hiding in a tree and throwing origami at his daughter’s feet as she trudges toward the school doors. He reads Green Eggs and Ham to her every night, and, even when she is scared of being able to understand more than him, encourages her because he loves hearing her read, grow, grow up. In many ways, he is the dad of which we dream, for ourselves and for our children. When Sam buys an apartment closer to the foster family’s house, Lucy walks there every night, blankie in hand, repeating the cycle at the behest of Sam and Randy alike. It is this exchange between a makeshift mother and father duo that ultimately lets Randy see that Sam is good at being Lucy’s father, and that to throw him under the bus at the next hearing would be bad form. Similarly, it shows Sam that Randy is good at being Lucy’s mother, and can be trusted to help him in raising her. Personally, I like the way a cup of hot chocolate at midnight oozes nostalgia, or a tearful testimony makes one think twice about one’s biases. Bring on the sentimentality. Bring on the tears. Sometimes, it’s for the best.
Track 8: I’m Looking Through You
There is an undercurrent of eugenics in how people look at Sam — from coffee shop patrons to Lovely Rita. He is treated as simultaneously virtuous and pitiable. These attitudes stick to Sam’s clothes like stardust, and, regardless of the façade of blissful ignorance that some may see, he is aware of them. At a cafeteria, Sam wants to cover Rita’s bill, too, and takes his time counting his change. She suggests, with brusqueness and condescension, that she pay for it. He is taking too long, and she cannot bear to watch what must be a humiliating spectacle play out. But he does not yield, and instead goes for the jugular in a retort reminiscent of Samuel L. Jackson in A Time to
Kill: she thinks like them, does not see him as her equal. By the end of the film, Sam has been transformed in the hearts and minds of those around him: from untouchable to lovable, from a problem to a person. This change of heart is not the point at all. It never has been. Rita’s life is shown to be irrevocably transformed by Sam’s presence, reminiscent of the age-old trope of marginalised characters existing to better the lives of those around them. Except Sam does not exist for Rita; if anything, she exists for him. As do most of the other characters, in some way or another. The only person for which he exists is Lucy, and rightly so.
Originally published at https://niamhahern.substack.com.
