Differently Disabled

My ruse of acting wheelchair-bound was soon discovered by a nurse, who proceeded to drill a hole in the back of my head in order to permanently fasten it to the chair. This disturbing dream scenario came to me only several hours after I had watched Door to Door (2002), a made-for-television movie now available in video rental stores. Based on the true-life story of a man impaired by cerebral palsy, the movie features the writing and acting abilities of William H. Macy, who achieved fame as the neurotically dishonest car salesman of Fargo (1996). In Door to Door, Macy plays a salesman once again, but this time he generates our esteem, delighting us when—as Bill Porter, the real-life person he plays—he becomes the “Door to Door Salesman of the Year” for a Portland company.

The two phases of my dream—from acting disabled to becoming disabled by a drill to the head—parallel the two phases of my response to Macy’s work in Door to Door, which earned him an award from the Screen Actors Guild. First, I was overwhelmed by his skill at capturing the debilitating effects of Bill’s condition: slurred speech from the side of a mouth which had to be repeatedly wiped for drool; a useless arm cocked stiffly behind a back which angled awkwardly toward the ground when Bill walked; huge ears cocked at a comical angle from his sad-sack face. By the end of the film, however, I was no longer thinking of Macy’s consummate acting ability; I was thinking of the amazing Bill Porter, who surmounted not only his physical disabilities but also the ridicule and suspicion that they elicited from others. Thus, my dream of actually becoming disabled echoed how Macy had actually become the disabled Bill in the dreamwork of film.

Door to Door, however, also illuminates the perversity of the dream that is Hollywood. Though winning six Emmy awards based upon impressive performances by characters who convincingly age from 1953 to 1997, Door to Door will not become famous like a Hollywood success similar to it: Forrest Gump (1994).

The parallels are quite striking. Both movies focus upon the disabled sons of widowed mothers, women whose strength and determination enable their sons to rise above their circumstances; hence, both men experience trauma over the death of the mother. And both movies symbolize, through the eating of food, the sons’ internalization of their mothers’ confidence in them. Just as Forrest Gump partakes of bon-bons as he repeatedly quotes his mother’s aphorism, “Life is like a box of chocolates,” so Bill Porter recites the words “Patience” and “Persistence,” which his mother inscribed with food coloring on the sandwich she packed for his first day of work.

The disparity between luscious chocolates and a white-bread sandwich represents the difference between these two films. The big budget Forrest Gump offers sumptuous bon-bons of dreamlike success: audiences are gleefully delighted when Gump unwittingly becomes the originator of the “Happy Face” insignia, tearfully impressed when he saves the life of a fellow soldier in Vietnam. The low budget Door to Door, however, never offers such extravagant treats. The successes are small, often as bland as a white-bread sandwich. Unlike the mentally deficient Gump, who has a choice among box-of-chocolate experiences, the mentally acute Bill has no choice but to persevere in a pavement-pounding, low-respect job—or else retreat into lethargy and depression. Whereas Forrest gets to experience romantic love with a pretty blond, Bill’s only chance for romance is with a lonely, middle-aged woman, and he doesn’t recognize his opportunity until after she has died. While Forrest is unfailingly sweet-tempered, Bill can become obsessive about his routine, caustically rejecting all forms of charity, even when they are offered in loving friendship. In other words, Forrest Gump satisfies a Hollywood sweet tooth for excitement and sentimentality; Door to Door gives us an extraordinary life in all its ordinary, white-bread gumminess.

Those who are addicted to Hollywood sensationalism will, by now, have come to the conclusion that Door to Door is a depressing movie. It is not. However, the only way I can think to describe it is “sorrowfully upbeat,” if you will allow me the oxymoron. For though it presents an amazingly “alternately enabled” human being, it does not gloss over the difficulties attendant upon his physical limitations.

The story line, in fact, repeatedly illustrates how glossing over difficulties is itself a human disability. The middle-aged woman who makes affectionate overtures toward Bill covers up an alcohol dependency by disguising her vodka with orange juice. She dies by mixing pills and vodka, although her daughter-in-law tries to conceal the actual cause of death. The woman’s biggest cover-up, however, is revealed when her married son shows Bill a room filled with unopened boxes of all the products she ordered through Bill in order to make him happy.

At the other end of the spectrum is the cover-up of adultery by another long-time client. When Bill approaches the door to promote his products, he witnesses a scantily clad floozy running for cover. The cheating husband glosses over the incident with a wink, telling Bill that it is a secret “just between us guys.” As Bill walks back to the curb, he encounters the man’s wife, who has taken off work to bring home a sick daughter from school. Without stating the problem, Bill convinces the woman to send the youngster to a neighbor’s. At first not comprehending Bill’s motivation, the wife looks toward her house and sees closed curtains behind a glossy window and immediately recognizes what has been glossed over. We do not see the confrontation after the wife heads toward the door, just as we do not see the death of the middle-aged woman. It’s as though the film acknowledges that intensely dramatic movie scenes often gloss over the real-life drudgery of human heartache.

What makes Door to Door upbeat, then, is Bill’s own refusal to give in to hopeless drudgery, instead becoming “the invisible thread,” as one character puts it, that ties his sales neighborhood together. Because of this thread, the deceived and now divorced wife ties the knot with a widower next door. In earlier years, when their spouses were still around, these neighbors argued vociferously. Bill, therefore, must slyly negotiate a rapprochement between the two lonely singles. He sends an open package of products to the wrong house, forcing the widower to carry the box next door to the person who ordered the items: his divorced neighbor. The open box, a nice contrast to the closed packages covered up (in both senses) by Bill’s missed love opportunity, leads to marriage between the formerly alienated neighbors. However, once again, we do not get the heightened stimulation of a glossy movie convention: the dramatics of a first kiss or sexual consummation. We only know that the neighbors have fallen in love from a brief shot later in the film, when Bill witnesses the couple, now old and graying, sitting on a front stoop together, holding champagne glasses.

Perhaps the most visually disturbing cover-up in Door to Door occurs at the home where Bill must place his mentally failing mother (played by the talented Helen Mirren). We first see the operator of the home—a mother who makes money by keeping invalids in her house—tending to her screaming child in a highchair. Ignoring the screams, she glosses over conditions in the house, saying of Bill’s mother “She’s alright; everything’s OK,” in order to dissuade Bill from visiting her in an upstairs room. Nevertheless, Bill searches for his mother, opening a door through which he sees her strapped into an elongated wheelchair reminiscent of a child’s highchair. The parallel between the baby in a highchair below and Bill’s mother restrained in a highchair upstairs communicates the ironic role-reversal: a disabled son once tended by his mother is now having to tend to his dysfunctional parent. What we see next is the most brutal shot of the film: adjacent to Bill’s mother, a man, still strapped to his highchair, quivers on the floor in the midst of a seizure, foaming at the mouth. Too much has been glossed over.

Bill moves his mother to a better facility, but once she dies he participates in his own cover-up. We see him, soon after the death, trying to sell items to a young mother holding a baby. He pronounces what we have heard him say several times before as he promotes different products: “Can I be perfectly candid with you? Our best buy is . …” This time, however, as he watches the baby in its mother’s arms, he can only get through “Can I be perfectly candid with you?” before stifling a sob. He leaves the house, glossing over his distress with “I’m alright; everything’s OK.” This glossing over is a different kind of cerebral palsy: a palsy of mental processes that refuse to admit emotion.

Due to the expenses of caring for his mother as well as a debilitating accident, Bill experiences financial problems and yet another cover-up. Having to sell the house in which he grew up, Bill meets with a real estate agent who glosses over the name of the buyer as she gets him to sign a contract. She then tells Bill that he can rent back the house from the new owner as long as he likes. Conditioned by the conventions of popular film, we assume that a swindle is afoot. However, we soon discover, along with Bill, that the buyer is his former assistant, now a married woman with children, who makes the transaction out of love, wanting Bill to be able to stay on in his childhood home. Though this benevolently glossy gesture satisfies a sentimental sweet-tooth, viewers are not allowed to savor its sweetness for long. Bill walks to the house of his patron and, instead of thanking her in a conventionally heart-warming scene, he yells in outrage, eschewing her charity. She, in defense, yells back one of the key truths of the film: that Bill’s need for the gloss of self-sufficiency, closing himself off from offers of love, has become his worst disability.

This is no glossy Forrest Gump spectacle of extravagant highs and lows in the life of a disabled man. Though presenting numerous touching, often humorous, scenes of Bill’s subtle successes, Door to Door focuses upon the undramatic, if not down-right boring, characteristics of patience and persistence—and their attendant emotional cover-ups. Granted, patience and persistence are not the stuff of exciting dreams, but far too many moviegoers forget that lively dreams are rarely the stuff of real life.

Crystal Downing is associate professor of English and Film Studies at Messiah College. Her book Writing Performances: The Stages of Dorothy L. Sayers will be published this summer by Palgrave.