Disability is in Everything (Including our Villains): FRESH

Warning: HARK! There are spoilers here, traveler. Take the road less littered with thought.

TW: Mentions of eugenics and surgical torture.

Fresh ((2022) Dir. Mimi Cave) is a dark, horror-comedy about a woman named Noa, unsuccessful in the online dating world, and meets a man named Steve by chance at a grocery store. They bond over their distaste of modern dating, their hate for inauthentic small talk, and the awkwardness that comes along when trying to be intimate with someone new; Steve and Noa fall in love, quickly. And that's when things start to take a disturbing turn.

I thought Noa (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and Steve (Sebastian Stan) played up the whole we're-so-different-and-quirky-and-indie very well! I really liked how sardonic humor was both the snare, trapping Noa into a horrible man's lair, and at the same time her saving weapon, hidden behind her back. Proving that bitter, terribly unfunny identities will always be a quick way to absolve yourself from any emotional attachments to sadistic flesh-selling lover boys and provide a horrible, catchy punchline, all in the same shopping bag. Preserving internet pluckiness and allowing it to live another day.

The movie wasn't perfect. I think there were a lot of failed plot devices, hidden beneath the meat of the story. For example, Noa's best friend Mollie (Jonica T. Gibbs) didn't really get to be a full person past being Noa's friend and it would have been nice to see some more of her development in the writing. Perhaps it would have been good to see her own experiences with dating.

And the movie tries to tackle a lot of patriarchal topics that I'm not really sure can be seen as "revengeful" or "triumphant" for everyone who experiences all branches of misogyny (i.e. transmisogyny, misogynoir, etc.) and the ending seemed to rely on what I felt like was an "overkill" of mainstream feminist fantasies like biting off the killer's dick and demanding him to smile before he dies. Striving to say something that's been said a thousand times in every which way.

But Fresh caught my attention on a whole other topic: assuming that the screenplay, written by Lauryn Kahn, was conceived, or at least finalized, under the harrowing climate of the last three years, I found myself connecting the anxieties Fresh was trying to rouse out of its viewers, to the fears circulating around the pandemic and topics of disability.

Steve is an earthy villain; when I call him this, I mean to say that Steve's entire villainy is built upon deep-rooted nightmares. Collective episodes of fright, programmed to be felt by a mass of people, collectively told to be afraid of being disabled. Be afraid of having your rights revoked by a society that does witness disabled people as worthy.

The U.S., being a eugenic state, not only seeks to normalize abusive practices but strives to self-feed its beliefs back to itself, through the minds it keeps hostage. Regulating its life support through the creation of "contributional" lies and posing them against the non-profitable vs the limbs reserved for labor. Exploiting them both.

But where does this ableist mindset go when the majority of the country gets Covid? Possibly contracting "Long Covid" and we suddenly have a world of people, considered to be disabled? How will eugenics, and our ableist healthcare, sustain themselves then if not through our country's willingness to uphold a cruel, eat-or-be-eaten, belief system?

Steve is the undoing of doctoral worship; since we all experienced a global failure of our governments, who were more willing to let us die than lose economic gain, there's been a rightful shift in suspicions of health experts, given their willingness to wave a mask mandate every time capital is low and claim it under the names of science and research. When Steve steals his victim's body parts and sells them to, in his words: "The 1% of the 1%", it mirrors how we all have been treated, forever, but especially as of late. Products adapting. The gears of our society, turning. Figuring out how to exploit us again, even if the majority of our country no longer meets its ableist ideals / never really has.