FIXED: The Science/Fiction of Human Enhancement premieres in Seattle

Mary Guiden

The CSNE sponsors the Seattle premiere of FIXED: The Science/Fiction of Human Enhancement this week. We look forward to watching the film with community members, students and researchers, and having a discussion afterwards with the audience and panel members from our center, DO-IT and the Disability Studies Program at the University of Washington. 

To provide some background prior to the screening, I’ve compiled a brief Q&A with Regan Brashear, producer/director of FIXED.  Thanks to Nikki Jardin at Beacons & Balefires for allowing us to repost the edited content.

Producer/Director Regan Brashear has been working on labor, race, youth, LGBTQ, and disability issues for over 20 years now through documentary film, union organizing, community forums, and grassroots activism. Now based in Oakland, CA, Brashear is a co-founder of Making Change Media which produces videos for non-profits and labor unions, as well as independent long-form documentaries such as Fixed.

Q: What inspired you to direct a film about this particular subject?

A: I was working as a union organizer and I stumbled upon a conference on genetic engineering. The keynote speaker was Gregor Wolbring, who years later became one of the main characters in the film. He was talking about emerging technologies and the blurring of therapeutic technologies with enhancement technologies . . . and how they are developing bionic legs that would allow him — a person without legs — to run faster than “normal” people with “normal” legs.

I thought, ‘Wow, that’s going to really shift our concepts around disability and ability and super ability.’ But, what really grabbed me was when he talked about being invited to a National Science Foundation conference (Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance) that was bringing together scientists, researchers, policy makers and scholars from all different disciplines to focus on this concept of how do we improve human performance, how do we make more productive workers, how do we make the cyborg warrior — and then it started ringing some alarm bells, like, really? This is happening in the plain light of day and is being publicly funded?

Q: What did you discover?

A: At that point the language and focus was around nanotechnology, what is it, where is it going and how is it going to change our world? So, in the early phase of the film I thought it was going to be specifically about nanotechnology. I went to a bunch of nanotech conferences and did some filming but wasn’t sure what direction I was going.

It was a long journey of zeroing in on what issues I really cared about, but also getting clear that this was a very DIY independent film. What I really cared about were the social, ethical and political issues and implications of these new technologies. What do they really mean for you and me?

And then certainly [I was interested in] the specific angle of looking through the lenses of disability. That just really grabbed me and I thought I could really dive into this topic, knowing that when you take on a long term documentary, it’s got to be something that’s going to grab your attention for a long time or you are going to get really bored, really fast. Little did I know that it was going to be seven years later (laughs)!

Q: Can you talk a little about the car accident you were in that also influenced your interest in the topic?

A: I went from being a massage therapist, working summers as a kayak guide and planning to start a woman’s backpacking company, to not being able to lift eight pounds. Since then I’ve been through these different phases of not being able to sit or stand or walk very far, but, I look able-bodied.

So, I was experiencing this different flavor of ableism that’s internal. I think people who have more external disabilities deal with a lot more judgment from society at large, for me it’s been the internal. I couldn’t identify [anymore] as this outdoorsy person, it just shifted and it was really depressing.

After the car accident, you know there’s the legalese, this person needs to be compensated for their pain and suffering. Well, what’s the difference between pain and suffering? I got it over time, the pain is the actual pain in my back, but the suffering is . . . everything else. And, it’s a lot about how the world is set up. That someone with my body and my abilities is set up in a world that doesn’t support it and has all sorts of judgments and all sorts of people telling me, ‘Man, if I couldn’t do X anymore, I would kill myself,’ or, ‘I just don’t know what I’d do.’ It’s the whole Million Dollar Baby scenario, we are so stuck in this idea that you have to have this perfectly healthy body or else everything else is deficient and lacking and needs to be fixed.

So, at the core, it was just my own process of discovering, wow, there’s this whole other way to think and build my community and learn and meet people who could teach me. That’s really how I came to thinking about ableism and what does this mean and what are the ways that this gets perpetuated in our society.

FIXED will be screened at the Varsity Theatre in Seattle on Thursday, October 9, at 7 p.m.  Doors open at 6:45 p.m.  Tickets are available now for $10 through Brown Paper Tickets. Student tickets, $5, may be purchased with ID at the box office. Proceeds from ticket sales will benefit neuroethics research at the CSNE.