[easyazon-image align=”left” asin=”B00005JLQW” locale=”us” height=”160″ src=”http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51549AE4TVL._SL160_.jpg” width=”110″]We get that the director is using the lack of communication with a comatose person as a metaphor for the slow death of a romantic relationship, but it’s hard to articulate exactly what we found most objectionable about [easyazon-link asin=”B00005JLQW” locale=”us”]Talk to Her (Hable con Ella)[/easyazon-link]. Was it the fetishization of the comatose female body–immobile, unresponsive, and therefore the feminine ideal? Was it the ridiculously luxurious “neurological clinic” in which they lounge around nude most of the time, have round the clock one-on-one care to massage lotion into their thighs, and get taken outside regularly to sit in lounge chairs with Grace Kelly sunglasses on? (The medical system doesn’t even treat conscious people that well.) Was it the notable absence of IVs, feeding tubes, contractures, atrophy, DNRs? The pathologically lonely male nurse who rapes and impregnates one such comatose woman? Or is it the perpetuation of the ableist conceit that attention from the opposite sex can “wake up” a comatose person and effect a cure?
