REFLECTIONS ON I SWEAR
I Swear was a great movie experience for me. Highly recommended. As someone who has Tourette’s Syndrome, it was a tremendously rare and emotional experience to see someone like me portrayed sympathetically in a movie. Basically never happens, certainly never this convincingly. I felt seen and understood and touched. It’s a tear-jerker. I also thought it might be worth trying compare the experience of the protagonist with my own, which is a little different.
The fact that the main character in I Swear has such a severe case of Tourette’s Syndrome helps make the movie’s educational purpose crystal clear. At the same time, most people with Tourette's Syndrome have milder cases. In my case there are many differences with the experiences portrayed onscreen. The most obvious is that I've never been subjected to the kind of violence and level of humiliation that he has. It brought home how lucky I’ve been to have the family and friends I’ve had.
Because his case was severe, its onset was clear, if misunderstood. He and his family knew something was strange right away. He understood very quickly that he was behaving in ways he couldn't help. In my case, years went by before I really understood and believed that my tics were beyond my control. This is partly because my milder case allowed me to suppress them for a time, leading me to wonder if my tics weren’t just “bad habits” that I just wasn't trying hard enough to control.
Among the blessings and curses of his severe case was the fact that for him a diagnosis came sooner. For me, it was 10 years from the point where I started having tics until I was able to acknowledge to myself that I was different. Eventually my dad read something in a newspaper about Tourette's Syndrome and thought "This is Greg." I was already in college. Diagnosis was nothing more than describing my symptoms to a doctor and him saying "Yep, sounds like Tourette's."
Another fascinating characteristic of the movie's protagonist, at least as portrayed in this fictionalized account, is the extreme contrast between his maximally offensive and violent tics, and his seemingly angelic personality. While it’s fun to identify with him and imagine that I too am perfect, most people with Tourette’s are just as capable of vices, meanness and mistakes as anyone else.
The educational theme of the movie, stated explicitly at one point, is that those encountering someone with Tourette's Syndrome should ignore the tics, as they do not represent the feelings, wishes, beliefs, intentions, or attitude of the person with the condition. For someone with a milder case, this distinction has always felt much less cut and dried. I'm about to turn 57 and still can't really say where Tourette's ends and my personality begins.
One thing I really appreciated about I Swear was a hospital scene in which the main character could not resist aggravating his own injuries. This really rang true. I also really appreciated how easy it was to see and empathize with how mentally and physically exhausted someone with Tourette's can be, not only from the tics, but the energy it takes to try and suppress them. Although the movie didn’t emphasize this, so many of us treasure our alone time where the mask can come off.
For anyone who knows me it should go without saying that I didn’t identify whatsoever with the emotional hay the story made of his being awarded some gong from a criminal, entitled, superrich figurehead. Vindication and acceptance can come in many forms and most of us aren’t going to get it from a queen and wouldn’t even be interested.
It is entirely understandable that the possibility of drugs or devices that reduce tics would be a welcome relief for this character and many, many like him. For many others like me, the losses can seem to outweigh the gains. I was prescribed some pills after my diagnosis, and was disappointed to discover that while my tics calmed down, so did my creative spark, my silliness, my explosive personality, and my tendency to concentrate intensely and almost endlessly on something I was doing. I stopped taking them after a maybe a month and never looked back.
The movie showed how the tics can tend to calm down under certain circumstances, such as being around someone deeply trusted, or being fully engaged in an all-consuming activity. They go away entirely during sleep. At the same time everyone is unique and that is no less true when it comes to Tourette’s Syndrome. Some people have ADHD, OCD, or Asperger’s symptoms. Personally I think I’m very obsessive but have no ADHD. Like most people with Tourette’s, I don’t have coprolalia. I find that activities that take all of my concentration, like playing the drums, give me relief from tics, while nevertheless seeming to be influenced by the character of my tics. It is confusing.
Unsurprisingly for this movie (or for any movie or TV show or instagram clip), the music overemphasized the lyrical and the melancholy in an effort to jerk tears. It’s not that I or anyone with Tourette’s Syndrome is incapable of the same lyrical or melancholy moods as everyone else. But if the goal was to elucidate those feelings and sensations and impulses that are unique to those with Tourette’s Syndrome, it might have been nice for the soundtrack to try and conjure something of the unsettled, uncomfortable, almost electric quality that is more or less present all the time for someone with this condition.
- GREG, AMATEUR MOVIE CRITIC