#deceiver 1997

celebrating my return to tumblr with late birthday art for the rat, the brit, the orange himself — TIMOTHY SIMON ROTH🎂🎉🎈

here's the first version I made in 2021, three years later and i finally get the sequel out 😔✌️tim roth nation is where i will always belong🧡🐀🍊✨

*the past five minutes*

james: sits like a hunched up gargoyle perched on his chair, openly admits to not telling the truth in his initial statement, insults the cops interrogating him, admits to having assaulted a girl when drunk in the past (althoughit's not explicitly said if this is ANOTHER lie or not), fails to mention he had epilepsy and takes pills for it which could mess up his polygraph, is all in all just a weird fucking dude

Epilepticon Movie Marathon 2024

Deceiver (1997) dir. Jonas & Josh Pate

Summary: Following a grisly murder, James Wayland, wealthy heir and prime suspect to the crime, must undergo strenuous polygraph tests to prove his innocence.

Representation: Wayland having temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) is a significant plot point. He discusses how his seizures are triggered by stress and has to discreetly take anticonvulsant medication (specifically: carbamazepine) when under police questioning.

Wayland is shown to have an alcohol addiction due to the stress of managing his epilepsy.

Wayland has multiple seizures throughout the film including absence and tonic clonic. He often gets an aura before each seizure and the film discusses different physical attributes people can experience during an aura such as a tic or rapid blinking.

During the absence seizures, he often stops what he's currently doing to go stand on furniture and try to remove his clothes. He also has elaborate visual and auditory hallucinations during these seizures.

He's shown having a tonic clonic seizure while having sex, which terrifies his sexual partner. He later has a tonic clonic seizure and someone plays Russian Roulette with a gun on him during the seizure.

The movie has an uncomfortable section of the film where the police speak with an epilepsy expert who says that people with TLE "make your skin crawl for a reason" and that they should treat Wayland "like a strange dog in an alley". The police also show footage of Wayland having a seizure to the expert without Wayland's consent.

The film makes a good point about not touching people when they are having a seizure. It should be noted that in real life, if someone is in active danger to themselves while having a seizure (such as Wayland standing precariously on the armrest of a chair), it's alright to touch and guide them to a safer location. This film inaccurately shows that touching a person when they're having a seizure will drive them into a rage, playing into a harmful stereotype that epileptics will bring violence upon others through the mere act of having a seizure.

On the one hand, the main character, Wayland, has temporal lobe epilepsy and it is cool to see a lesser known form of epilepsy get some rep. He has multiple seizures including absence and tonic clonic, which I like seeing in rep as it shows the diversity of seizure experiences even within one person. He's also a (to put it very mildly) flawed character who deals with a lot of addictions, which I'm totally into as I want more nuanced epilepsy rep. There are epileptics who have alcohol and sex addictions and I don't want their stories to be ignored because it's not considered perfect rep.

The problem is with all the characters around Wayland. They're just constantly dehumanizing folks with epilepsy and it's beyond frustrating. At one point the detective characters go to an "epilepsy expert" who says things like people with TLE "make your skin crawl for a reason" and that they should treat Wayland "like a strange dog in an alley". And the audience is just supposed to agree with that! I know the 90s in general was awful for positive representation for most disabilities but this nonsense sounds like something out of a 1890s eugenics pamphlet.