MOST of the time, art is associated with luxury (not hardship), or with comfort (not discomfort), the reason why even left-leaning people would prefer to wallow in songs about love when they're already in their homes. Punk rock music screaming about fascists or theonomies can be played, say, while cooking breakfast, but not while eating breakfast. After all, to activists, the content about the plight of the powerless trodden by the shameless or hypocritical powerful are part of their Work and should probably not be allowed to enter their lives at Home (at least not until the start of such moments as the family-dinner conversations and banter). Art comes with rest, in short, or with rest comes art, the comfort of art, delivered via art's glimpses that return the mind to the beauty of life after one's day or week immersed in ugliness. . . .
  But then the ugly, or "the horrible," or "the pitiable," is, of course, derivative of a concept of beauty or art that has been leaning on concepts of luxury (not hardship) or comfort (not discomfort). And because comfort informs our daily lives tremendously (well, at least certain important hours of our daily lives), a cottage industry was created to define ideals of beauty within comfort. This industry then led everyone to a common acceptance of the uncomfortable as anathema to those idealizations of theirs regarding beauty, or art, needed for comfort.
  The view of the disabled as an uncomfortable stimulus is not only due to society's appreciation or recognition of the normality of a human physique qua norm and the supposed opposites to that normality, it is also borne out of an aesthetic philosophy crafted by the human mind from these idealizations of normality as an adjunct of an appreciation of the common. Perhaps humanity's phobia for the uncommon is due to its . . . well, propensity to fear. The opposite of fear is comfort.
  Allow us to quote something from our essay on another documentary in our July picks of the month listing. There we wrote: "If the disabled is deemed, even in our time, as the uncommon, . . . thus as the fearful symbol of a certain human state, it is only natural that the most inflexibly 'idealistic' or illiberal political utopias the human mind created, such as fascism, Nazism, neo-Nazism, white nationalism and other modes of xenophobia, including Communism and conservative religion (which latter would every now and then show its influence on secular governments, even left-leaning governments such as Brazil's in 2016), would include this vision of disabilities as a part of their design, a design stipulating that certain human elements have to be excluded or hidden or labeled as a liability in their perfect societies. These elements, that is, as shameful or sorry phenomena, apart from being manifestations of divine punishment or earthly misfortune."
  Then again, the essay continued, "liberal governments have also displayed a similar culture towards disabled elements of our society. This is amply illustrated in the Netflix documentary launched just last March 25, Crip Camp, executive-produced by Barack and Michelle Obama and made by Nicole Newnham and James Lebrecht. . . .
  "Among other things, Crip Camp is also about the Carter government's long refusal to heed disability rights activists' demands for the ratification of what would later be the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. It was a refusal that looked like a continuation of the social spending-wary Nixon government's own. To viewers of the historical documentary, the Nixon government's refusal wasn't surprising. Nor was the bill's heavy cruising through the Reagan years. It was the Carter government's refusal that would be the shocker to those who've only learned about it now. The ADA, the global influence of which many disabled people today reap benefits from, would, ironically, be signed by George H. W. Bush's government; we say that's ironic because the Carter government did advance a number of policies sympathetic to civil rights, as has been expected of Democratic administrations of the post-Kennedy era, while Bush's presidential campaign was actually the one that had a number of racist statements attached to it. . . ."
  Now, in contrast, there is a real sympathy for disability that can be gleaned from certain parenting governments. But, almost always, this sympathy would actually translate to a diminution of the disabled citizen's capacity to perform actions only expected of elements of the norm. This diminution leads to disbelief at even the mere possibility (not yet the probability) of a disabled person surpassing the achievements of above-average representatives of this so-called norm. . . .
  So, welcome to Rising Phoenix. In this film, this false sympathy would be surprised at the fights legless Russia-born T54 track and marathon star Tatyana McFadden fought, even after she was adopted by influential Deborah McFadden and brought to the US (one of Tatyana's fights in this latter country led to the passage of the Maryland Fitness and Athletics Equity for Students with Disabilities Act). Or the struggles that one-footed Australian swimmer Ellie Cole had to overcome. Or those physical and emotional battles fought through by Burundian-French sprinter and long jumper Jean-Baptiste Alaize, one of whose legs received four machete blows when he was three years old during the Burundian Civil War (that event where he also saw his mother killed in front of him). Or those by armless American archer Matt Stutzman, whose humor is just outstanding, probably because of his fortune in having adoptive parents who chose him despite his physical drawbacks. Or those by one-legged British 100-m runner Jonnie Peacock. Or those by Australian Ryley Batt, a wheelchair rugby player without legs and some missing fingers, who couldn't be content with a Beijing silver for his team and nudged himself to "get out of bed" to "be an athlete" for the return fight against the USA team in Rio 2016. Or those by legless South African runner Ntando Mahlangu. Or those by Italian Bebe Vio, a wheelchair fencer with amputated legs from the knee and amputated arms from the forearms due to meningitis that attacked her when she was 11. Vio's nickname "Rising Phoenix" inspired the title of the film. The Netflix-supported documentary is a castigation of those norm creations.
  There are two types of disabilities on show here. One is physical disability, which the film as well as the Paralympic Games inspire us to see as a disability no worse than the norm's inability to juggle 25 balls, although some of us within the norm can actually get ourselves to juggle as many as 9-11. The other is of a disability of the norm-creating mind, which is harder to train to attain higher levels of thinking. Many consider this latter form of disability as the hopeless kind, having been caused mostly by a complex syndrome of fallacies. But Dr. Ludwig Guttmann battled hard to cure such disabilities of the mind, and the Paralympic Movement-established International Paralympic Committee (IPC) is continuing that fight. It seems that that fight is making some headway, what with China's having started to expose its erstwhile-hidden handicapped talents during the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
  One thing everyone should notice: every time the athletes are interviewed, directors Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedguiy would have each occupy only about 1/12 of the entire screen that mostly shows details of a room with lateral and diagonal forms with a color scheme contrasting with the athlete's color. It's as if the disabled athletes are the only biomorphic forms in these aesthetic compositions, which should be a sneering statement, considering that geometric abstraction itself has been associated with certain forms of idealizations akin to the idealizations of Classicist figuration. (When it gets to people like then-IPC CEO Xavi Gonzalez or then-PIC President Sir Philip Craven or current IPC President Andrew Parsons, or to Eva Loeffler, daughter of Sir Ludwig, the composition of their setups would still be largely geometric, but they as subjects would occupy something like 1/8 of the camera already. The only exception is the shot with The Duke of Sussex, Prince Harry, founder of the Invictus Games, who is here given the same treatment as the athletes, in recognition perhaps of the larger world he also had to contend with).
  You'll get the entire point of the film at the end and may even leave your screen better informed. You might even put the Paralympics above the Olympics itself. But if you're ever going to want to watch the film again, aside from wanting to get the statements again, it'd likely be for the sporting acts' footage, and then for another view of those interview shots. We guarantee that that's what you'll want to do, because those interview shots . . . are just beautiful. And comforting, not discomforting. For, here, the erstwhile "uncomfortable stimuli" are now looking like they completely belong to their surroundings, like some Sir Ludwig with his order of chivalry, well-placed in a deserved spot within a national palace.