Depicting Stutterers in the Movies

The King’s Speech notwithstanding, “filmmakers have advanced their own unhelpful theories of a stutter’s cause and consequence since their earliest opportunity, amounting mostly to cartoon depictions of slapstick ineptitude and a jumble of mistaken assumptions about the disorder: That its sufferers are lily-livered, or ‘girl shy,’ or nervously traumatized. Watch as we torture the son of a bitch!”