Stuttering

My Trepidation with The King's Speech

The complex reactions of stutterers watching a film about themselves.

Posted February 25, 2011

I have been remiss in two key dimensions: the first in not having attended to this column for months, and the second in not having viewed The King's Speech before this week.

It was not for lack of awareness. Fifteen years ago in a bedroom in New Delhi, India, the smiling face of King George VI would greet a seven year old every morning with the words, “Stuttering didn't stop them. It need not stop you.” I must have viewed that poster a thousand times. No, the source of my neglect was a strange confluence of trepidation and hope.

Speech is the most complex motor activity of man and ostensibly what separates him from beast: over a hundred muscles work in coordination to produce, during normal conversation, an astonishing six hundred articulatory changes per minute. To a stutterer each of these is a liability: ten potholes a second on the road to communication. We are collectively locked in our heads and bound up in words, struggling to breathe life and expression into our thoughts. Robbed of our humanity.

And yet stuttering — as we shall explore in later columns, a disorder staggering in its complexity and astounding in its variability — is perhaps the last condition socially acceptable to ridicule. Growing up I and others have been routinely teased, laughed at, ejected from trains (in Manhattan, no less) and hung up on. Stutterers are dismissed as unstable, epileptic, or at the least debilitatingly nervous.

Here was a movie purporting to change all that, to elevate stuttering and stuttering awareness not merely into the plane of movie protagonists but into the realm of royalty. My fear was that they would get it wrong; my hope was that they would get it right. So I waited, ignoring the coveted invitation to the movie premiere, the groundswell of positive publicity and word-of-mouth referrals, until I was able to watch alone and on my own terms.

Only today do I realize I was hiding from the very movie that has brought stutterers everywhere out of hiding.

Every stutterer (and there are an estimated three million in the United States alone) will have his or her own unique and ultimately personal dialogue with this film. Each will find a bit of their selves in King George VI. And there is no better catalyst with which to explore this disorder, perhaps providing insight into the invisible impediments we all, not just stutterers, face and the resilience we all display.