Tell Them You Love Me: A Review

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Tell Them You Love Me

Released: 2023

Setting: 2009 in NJ

Genre: true crime documentary

Tell Them You love Me synopsis

Tell Them You Love Me is a fascinating true crime documentary that was just added to Netflix. It’s now the No. 2 movie on the platform. See the trailer on YouTube here.

Anna Stubblefield is a woman who went to prison for having a relationship with a disabled man. Some background. Anna had specialized in disability studies as a professor at Rutgers. The topic interested her because growing up, her mother had worked with disabled people and she was around them a lot. Most severely disabled people have a lot to say, even if they don’t have the ability to express it, she found. Opening up the world of communication for those with speech and other disabilities became her passion in life. It was called facilitated communication.

A student in her class had a nonverbal brother with cerebral palsy who he thought might have more to communicate. He introduced the two of them, hoping she could help Derrick, the brother, express more of his feelings. Anna then started working with Derrick using a type pad, steadying his arm so he could type. Slowly but surely, he seemed to make progress and communicate. He had so much to say after his whole life as a bystander, unable to speak. Once this avenue was opened, he expressed endless curiosity. He even started taking college classes. A miracle!

Over time, Anna developed feelings for Derrick. Via his typing, Anna saw he felt the same way. She, being the intellectual type, was drawn to his heart and mind. Derrick seemingly loved her intellectual side as well, along with her ability to see him without assuming anything. But as things went on Derrick’s family got more and more uncomfortable with their relationship, which shined a light on an entirely different perspective.

Tell Them You Love Me review spoilers lie ahead for the rest of this post

Tell Them You Love Me (on Netflix here) started out a little slow but tension mounted expertly. The documentary put us on one side for most of the feature and then completely switched it up (if you forgot about the description of course). This left me to grapple with questions that hurt my mind to think about for too long but were very interesting nonetheless.

Its messages

The feature showed how both extremes were bad. Derrick’s family probably underestimated his capabilities. They didn’t fully honor the possibility that there could be a lot more under the surface with him and were set on seeing him as severely retarded. At the same time, Anna assumed too much, that he was far more capable than he seemed: a perfectly coherent man trapped inside a body that didn’t work. Both sides wanted the best for him but they were set on their beliefs that may not have been 100% accurate.

My frustrations

I don’t think the researchers did enough experimenting to get to the bottom of Derrick’s mental state. They conducted experiments where a disabled person and a facilitator were sitting together with a type pad. The facilitator was shown one image while the disabled person was shown another. The disabled person ended up typing out the image the facilitator was shown. What they should have done was an experiment where the facilitator was blind folded. What would the disabled person have typed then?

It seemed Derrick’s family didn’t try enough to help him type. They might have had their minds set one way, but I’d be happy to hear otherwise. Did Derrick ever type coherent messages with someone unbiased holding his arm? That wasn’t clear.

Did anyone explain to Anna that all the research pointed one way, and get her to open her mind to another possibility? Was she confronted with the fact that when his family tried to facilitate his communication they didn’t get anywhere?

At the end of the day, Anna clearly had some sort of savior complex, but did she believe she was helping him? I think so. Should a crazy person have been sentenced to that many years in prison when they had good intentions?

My takeaways

What Tell Them You Love Me showed me is that there must be a commitment to fluidity in our assumptions and treatment of disabled people and really in all people. We make decisions about others, categorize them in our heads to have a sense of order and control in our lives, but people don’t fit into labels. (This was Anna’s whole ideology but she fell into this pattern herself by assuming Derrick was fully capable, another label.)

The best way to ingrain this concept into ourselves (I think) is to be cognizant of the fact that we are just human. We are so so limited. When we zoom out of planet earth we see a whole solar system and then when we zoom out of that we see a whole galaxy. So too, we have to remember that as smart as we think we are, we are also so dumb. There’s always a bigger picture, and we should be open to all possibilities and ideas about others and ourselves, including that we may be misreading a situation entirely.

My rating: 8/10.