Toward Aspirational Care Labor: Dementia Care Meets Documentary Filmmaking

Abstract

On film, care for people with dementia looks like bleak work. Tragedy and horror are the film genres most often deployed to represent dementia care, reflecting the austere material realities of that care in the United States today. Despite decades of feminist organizing around the importance of care labor, the current shortage of carers for aging and disabled people in the United States suggests that few view it as a first-choice job. Two recent documentaries, cocreated by a person with dementia and their carer, dispute the horror story of dementia care: Michelle Memran and Irene Fornes’s The Rest I Make Up and Kirsten Johnson and Dick Johnson’s Dick Johnson Is Dead reveal the creative possibilities of dementia care as well as the care work fundamental to filmmaking. I compare the labor of filmmaking with the labor of caring in these documentaries to argue that they transform dementia care into aspirational labor—labor that, like filmmaking itself, can be recognized and experienced as valuable, creative work. I assert that these films reconfigure a landscape of bleak and austere care labor, experiment with ways of living in which care work is well distributed and well liked, and envision dementia care as care we all might give and receive.