The current icon seems to have done an okay job. Society’s customary use of the symbol since its introduction in 1975 (two years after passage of the Rehabilitation Act) has provided those with mobility issues specially marked parking spots, and serves as a nifty indicator of proximate wheelchair-accessible ramps, doors, and elevators. So why take issue with this effective, readily recognizable figure?

Perhaps because of its conceptual resonance, whatever its admitted practicability. A symbol that connotes a static condition and an anchored, immobile state is both misleading and potentially pernicious. Disabling conditions change over time, and most of the disabled are able to move at will. To some in the disabled community, the familiar symbol implies an unhelpful helplessness, suggesting to the able-bodied population at large that those with mobility concerns deserve our pity and special attention, but not recognition of either their will or sometimes autonomy. By suggesting motion, the alternative icon would have worked against the pervasive assumption that persons with disabilities (pwd’s) are fundamentally incapable of independent action.

A number of recent adventure flicks behave in similar fashion, removing with one hand what they offer with the other. They supply the wheelchair-bound sidekick enough screen time to avoid making him totally peripheral, and provide him some kind of “prosthetic”—usually a special skill—in a transparent effort to make him a more “equal” player with the other characters, but they rarely allow him enough prowess or agency to, well, survive.

Consider Resident Evil 2: Apocalypse, in which a mobility impaired, brilliant scientist with cool computer skills largely avoids the zombie hordes that infect (and sometimes eat) a city’s inhabitants, only to be shot dead like a punk in the final moments. Same goes for last summer’s awful Mindhunters (2004), a movie so bad they delayed its release for a year in (obviously useless) attempts to tweak it. In this forgettable “thriller” about a nutball who goes around an island picking off a team of FBI trainees, a wheelchair-bound operative with a gun lasts longer than most of his pals, but finally meets his end when his gun backfires. And then there’s last year’s truly atrocious Blade: Trinity (2004), in which a blind but very smart computer technician is one of the first fatally bitten by the bad guys.

When someone does write against the traditional, rhetorical use of disabled figures, there’s often an audible uproar. Joss Whedon fans will recall that well before Serenity, there was Whedon’s script to Alien Resurrection (1997), a film about another ragtag crew of pirate-types. This particular spacefaring band ends up bearing the brunt of some failed scientific experiments that let loose a gaggle of aliens on board a medical research ship. Vriess, the group’s skilled mechanic, smuggles in a shotgun disguised as pieces of his wheelchair, and holds his own against some pretty mean, acid-bleeding monsters intent on his dismemberment. He’s actually one of the gang that survives and makes it to Earth. Now, take a moment to Google “Vriess” and “Alien Resurrection,” and you’ll get a sense of how many irate fanboys out there were incredulous at the disabled Vriess’ “inexplicable survival.”

For all the talk of social progress, it sometimes appears we’re standing pretty darn still.