The Problem Body Projecting Disability on Film
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The Problem Body The Problem Body Projecting Disability on Film - E d i te d B y - Sally Chivers and Nicole Markotic’ T h e O h i O S T a T e U n i v e r S i T y P r e ss / C O l U m b us Copyright © 2010 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The problem body : projecting disability on film / edited by Sally Chivers and Nicole Markotic´. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8142-1124-3 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-8142-9222-8 (cd-rom) 1. People with disabilities in motion pictures. 2. Human body in motion pictures. 3. Sociology of disability. I. Chivers, Sally, 1972– II. Markotic´, Nicole. PN1995.9.H34P76 2010 791.43’6561—dc22 2009052781 This book is available in the following editions: Cloth (ISBN 978-0-8142-1124-3) CD-ROM (ISBN 978-0-8142-9222-8) Cover art: Anna Stave and Steven C. Stewart in It is fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE!, a film written by Steven C. Stewart and directed by Crispin Hellion Glover and David Brothers, Copyright Volcanic Eruptions/CrispinGlover.com, 2007. Photo by David Brothers. An earlier version of Johnson Cheu’s essay, “Seeing Blindness On-Screen: The Blind, Female Gaze,” was previously published as “Seeing Blindness on Screen” in The Journal of Popular Culture 42.3 (Wiley-Blackwell). Used by permission of the publisher. Michael Davidson’s essay, “Phantom Limbs: Film Noir and the Disabled Body,” was previously published under the same title in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Volume 9, no. 1/2, pp. 57–77. Copyright, 2003, Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Used by permission of the publisher. Sharon L. Snyder and David T. Mitchell’s essay, “Body Genres: An Anatomy of Disability in Film,” was previously published in their book Cultural Locations of Disability as chapter 5, “Body Genres and Disability Sensations: The Challenge of the New Disability Documentary Cinema” (University of Chicago Press). © 2006 by The University of Chicago. Used by permission of the publisher. Cover design by Janna Thompson-Chordas Text design by Jennifer Shoffey Forsythe Type set in Adobe Palatino. Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48–1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 We dedicate this book to Emma, the pre-eminent Vampire Slayer. EmmA the VAmpire Slayer By Riva Lehrer l Contents List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction Sally Chivers and Nicole Markotić 1 “The Whole Art of a Wooden Leg”: King Vidor’s Picturization of Laurence Stallings’s “Great Story” Timothy Barnard 23 Phantom Limbs: Film Noir and the Disabled Body Michael Davidson 43 Seeing Blindness On-Screen: The Blind, Female Gaze Johnson Cheu 67 The Wild Child Dawne McCance 83 No Life Anyway: Pathologizing Disability on Film Paul DarkE 97 “And Death—capital D—shall be no more—semicolon!”: Explicating the Terminally Ill Body in Margaret Edson’s W;t Heath Diehl 109 viii | Contents “A Man, with the Same Feelings”: Disability, Humanity, and Heterosexual Apparatus in Breaking the Waves, Born on the Fourth of July, Breathing Lessons, and Oasis Eunjung Kim 131 Neoliberal Risks: Million Dollar Baby, Murderball, and Anti-National Sexual Positions Robert McRuer 159 Body Genres: An Anatomy of Disability in Film Sharon L. SNyder and David T. Mitchell 179 Coda: “Blinded by the Light,” OR: Where’s the Rest of Me? Anne Finger 207 Filmography 217 Notes on Contributors 221 Index 225 l illustrations Chapter 1: James Apperson (John Gilbert), amputee veteran. The Big Parade. Directed by king Vidor. MGM, 1925. Chapter 2: Opening credits superimposed over the figure of a man with crutches who moves menacingly toward the audience until his shadowy form covers the entire screen. Double Indemnity. Directed by Billy Wilder. Paramount Pictures, 1944. Chapter 3: Susy (Audrey Hepburn) tries to put out the light. Wait Until Dark. Directed by Terence young. Warner Bros., 1967. Chapter 4: Le Dr Jean Itard (François Truffaut) tests the hearing of wild child Victor (Jean-Pierre Cargol). L’enfant sauvage (The Wild Child). Directed by François Truffaut. Les Films du Carrosse, 1969. United Artists, 1970. Chapter 5: ken (Richard Dreyfuss) reacts uncontrollably to the hospital’s medical treatment. Whose Life Is It Anyway? Directed by John Badham. MGM Films, 1981. Chapter 6: Text eclipses the ill body of Vivian Bearing (Emma Thompson). Wit. By Margaret Edson. Adapted for film by Emma Thompson and Mike Nichols. Directed by Mike Nichols. Home Box Office Network, 2001. Chapter 7: Bess (Emily Watson) flees torment from local children. Breaking the Waves. Directed by Lars von Trier. Zentropa Film Entertainment, 1996. ix x | Illustrations Chapter 8: The filmmakers procure authenticity for Maggie (Hilary Swank) by having her purchase her training bag with rolled coins. million Dollar Baby. Directed by Clint Eastwood. Warner Bros., 2004. Chapter 9: The double-amputee war veteran Lieutenant Dan Taylor (Gary Sinise) lifts himself from a seated position on the floor into his wheelchair. Forrest Gump. Directed by Robert Zemeckis. Paramount Studios, 1994. Coda: Mata Hari (Greta Garbo) descends toward her executioners, as Lt. Alexis Rosanoff (Ramon Novarro), her blind lover, “looks on.” mata Hari. Directed by George Fitzmaurice. MGM, 1931. l Acknowledgments Beyond all our fabulous colleagues in Disability Studies, especially the contributors to this volume, we’d like to thank Martin Boyne for his careful indexing, Sandy Crooms for her amazing editorial support, Maggie Diehl for her exhaustive copyediting, Jennifer Shoffey Forsythe for exemplary patience in vetting and giving advice regarding images, Malcolm Litch- field for his permissions advice, and Jonathan Pinto for his technical expertise. We also thank our wonderful families and our partners, Louis Cabri and Wade Matthews, for always reading. Lastly, through our work on this book, we have developed a remarkable collaborative companion- ship for which we are both immensely grateful. xi S A l l y C h i v E r S A n d n i C o l E M A r k o T i C‘ l introduction In this compilation we have gathered a set of essays that explore rep- resentations of disability on film. One of the quickest paths to critical acclaim for an able-bodied actor is to play a physically disabled char- acter in a manner that a largely uninformed audience finds convincing. Filmic narrative fictions rarely ignore disability. Examples of lauded per- formances include those by Daniel Day Lewis (my Left Foot), Tom Hanks (Philadelphia), Sean Penn (I Am Sam), and Hilary Swank (million Dollar Baby).1 As David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder point out in Narrative Pros- thesis, disability in narrative is both excessively visible and conversely invisible (15). Rather than absent, as other stigmatized social identities can be (for example, films can entirely avoid lead female or racialized roles), disability is highly and continuously present on-screen. However, it is not always agential. Often, disabled bodies appear in order to shore up a sense of normalcy and strength in a presumed-to-be able-bodied audience. In this book we follow this argument into narrative film, noting the contradiction between how many characters in films display disabil- ities and how seldom reviewers and audiences “notice” disability as a feature within the film. This characteristic disability haunting of contem- porary film merits critical scrutiny and warrants a set of critical terms that separate disability studies from past film criticism. In what follows, we focus on critical notions of “projection” and filmic constructions of “problem bodies” to contribute such scrutiny and such terms. Filmic narrative often aligns the bodies it represents with an elusive and ideal norm of the human body that William Blake designated “the 1. All films cited and discussed in the essays are listed in the Filmography at the end of the book. 1 2 | Introduction human abstract.”2 Most bodies are presented as normative by default, implicitly—self-evidently, or so it might appear to a viewer—achieving the norm, while other bodies are designated “abnormal,” failing to achieve, or even to aspire to, that norm. As Robert Bogdan, quoting his young son in his pivotal publication Freak Show, points out, typically, in mainstream films, when characters “look bad” they “are bad” (6). Fre- quently, a disabled body is represented as a metaphor for emotional or spiritual deficiency. Unlike normative filmic bodies that literally advance the plot, the disabled body often exists primarily as a metaphor for a body that is unable to do so.3 Rarely do films come along like Crispin Hellion Glover’s, David Brothers’ and Steven C. Stewart’s It is fine! Everything is fine! a film written by and starring a disabled actor, which presents a disabled character as exactly that—disabled, yet still a fully participating character in the film.4 So what happens when a disabled body metaphori- cally becomes a site of projected identity? The essays collected in this anthology take on the poetics and politics of that question. Projecting disability In this book we analyze the “projection” of disability. We include in our analysis the act of the film projector displaying disability as well as what film viewers project—in the sense of prediction—disability to be. According to Sigmund and Anna Freud, projection is an emotional defense mechanism, whereby one attributes one’s own negative or unac- ceptable thoughts and emotions to others.5 Rey Chow, in her book on cultural otherness, Ethics after Idealism, discusses the notion of fascism as “projection, surface phenomena, everyday practice, which does away with the distinction between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’” (19).