Often we walk right by the disabled, and they do not even register in what we “see” whether we are strolling through an airport or down a downtown street. According to a number of theorists, their disability removes them from what we notice. In the movie The Fisher King, Tom Waits plays a disabled veteran in an uncredited role. While Parry (Robin Williams) and Jack (Jeff Bridges) await the appearance of Lydia (Amanda Plummer) in Grand Central Station, Jack breaks off into a conversation with this veteran. An amputee in a wheelchair, the veteran describes himself as a “moral traffic light” that keeps the able-bodied from giving in to the darkest desires. He relates the example of a mid-level executive who is tempted, just one time, to stab his boss with a pair of scissors instead of “kissing his ass” just one more time. Because the executive remembers the veteran, sitting and begging in the train station, and because that executive does not want to be homeless, he does what he needs to do to keep his job – kiss that ass one more time. The ways in which we see the disabled differ from the way we see the able-bodied, and the filters through which we see the disabled are no different on the silver screen than they are in real life. Throughout cinematic history, screenwriters and directors have taken advantage of those differences in creating compelling stories that use those differences to create their central conflicts.
Robert McRuer makes an intriguing comparison between homosexuality and disability in “Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability.” He places what he calls a theory of “compulsory ablebodiedness” parallel to a system of “compulsory heterosexuality” that guides many of the assumptions that people make in societies marked by “neoliberal capitalism” (McRuer, p. 2). According to this theory, the normative state of the average person is to be straight, and to be free of disabilities. In the past, this meant that the disabled and the gay were simply invisible. In 1947, when “The Lady of Shanghai” came out, homosexuality required invisibility: if you wanted to carry on a homosexual relationship, you had to do it in total secrecy. Homosexuality was not acknowledged in the media in any way. There were virtually no novels, films, or television shows that involved characters that were homosexual that came out between the first written story and 1970. Disability also connoted a certain degree of impotence, as Paul Newman’s character in Rear Window found out, as well as a degree of invisibility, because of the simple fact that the disabled lacked access to so many different sorts of facilities that their lives often fell all the way out of public view. Even in the 2000 film “Unbreakable,” directed by M. Night Shyamalan, disability leads to a degree of invisibility, because of the simple fact that there are so many maladies that keep their sufferers from a full range of activity. As a result, they often choose to be insulated from much of mainstream society and, as a result, develop certain eccentricities that can blossom into obsessions. The reason why the disabled continue to be a subject of fascination in the cinema, despite the decrease in stigma in modern society, often has to do with the struggles that the disabled face to reach recognition; on the other hand, though, we are still often fascinated by the ways in which those disabilities have warped the personalities of those who suffer from them.
In “The Lady from Shanghai,” the disabled person is criminal defense attorney Athur Bannister (Everett Sloane). He and his wife, Elsa, are in New York City, having taken a break on their yacht journey around most of the world, from Shanghai to San Francisco: their next leg is to be through the Panama Canal. When Michael (Orson Wells) rescues Elsa from an attack by would-be thieves in Central Park, they form a bond of attraction that, at least on several different levels of consciousness, is based on the simple difference between Michael and Elsa’s husband. Michael is a strong seaman, able to protect Elsa from danger. Her husband would not have even been able to go on the carriage ride that she was enjoying when she was attacked, because there would have been no way to move him from his wheelchair up into the carriage. This represents a dilemma that even the most liberal members of society have not been able to ease for the disabled, as the expectation that a man will be able to provide for and take care of his female partner persists into our era, even if it is primarily on the affective and sexual levels, as new legislation and litigation have driven explicit discrimination on the basis of disability from the public sphere. In a marriage relationship, divorce has become a common solution for partners who become dissatisfied or unhappy with their situation, for any number of reasons; however, in the 1940’s, divorce was a more difficult solution, as it was much harder to be granted a dissolution of one’s marriage. As a result, marital partners either had to be more disciplined, or had to be more furtive about their ways of finding satisfaction. In the case of Elsa and Michael, their attraction leads to an intricate plot. Too late, Michael finds out he is being set up, and he is arrested. Bannister defends Michael vigorously, acting as his attorney, until he learns of the affair. At that point, he enjoys the knowledge that Michael might get the death penalty for this murder. However, matters get even weirder, as it turns out that Grisby and Elsa had planned to use Michael as the patsy for the murder of Bannister – apparently, Elsa had already picked a new husband, and it wasn’t going to be Michael.
Elsa’s behavior in this film turns what had long been a standard gender bias on its head, according to Erhart; what set such directors as Hitchcock and Welles apart from their competition was their recognition of a failed “system of viewership that, without exception, associated men with vision, desire, and agency, and women with passivity and desiredness” (Erhart, p. 171). Clearly, the one with the “vision, desire and agency” here is Elsa, and her husband’s disability may just be one of many factors that have pushed her into the arms of another man. This system persists even in modern entertainment, as such works as Michael Connelly’s novel The Fifth Witness and the 1999 film Being John Malkovich indicate; both works feature strong women who are able to manipulate the assumptions that men have about their passivity to create their own reality – in the case of Connelly’s novel, the reader encounters a female “victim” who sets up a crime scene to make it look like a short woman never could have committed the bludgeoning that she carries out; in the case of Being John Malkovich, the viewer encounters a woman who finds a way to become pregnant with a baby fathered by a man whom her female lover has come to mentally possess.
The degree to which Bannister’s disability comes into play in this film is up for debate. The fact that he is ultimately the target of the plot indicates that his wife, for some reason, has decided to eliminate him; in an age when divorce was highly difficult to obtain, particularly when married to a disabled attorney, she may have seen this as her only escape. What is clear is that the network of lies that her dissatisfaction sets into motion produces the conflicts in the story; the surreal journey through mirrors near the end of the film could indicate the lack of introspection that must have gone on in the minds of Grisby, Elsa and Michael as they all plotted either the death or the abandonment of the only disabled character in the film.
In the film Unbreakable, Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson) is the disabled character; however, unlike Bannister’s, his disability has been lifelong. He has osteogenesis imperfect, which causes his bones to break very easily. During the extensive amount of time he has to spend in the hospital, he develops an idea that somewhere in the human species there must be someone else who is incredibly strong, to balance his weakness. He finds David Dunn (Bruce Willis) in a news article, which reports a train wreck that killed 131 passengers – but did not even scratch the 132nd, Mr. Dunn. Once Elijah and David meet, Elijah helps David build some of his other superpowers, which include a sort of telepathy that is activated when he touches people. As his moral vision grows, though, he learns more and more about Elijah – particularly the fact that Elijah has spent most of his life masterminding disasters. Elijah’s excuse is that he was trying to find a hero to counterbalance his own status as an archvillain; as many archvillains do, though, Elijah ends up in a mental institution for the criminally insane.
The treatment of Elijah in this movie follows the stereotypical idea that disability warps the ethical sensibilities of the person suffering from the malady. The disability isolates Elijah as a child and, while the idea that there would be a person out there with amazing strength to balance his condition could even be seen as heartwarming, the fact that he turns to evil to find that person – or to assuage his own inner anger – shows the vision of the able that still, too often, informs the ways in which the able view the disabled.
In the cases of Bannister and Elijah, it is clear that the vision that the able have of the disabled carries more than a touch of the grotesque. Both men have become twisted in their sense of ethics and morals: when Bannister finds out about Elsa’s affair with Michael, he is willing to passively allow Michael to suffer a dishonest conviction, even though he knows that someone else killed Grisby. When Elijah decided to search for a superhero, he doesn’t just read the news – he decides to create the news. In both instances, the disabled are imbued with a jealousy and, ultimately, a pathology that is not accurate when compared with the vast majority of the disabled in the world outside the silver screen. This jealousy comes from the fact that many of the able take on a view of the disabled as less than equal, or even less than human. The ways in which this plays out serve as the springboard for the plots of many films.
Works Cited
Being John Malkovich. Dir. Spike Jonze. Perf. John Cusack, Cameron Diaz, Catherine Keener.
Gramercy, 1999. Film.
Connelly, Michael. The Fifth Witness. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2011.
Erhart, Julia. “Laura Mulvey Meets Cahterine Tramell Meets the She-Man: Counter-History,
Reclamation, and Incongruity in Lesbian, Gay and Queer Film and Media Criticism.
From A Companion to Film Theory, ed. Toby Miller and Robert Stam. London:
Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2004.
McRuer, Robert. Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability. New York: New York
University Press, 2005.
The Fisher King. Dir. Terry Gilliam. Perf. Jeff Bridges, Robin Williams, Mercedes Ruehl,
Amanda Plummer. Columbia Pictures, 1991. Film.
The Lady from Shanghai. Dir. Orson Wells. Perf. Rita Hayworth, Orson Welles, Everett Sloane.
Columbia Pictures, 1947. Film.
Unbreakable. Dir. M. Night Shyamalan. Perf. Bruce Willis, Samuel L. Jackson, Robin Wright.
Touchstone, 2000. Film.
