Pathologising
Disability the Cinematic Way
'Deformed bodies depress me.'
Nicholas Van Ryan (Vincent Price) in Dragonwyck (Joseph L. Mankiewicz,
US, 1946)
On film representations of Disability place the
problem of Disability as being caused by impairment rather than being socially
orientated or constructed. Thus, the Medical Model of Disability has almost total hegemony over the modern
definition of disability on film: it places all problems of disability within
the individual's own body and their impairments. For the Medical Model
(of disease as well as deformity) the body is a machine, one with a
physiological norm to which the body either does or does not conform: when a
body does not fit the physiological norm all subsequent problems are seen as
arising from its corporeal deviance and not from how it is perceived or placed
socially. When Gilman (1988,
p.255) writes: 'it is in the world of representations that we banish our fear
of [the Other ... ] proof that we are still
whole' (Gilman's emphasis), it is possible to see why representations remain
negative even after social or political change. Although some social change has occurred - legal rights,
economic advancement et al - the
archetypal and stereotypical persist even though many have been forcefully
challenged (be they of minorities of one kind or another, or the disabled).
Whose Life Is It Anyway? (Badham, 1981, USA) – the focal point of this
chapter - is a film about Ken Harrison: a man who sustains irreversible
quadriplegia in a car accident necessitating, in the logic of the film,
lifelong hospitalisation. In
hospital, every possible act of objectification and surveillance -
medicalisation (Armstrong, 1983) - is enacted upon Ken to keep him alive. The
film is a critique of medicalisation; it even advocates de-medicalisation. The problem is that the means used to
criticise modern, technologically-advanced medicalisation consists of people
with impairments. Consequently,
the disabled are dehumanised and pathologised as a burden, out of a desire to
demean the technology that keeps them
alive. The film’s argument
is that the problem with modern medicine is that it unnaturally keeps certain
people alive and, as such, those people have to be portrayed as less than human
or the Other in order to demean medicalisation. The way the film ascribes certain characteristics to the
body of Ken Harrison, which are culturally unacceptable and filmically
constructed, makes him - and his type - inhuman and the Other. Thus,
medicalisation is seen as ‘bad’ because it keeps the negative,
sub-human Disabled alive. As in Whose
Life Is It Anyway? other films, such as Duet
For One (Konchalovsky, 1987, UK), The
Raging Moon (Forbes, 1970, UK), and
Passion Fish (Sayles, 1992, USA) set up a parallel between the normal past and the abnormal
present (and future) of their Disabled character(s). The body that becomes
disabled in films is, thus, easily (and routinely) devalued and degraded by the
creation, intimation or presentation of a glorious past or alternative normality
(a degree of success) seen in parallel with an abject present (a degree of
failure). A similar narrative
process of negation for an impaired character is used in almost all films about
disease, impairment and Disability whatever their date, diversity of style,
genre and production base. Whose
Life Is It Anyway? achieves this by having
before-the-accident and after-the-accident components in the narrative.
Whose Life Is It Anyway? de-humanises Ken by having him articulate his inhumanness
himself in a particularly human way.
Ken shows his humanness through his ability to be a thoughtful, rational
and intelligent person. Ken's
inhumanness must therefore be made apparent in his body, which is achieved by
having Ken appear as dependent, impotent and 'feminine' (impaired). The ideal(s) of the Independent Living
Movement - with disabled people living and controlling their own lives (Oliver
and Barnes, 1998) - is denied when the implication of the mise en
scène is that of having
medicalisation as essential in keeping Ken alive.
The argument in the film against medicalisation is
initially revealed in a scene when Dr Emmerson calls into his office a
psychiatrist and the young, attractive, female Dr Scott; he explains to the
psychiatrist that he wants Ken committed.
He bases this on Ken’s desire to have the right to die as the
doctors have: 'just about [got] a viable human being'. At this point the psychiatrist
immediately agrees to carry out committal proceedings (without having met Ken -
further reinforcing the domination, and power, of doctor over patient as
excessive medicalisation), then leaves. The scene takes place in Dr Emmerson's
office, an office lined with live television monitors of the ICU's
patients. As Dr Scott starts her
speech she strides to the monitors and points at them. She argues:
[D]oes he look crazy to you? Look at him lying there. I mean, Christ, he's got no privacy at all, he's got no
sense of dignity. I tell you, if
that happened to me I don't know if I'd have the courage to live either. Would you like to live like that?
Significantly, it is a generalised argument: she is
speaking not merely about Ken but about all ICU patients. The validity of Dr Scott's perspective
is clearly established in this scene and by her prior and subsequent character
development. For example, in this
scene, Dr Scott, a stereotypical WASP, walks into the light as she speaks her
lines and is touched by the natural light coming through the office windows. Her adversary (which is what Dr
Emmerson, played by John Cassavetes, becomes), on the other hand, is both in
the shade and, significantly, has a much darker ethnic appearance. Since Emmerson has just ordered a
psychiatrist to commit a man established in the film as highly rational and
perhaps, even, illuminated by intellect, the lighting and mise en
scène contrast - literally and
metaphorically - with the light in which we see Emmerson. Emmerson is also smoking. It clouds close-ups of him in his share
of the shot / reverse shots of his argument with Dr Scott, and in this way
further degrades him through the negative medical connotation of smoking; an
unavoidable association emphasised by the film's setting. Similarly, Emmerson is the only person
in the film who smokes tobacco – so Emmerson allows himself and is
allowed by society to self-destruct, yet he is the one to decide whether to
‘allow’ Ken a similar right.
The monitor screens in Emmerson's office, and the
whole institution itself, appear as a visual representation of what Foucault
called the 'clinical gaze' (cf.
Armstrong, 1983), a gaze that is on the individual at all times and in all
places. Dr Scott herself states
that privacy and dignity are non-existent. Armstrong (1983, p.8), adopting Foucault, writes of the
modern hospital that: 'it is a medical Panopticon writ large'. Emmerson's hospital signifies the
epitome of such a hospital. The
problem of the film is that it uses disability as the perspective through which
to examine medicalisation; the film practises in its discourse an extreme form
of normalisation by demeaning the successes of medical advances. Thus, the film, and culture in general,
is unable to divorce the technological benefits of medicine from the excessive
potential for dehumanising that it exhibits. The film's normalisation is a highly prescriptive one in
that it sets up a rationale for preserving a life only if the life has a
certain degree of both bodily and intellectual control over itself. The philosophy of the film seems to
follow that which Foucault (cited in Rabinow, 1991, p.150) credits to the
normalising state: 'if man is made in God's image then one needs to protect
that image of God in man's body'.
The name ‘Emmerson’ is an ironic, and comparable, comment on
human alienation in modern society since it conjures up the philosophy of the
nineteenth-century transcendentalist poet Ralph Waldo Emerson and all the
natural / nature ideas that he professed. Dr Scott, on the other hand,
symbolised through her embodiment, represents the value of the natural and nature
and the ideal (re: Emerson rather than Emmerson).
Viewed logically, it is
somewhat bizarre that all the characters who 'befriend' and 'love' Ken are
those who eventually support his wish to die: Dr Scott; a petite white female
student nurse named Joey; his white male lawyer; and a black Caribbean hospital
porter called John. John is indicative of the emphasis of the film when, whilst
trying to get her to go out with him, he asks Joey:
[h]ow much does it cost to
keep him alive; thousands of
dollars a week?
Joey: That's
not the point.
John: Well
the point is that in Africa people die of the measles, ya
know;
little babies even. Only cost a
few pennies to keep
'em
alive. No, there's got to be
something crazy somewhere,
man!
Joey: Well
that's wrong too.
Here, then, the cost of medical treatment, as opposed
to the ethics of it, seems to be of equal significance in whether they should
keep Ken alive. The power of John
and Joey’s viewpoint is reinforced by the choice of low camera angle and
by the fact that John and Joey are very friendly to Ken. Consequently, as Ken's friends advocate
his death on purely economic grounds, it gives their argument a validity (and
an airing) that places it as a central theme of the film's criticisms against
medicalisation and, by implication, marks impairment as expensive and
unproductive. Ken's body is seen
as totally unproductive with his inability to use his hands clearly symbolic of
such a viewpoint. As Joey, in the
above conversation, starts by saying: '[T]hat's not the point', and ends:
'that's wrong too', it is quite a volteface. By agreeing
that the treatment of African children is wrong 'too' she agrees that keeping
Ken alive is wrong, thus undermining her initial reluctance to support Ken in
his suicidal wishes. Equally,
Joey’s support for Ken soon becomes positive support for his wishes to
die. The 'nature' of Ken's
impairment does necessitate a high degree of personal assistance, a fact that
places it in the realm of what Turner (1992, p.177) calls: 'chronic
degenerative illness'. Through
having such a physically dependent central character, the film indicates the
financial problems incurred by revealing how modern medicine has moved from
curing infectious diseases to containing and curing chronic degenerative
illness. Significantly, Joey
wishes Ken 'good luck' when he goes to court (a makeshift court in the hospital
library) to plead for the right to die.
An ill body, and similarly Other bodies, are
consequently seen in Whose Life Is It Anyway? both as symbolic of and the cause of social ills (somatic
ills, or problems such as excessive tax burdens, health care costs or even
recessions). Ken's body is
indicative of the excesses of medicalisation and its alienating
consequences. It is also a symbol
of the 'sick' society that pursues such medicalisation at all costs, both
metaphorically and literally.
I often point out that 'this film' has this 'cripple'
doing this 'disgusting thing' when in fact the activity is not disgusting,
unnatural, or unrealistic. This
chapter does not aim to be prescriptive and say that such features of
incapacity should not be shown; the point is that they are the only images
shown and that they are exaggerated or falsified to categorise the individual
through the functions of his / her body.
Consequently, such images are perceived as the reality of disability
when in fact they represent merely a specific construction of disability as
impairment.
Whose Life Is It Anyway? consists predominantly of long takes, some lasting up to
nearly two minutes, and one scene starts with a fairly static long take of Joey
giving Ken his coffee which is then spilt. Ken then falls out of bed whilst being cleaned up. The simple visualisation that Ken has
to have special canned coffee makes specific the high cost of keeping him
alive; it is not just technology but special people and special nourishment
that are required. His needs are
time-consuming, too. However, at
the point at which Ken starts to fall out of bed there is an increase in the
pace in the choice of camera positions, angles and music; cuts become
increasingly rapid. Between
Ken’s starting to fall, falling and being put back in bed into his former
position, there are twenty-seven shots which together last under seventy
seconds. They consist of
straight-on medium shots of Joey, who is panicking, long shots of male and
female nurses coming to rescue Joey / Ken and shots of Ken’s body
slipping down to the floor, from the bed, from under the bed and from the
opposite side of the bed to Ken.
Most importantly, though, we have point-of-view shots from where Ken is;
shots which involve the camera panning left, tilting ninety degrees, rapidly,
and shots canted from the floor as Ken's head rests upon it. The disorientation suggested by the
movement of the camera, its pace and rapidity, all combine to emphasise the
helplessness and terror that a lack of body control - in Ken and the disabled -
is constructed as entailing in circumstances where control would be advantageous. Ken is simply helpless; he becomes a
spectacle for the camera initially and then for the medical gaze: Emmerson, his
students, and Dr Scott walk in upon Ken hanging from his bed.
Embarrassment is the emotion that Ken first seems to
feel upon falling out of bed, but it turns to outrage when Emmerson walks in
with the student doctors. Ken
orders them all out and Emmerson, realising how Ken feels, leads them out. Ricks' (1974, p.1) assessment of Keats'
art and its use of embarrassment is applicable here to how Ken feels, and what
the art of the film is achieving, when he states that embarrassment is
connected with feelings of: 'defencelessness [ ... and that A]rt uses
embarrassment to help [the spectator / reader] deal with it, not by abolishing
or ignoring it, but by recognising, refining and putting it to good human
use'. Ken's embarrassment is
rooted in his defencelessness. The
art of the film uses the audience's defencelessness against developing
quadriplegia (an impairment) to make the audience feel as uncomfortable in
observing Ken's defencelessness as Ken is in experiencing it. The embarrassment, which is the
embarrassment of witnessing the deformed, or non-controllable body, is achieved
by having it individualised in Ken; closure is achieved by Ken’s deciding
for himself that it is all right for this embarrassment to be removed (by his
suicide). Consequently, through
such a resolution, an audience's embarrassment and discomfort are relieved and
the ideal world (of entertainment and normality) is restored. The embarrassment in the scene is not
only the audience's point of view but also the audience's required emotional
response, because embarrassment is both personal and social in this, and all,
contexts. It is a reaction to a
social situation, whoever is involved.
No other single scene in the film more explicitly combines its
philosophy and imagery to greater effect – it is a wonderful piece of
film-making. Equally, in having
Ken's body require four people to lift him into bed, with two more nurses
present, and two doctors to check him medically after the event, his financial
cost in manpower is shown and, by implication, condemned.
Mary Douglas (1970, p.160) tells us that: 'the body
is a symbol of society', and that: '[W]e cannot possibly interpret rituals
concerning excreta, breast milk, saliva and the rest unless we are prepared to
see in the body a symbol of society, and to see powers and dangers credited to
social structures reproduced in small on the human body' (Douglas, 1966,
p.115). Although Douglas is
talking of the typical - normal - body, the anxiety about the disabled body can
be understood only if we see the disabled body as part of a range of available
bodies that may act as potential cultural symbols in general. Ken's body has been normal and now it
is not; its value as a symbol is both metaphorical and as a potentially lived
reality. If we take
Douglas's views on the body and apply them to this film, Ken's body is a body /
society paralysed by rationality and intellect, a society whose head thinks but
whose body has become a danger to itself, ready to topple at any moment. Ken needs such a multiplicity of
technology and bureaucratic hierarchies to survive that, if we take Douglas's
point again, it is impossible now to enjoy death or dignity as a natural part
of living. After all, it is death
that is the root desire of Ken. In
contrast, Emmerson, in an earlier scene with his student doctors, cites death
as 'the enemy'. Death is, more
radically, for Foucault (1977) the last resistance to power. This gives rise to a crux in
interpretation: with the film as seen through a Social Model of Disability analysis, death is given as the release from
abnormality, and not as Foucault meant it: a last stand against the tyranny of
normality over us all. Ken's body
acts as a symbol of the failure of society because it uses the body language of
anxiety about the social state to criticise medicalisation. If we relate Ken's dependence and
inability to protect himself from potential danger to his lack of freedom of
choice (the 'right to die') then Ken is also a metaphor: a metaphor for a
society paralysed by its construction of people so dependent while nevertheless
keeping them alive that they become 'useless eaters' draining society. Ken represents not only society but
also a particular product of that society; he can be read in both ways. The need of eight to ten people to put
Ken back into bed and check him is surely meant to indicate such an interpretation.
Once Ken is back in bed,
Dr Emmerson tells Ken that he will be a quadriplegic for life and that it is
hoped he will be transferred in the near future to another ward or hospital for
continuing rehabilitation. Ken
retorts to this statement: '[Y]ou mean you just grow the vegetables here, the
vegetable store is somewhere else'.
Again, Ken's humanity is contrasted with his own words but, more
importantly, whilst this conversation is continuing, a new 'vegetable' is
brought in to an ICU cubicle along from Ken's (it is in view as all the ICU
cubicles are Panopticon-like glass constructions). The medical production line of 'vegetables', the wholly
dependent and very expensive, are shown being created and damned in the same
process of medicalisation as Ken has undergone. The lighting of the characters in this dialogue shot /
reverse shot part of the sequence is of interest. Emmerson - in medium shot from the side - is again lit in a
cinematically sinister manner with the left side of his face in near darkness
which, when combined with his ethnic (Italian-American) features, gives him an
appearance of being obsessed. In
itself alarming, this is in sharp contrast to Ken, who is well lit in close-up
(for extra intensity and feeling it is shot straight on), with no shadow on his
face. Thus, Ken's words are more
pure and possibly vulnerable through their purity (signified by the lighting)
than Emmerson's. The
latter’s appearance is shown to be a prediction of evil. This reading is confirmed later at the
hearing when Ken classifies Emmerson's wishes as committing him to 'a life
sentence'.
There is no comprehension of the quadriplegic body as
the product of a patronising, de-personalising discourse. The film’s makers are seemingly
unaware of this perspective because the film is, as I have shown, acting as
part of the (cultural) discourse that is describing quadriplegia as dependent,
inhuman and child-like. As such,
it demonstrates its lack of awareness of the fact that, as Foucault stated, the
body is a product of discourse.
The ideologies of the film, a normalising individualism and disabling
medicalism, are revealed by the absence of Disability-specific issues; the film
carries its own ideological theme forward with no regard for alternatives,
despite its supposed liberal philosophy of choice. The
film’s makers cannot be assumed to have read Foucault - they may have -
but the film does propose itself as a challenge to disempowering situations of
(medical) hegemony. In fact, it
challenges only the right to be (medically or socially) different, despite the
film's makers message that they understand all the issues. The view held by this thesis is that
they do not and, as such, they merely reinforce continued (mis)understandings
about the issues upon which the film purports to comment (especially
Disability).
In one scene Ken has his bed changed and is then
washed and dressed: the film here places him bodily as the equal of an
infant. It is important to note
here that social relationships are mediated by our bodies and that Ken’s
is constructed in the film as the root of his social exclusion. It is only if we see what Goffman
(Burns, 1992, pp.38;85) calls our 'body idioms' - movement, gestures - and
'body gloss' – the desire to enact those 'idioms' - as natural rather
than constructed that the loss of one's standard 'idiom' or 'gloss' becomes
problematic. A loss is indeed a
loss; however, it becomes the reason for living - or dying in Ken's case - only
if the loss is seen as the loss of one's natural state. Whose Life Is It Anyway? inadvertently demonstrates the acceptance of such norms as
natural through the film’s attempt to have Ken rationally decide to
commit suicide because of his inability now to have the 'idioms' and 'gloss'
that were part of his existence before the accident. There is nothing essentially negative about being dependent
or needing help in changing, for example; it is only if one constructs the body
as the 'showcase of the self' which is in turn a 'showcase of a successful
life' (Seymour, 1989, p.13) that it is seen – constructed and interpreted
- as negative.
Body idioms define the difference between what is
considered masculine and feminine.
Taking a cue from Creed (1993, p.131), who states that 'the abject body
is identified with the feminine, which is socially denigrated, and the symbolic
body with the masculine, which is socially valorised': Ken's body is denigrated
by being placed in the idioms of the feminine. The negation of Ken’s masculinity is effectively and
intentionally, even by its own logic, achieved by having valorised it as
overtly masculine prior to the accident that led to his quadriplegia. At the beginning of the film Ken is
welding, adding the final touches to a giant metal abstract sculpture that he
has been commissioned to make, about fifty feet up in the air and hanging from
a mobile crane. A masculine image
indeed; instantly, we are assured that we have an energetic, strong and
physical man with a grand, and very public, artistic vision - no weedy little
sculptures for this guy. The sculpture
in question is approximately a hundred feet high and appears to be a minimalist
iron representation of a sailing ship.
Upon clambering down, Ken's virile sexuality is immediately shown when
his girlfriend Pat (a dancer) instantly embraces, kisses and is carried by
him. As such, Ken is a man's man
whose physicality is manifest in his art. To push the emphasis on Ken’s
masculinity beyond doubt he even drives a sports car.
The car accident occurs immediately following the
above opening display. The
audience next sees Ken having his bed changed, his body rubbed (to prevent
pressure sores) and being washed and fed in the Intensive Care Unit. We further see Ken being fed and this
seems to signify the child-like quality of what he has become; more so than his
feminisation. Infantilising is
very closely allied to feminising - i.e., the Lolita (Stanley Kubrick, GB, 1962) syndrome that places each
within the (O)ther. Feminisation
occurs in the way that the camera uses tight close-ups of Ken's body when it is
being rubbed, fragmenting him in a way that children are rarely
represented. Ken becomes an object
similarly to when Mulvey (1975, p.19) describes the objectification of the
female, as Ken is submitted to a 'to-be-looked-at-ness'. The process can be seen as part of a
criticism of medicalisation, as indeed is intended in this film. The difference lies in the constant
'to-be-looked-at-ness' which aligns Ken with the feminine, in contrast with his
having previously been so masculine.
Ken has moved from a situation where his creations were looked at and
into a situation where he himself is the object that is looked at. Equally, the to-be-looked-at-ness
process is part of the construction that makes Ken an abject creature (or
'vegetable') through medicalisation as much as feminisation. Feminine to-be-looked-at-ness is
considered to be pleasurable, as is impairment to-be-looked-at-ness; in the
latter case, it is pleasurable because the normal body's anxiety about its own
condition is relieved and passed on to an[O]ther.
Part of Ken's masculinity in normality was his bodily
control; his ability to keep his balance whilst hanging from a crane; his
fearlessness; his strength and poise - without our being shown its (O)ther
bodily functions. The above are factors
which combine to encapsulate his masculine attributes. They are of equal importance in
Ken’s (and society’s) perception of masculinity. Later, in the
hospital scene where Ken falls out of bed, the symptoms of his fear are most
often associated culturally, with the aspect of the weaker: the feminine. Control of the body can easily be
paralleled with social control and the control of nature. The disquiet about Ken's lack of
control is best explained by Scott (1970, p.273) when he states that: 'cripples
make us feel uneasy; they threaten our sense of mastery over nature'.
Another way that Ken is made abject, and feminine
– apart from a symbolic rape of Ken by Dr Emmerson who gives him an
injection in his buttock against his will, a scene that is visually similar to
many rape-type mises en scènes - is by
his showing of emotion.
This is signified by the fact that Ken loses his calm
and 'in control' manner from his masculine beginning - his normal period - and
becomes emotional - in his abnormal period. The best example of this is when Ken is crying after having
told his girlfriend Pat to leave him and to go and get married and have
children with someone else (having himself indicated that he is impotent). Ken is further emasculated by the
feminising implications of the construction of his condition and, if taken
together and in light of his own view that he has 'a piece of knotted string
between his legs', it leaves us in no doubt about the socio-sexually
emasculated state of Ken’s body.
John is one of the characters who comes in to Ken's cubicle to wipe his
tears away, saying as he does it: '[I]f a man cannot use his hands he's got to
be a real dumb son-of-a-bitch to cry.
I mean, it's just another way of getting your gown wet'. John instantly places the issue
of being 'a man' into the discussion and parallels it with Ken's inability to
move his hands. As John talks of
crying as 'another way' of wetting a gown, the lack of bodily function control
is paralleled to crying (feminine / infantile). Consequently, Ken's crying and uncontrolled excretions also
act to place his body parallel to that of a baby's; however, one grows out of a
baby’s body, not into one.
As babies grow up, they also learn, they are socialised, to control
their emotions.
Having control of one's emotions is, as Tasker
states, part of the process of restraint that signifies masculinity, but it is
the idea of it as a 'protective performance' (Tasker, 1993, p.237) which makes
Ken, via his body, monstrous and an
abomination of and against society in the logic of the film. Masculinity as a performance implies
that it is above nature, whilst identifying it as a performance reveals that it
is in fact unnatural. If we
combine this perspective with Creed's (1993) view that the masculine male body
is the 'symbolic' and with Kristeva's view (1982, p.102) that: '[T]he body must
bear no trace of its debt to nature: it must be clean and proper in order to be
fully symbolic'; furthermore, that the body that does betray its debt to
'nature' is perceived to be the female body, then we can see Ken's body as
being shown as feminine. The
female body is seen to betray its debt to nature through menstruation and its
function's ability to determine behavioural patterns; just as Ken's body
does. Ken is unable to control his
bodily functions (after kidney failure it has its blood purged regularly), and
they are actions and bodily necessities shown both to affect and to determine
his emotional state. Consequently, Ken's dialysis is both mentioned and shown
in great detail, as in the interview with the hospital psychiatrist, and
paralleled with menstruation for the viewer explicitly to infer Ken’s
feminisation.
As clothes are increasingly seen to signify the worth
of the individuals within them (Kaiser, 1985), the degree of success and worth
manifest in their apparent cost or individuality, then Ken's apparel singles
him out (and all who are sick) as both a social and a physical failure
(Hoffman, 1979). All the
characters in the film are seen in clothes which vary and signify the social
multiplicity of individuals (Kaiser, 1985) in comparison to Ken in his hospital
outfit / dressing gown. For
example, the main doctors are seen in their professional outfits (white coats)
and leisure / daily wear. When Dr
Scott has an evening out with Ken's lawyer, and then visits Ken in the hospital
in her elegant dress, the scene serves to show that she has an external
(private) life, as well as a professional (public) life, in direct comparison
to Ken; it is, thus, a created comparison which acts further to demean Ken in
his impaired state. If we take
Gilman's (1988, p.26) view that 'human identity lies in the individuality of
the body', and that 'the outer-man is a graphic reproduction of the inner-man'
(ibid, p.128), then we can interpret
Ken's body as symptomatic of his limited character and performance
capabilities. Ken's body has become his sole character whilst all the other
characters signify that to be a social being one has a multiplicity of uniforms
/ hats for a multiplicity of bodily or social performances. Representationally, here and in many
other impairment-orientated films, the individual with quadriplegia becomes his
body and, as Gilman states, 'the cultural image can become the self definition'
(ibid, p.10). The limitation of this film is that it
does not question how the 'image becomes the self definition' through social
discourse and its processes, yet merely reinforces it as the logical and
natural, essentialist definition generic to quadriplegia / Disability. Significantly, the two other main
characters of the film, John and Joey, also have an external life - they begin
courting - whilst at the same time the film is showing us Ken's inability to
have either a private or a satisfactory public life. Another method by which Ken is made a hideous liminal man,
half-alive, half-dead, half-man, half-animal, is in the way in which the
characters other than Ken are all seen as mobile or physical.
The whole question of posture relates to Goffman's
points about body idioms. Murphy
(1991), an anthropologist who himself developed quadriplegia, states about
quadriplegia that:
[T]he quadriplegic body can no longer speak a 'silent
language' in the expression of emotions or concepts too elusive for ordinary
speech - for delicate feedback loops between thought and movement have been
broken. Proximity, gesture and body set have been muted, the body's ability to
articulate thought has been stilted.
(p.101)
In Murphy's comments we can see how the body, if
muted, can place an obstacle upon social relationships, but also that we should
not take the muted version to be the full expression of the individual. If we understand muted bodies as
mutations only comprehensible as outsiders to interactive social relations then
an acceptance of bodily difference will become increasingly difficult. Another method the film employs to
advocate the muted body as the equivalent of the dead body is by having others
speak Ken's body language for him.
A good example of this is in the scene where Ken is being fed a chicken
leg by the nurse Joey: she lets him take a bite, puts the bone down and then
she licks her fingers. Ken makes
an envious comment. Such an
apparently natural reaction of licking one's fingers is used against Ken in
order to mute his body still further.
The same point occurs when John wipes away Ken's tears and when Ken has
to ask another nurse to get his lawyer's card out of his bedside cabinet and
telephone him. The repeated use of
having others carry out bodily reactions and simple tasks either for, or in
contrast to, Ken places him further into the realms of 'the dependent useless
eater'; with the 'useless eater', or useless of body, being equated with the
dead body. Any understanding
of dialysis would also lead the spectator to realise that even his bodily
functions are being carried out for him, only this time by a machine.
Ken’s poise prior to his accident was energetic
and strong in body, one showing assurance in his movements and posture; his
head is held high and he has a darkish beard covering a strong chin. Significantly, once the accident
occurs, his posture is given an attitude that reflects the change in the nature
of his personality and ideals: it emanates hopelessness and it is portrayed in
a manner that is not logically, medically speaking, related to his
quadriplegia. Once the accident
has happened Ken's chin is always resting on his chest and even the beard has
paled, apparently in order to signify the waning of his masculine health. Yet Ken can hold his chin up (he is
shown having physiotherapy to strengthen his chin / neck) in a way that would
drastically change the way the spectator perceives his posture and, by
extension, his character. His
character is inextricably linked with his posture to reinforce the ideology of
the film that his condition is hopeless.
Most other Disability films use the same techniques
and constructions to make their disabled characters abject. The disabled are easily fatigued;
totally dependent; socially isolated; asexual; infantilised and have an
impaired posture. Perhaps part of the problem for society of the quadriplegic /
impaired body can be related to Featherstone's (1991) argument that consumer
culture needs a plastic body that will be stimulated into buying decay-delaying
consumables. Ken is unable to
consume freely and repeatedly in the manner that consumerism requires. Ken does consume, but it is of high
cost, low demand, technology; thus, he consumes in a way that is considered to
drain capital from a more rapid product consumerism. Equally, Turner (1992, p.11) states that old and sick bodies
are: 'a brake on growth [due to their being a] burden of dependency [ ... ] a
form of hyper-Malthusianism'. Even
so, Ken still has a function in consumerism, as does the film itself, if we
take Featherstone's (Featherstone et al,
1991, p.186) point that consumer culture 'needs to stimulate the fear of decay
and incapacity which accompanies old age and death by jolting individuals out
of complacency and persuade them to consume body maintenance strategies'. Ken, and the film, facilitate this
process by signifying all that is horrific about not controlling one's own body
functions and not having specific control over one's own body idioms. It is a perspective that extends even
to fashion and body garments in Whose Life Is It Anyway?, where, for example, Ken is almost at all times seen in
his hospital gown - in his wheelchair he has a particularly tasteless
dressing-gown on over it - which ensures that he is never represented as
anything other than a sick person.
Equally, the 'sick person' implies loss of bodily control, dignity,
privacy and freedom, but also implies decay and mess due to its chaos of faecal
and urinary excreta (i.e., bodily decay).
That the quadriplegic / impaired body is unable to fulfil its part of
the paradigm of the 'sick role' also accounts for the desire to see it as
useless and worthy of termination (as defined by Parsons (cited in Murphy,
1991, p.19). The failure to play
the ‘sick role’, where the individual promises to make the effort
to recover in return for the temporary abdication of responsibility to work, is
clearly a part of the overall negation of impairment as a validated state and
seen to be so in Whose Life Is It Anyway?
Movement is the subtlest way in which the film
disables and objectifies Ken as a body and as an individual, particularly since
it is movement of other people.
The mise en scène of
movement to degrade Ken lies both in the characters' direction and in the
movement of the camera, in the lighting and in the editing. The mise en scène is striking in that a large number of scenes impact a
style of movement that gives a flow that permeates the entire film. It starts to decrease only when Ken
gets closer to winning his battle to die (the ultimate in non-movement).
The immobile body is expertly revealed in Whose
Life Is It Anyway? as additionally abject in
a very short scene in which Ken's lawyer, Carter Hill, tries to talk to an
uncooperative Dr Emmerson.
Emmerson, trying to dissuade Hill from continuing to represent Ken's
case, is walking very rapidly along a hospital corridor. The two then turn a corner. The scene is shot from behind the two
professionals as they quite literally hop-skip-and-jump up five steps and
immediately turn another corner.
Next to the five steps, to the left of them and the screen, is a
hospital porter slowly pushing another patient in a wheelchair up a ramp. The design and existence, socially and
filmically, of the steps / ramp juxtaposition enables an instant parallel to be
drawn between them. The virtual
non-movement of the wheelchair-user up the ramp in the short period that
Emmerson and Hill take to climb (jump) the stairs can have been included for no
other reason than for it to be comparative. The comparison is used to clarify the difference - as the
film sees it - in ability and efficiency between the two types of mobility: the
normal and the abnormal. There is
little need to have such movement in the whole sequence except to give the camera
another opportunity to move as rapidly as the normal characters, with the whole
Emmerson and Hill conversation in this segment filmed on the move, cinéma
vérité style, for both camera and
actors.
Although Ken fleetingly mentions that all he wants is
choice, his liberal demands are lost in the plethora of 'body fascist' (Shaban,
1997) images that the film puts forward for him to have the right to terminate
his ability to have choice at all in the future: the 'right to die'. As such, there is one further segment
of Whose Life Is It Anyway? that
should be addressed, and that consists of the sequences prior to Ken telling
his girlfriend, Pat, to leave him so that she can get married and have
children. It is a flashback
sequence, in black and white, of Pat doing a divertissement as Ken draws in charcoal and sculpts in clay her delicate
and graceful body doing a pas de brisé. The sequence
starts with a medium close-up of Ken on his side in the hospital bed, his hands
up to his chest and totally immobile (as if sculpted in clay) due to
quadriplegia. The scene (that
starts with a one-hundred-and five-second-continuous take) ends with Joey,
under detailed instruction from Ken, laying Ken's hand on a pillow with his
fingers and thumb specifically positioned. This attitude of the hand is later revealed as that of
Michaelangelo's God's hand giving Adam life. Hands and fingers, or in this case Ken's lack of mobile
hands, are signified in the film as (Ken states) the tools through which the
mind's imagination speaks. Thus the lack of hand (bodily) movement
is another element in the film's devaluation of impaired people and the
mystification of the cause of disablement. However much Ken is nevertheless able to articulate his
intellect he is not, at least from his perspective, able to articulate his
creativity.
From the view of Ken lying on his side in the
hospital bed - with a storm rumbling outside the hospital - we cut to the first
black-and-white flashback sequence of the film in which Pat is wearing a leotard
doing her battement in front of a seated Ken
who is rapidly sketching, in charcoal, Pat dancing. The sequence lasts just over a minute and on the soundtrack
is suitably evocative orchestral music which accentuates every pirouette, glissade,
entrechat, ciseaux, écarté, bourrée and fouetté
Pat does; all that is considered elegant and graceful in body movement. As Dyer (1992, p.43) states about
ballet: 'muscle, stamina and power' are all utilised in the 'service of the
opposite feminine ideal'. Once her
dancing is over she sits on Ken's lap and admires his sketches of her. There
are repeated close-ups of Ken's hands sketching the dance action while she is
dancing. As a couple Ken and Pat
epitomise the combined talents of mind and body both as individuals and as an
artistic couple trying to achieve artistic perfection in their chosen
respective arts, arts which could hardly have been more dependent bodily on a
functioning body. At the end of
the sequence the music becomes discordant and, with a return to colour, we cut
back to Ken as a bolt of thunder and lightning strikes outside his room; Ken is
literally and metaphorically bought back to his newly-impaired self in a flash
with a bang. The mise en
scène of this entire section is meant
to indicate that Ken's mind is being tortured by his past normality. The external thunder and lightning of
the sequence signify Ken’s internal turmoil, a past and present crashing
about in the psyche of man who wishes he'd been left to die. Consequently, the mise en scène is effective, and well executed, in explicitly revealing
the film’s, and Ken's own, perspective of what it is like to have
quadriplegia.
Within five seconds of the momentary return to the
Metrocolor reality of Ken’s impairment the film cuts back to another
black-and-white sequence. This
time the sketch has become a sculpture of a figure and is being made by Ken as
Pat dances in a darkened studio.
The shots of both Ken sculpting and Pat dancing are superimposed upon
the screen – the former to the left and the latter to the right - thereby
demonstrating the intrinsically intertwined physicality of both their life and
art. We see Ken with the wire
frame of his clay sculpture layering clay upon it to create a sculpture of a
somewhat anorexic body doing a pirouette:
i.e., Pat. As the sculpture frame
acquires more and more clay, Pat has fewer and fewer bodily coverings. The camera cuts to Pat as her chiffon
clothing slides off her body until she is completely naked and lying on the
floor, the camera closing in on her from above, as if it is caressing her
buttocks, breasts and pubic body fragments as she does the splits. As she
finishes the completed sculpture slowly replaces her image and the sculpture
begins to turn as if it is doing an independent pirouette - which, in the logic of the film, means it is 'alive'. Ken's
hands and fingers are seen creating his 'living' sculpture out of nothing as
they were in previous dance sequence, which is surely the point of having both
his massive iron sailing ship and the more delicate ballet sculpture appear to be moving independently. Dyer (ibid, p.41)
writes of ballet that its: 'gesture[s] literally embod[y] grace, poise,
elegance and transform[s them in to ... ] a dream of living in harmony with
one's body', a feeling that Pat’s and Ken's artistic representations are
explicitly meant to imply. Ken's
masculinity forbids him to embody those qualities (and, conversely, qualify Pat
to signify them due to her slim, lithe embodiment) yet his masculine skills
allow him to represent them. Ken
is allowed to admire and create from his imagination feminine beauty but not be it.
Consequently, Ken's disembodied-embodiment from his imagination traps
him inside his imagination with no hope of letting it speak. The silence renders the apparently mute
body a prison and, as such, abject and unbearable.
Dyer (ibid, p.44)
continues by stating how ballet exemplifies the potential of the body, shorn of
social construction, as an ideal; however, it is an ideal that: 'does not
accommodate disabled bodies'.
Dyer's point is astute (it reveals the ideological flaws behind the
apolitical ‘integrated’ dance troupe CANDOCO, for example): that ballet is identifiable in Whose
Life Is It Anyway? as proving Dyer's point
could not have been clearer; it is the apparent perfection of Pat's performance
(and body), and Ken's representation of it, that makes sure the point is
taken. If, as Dyer states, ballet
(and dance in general, for that matter) is the pinnacle of the ideal and
co-operative body then the disabled body is the converse: the embodiment of the
abyss of impaired physicality.
Furthermore, if, as Irene Castle (cited in Cohan and Hark, 1993, p.26)
states: 'dancing is the language of the body', then Ken's body - the disabled
body - is the enemy of that language through the fact that its mute character
strips the body of such a language and, also, survives by fatiguing
others. This supposed language of
the body can only be understood, or brought into being, when it is rigorously
structured and constructed by the imagination and intellect. As such, the language of dance in Whose
Life Is It Anyway? is used - structured and constructed - to negate (O)ther
languages of the body, just as oral language has used its hegemony to negate
sign language (cf. Davis, 1995; Gregory and
Hartley, 1991). The conclusion of
this segment of the film, with Ken persuading Pat to leave him for a 'real'
man, acts to ensure that the dancing Pat, and sculpting Ken's potential -
capital and social - is seen as a glorious past with no future.
Ken’s past, present and future are wholly defined and valued by
his past and present embodiment.
The strength of the film's intention can be
comprehended only if Ken's body, at the same time as being represented as a
reality, is a symbolic representation of the danger to society of medical
technology (i.e., it is a metaphor). From a Social Model of Disability viewpoint, the film is a very negative and
one-sided view of the causes and needs of the impaired; it fails utterly to
consider Independent – or any - Living as an option. The factors that it could be cheaper or
a process that will enable Ken to have dignity, independence and the right of
choice to live as he wishes and not die are not demonstrated. In Whose Life Is It Anyway? technological medical culture is damned for its success
through its successes: the severely impaired. Thus, the impaired as symbols of its success have to be, and
are, equally damned. As regards
the perspective propagated by the film, this is undeniably achieved by a
sophisticated piece of film-making which has great depth and skill behind it,
at all levels of production.
If we accept Canguilhem's (1989, p.77) point that:
'strictly speaking a norm does not exist, it plays its role. [A role ... ] which is to devalue
existence by allowing its correction', then we can see how Ken’s body is
devalued by not following the adult human 'norm' of ordinary masculinity. Although Canguilhem's point is that all
existence is devalued - even those who can closely fit the norm - my point is
that the norm is specifically used on film to devalue the disabled body. Canguilhem's suggestion that the norm
devalues the norm is an important one in that the norm devalues itself by
making an individual's body an object rather than a subjective, lived
experience with the freedom to experiment. The devaluation of the normal body by the normal body is
achieved through its generalisation (as in these films) and the processes of
generalisation of the abnormal body.
I would argue that the liberation of the disabled body from a negative
generalisation (medicalisation and normalisation) would, above all else, free
the body of normality from the tyranny of itself. If Ken were allowed to live, without stigma, then all others
are free of the dread of embarrassment of either others or themselves, for
example, to live with an impaired body.
Most Disability / impairment-oriented films follow
the same bodily logic as the films discussed in this chapter. Most other films about impairment /
disability represent the impaired in a similar vein, for example, to name but a
few, films such as La Buena Estrella (Ricardo
Franco, Spain, 1997), Crash (Charles
Band, US, 1977), Crash (David Cronenberg, Canada,
1996), Dark City (Alex Proyas, US, 1997), Eye
of the Needle (Richard Marquand, GB, 1981), I
Don’t Want To Be Born (Peter Sasdy, GB, 1971), In
The Company Of Men (Neil LaBute, US, 1997), Just
The Way You Are (Eduardo Molinario, US, 1984), Mute
Witness (Anthony Waller, GB, 1995), Salon
Kitty (Tinto Brass, France/Germany, 1978), Santa Sangre (A. Kodorowski, Italy, 1989), Sick: The Life and Death
of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist (K. Dick,
US, 1997), Sitcom (Francois Ozon, France,
1997), A Zed and Two Noughts (Peter
Greenaway, GB, 1985) and The Bone Collector (Phillip Noyce, USA, 1999). A list so diverse in so many ways,
including impairment subject, demonstrates that the nature of Disability
representation is revealed as astoundingly static, given its regular and
continued use by film-makers as subject matter.
In conclusion, I would argue that the 'good cripple'
for culture is represented as the cripple who does his / her utmost to overcome
his / her abnormality of body, in contrast to the 'bad cripple' who is the
cripple who is happy to be a cripple.
Ken Harrison overcomes him abnormality by preferring death to impairment
in Whose Life Is It Anyway? The impaired and abnormal body is represented on film as
the model through which normality is created, validated, defined and reinforced
as superior with the impaired body disqualified and invalidated by its
inability to be, as a consequence, normal. They are representations that are, overall, created in a
form, style and content of disability representation that is, somewhat
ironically, the norm for cinematically constructed disabled characters.
Armstrong, D., 1983, Political
Anatomy of the Body, Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge
Burns, T., 1992, Erving
Goffman, Routledge, London
Canguilhem, G., 1989, The
Normal and the Pathological, Zone Books, New
York
Cohan, S. and Hark, I.R.,
(eds.), 1993, Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood
Cinema, Routledge, London
Creed, B., 1993, 'Dark
Desires' in Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood
Cinema, edited by S. Cohan and I.R. Hark,
Routledge, London, 118-133
Davis, L., 1995, Enforcing
Normalcy, Verso, London
Douglas, M., 1966, Purity
and Danger, Routledge, London
Douglas, M., 1970, Natural
Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology, Cresent
Press, London
Dyer, R., 1992, Only
Entertainment, Routledge, London
Featherstone, M., 1991, Consumer
Culture and Postmodernism, Sage, London
Featherstone, M., et al,
(eds.), 1991, The Body: Social Process and Cultural Theory, Sage, London
Foucault, M., 1977, Discipline
and Punish: The Birth of Prison, Penguin,
London
Foucault, M., (edited by C.
Gordon), 1977, Power and Knowledge:
Selective Interviews and Other Writings, Pantheon Books, New York
Gilman, S.L., 1985, Pathology
and Difference, Cornell University, New York
Gilman, S.L., 1988, Disease
and Representation, Cornell University, New
York
Gilman, S.L., 1991, Inscribing
the Other, Nebraska University Press,
NebraskaGregory, S. and Hartley, G., (eds.), 1991, Constructing Deafness, Open University, Milton Keynes
Hoffman, A.M., 1979, Clothing
for the Handicapped, the Aged and Other People with Special Needs, Charles C. Thomas Publisher, Springfield
Kaiser, S., 1985, The
Social Psychology of Clothing and Personal Adornment, Macmillan, New York
Kristeva, J., 1982, Powers
of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, (Translated
by L.S. Roudiez), Colombia University Press, New York
Mulvey, L., 1975, Visual
and Other Pleasures, Indiana University Press,
Bloomington
Murphy, R.F., 1991, The
Body Silent, Norton, New York
Oliver, M. and Barnes, C.,
1998, Disabled People and Social Policy,
Longman, Harlow
Rabinow, P., (ed.), 1991, The
Foucault Reader, Penguin, London
Ricks, C., 1974, Keats
and Embarrassment, Clarendon Press, Oxford
Scott, R.A., 1970, 'The
Construction of Conceptions of Stigma By Professional Experts' in Deviance
and Respectability, edited by J. Douglas,
Basic Books, New York, 255-290
Seymour, W., 1989, Bodily
Alterations, Allen and Unwin, London
Shaban, N., 1997,
‘Pandora’s Box’ in Framed: Interrogating Disability in
the Media, edited by A. Pointon and C. Davies,
bfi, London, 117-122
Tasker, Y., 1993, 'Dumb
Movies for Dumb People' in Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities
in Hollywood Cinema, edited by S. Cohan and
I.R. Hark, Routledge, London, 230-244
Turner, B.S., 1992, Regulating
Bodies, Routledge, London.
Further Reading - Key Texts on Disability and Cinema:
Ann Pointon with Chris
Davies (Eds.), 1997, Framed: Interrogating Disability in the Media, bfi (British Film Institute), London (a good broad
instruction)
Norden, M.F., 1994, The
Cinema of Isolation: A History of Physical Disability in the Movies, Rutgers, New Brunswick (very good on silent
cinema)
Schuchman, J.S., 1988, Hollywood Speaks: Deafness and the Film Entertainment Industry, University of Illinois Press, Chicago (very good on silent cinema)
Flemming, M. and Manvell,
R., 1985, Images of Madness, Associated
University Press, London
Oliver, M., 1996, Understanding
Disability, Macmillan, Basingstoke
Cumberbatch, G. and
Negrine, R., 1992, Images of Disability on Television, Routledge, London
Lennard J. Davies (Editor),
The Disability Studies Reader,
Routledge, 1997, London
Barnes, C., 1992, Disabling
Imagery and the Media, BCODP & Ryburn
Publishing, Halifax
Dyer, R., 1993, The
Matter of Images: Essays on Representations,
Routledge, London
Darke, Paul,
1998, 'Understanding Cinematic Representations of Disability' in The Disability Reader: Social Science Perspectives edited by Tom Shakespeare (pp.
181-200), Cassell, 1998, London
Michael Blake,
1995, The Man Behind the Thousand Faces (Lon
Chaney), The Vestal Press,
Ltd., London & New York
David J. Skal
and Elias Savada, 1995, Dark Carnival: The
Secret World of Tod Browning,
Hollywood's Master of the Macabre, Doubleday, New York
Enns, A., and
Smit, C.R. (eds.), 2001, Screening Disability:
Essays on Cinema and Disability, University Press of America, Inc., Lanham
Corker, M.,
& Shakespeare, T., (Eds.), 2002, Disability/Postmodernity:
Embodying Disability Theory,
Continuum, London
Dr Paul Darke
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