Film, Comedy, and Disability

Understanding Humour and Genre in Cinematic Constructions of Impairment and Disability

Alison Wilde

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780367587680
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317135241
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Social Sciences

Comedy and humour have frequently played a key role in disabled people's lives, for better or for worse. Comedy has also played a crucial part in constructing cultural representations of disability and impairments, contributing to the formation and maintenance of cultural attitudes towards disabled people, and potentially shaping disabled people's images of themselves. As a complex and often polysemic form of communication, there is a need for greater understanding of the way we make meanings from comedy.

This is the first book which explores the specific role of comedic film genres in representations of disability and impairment. Wilde argues that there is a need to explore different ways to synthesise Critical/Disability Studies with Film Studies approaches, and that a better understanding of genre conventions is necessary if we are to understand the conditions of possibility for new representational forms and challenges to ableism.

After a discussion of the possibilities of a 'fusion' between Disability Studies and Film Studies, and a consideration of the relationships of comedy to disability, Wilde undertakes analysis of contemporary films from the romantic comedy, satire, and gross-out genres. Analysis is focused upon the place of disabled and non-disabled people in particular films, considering visual, audio, and narrative dimensions of representation and the ways they might shape the expectations of film audiences.

This book is of particular value to those in Film and Media Studies, and Critical/Disability Studies, especially for those who are investigating more inclusive practices in cultural representation.

1 Introduction

The fusion of Film Studies and Disability Studies – why and how?

This book has been written in an effort to discern some of the limits to representation for portrayals of disability in media, focussing on what is attributable to cinema as a specific medium.¹ I will show that there is much understanding to be gained from a synthesis of Disability Studies (and Critical Disability Studies) with Film Studies, not least in understanding how images of disability are constructed in ways which are specific to the practices and processes of cinema, and also in exploring the ways in which audiences make meanings from them, shaping, and being shaped by, individual attitudes and wider cultural outlooks.² Most obviously, insights gained from deeper analysis of cinematic representations of disability might be used to improve representations in film and wider media.

Analysis of disability in film and wider media is a relatively new area of study, predominantly stemming from disabled activists and Disability Studies scholars in the late 1980s and 1990s. However, echoing a call for deeper and more ‘objective’ understandings of cinematic representations of disability by Safran in 1998, and questioning the political bias of earlier work, Hoeksema and Smit (2001) argued that there was a need for a more scholarly approach to the analysis of cinematic representations. They called for a fusion of film theory with Disability Studies, as a synthesis deemed necessary in order to understand the complexity of cultural images and the myriad ways that people make meanings from them. Since then, there has been a burgeoning of studies on cinema, from a range of theorists straddling several disciplines (see Chivers and Markotić, 2010; Fraser, 2016; Markotić, 2016; Brylla and Hughes, 2017) as well as Disability Studies, but little further discussion on how the study of cinema and disability should proceed, and why. There are many reasons why Hoeksema and Smit’s recommendation was an important one. It is crucial to revisit questions of theory and methodology in the analysis of disability and media, and cinema in particular, if we are to tackle the dilemmas of representation, and find new ways of addressing the gaping inequalities in cinematic content, and the marginalisation of disabled people at all levels of the film industry.³ Early work on disability and media demonstrated how a very limited range of stereotypes of impairments (as individual accredited deviations from medical norms), were pervasive across all media, and portrayals of disability (as social oppression) were not. However, later critics (e.g. Shakespeare, 1999a; Mitchell and Snyder, 2000; Wilde, 2004a; Mallett, 2010) have shown how the explanatory power of such categorical approaches, or indeed the content/frequency analyses of work on disability and media, had rarely gone beyond value-driven assertions about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ portrayals of disability (e.g. Barnes, 1992; Cumberbatch and Negrine, 1992; Gartner and Joe, 1987; Klobas, 1988; Pointon and Davies, 1997). As much as these responses to such limited and limiting forms of imagery are understandable (given the misrecognition of disabled people’s lives and the pervasiveness of pathologising images of impairment – see Gilbey [2016] for more recent examples), it has been demonstrated that the use of such criticism often resulted in mechanistic solutions such as those seen in journalism guidelines and broadcasting manifestos in the early late 1990s and early 2000s. Thus, we often saw the ‘problem’ of disability representation reduced to recipes for avoiding particular stereotypes (Ellis and Goggin, 2015, 28; and Wilde, 2004b).

Smit and Enns (2001) explained how academic work on disability and cinema has followed a similar trajectory to ‘feminist film criticism’, especially in the capacity to set analysis within a paradigm which is founded on ‘exposing and reversing the discriminatory ideology underlying most portrayals of disability in film’ (2001, x). A central goal of changing, or removing, an objectifying ‘non-disabled gaze’ on disabled people can be seen as the equivalent of Laura Mulvey’s psychoanalytically informed exposition of the ‘male gaze’ in ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975). Thus, it can be argued that Disability Studies, analyses of cinematic images have often replaced women with disabled people as carriers of ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ (1975, 12), and placed non-disabled people as the owner of the ‘gaze’. In films featuring disability, this perspective would mean that it is the non-disabled person, rather than Mulvey’s male, who is conceptualised to be positioned as the ‘bearer of the look of the spectator’ who ‘controls the film phantasy’ (ibid., 13). Further, like later feminist film scholars’ critiques of Mulvey’s theory of the gaze (e.g. Ettinger, 2006), critics of disability in cinema such as Smit and Enns suggest that these early positions taken towards disability representations tended to be crude and essentialist.⁴ While by this time there was already a recognition of the polyphonic character of cinema texts – Shakespeare (1999a), for example, had explored potential differences in interpretation from a disability-informed point of view, in the films Shine (1996) and Breaking the Waves (1996) – the shaping of the contradictory, sometimes oppositional, readings which are extrapolated by people holding ostensibly similar politics and subject positions (e.g. disabled activists) remain unexplored. Acknowledgement of the processes of interpretation at play may well reveal the implications of particular representational strategies for both niche and wider audience understandings.

Smit and Enns (2001) compared feminist film theory and Disability Studies histories to conclude that scholars of disability and film must re-examine their basic assumptions. Although they did not elucidate any further on the similarities of feminist and Disability Studies film criticism, they suggest that the logic of Disability Studies scholars’ early work on cultural representation was flawed in similar ways. Primarily, their argument centred on comparisons with criticisms of gender essentialism and the mapping to gendered subjectivities, found in early theorisations of ‘the gaze’, which, it is suggested, are replicated according to presumed biosocial differences. Thereby, viewing positions are likely to be theorised as corresponding too neatly to fixed ideas of subjectivities shaped by impairment experiences and disabled identities, or too-equally rigid notions of non-disabled identities, promulgating simplistic ideas of a ‘non-disabled gaze’. They argued that first-wave studies of disability representations were characterised by ‘political correctness’ (2001, x) and that the goal of promoting positive change was put in a central position, as an answer to what earlier scholars believed to be the inherent prejudice of cultural representations of disability, premised on what might be viewed as this (monolithic) ‘non-disabled gaze’. It is these types of aims and assumptions which were seen as crude, leading Smit and Enns (ibid.) to argue that such approaches are inadequate for acknowledging ‘contradiction in the text’ or the subjectivities of viewers, contending that they neglect ‘resistance’ in the interpretations of an active audience (Smit and Enns, 2001, xi).

In the same edited collection on ‘Screening Disability’, and in the spirit of contributing to a more nuanced analytical framework, Hoeksema and Smit (2001) developed these themes further, making some initial recommendations for change. Their central proposition was the need for a greater fusion of Disability Studies with Film Studies. Here, they provided a provocative and necessary start to such a project, calling for a move beyond ‘a posture of disability activism’ towards ‘stylistic, analytical or structural’ methods which position film as ‘cinematic expression’ (ibid., 34). However, they did not elaborate on the ‘missing insights’ (ibid., 33) that Disability Studies theorisations have failed to generate, or show exactly how Film Studies may help us to understand the interactions and relationships between ‘cultural beliefs’ (ibid., 35) and cinema. Nonetheless, their call to recognise the ‘art’ of film and pay closer attention to cinematic aspects of film is essential if we are to take the theorisation of disability imagery as seriously as other aspects of representation. Accordingly, this troubled relationship between ‘art’ and ‘politics’ will be explored a little further as a precursor to examining some of the ways that analysis of cinematic representations of disability might be best embedded in Film Studies; this latter concern will be the primary focus of the remainder of the Introduction as a rationale, and template for the remainder of the book.

Disability politics and film theory

In working out how to conduct sophisticated analyses of cinematic representations of disability, we are immediately faced with a problem inherent within Film Studies itself – that of providing more holistic forms of investigation which contextualise micro levels of study within macro analysis, and vice versa. At the heart of the perceived difficulties of a fusion of Disability and Film Studies there seems to be an unacknowledged need to find ways to meld methodologies and to seek forms of criticism which interrogate the internal worlds created by cinema, in conjunction with the external forces influencing and shaping individual films, including the political and economic decisions and vested interests of film-makers. All of these factors are likely to be inherent within the stories films tell us, evident in the decisions made at the top about what audiences want to see, low levels of participation of disabled people in the film industry, and content which is deemed inadequate or discriminatory by critics.

However, Hoeksema and Smit’s (2001) critique rather reduces Film Studies’ strengths to its capacity for exploring the minutiae and artistic intent of film. Although they also illustrate the importance of wider considerations in the form of a suggestion to explore dimensions of auteurship in their call to comprehend the ‘particular purpose a filmmaker is trying to accomplish’ (ibid., 36), they tend to compare the art of film quite starkly with a Disability Studies macro- focus on society and its disabling dynamics, as conventionally (perceived to be) placed at the centre of the social model of disability. Hoeksema and Smit (2001) suggest that this is a trait of later theories, which might be associated with Critical Disability Studies. There is a degree of academic snobbery to be found here, including a common tendency to deny the theoretical character of politically motivated work on disability, relegating it to ‘advocacy’ or positioning it as an extension of the aims of the disabled people’s movement (Evans, 1999; Smit and Enns, 2001; Hoeksema and Smit, 2001). Effectively, this can maintain perceptions of a chasm between activism, creative practice, and the academy, and the hierarchies and inequalities inscribed within each of these sectors, e.g. working to perpetuate divisions between ‘creatives’ and critics whilst inflating the importance of those at the top of such hierarchies (e.g. film directors and professors), simultaneously marginalising the efforts and ideas of those who struggle to be heard. It also raises crucial questions about the purposes of our investigations, the objectives of allegiances made, and the potential impact of research (see Blomley, 1994, and Greyser and Weiss, 2012, for example), especially in relation to links between academic endeavours, creative practices, the film industry, and wider cultural outlooks. Criticisms which do not seek synthesis and balance across disability politics/studies and Film Studies are thus likely to widen the gap between theory and practice, minimising possibilities for collaborations between academics and creative practitioners, and thwarting strategies aimed at representational diversity and change.

So, although Hoeksema and Smit have indicated that there are a range of important aspects of film which need to be synthesised with Disability Studies, including an appreciation of art and cinematic strategies, I am proposing that any fusion with Disability Studies should engage with political agency, and an understanding of the multiple ways in which viewers experience, and make meanings from, film. Like Hoeksema and Smit, and Smit and Enns, I will show the importance of a fusion between disability and film theory, but will do this by exploring some of the potential ways forward and showing how both disciplines will benefit from interdisciplinary dialogues, ongoing reflection on political goals, and attention to communicative structures.

Moreover, many of those who have worked on feminist, queer, and critical race critiques of film have demonstrated that a core reason for doing such work should be to interrogate the ideological foundations and implications of contemporary cinema (e.g. Mulvey, 1975; and Dyer, 1990, and 1997). More recently, such objectives have become central to those who are working on themes within representations of transgender people (Smith, 2017). The Oscars awards of 2016, and the boycotts of the award ceremony itself (see Smith, 2016), illuminated the growing dissatisfaction about the lack of ‘diverse’ portrayals in film, specifically the exclusion of Black people. These increasing calls for greater diversity, common to feminist, anti-racist, queer, and trans criticisms of film, call our attention to the narrowness of cinematic storytelling. A cursory examination of film theory and philosophy might also reveal that principles of ‘normalcy’ are embedded within the narrative and visual/audio aspects of the film, the intent of the director/writers and cinematographers, the agendas and the commissioning/distribution and employment practices of the film industry, and in conceptualisations of wider film audiences and the way they are addressed, demonstrating that politics is always present in cinema.

It is important to recognise, then, that although we can detect an excess of politically driven argument in early Disability Studies work on media, which overlooks crucial aspects of cinema, especially in the identification of stereotypes and quantitative surveys on content (e.g. Barnes, 1992; Klobas, 1988), this fusion of both ‘sides’ of academic analysis (disability and film theory/studies) also needs to address the under-theorisation and depoliticisation of disabled bodies and disablement within cinema and the wider mediascape. It is also clear that the audience’s relationship to representations should be reconceptualised. First, this is important if we are to move beyond assumptions that there is a simple cause and effect between portrayals deemed to be ‘negative/positive’ or ‘bad/good’, and the suppositions about stereotypes, media effects and cultural attitudes. Second, it is crucial that insights from both disciplines are synthesised if we are to move beyond individualistic, shallow assumptions of disability, which tend to view ‘disability’ as impairment in ways which spurn, marginalise, or even ignore the social causes of disablement, rendering the film viewer as an ‘outsider’ to the world of disabled characters.

Two good examples of individualistic analysis can be found in Evans and Hall’s collection on Visual Culture (1999). Evans’ chapter counterposed individualist explanations of disability with social model views where, despite the provision of valuable insights into the exclusion of disabled people from culture (deployed as ciphers by charities), the social model is relegated to the status of political activism rather than theory. This is a dualism which clearly cannot be sustained given Evans’ (political) choice to position herself within a form of analysis which, whilst critical of a medical model of disability, anchors itself within an individualist paradigm. There is quite an explicit appeal to the ‘we’ of the audience, implicitly positioned as non-disabled witnesses of the charitable spectacle, as judges of the meanings attributed to people with specific impairments, suggesting disability should be measured in impairment terms. The questions posed seem to be whether these images are an accurate account of impairment, i.e. ‘the reality of the image’ (Evans, 1999, 283), and what feelings they are likely to evoke in the viewer. Whilst matters of audience affect are crucial to any analysis which attempts to consider the ‘rights and wrongs’ of disability imagery and its effects within society and culture, the marginalisation of the social model in Evans’ exposition means that disabled people are presented as rather misguided activists, and as passive figures used to sell charitable messages. Overall, they are defined predominantly by their impairments, not as fully-fledged people with their own stories to tell.

In a more extreme manner, Fenichel’s chapter (1999), within this collection, illustrates the dangers of a politically uninformed theoretical approach to disability and impairment (or other) representations. Published in 1954, before the disabled people’s movement was formed, with none of the insights provided by the social model, he offered a psychoanalytic appeal to relationships between fetishism, masturbation, and visual impairment. Although Fenichel argues that ‘there is no reason to suppose that every case of myopia is psychogenic’ (ibid., 338), he suggested that there is common agreement that blindness is associated with shame (ibid., 337) and begins his analysis by stating that,

we regard it as a matter of course that the eye is a phallic symbol and that, accordingly, to be blinded signifies to be castrated (especially as a punishment for some transgression promoted by the scoptophilic impulse).

(ibid., 333)

Given what might be called the ‘ableist’ (Campbell, 2009) assumptions of the author (rather than the ‘non-disabled gaze, given that this idea centres and reifies the idea of a straightforwardly non-disabled psyche or subject position), such analysis is an exemplar of how ‘theory’ can perpetuate common discriminatory stereotypes and cultural attitudes towards the (deviant) sexualities of people with visual impairments.⁵ However, following Vehmas and Watson’s (2014) recommendations for a ‘critical theory of disability’, neither Evans’ nor Fenichel’s accounts of disability as difference deconstruct representations (as cultural goods) or attitudes in ways which are ‘ethically or politically … helpful’ or ‘offer guidance on how to solve moral dilemmas and on how to distribute goods in society fairly’ (ibid., 649).

Although cultural representations of disability and the needs and desires of audiences are likely to be seen by some as residing outside the distributive sphere, cultural portrayals of impairment and disability can be seen as fundamental to informing ideas of disabled people as different, as a mechanism for the transformation of prejudicial attitudes which discriminate and perpetuate cultural, social, and economic inequalities. As such, these ethical and political questions, and matters of social justice, must surely have a central role to play in Disability Studies approaches to culture and media. Moreover, Film and Media Studies approaches which neglect the development of theory and research on disability, as a social ph...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Comedy and disability
• 3. Contemporary comedy: subjectivity, genre, and impairment
• 4. Romantic comedy and disability
• 5. Romantic comedy meets satire: Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster
• 6. The gross-out genre, the Farrelly Brothers, and disability: mapping representational change
• 7.Conclusion, or when is an ending not an ending?
• Bibliography
• Index