An unpublished piece from 1996

Never Mind the Urine, Where's the Shit

A Taxonomy of Types

Two recent letters to the British Sight and Sound magazine have brought up the issue of disability and its representation on film. Stephen Sheach's letter (Vol. 2, Issue 5) ends with the statement that "No films have had a positive depiction of disabled people. Therefore this is no minor issue". The taxonomy of filmic disabled types listed in Sheach's letter - taken from the popular Jenny Morris book Pride Against Prejudice - goes some way to justifying his claim. And it is not a claim I would dispute, as Morris writes, disabled people are almost exclusively portrayed as metaphors or examples of evil, dependency, and vulnerability whilst usually leading lives of no use or of such heroic proportions that they are 'supercrips'; never forgetting that the disabled characters are always only successful or balanced human beings once they have been 'helped' by a normal one. Colin Barnes in his recent British Council Of Organisations of Disabled publication Disabling Imagery and The Media more expertly sums up the disabled stereotypes in his chapter "Commonly Recurring Media Stereotypes" by his use of chapter sub-titles:

The Disabled Person as Pitiable and Pathetic

The Disabled Person as an Object of Violence

The Disabled Person as Sinister and Evil

The Disabled Person as Atmosphere or Curio

The Disabled Person as Super Cripple

The Disabled Person as an Object of Ridicule

The Disabled Person as Their Own Worst and Only Enemy

The Disabled Person as Burden

The Disabled Person as Sexually Abnormal

The Disabled Person as Incapable of Participating Fully in

Community Life

The Disabled Person as Normal

One or two other sub-titles could be added to the above list: titles such as the disabled person as asexual (My Left Foot), or even, the disabled person as not really disabled and only pretending - either as a plot device or as a psychosomatic malady (Taste of Fear, The Rossiter Case or even Marlon Brando in Bedtime Story, disastrously remade recently, with Steve Martin, as Dirty Rotten Scoundrels). There is also the disabled person as the only true seer of the meaning of life (Duet For One). The list is vast and often derivative of Classic Literature; the pitiable and pathetic disabled characters being straight out of Dickens. I will let the reader provide their own films for each sub-title as an exercise in their own awareness.

The picture that has been drawn is of people with disabilities being unfairly, or unrealistically, represented but, and it is a big but, why should we expect to be more fairly treated than women, gays, blacks or any other group who don't fit the white, heterosexual, male bourgeois hegemony of cultural reproductions. This is not to say that we should not stand up and shout this is wrong! But it is irrational to expect it to change overnight, if it will at all. The filmic representation of disability comes from centuries of negative representation in all forms of artistic production: poetry. painting, music and, most obviously, literature to name but a few. The stranglehold of an idea(l) of normality in culture is now so firmly established that to break it would require such a fundamental shift in the way people think and live that it will not happen under current social conditions. Michael Oliver, the disabled disability theorist, sees the destruction of capitalism as essential for even the slightest chance for change for disabled people; my wanting a better representation of how my life 'really' is seems slightly deluded in such a light.

The main criticism of cinematic representations of disability is that it is based on the medical model of disability rather than the social model. The medical model states that a disabled individuals' capability's are rooted in the pathology of his body - Merrick (John Hurt) in The Elephant Man is a good example of a film choosing to view disability as pathological - where as the social model would argue that society either constructs the restricted capabilities as inferior or has erected barriers - cultural, physical, institutional etc. - that make people with an impairment inferior, disabled by society rather than due to any innate characteristic. A simple example would be my having Spina Bifida and Hydrocephalus, which means I cannot walk; the medical model would argue that I cannot get into a cinema because my impairments prevent me from walking up stairs (inability due to medical condition), the social model would argue that it isn't that I cannot walk that makes the difference but that the cinema was built (socially constructed) with stairs to exclude me from full social participation. If we look at My Left Foot we can clearly see that Christy Brown's (Daniel Day-Lewis) problems in the film are constructed as being pathologically based: i.e. Christy Brown's problems are firmly rooted in his bodily impairments where only the controlling or changing of his body can achieve social integration/equality or acceptance. The social, economic or political environment in which Christy Brown lives does not change at all, making the viewer see Christy's impairment as in his own body and not the social, economic or politically constructed society in which he lives.

The Individualisation

My Left Foot is a good film to talk about in that it encompasses most of the problems involved in talking about representations of disability. Most films individualise social problems so that wholesale social change is not seen as necessary to solve it, after all, wholesale social change is expensive, especially to the elite or capitalism. Disability is a social problem politically, economically and morally: the systematic discrimination, economic degradation and genocidal extermination of disabled people (the current genetics debate is little else) is a consequence of generalised social actions and as such need social policies to rectify them. A Day In The Death Of Joe Egg advances no other idea than those ideologies that disabled people rightly associate with the Nazi's.

The success of My Left Foot, and others of its ilk, like Born On the Fourth Of July, Waterdance and The Elephant Man for example, is rooted in the way they conclude for the able-bodied audience that it is up to the disabled individual to improve their own life with the assistance, if need be, of the social guardians of normality: the medical profession. It is no coincidence that John Merrick's only friend in David Lynch's interpretation of his life, The Elephant Man, is the great Doctor Treves (played by Anthony Hopkins), or that Christy Brown is helped by the great Doctor Cole (played by Fiona Shaw). The medical profession ensured its own position as the judge of normality when it took the freak out of the carnival and turned them from valued human anomalies into 'containable' medical cases histories in the confines of the hospital; although The Elephant Man demonstrates the medicalisation process it is shown as the best and only human alternative: moral bourgeois sensibility saving us poor freaks from the tyranny, ignorance and exploitation by the masses. The Freddie Jones character in The Elephant Man, Merrick's manager, was in fact Merrick's partner and not exploiter; far from being saved by the medical profession many Freaks feared doctors much more than the masses - something I can fully appreciate knowing how doctors, especially surgeons, like to practice on us. The complete distortion of Merrick's story to dispossess him of any agency in his own destiny is little more than typical but wholly understandable if the film is viewed as blindly supporting bourgeois normality by its creation of the 'Other' (disability or even working class life) in abnormality. Lynch's radicalism in The Elephant Man is little more than disguised reactionary moralising. One (and only one) critic at the time called it a middle-class morality tale in its treatment of the working- class alone, its anti-abnormality is so strong (its conclusion advocates that we selflessly commit suicide in a manner to Whose Life Is It Anyway?) that its pathos slips into reactionary body-fascism.

The very fact that the disabled stereotype on film is really rather varied - the list at the beginning covers a wide range of character types, often contradictory at that - in many respects it is wider than those accorded to women, gays or blacks - shows us the extent to which the disabled (me) must be made in to a generalised 'Other' so as to constantly re-incarcerate them (me, us) in the prison of 'Otherness'. It is the very ambiguity of disability - the enormous range of impairments the one term covers makes a mockery of the term in reality - that 'normality' finds so troubling, so frightening that it must fight a constant battle against abnormality to keep it in its place. The wide variety of stereotypes reveals the normals' constant battle to feel that they know or have contained what is a slippery menace: the disabled. No film has, or will, give a positive image of disability because disability is not seen as positive in cultural terms. To some degree all images of disability are neutral, it is only seen as negative in a society that sees it as negative. And it is here, I believe, that the battle between negative/positive imagery should be fought.

The Negative/Positive Debate

Both Morris and Barnes, the two authors already mentioned, are well known in disability circles and both feel that a positive image of disability is that which emphasises the abilities of disabled people in an ordinary environment. That which they consider positive representations are various American Adverts and programmes (some Cagney and Lacy episodes or the NIKE cinema advert with a wheelchair user basketball player for example) which have had disabled characters who are not bitter, dependent or poor. There is one such character in The Player: Tim Robbins lawyer at the police station scene with Whoopi Goldberg, at the end of this scene the lawyer leaves the building and comments upon the lack of ramps in the face of a few steps leading out of the building. This is considered a positive representation because it emphasises the disabled persons abilities whilst acknowledging their physical disability as socially (i.e. the building of steps) constructed. The negative representation of disabled people, for those who see the above as positive, is that which has the disabled person as being like anyone of the types listed at the beginning. Such a view, however politically correct, is not only a retrograde step for the disability movement but, I would argue, positively dangerous in the long run.

Looked at critically what is considered as positive is little more that a splitting of the good cripple from the bad; what is seen as positive is the ability of the disabled person to be as normal as possible; one film that is always cited as positive on this basis is Coming Home, purely on that basis that the main character (Jon Voight) seems to have penetrative sex (with Jane Fonda). Consequently the good cripple here - who is little other than a parody of a normal - only serves to reassure the able-bodied that their hegemony is both correct culturally and philosophically, and by extension reinforces the foundations upon which the ideal of normality is strengthened and perpetuated (in the case of Coming Home, that penetrative sex is the be all and end all of masculinity). Christy in My Left Foot is a good cripple, as is Merrick or most other filmed crips who either 'make good' or are at least seen to try; the story of true disabled people, like Christy, Merrick, Douglas Barder (Reach For The Sky) or Ron Kovic (Born On The Fourth of July) for example, are always very popular because they make normal people feel better about themselves because no matter how bad their life is at least they can walk, talk and screw. By advocating the 'good cripple' as the positive one we, the disabled (by them), risk the danger of doing the same: splitting the good cripple from the bad cripple.

The 'bad cripple' is a character (filmically and socially) who cannot or does not want to be seen as 'really normal' or even slightly normal: Marlon Brando in The Men starts out like this but becomes a good cripple due to listening to the wise normals around him. Thus a a hierarchy is created whereby one is tolerated and the other isn't; something that already happens in hospitals whereby new-born babies with disabilities are treated, or not treated and left to die, based upon the perceived degree or severity of the disability (I would fail the current tests of perceived quality of life that current Government guide-lines recommend to doctors for for the non-treatment of people born with Spina Bifida). Advocating images that pander to this ideology (usually rooted in economics, at present, in the very least) only puts at danger those further away from the perceived ideas of normality or good crippledom. With examples of German disabled people being torched in the street on the increase, us going around saying we are really normal is getting us no where, we have to validate ourselves as we are (those bits that are seen as 'bad' as well) and not as something we are not because that which we are trying to masquerade as - normality - doesn't actually exist anyway.

It is significant I feel that it is usually the obtained-disability writer that idealists these images as positive, and usually from a position of middle-class authority whilst the congenitally deformed are left behind to wallow in their own socially created poverty, lack of education and dependency (that's if they survive amniocentesis or the threat of abortion to start with). Nothing will change for the severely congenitally deformed - but we don't expect it too - whilst the obtained-disability writers dream of being accepted as pseudo-normals. Sadly, for us all, no disabled person can be free of discrimination or the accusation of being, what the Nazi's called, a useless eater ('Joe Egg' sees us as little else) unless those who are incontinent, dribbling, dependent cripples are validated as unique and worthwhile in their own right as who they are. By seeing the positive of disability as that part which is capable is all very well and good for those of us who can either pass or try to be normal, but by implication we degrade those of us who cannot or do not want to be such characters. The positive image for me is created by having any representation and saying what's wrong with being incontinent, impotent or dependent or even what some may consider deviant (one film I found particularly interesting is Romero's Monkey Shines, where a quadriplegic gives his newly found girlfriend more sexual satisfaction than she has ever had by oral sex alone). The images will not change, so what we have to do is re-interpret those that arise differently; prescribing a different image may well be ideal but it is largely pointless as the image by then has arisen and taken hold in the public consciousness. If we cannot make a negative positive we should at least try to explain how a negative character can be seen as an active response to a negative society, either films created society or the 'real' one. The habitus that we inhabit currently has no real value as a form of cultural capital, it has even less when we devalue it as well; we must create our own cultural capital out of our bodies, creating a feeling of the carnivalesque - the un-controlled, free, life giving and decaying body - in which we can all enjoy life.

Bodily fluids seem to always be flowing from the disabled - Coming Home, Born on the Fourth of July, Waterdance and Whose Life Is It Anyway? for example - flowing to ensure that disability is seen as both un-predictable and dirty (the 'Other'). The flowing of bodily fluids are, as Mary Douglas has repeatedly shown, the symbols of chaos, a society in turmoil and signs of taboo or potential social disintegration (thus their prevalence in Horror films). Consequently the disabled person who is not able to control his bodily fluids must either show they can or want to control them, or die as Ken Harrison (Richard Dreyfuss) does in Whose Life Is It Anyway? The main character at the end of The Raging Moon (Malcolm Mcdowell), upon pissing himself, tells us "it matters" to be incontinent and that basically he should do his utmost to not be so. Why? What we should be doing is not pandering to the new middle-class, liberal sensibility of Political Correctness (as that is what it so often is) but freeing both them and us from seeing bodily fluids as either an example of or metaphor for moral or social degradation. What we have to do is get things, starting at the extreme with shit, seen for what they are: shit is after all shit, urine is urine. If we play the game of normalising ourselves, or calling for a 'nicer' representation of our bodies we fall right into the hands of the normalising culture that contemporary consumer culture wants. In a consumer culture that sees even sweat as morally reprehensible making shit and urine ordinary or irrelevant is going to be hard, but it is a journey we must make. In the short-term we may be seen more negatively but it is the only slight chance we have to free normality from its own fears.

In many respects we have to first help the normal free themselves from the tyranny of normality before they will ever consider freeing us (the abnormal) from it. What we have to do is neutralise the symbols of society, or at least deconstruct them, so that they become irrelevant rather than the all encompassing symbols/metaphors of (dis)order that they are taken for at present. We have to subvert the conventional negative symbol and turn it in to positive or irrelevant ones. As our only tool is our bodies they must be the instrument by which we re-interpret the world for others, to free them. Instead of writing that all images are negative (which they are) we must write how they are positive because they emphasise our bodies.

My Left Foot was successful because it used all the age old symbols of order/disorder associated with disability to re-invigorate normality at the expense of abnormality. Christy Brown's aims and goals in the film are exactly those of a bourgeois sensibility: family, home and the love of a good woman. Christy Brown is a good cripple, especially to the able-bodied, because he strived for that which most of the (able-bodied) audience strive for: family, home and the love of a good woman. But the supreme success of the film was that it is little more than a parody of those ideals, in reality Christy fails because basically he marries his mother (metaphorically demonstrated by her physique and skills as a care worker - i.e. she's a nurse, and not a sexual being) and remains dependent upon a patronising society. It could be considered a prime example of the ideology of Ethnocentricism: setting the 'Other', or them, up as trying to be like normal people, or us, only to fail. As Richard Dyer has written in relation to Ethnocentricism and gays, but equally relevant here: "In stereotyping the dominant groups apply their norms to subordinate groups, finding the latter wanting, hence inadequate, inferior, sick or grotesque and hence reinforcing the dominant groups' own sense of the legitimacy of their domain". Hence the good cripple by trying to be normal ensures their own degradation by reinforcing the dubious ideals of the normal and the normals feelings of righteous superiority over them.

Negative Consumption

Sander L. Gilman has written that it is in representations that we all banish our fears of the 'Other', and that there they are controlled and controllable to us. The complete resistance to social change that representations have has never been so aptly surmised. It is amazing how, despite themselves, so many representations are as negative or derogatory as those they claim to supersede; Is My Left Foot any better than The Hunchback Of Notra Dame? No. To some extent it doesn't really matter who makes the image, it is the consumer of the image who controls its meaning, usually in the social context within which it is consumed. Thus I would argue that even those images that are made by disabled people (we are after all people disabled by society) are as equally negative because they are consumed by a non-disabled, dis-ableist, mass audience (those lucky enough to be allowed a mass audience that is). The work of Steve Dwoskin is a good example; much of his work on disability - however boring - cannot escape the abyss of negativity because it is about disability and as long as disability is seen as negative, images of it will also be so.

The other recent letter to Sight and Sound magazine (Vol. III, Issue 2) by Lydia Popowich about images of disabled people perhaps enables me to more simple state the point, she writes: "[i]s an erect penis really the defining characteristic of true manhood?" If we take "really" to be social norms or conventional cultural values the answer is yes, or at least if not erect it has to have the potential or ability to be erect to be attached to a real man. Of cinematic representations of masculinity this is also true (though off screen of course). Polanski's recent Bitter Moon aptly proves this whilst using every disabled stereotype going: the main character becomes paralysed (and impotent) and then starts to play games of voyeuristic perversion with his friends, finally killing his ex-mistress because he can no longer give her satisfaction. Bitter Moon is no different in it ableism (and therefore dis-ableism) than almost all other films - although in Waterdance the central character doesn't kill his mistress, he banishes her, the resulting stereotype is the same - but its saving grace is that it doesn't even pretend that it cares. The more aware film, that which thinks it is being positive, is more dangerous because often they have a claim to a higher truth (i.e. a disabled person wrote it) which is not only not so but is also usually a plea by an abnormal to be allowed to play in the world of the normal (Waterdance and My Left Foot to name but two).

The critic should not fear being called impotent or incontinent just because he/she validates such life-styles or bodies as equal, as is so often the case, because if they do they imprison themselves in the tyranny of normality by giving it a superiority which, however real, is only an illusion. We have to free the ordinary man or woman from his own terror of impotence or incontinence or the wheelchair (or any other impairment) before he will free us. It is only when the ordinary is free to range all representations of the strange, the abnormal, that the strange will be free to inhabit the ordinary.

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