Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Punching Up the Story: Disability and Film

2008; University of Toronto Press; Volume: 17; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.3138/cjfs.17.1.2

2561-424X

Nicole Markotić,

Radio, Podcasts, and Digital Media

In many contemporary films, disability may be represented as a moral metaphor (The Straight Story [France/UK/USA, 1999, David Lynch]), as extraordinarily heroic (A Beautiful Mind [USA, 2001, Ron Howard]), or as the punch line of a gag (There's Something About Mary [USA, 1998, Bobby and Peter Ferrelly]). For audiences, such portrayals translate as permission-even encouragement-to feel apprehension, admiration, hilarity at the appearance of bodies on screen.1 Much has been written about disability on screen as narrative metaphor,2 but little about disability as sight-gag in contemporary films. Consider, then, Lars and the Real Girl (USA, 2007, Craig Gillespie), a kooky story about an extremely shy and withdrawn young man and his anatomically-correct sex-doll Bianca. The film has much to criticize. It perpetuates, for example, a characteristically American nostalgia for small-town U.S.A., imagined to be an old-fashioned and tightly knit community: homogenous, cohesive, mono-religious, mono-lingual. Nearly everyone in Lars and the Real Girl is white, able-bodied, and some generalized version of non-denominational Christian. As a rare representative of diversity in the town, Bianca is not only confined to a wheelchair, but, Lars says, she is from Brazil and doesn't speak much English. Yet the film is also a touching portrayal of mental and physical disability. There is something unique and life-affirming about the way people in the town-though shocked at first-rally around Lars and his new girlfriend. Although a plastic doll, Bianca is also a filmic representation of a grown woman in a wheelchair, and once people in the town become used to the idea of Lars dating Bianca, they quite cheerfully offer her jobs, invite her to sit with sick children, groom her, and even elect her to the school board. Ostensibly, they are including Bianca in town activities because of Lars, but individual members of the town express fondness and concern for Bianca and grieve when she dies. Bianca the sight-gag becomes Bianca the sympathetic, doomed-to-die-young heroine. Early on, the local doctor-a wise and compassionate woman-insists that Lars bring Bianca to her office regularly to have her low blood pressure checked. The weekly visits allow her to help Lars work through the fear of close human contact that has led him to substitute a sex-doll (with whom he apparently does not have sex) for a relationship with a real, live woman. Eventually, and somewhat predictably, Lars becomes more self-confident, conquers his delusion by allowing Bianca to die, and sets off on the road to love and happiness. What I find most interesting about the film is that, to borrow terminology from David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder (see endnote 2), Bianca serves as a narrative prosthetic device: she furthers the narrative without disrupting the normative boy-girl romantic ideal. But interestingly, Bianca does not provide a solution to Lars's mental so much as she offers the town members a means to re-evaluate their relationship to Lars. As a disabled person, Bianca serves as a prosthetic for the town, an enabling device for the community to recognize that Lars is not lonely or emotionally needy, nor does he require the town's help to be romantically fixed-up. By introducing Bianca into his community, Lars escapes the need to avoid community contact and is able to present himself as dating. It is almost as if he is taking care of them by getting this mail-order doll and treating it as his girlfriend. So, although presenting a protagonist with a he needs to overcome, the film also presents a town in need of overcoming its reactions to mental disability. Lars's problem is his disability, his disability is his personality, and his personality is the art of the film. Personality through art; personality through bodily problem; corporeal problem represented as the soul of the individual. In his introduction to the philosophy anthology The Body, Donn Welton writes, With the rise of Modern philosophy in the seventeenth century, there came into being the question of how one can develop a rigorous theory of the nature of persons or, to put it more accurately, of what could be admitted into such a theory if one employed a philosophical method incorporating the precision found in the newly emerging mathematical and natural sciences. …