Cinematically Challenged

Letters

Vol. 19 No. 2 · 23 January 1997

From Martin Norden

Though I did invite other writers to ‘confirm or dispute the findings and interpretations’ in my The Cinema of Isolation: A History of Physical Disability in the Movies, I might have reconsidered had I known Adam Mars-Jones would pursue the latter option so vigorously (LRB, 19 September 1996). He finds my reading of Bad Day at Black Rock, which stars Spencer Tracy as a one-armed World War Two veteran who ‘penetrates’ a Nevada desert community, to be particularly chafing. (‘Are women deserts?’ he scoffs. He might do well to view The English Patient for an answer.) In reference to Black Rock, he wrongly attributes to me an ‘equation of disability with an internal defectiveness’ which is ‘so thorough that it seems to have bewitched him into overlooking a rare exception, where the character who is physically impaired is the one to embody integrity’. I hardly overlooked the Tracy figure’s moral and heroic qualities. Despite Mars-Jones’s assertion that ‘all Norden can think of to say is that Tracy’s character is “remasculated” through his heroic deeds’ (an assertion he contradicts in his very next sentence), I described the Tracy figure at length, calling him a ‘courageous lead character’ who ‘expertly deflects’ the villains’ assaults on him through karate and judo. More important, Black Rock’s hero is by no means a ‘rare exception’. The Cinema of Isolation is loaded with discussions of virtuous, heroic movie characters who happen to have disabilities: Helen Keller, Monty Stratton, Jane Froman, Marjorie Lawrence King, FDR, Jill Kinmont, Leonard Gillespie of the many Dr Kildare films, disabled veterans and others.

Judging by the Schliemann/Troy analogy that begins his review, Mars-Jones views the films as artefacts to be dusted off and appraised in objectivist terms. I, on the other hand, regard them as forms of political discourse designed to perpetuate mainstream perspectives and to keep disabled people in their place. As I note in the Preface’s first sentence, ‘Every history is an act of interpretation laden with biases, and this one is no exception.’ Mars-Jones is astonished that I often expressed my opinions in a direct and admittedly caustic way, but I did so for a specific reason. Social scientists have long known that able-bodied people tend to avoid interactions with their disabled counterparts, so it is reasonable to assume that members of the majority get their ideas about disability primarily from the culture that surrounds them – Biblical stories, novels, films, TV programmes and the like. If we are to have any hope of breaking the cycle of oppressive images that bombard us daily, we must speak out against them in the strongest terms.

Martin Norden
University of Massachusetts, Amherst