Film, Comedy, and Disability: Understanding Humour and Genre in Cinematic Constructions of Impairment and Disability
By Alison Wilde. Routledge Interdisciplinary Disability Studies Series. 2018. $124.00 hardcover; $57.95 ebook. 196 pages.
Review by Michael Stokes
Navigating the nuances between continental and British disability studies, Wilde neatly stitches together a conversation on the philosophy of humor, the social norms and pressures around ‘punching down’ in comedy, and the ways in which bodies and minds are expected to be represented in film. Wilde’s work seeks to find what’s in-between disability studies and film theory, building on a phenomenological approach.
In the wake of the academic ripples generated by prominent interdisciplinary disability scholars Tobin Siebers, Davit Mitchell, Sharon Snyder, and Lennard Davis, the field of disability studies has moved from the periphery of social sciences into a burgeoning field of its own, rooted in the humanities. Alison Wilde’s Film, Comedy, and Disability works to realign core elements of disability studies with methodologies and practices of film studies. In her introduction, Wilde argues that there is “An unacknowledged need to find ways to meld methodologies and to seek forms of criticism which interrogate the internal worlds created by cinema” (3). In pursuit of this need, Wilde proposes integrating elements of film studies as a way to navigate the so-called subjective nature of disability representation and interpretation. Her proposed method is to integrate disability studies, alongside filmic analysis and its ‘objective’ approaches, while challenging “the non-disabled core of cinematic practices, and most Film Studies approaches” (8). This approach, for Wilde, means holding together multiple conflicting perspectives and disciplinary approaches in order to generate a new, transdisciplinary approach to film analysis alongside disability theory.
Before discussing the methods that Wilde uses in this text, she offers a concise and effective introduction of disability theory for film scholars. She delineates between the medical model of disability, the idea that disability is a personal matter that is to be confined to the private sphere and ‘fixed’ under the care of a specialist (doctor), and the social model of disability, which locates the matter of disability within social structures that are not created considering the needs of non-normative bodies and minds (e.g. the matter of disability is not in the person using a wheelchair but a building’s lack of a ramp). Building from this explanation, she introduces the distinction between disability and impairment, in that while the social model of disability locates disability outside of the body, a body may still maintain a form of impairment that may be ameliorated or otherwise supported with medication, prosthesis, or other forms of assistance. Using this framework, Wilde argues that representation of impairment on screen has a material impact on the lives of disabled and non-disabled viewers and is a means to demonstrate social structures of disability.
This approach to integrating formalist analysis, drawing attentions to genre theory, style, structure, and gaze, within a disability studies framework is a novel approach to unifying the fields of disability studies and film studies (which are often caught in friction) into one disability film scholarship. Unfortunately, while the text implies a significant amount of these approaches, much of the conversation within the body of the book relies on philosophical engagements with film theory and disability theory without generating a broader discussion about what disabled methodologies might offer to formal/structural analysis of film. While these analyses are often rooted in measurements and comparison to a ‘norm,’ disability theory is invested in making arguments from multiple and often incompatible viewpoints in order to demonstrate the unapproachability of this standardized (and often ablest) ‘norm.’ That being said, the film theory that Wilde draws from does offer interesting potential to explore the relationship between a disability-focused analysis and the usual generic encoding of film.
The root of this argument is in a tripartite approach to reading disability and impairment in humor. As Wilde later demonstrates, these approaches begin from a phenomenological understanding of Jenny Chamarette’s “chiasmic in-betweenness” as it “enables us to avoid mapping a reductive, unitary, and/or categorical psyche onto either disabled or non-disabled film viewers” (13). Chamarette draws on Deleuze to draw out the interface of the viewer and the viewed, the seen and seer as a space that cannot be wholly subjective or objective, but an external interface shared by the two. The relationship between representation of disability and the presumed able-bodiedness of the viewer forms the crux of Wilde’s approach to humor as a locale where we can read the intersection of who is being laughed at and what shapes this humor. The second approach that Wilde uses to ground her theory is through a deep analysis of genre. Ultimately, comedy is chosen as a way to engage with “the conditions of possibility present for new representational forms and challenges to normalcy” (20). By navigating the expectations of a cinematic audience in three forms of humor (Romantic comedy, satire, and gross-out), Wilde follows the pitfalls and potentials of humor as a means to transgress limited representations of disability on screen. Finally, Wilde’s arguments are grounded in film philosophy and psychoanalysis via Žižek’s speculations on “the Real.” Wilde draws from Žižek’s explanation in The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kieślowski Between Theory and Post-Theory to talk about the ways that disability complicates realness by occupying something that does not necessarily (nor easily) ascribe to “the symbolic real,” “the imaginary real” or the “real real.” By questioning the ability of film to mimetically enact the experience of disability, Wilde makes space for even assumed-to-be-negative representations of disability to be potentially transgressive as a way to resist audience expectations, as in the case of The Lobster, where characters are reduced by description to their bodily differences (e.g. Limping Man) which in the realm of satire, Wilde argues, critiques the practice of such simplifications.
Wilde opens with a justification that comedy is an untapped field for the intersection of disability and film studies in terms of “understanding significant forms of cultural ‘currency’ and production, and for analysing taste and social stratification” (25). Whereas disability is often assumed to occupy a space of tragedy by non-disabled audiences (even in comedy), Wilde complicates this understanding by drawing on Ato Quayson’s theories of “aesthetic nervousness” from the text of the same name. Thinking through Ato Quayson’s analysis of Samuel Beckett’s use of disability and humor, she theorizes on the potentials of tragedy and humor’s overlap as one opening up what are presumed to be closed associations of disability’s previous encodings as simultaneous tragedy and comedy, instead making room for transgressive representation. It is in this role as transgressing standardized representations of disability that Wilde finds comedy cinema as that with the most potential to theorize and reflect on representations of disability, she argues that “Comedy… seems to have the greatest power in both exposing, and overturning, characterizations which have been very resistant to change whilst simultaneously problematizing the voyeuristic stare” (60). Wilde finds that both the experience of amusement and the social codings which generate an amused response make avenues for a critical reflection of disability and impairment in comedic cinema.
Drawing on legacies of Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” alongside Ato Quayson, Wilde works backwards from the laughter to find where we as an audience imagine the appropriateness of laughter. In this codification, Wilde looks at the comedic tendency to “punch down” or “punch up” in humor, which looks at humor as a form of critique against structures of power (punching up) or when it is used to make the powerless more abject (punching down). In this way, Wilde locates distinct strategies in film and television featuring disabled and impaired characters (and less often, disabled actors portraying disabled characters). Thinking specifically through the codes of the romantic comedy, she notes the disjunction between disability and anticipated romantic interests: “conventional tropes of disabled men as creepy, bitter, violent, or pathetic are hardly likely to place them in, or near, the endearing category of ‘putz’” (66). In this vein, she then turns to the film Me Before You as a critical site in which to ground this theorization as a romantic comedy/tragedy. Unfortunately, much of the incorporation of the analysis in this portion is done in absence of the same critical eye, implying that high camera angles indicate “higher moral ground” (88), a problematic conception when the primary disabled character is a wheelchair user and shots from his perspective must always be coming from a lower angle. Moving away from this slightly problematic formatting, Wilde then offers a formulaic read of the use of color to critique the way that, while the primary disabled character is ostensibly a “main” character, the woman who cares for the disabled protagonist is the central figure of attention and the perspective with whom the audience is most encouraged to align.
Building off of this analysis, Wilde discusses the potentials of satire as a means to consider bodily difference outside of expected norms. Using Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster as a satire on the romantic comedy, she notes ways in which its use of satire permits it to emphasize bodily difference as a way to critique the usual unapproachable norm presented in romantic comedies (111). As characters are encouraged to pair off under the threat of transmogrification into animals, the movie names most individuals according to impairments, without the expected romantic comedy coding of these impairments marking them as unfit for love. This insight, then, turns the mirror on why people should be seeking bodily connection according to capacity/ability, as they often are the genre of the romantic comedy (112). Wilde uses this argument to show the potential of “bad” use of disability, especially as a form of critiquing normative expectations.
In the final section of her analysis, Wilde addresses the in-your-face excess of disability in gross-out comedy through the Farrelly Brothers’ films. Wilde notes that “Gross-out [humor] is more likely to be seen as a pathologising genre, particularly when one considers the history of comedy and disability, and the ways in which humor has been weaponized against disabled people” (118), but refocuses this interpretation as a means to question the placement of bodily humor on screen. To that end, Wilde argues for the potentials of gross-out humor as a way that initially made space for representing disabled characters that could later be used to incorporate greater disability representation. Thinking through the Farrelly Brothers, she emphasizes examples of ways that their work, instead of relying on tropes and troping, includes disability as central to its own lived experience (147). By making space for disabled characters (if not actors) on the screen, for Wilde, offers a means to greater nuance in the potential narratives of disability.
In her conclusion, Wilde presents several examples of films featuring disabled actors playing disabled characters, imagined by disabled writers, noting the improvements in the field for those on one side of the camera. Alongside this, she calls for disabled crew and production people in order to add elements of disability to all elements of filmmaking (156). It is this call that is most exciting, as I would greatly like to know what opportunities and alternatives lie in the creative decisions of disabled producers and technicians.
Overall, Film, Comedy, and Disability: Understanding Humour and Genre in Cinematic Constructions of Impairment and Disability offers some insights into the potential overlaps of film theory and disability theory utilizing a nuanced approach to humor and audience. However, given its primary focuses and rhetorical strategies, might have better been named: Humor and Disability: Using Film to Interpret Narrative Constructions of Impairment.