Shakespearean Drama, Disability, and the Filmic Stare

Grace McCarthy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000416824
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Shakespearean Drama, Disability, and the Filmic Stare synthesizes Laura Mulvey's male gaze and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson's stare into a new critical lens, the filmic stare, in order to understand and analyze the visual construction of disability in adaptations of Shakespearean drama. The book explores the intersections of adaptation studies, film studies, Shakespeare studies, and disability studies to analyze twentieth and twenty-first century representations of both physical disability and 'madness' in global cinematic film, television film, and digital broadcast cinema in Shakespeare's works. Shakespearean Drama, Disability, and the Filmic Stare argues that the filmic stare does not differentiate between male and female characters with disabilities, or between powerful and powerless figures in disability representation. This multi-disciplinary volume is ideal for disability studies scholars, Shakespeare scholars, and those interested in adaptations of Shakespeare's famous works.

1 Staring, the Filmic Stare, and Theorizing Disability

DOI: 10.4324/9781003163374-2

Linda Hutcheon argues that Shakespearean film adaptations are highly palimpcestuous,¹ haunted not only by the play texts—themselves highly unstable—but by the theatrical performance histories of the plays. As Samuel Crowl says of Richard Loncraine and Ian McKellen’s 1995 film adaptation of Richard III, “even repeated viewings of the film, often experienced with classes of appreciative students, have failed to erase from my memory the thrill of the stage performance—an experience that I compare unfavorably with the tepid amusement provided by the film.”² Add filmic influences, new technologies, and, especially as we move to late twentieth- and twenty-first-century film adaptations, the film histories of each play to this already complex set of palimpsests, and it is easy to see where aesthetic nervousness, as Ato Quayson terms the discomfort of engaging with disability, might tempt scholars to skim over the representations of disability as sites of analysis in favor of other concerns. Given this complex web of histories, influences, and hypotexts, it is unsurprising that representations of disabilities in film adaptations of early modern drama are both diverse and frequently lack a disability-studies grounded analysis. To thoroughly analyze and categorize the many and varied representations of disability in film adaptations of early modern drama, I will construct a critical and theoretical framework using influences from disability studies itself as well as film, sociology and literary studies scholars who address texts and characters that feature representations of disability. I will, as Tobin Siebers does,³ privilege disability as an identity category, with the nuance and weight of identity categories such as race, gender, or class. As a result, my critical-theoretical framework will explore the construction of representations of disability on film in a manner similar to constructing gender, race, or class on screen.

Film, as an audiovisual medium, requires as much thought and multi-layered understanding in both the crafting and consumption of representations of disability as does a sociological, literary, or medical paradigm. The characters in these film adaptations are not real people, they are representations, and what these representations tell us is valuable, even if they are not medically accurate representations of a given physical or mental impairment. To discover meaning in these representations then, I will explore three main areas. (1) The points of tension between fields under the umbrella of disability studies—specifically the differences between a film-centered approach to disability studies (the aesthetic approach) and a social sciences approach (the sociological approach)—in how disability is theorized, defined, and constructed. (2) The interconnected web of shots, angles, and cinematographic techniques that comprise the filmic stare, and (3) choices made by the director, editor, and actors that highlight or suppress impairments and disabilities. My approach is neither proscriptive nor prescriptive, but rather descriptive and analytical. By exploring these three areas, I have developed the filmic stare, a critical theory describing the cinematographic construction of visual representations of disabled bodies based on the unconscious social, cultural, and physiological reactions to disabilities, and valuing those representations as sites where those unconscious assumptions and/or reactions can be explored and challenged in nuanced and complex discourses. The filmic stare is strongly influenced by Laura Mulvey’s concept of the male gaze, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s concept of the stare, and disability aesthetics, all of which I will explore in more depth later in this chapter. To demonstrate the breadth of applicability of the filmic stare, I include a few non-Shakespearean films in my discussion. I will begin with a brief overview of disability studies as a field before focusing on disability studies as it relates to film studies. Finally, I will lay out Garland-Thomson’s stare before defining and applying the filmic stare.

Disability studies is an umbrella field encompassing many sub-fields; however, Ronald Berger and Catherine Kudlick offer excellent starting point definitions for a humanities-based exploration of disability. Berger defines the field of disability studies as “an interdisciplinary field of inquiry that includes representation from the social sciences, the humanities and the medical and rehabilitation and education professions.”⁴ Kudlick adds that disability studies “invites scholars to think about disability not as an isolated, individual medical pathology but instead as a key defining social category on par with race, class, and gender.”⁵ Within disability studies, however, are disagreements about defining disability, representing disability, and the ways in which disability and society interact. Sociology has developed disability theory in three waves, beginning with the medical model which gave way to the social model, which in turn gave way to the cultural model.⁶

The medical model is an essentialist theory which holds that disability is located in the physical body and requires medical intervention to ‘normalize’ a non-normative body—or mind, in the case of mental disability. In the 1970s, however, the social model of disability rose to popularity. Rather than locating disability in the body, the social model locates disability as a relationship between an individual with an impairment and a society whose architecture, customs, and assumptions are ableist—that is, assumptions which prejudice against or disregard the needs of disabled people⁷—and need to change to accommodate more variations of the human body and mind. Finally, the cultural model, which arose in the wake of the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, argues that disability is a point of group identity and personal and cultural pride. These models demonstrate an evolution in the theorizing of disability from an essentialist approach that understands disability as a property of an inherently deficient (and therefore inferior) individual to models which posit that disability can be celebrated as a matter of group identity, a part of the broader fabric of human diversity, and as a site of cultural resistance to socially constructed conceptions of normality.⁸ The medical model has largely fallen out of favor in both the academic theorization of disability and in practical applications of theory in social, legal, and governmental settings and policies.

I do not wish to give the impression here that the progression from the medical to the cultural model is somehow inevitable, or that the progression represents linear progress. While the US focuses on the cultural model of disability,⁹ that emphasis is challenged by UK disability theorists, including Tom Shakespeare,¹⁰ who argue that the social model of disability is most relevant and politically effective.¹¹ Tom Shakespeare specifically argues that “US-style cultural disabilities studies” focuses on “rhetoric” to the extent that embodiment, and even action (social, legal, political, etc.) are neglected.¹² A common thread I highlight here is that both cultural and social models of disability have been criticized for omitting the body. Whether that omission is through a focus on the relationship of the individual to society at large,¹³ or the “linguistic turn,”¹⁴ setting embodiment to the side ignores the material reality of a body with impairments. The focus on rhetoric and the linguistic turn seems to inherently invite what Ato Quayson terms “aesthetic nervousness.”¹⁵ Quayson specifically locates aesthetic nervousness in the literary text, arguing that “aesthetic nervousness is seen when the dominant protocols of representation within the literary text are shortcircuited [sic] in relation to disability.”¹⁶ Because Quayson locates the “final dimension of aesthetic nervousness […] between the reader and the text,”¹⁷ however, the linguistic turn in disability studies and its resulting tendency to omit the body may itself be a form of aesthetic nervousness that reflects the discomfort with a body that is aesthetically different from what a non-disabled individual might expect in the real world. Quayson nods to this idea in his book when he notes that “for the reader, aesthetic nervousness overlaps social attitudes to disability that themselves often remain unexamined in their prejudices and biases.”¹⁸ Situating aesthetic nervousness between the reader and the text mirrors Garland-Thomson’s stare, which takes place between real people in the real world, and invites an expansion of that relationship, to a viewer and a film text. By situating aesthetic nervousness in literary texts, however, Quayson notes issues in disability representation and begins to articulate the aesthetic turn in disability studies more widely.

Barker and Murray argue that Quayson and Siebers—and I add Michael Davidson—“point to disability’s pivotal role in complicating and enriching notions of the aesthetic because of the difference disabled bodies and minds bring to the process of representation.”¹⁹ Rather than focusing on language or linguistic representations, Siebers and Davidson focus on visual representations of disability and the aesthetic therein created. Siebers argues, “What I am calling ‘disability aesthetics’ names a critical concept that seeks to emphasize the presence of disability in the tradition of aesthetic representation,”²⁰ to place the visual aesthetic at the forefront of analysis and discussion. The significance of prioritizing a disability aesthetic is twofold. First, this approach grounds disability aesthetics in embodiment by focusing on the body as “both the subject and object of aesthetic production.”²¹ Grounding analysis in the body and in embodiment in general directly addresses the criticism that metaphorical and linguistic treatments of disability fail to confront the “material conditions” or lived experiences of persons with disabilities.²² Second, as Barker and Murray argue, prioritizing disability aesthetics has pushed disability studies as a field “beyond making distinctions between ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ representations,” and “toward a better understanding of the complex nature of many disability narratives.”²³

Moving beyond positive and negative classifications of representations of disability is aptly demonstrated by Siebers in his modern art examples²⁴ and by Davidson in his analysis of Maurice Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand.²⁵ In the context of film studies, however, there seems to be a lag in understanding and analyzing complex representations of disability and a resurgence of aesthetic nervousness. Reviewers tend to seek out medically accurate representations and lambast films that deviate from “inspiration porn,” a term that denotes an overwhelmingly positive narrative that represents disability as something that is overcome by the protagonist.²⁶ Forrest Gump (1994) is worth a mention here, as the film, while widely beloved, is also an ableist combination of overcoming narrative and inspiration porn. Davidson points out a corollary to the desire for inspiration porn in self-help literature, noting that “[a] good deal of self-help literature has been written to explain how to ‘endure’ or ‘triumph over’ such adversity, and figures who do—Helen Keller, Christopher Reeve, Stephen Hawking—are celebrated as exemplars.”²⁷ Keller and Hawking have both been the focus of feature film adaptations that explore their lives, and the ableist, overcoming narratives that Davidson identifies are reflected in the films. However, in a film studies paradigm, a more nuanced and complex representation—or a representation designed to elicit shock and/or body horror—in concert with disability aesthetic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• A Note on the Text
• Introduction
• 1. Staring, the Filmic Stare, and Theorizing Disability
• 2. Physical Disabilities and the Filmic Stare in Richard III and Titus Andronicus
• 3. Caliban and the Filmic Stare
• 4. Madness, the Filmic Stare, and Hamlet
• 5. Madness, the Filmic Stare, and Ophelia
• 6. Madness, the Filmic Stare, and Macbeth
• 7. The Filmic Stare and Digital Broadcast Cinema
• Conclusion
• Index