For representation of disability to become representation of diverse singular disabled persons rather than types, there would have to be hundreds of portrayals of disabled persons -- especially as major characters -- on film. If there were hundreds of major disabled characters on the film, we could take the character played by Hillary Swank in _Million Dollar Baby_ as a singular individual, just one disabled person who makes a uniquely tragic choice unlike all other disabled characters. More likely than not, though, the Swank character is the only major disabled character most American movie-goers have and will see in many years. So the character becomes a type that represents a category of people -- the disabled -- in such movie-goers' cinematic memory, because they have not and will not see any other memorable disabled character for a long time.
As it happens, there is another film that got recently shown in art theaters in the United States featuring a disabled character: _A Very Long Engagement_ (Dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet), which stars Audrey Tautou as Mathilde, a polio survivor, whose disability is matter-of-factly represented as just one element among many in the character's life. Unfortunately, it is more likely for American viewers to watch _Million Dollar Baby_ than this film. Also, even this film downplays the disability: in the film, Mathilde walks with a limp, except when she uses a wheelchair on purpose; in Sebastien Japrisot's novel of the same title on which the film is based, she is in a wheel chair.
_A Very Long Engagement_, btw, has a pretty good anti-war theme, set in World War 1. The heroine Mathilde's fiance Manech, together with four other French soldiers, gets sentenced to be thrown out and left to die in No Man's Land between the French and German lines, on account of self-mutilation to escape the front line and go home. Mathilde is convinced that Manech didn't die, so the film is plotted along her search for her beloved. (I wouldn't be giving away anything if I say she finds him in the end -- what film starring Audrey Tautou can have less than a happy ending?) Mathilde's search parallels that of a prostitute Tina Lombardi, whose lover was one of the five condemned soldiers and who is determined to avenge his death (which she does, killing two officers who blocked news of the pardon that would have saved the five men's lives, and she gets guillotined -- the sentence she faces with courage and dignity). Following their searches (for the most part Mathilde's rather than Tina's), the audience encounters various French and German characters, most of whom are peasants and workers, and finds out how the war impacted their lives.
_A Very Long Engagement_ has two more distinctions: one of the five condemned men, played by Denis Lavant, is a socialist welder. Very few films have represented any working-class individuals -- even minor characters -- as socialists. Here's an excerpt from the book that says a little about the welder (the film doesn't say as much about the man):
<blockquote>Before the nightmare he'd been a corporal, because they'd needed one and the fellows in his platoon had chosen him, but he hated military ranks. He was certain that one day all men, including welders, would be free and equal among themselves. He was a welder in Bagneux, near Paris, with a wife, two daughters, and marvelous phrases in his head, phrases learned by heart, that spoke of the workingman throughout the world, that said. . . . For more than thirty years he'd known perfectly well what they said, and his father, who'd so often told him about the Paris Commune, had know this, too.
It was in their blood. His father had had it from his father, and had passed it on to his son, who had always known that the poor manufacture the engines of their own destruction, but it's the rich who sell them. He'd tried to talk about this in the billets, in the barns, in the village cafés, when the proprietress lights the kerosene lamps and the policeman pleads with you to go home, you're all good folks, so let's be reasonable now, it's time to go home. He wasn't a good speaker, he didn't explain things well. And they lived in such destitution, these poor people, and the light in their eyes was so dimmed by alcohol, the boon companion of poverty, that he'd felt even more helpless to reach them.
A few days before Christmas, as he was going up the line, he'd heard a rumor about what some soldiers had done. So he'd loaded his gun and shot himself in the left hand, quickly, without looking, without giving himself time to think about it, simply to be with them. In that classroom where they'd sentenced him, there had been twenty-eight men who'd all done the same thing. He was glad, yes, glad and almost proud that there had been twenty-eight of them. Even if he would never live to see it, since the sun was setting for the last time, he knew that a day would come when the French, the Germans, the Russians -- "and even the clergy" -- would refuse to fight, ever again, for anything. Well, that's what he believed. He had those very pale blue eyes flecked with tiny red dots that welders sometimes have. (Sebastien Japrisot, <http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?show=TRADE%20PAPER:NEW:0312424582:14.00&page=excerpt>) </blockquote>
The second distinction, the more extraordinary, is that _A Very Long Engagement_ shows a French soldier killing a French officer during an offensive. The soldier sees the officer kicking the bodies of dead French soldiers whom the officer curses as incompetent cowards, and, outraged, he suffocates the officer in the mud. Most importantly, he _gets away with_ killing a superior. Nobody sees his act (except the audience), so he does not get charged with murder. And, among the five condemned men, he is the true survivor, saving Manech's life and escaping himself.
What other film has shown a soldier kill a superior and get away with it? -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * OSU-GESO: <http://www.osu-geso.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>