Always an Other?
Physical Disability and Dependence
Dependence is one of the longest-standing “qualities” associated with screen disability and remains one of the most persistent dialectics in contemporary screen treatments of such, considered almost integral and yet increasingly problematic.
Its handling in Australian film gestated in the 1970s and then strongly emerged in the 1980s with the high-profile release of Annie’s Coming Out and is subsequently not as reductionist as the American screen heritage to which it often refers. Indeed, with that screen heritage as something of a knowing frame of reference, much in Australian cinema emerges as uniquely challenging, even stridently anti-authoritarian and increasingly psycho-dramatic in intention.
Disability and Pathology: The Well
For as much as Australian film may utilize the many assumptions surrounding disability and dependence, so too does it often engage viewers in a discussion of just what said “dependence” implies on a social, political and inter-personal basis.
Hence, there is a polarity in this body of work. On the one side there is a streak of defiance, a questioning of the social ramifications of a disabled underclass and hence a progressive movement towards allegorical dramatizations of disability and dependence perhaps superseding any need to depict the actuality of the disabled subject’s lifestyle. But on the other side there is a tendency to fall back on tried, perhaps comforting, stereotypes, the same stereotypes now decried by the Disability Movement. This tension informs and even propels Australian films of disability and dependence.
From the preliminary film analyses of the Disability Movement, the assumed connection between disability and dependence in the cinema is that the disabled individual is a tragic figure whose disability (signified mainly by their physical “difference” from normality) is in fact synonymous with their disempowerment.
Disability thus implies, by definition, a loss of humanity. Such a course is considered to be inevitable and is thus frequently the disabled person’s problem alone (1). Dependence is considered the inevitable end result of such a process of disablement (2) and an absolute horror in that it is the quality of dependence which fully demonstrates the loss of autonomy which in turn equates to a loss of even the individual psyche as a direct result of disability. “Loss” is a key concept in such definitions.
Disability and Populism: Muriel's Wedding
Disabled people are less than “normal” not only because of the way they look but because of their presumed inability to fend for themselves or interact as equals with the remainder of society. The pre-conditioned expectations of failure at worst and the loss of potential (3) at best thus saturate screen depictions of dependent disabled characters as a generic foundation of sorts. However, in certain films, it can also make for a potential point of departure and self-reflexive assessment. Dependence after all, has tremendous social and political implications. The imperative to re-consider these implications forms the basis for an underlying strand of social criticism in much Australian cinema.
In cinematic depictions of disability based on these ingrained expectations, the loss of self-reliance inherent in the condition of “dependence” thus represents disability at the most pathetic level of personal tragedy.
Still, what has been lost, or what is lacking, is not just a physical attribute but (correspondingly) a psychological, even spiritual sense of self. Disability denies “wholeness” and thus implies the alternate self-image of people considered to be thus “imperfect”. In this particular filmic legacy, it is as if disability means the systematic erosion of one’s individuality, confirmed (and re-enforced) by dependence. In a culture of self-reliance, dependence is a sign of weakness and when allied to an obvious physical impairment results in cinematic depictions of increasingly lost, bewildered, and isolated characters.
Institutionalization rests at the end of this road – the total removal of the dependent from the society they have paradoxically become dependent upon.
Disability activism may have arrested this trend and re-directed it towards “normalization” and “re-integration”, but the idea of disability as systematic erosion resulting in dependence as an inevitable subjugation of individual will remains a potent tool in cinema culture. Even in films which reveal disabled characters as living relatively independent lives, their emotional dependence on idealized non-disabled figures is stressed (to pathological levels in such recent films as The Well and Walk the Talk) as a condition of their disability and even a reminder of the weakness of need which qualifies their “otherness”.
Consider one of the most popular Australian films of the 1990s, Muriel’s Wedding, a film which partially dramatizes its “crisis of disablement” in terms of dependence and an inevitable slide into isolation. Rachel Griffiths’ character begins as an independent woman, in fact the inspiration to the protagonist, Toni Collette, to seek a life of greater independence. However, shortly after becoming disabled by a tragic medical condition, Griffiths begins to isolate herself. Indeed, she is separated from others by camera position, being progressively less dominant in the frame, struggling in any action and finally sitting passive in her wheelchair. She cannot maintain her independence (financially as well as physically) and in the end must return home, whereupon she ceases to have any dramatic function in the narrative.
The more dependent Griffiths becomes, the less screen time she has, her status reduced until she is finally only important as a measure of Collette’s reformation. Indeed, Collette’s personal triumph is marked by her willingness to accept responsibility for the fate of her disabled, dependent friend. In the end, Collette becomes a stereotypical figure, the able-bodied “rescuer” (4) of the helpless. For all its popularity, Muriel’s Wedding is a regressive vision of disability, a view to be whole-heartedly challenged in Dance Me to My Song.
Reliance on another person’s sense of responsibility also informed Bob Ellis’ 1987 Warm Nights on a Slow Moving Train in an even more pathetic depiction of a disabled individual. Here, the disabled person is a former able-bodied man. When we encounter him he is seen trying to stand (symbolically thus hoping to be the whole man he now can never again be, and defining his disability immediately in terms of lack and loss). He is soon revealed to be a weak, effeminized junkie whose sister supports him and his drug habit by prostitution. His physical addiction overloads the dependence metaphor already associated with his disability, and the character is thus truly pathetic, more revolting than pitiful in the film’s rather cruel assessment of disability.
Indeed, he is the only male character in the film denied an active sexuality, his implied impotence and social malfunction rendered easily explainable for the filmmakers by way of the character’s physical disability. Going much further than Griffiths, this character wallows in his own self-pity, begging his sister to put him out of his misery. Disability and its association with dependence is thus an emasculating condition tantamount to despair and Warm Nights on a Slow Moving Train hence considers disability to be a crisis of masculinity (5). For his sister, the disabled man is not so much a responsibility as a burden. The complete revulsion for the disabled character’s dependence makes this film’s intended sense of pathos decidedly monstrous in its implications.
Yet, dependence need not mean pathos alone and paradoxically if struggled against can reveal a terrible, perverse malevolence.
Such was the case in 1979’s Patrick, which revealed the absolute horror of masculine dependence as a psychologically transforming process, not as a descent into weakness but as triggering a horrifying overcompensation. This film sees the prospect of a dependent person gaining whatever independence and self-assertion their condition allows with sheer terror. The comatose protagonist’s eventual telekinesis stems from an unresolved Oedipal conflict (indeed, his disablement is construed as a punishment for such transgressive desires) and marks him not as a pathetic but as a monstrous figure (6) – the dependent disabled man as a threat to his carers / keepers.
This monster is, however, reliant on others for the care of his body and significantly it is one of these figures, the doctor, who seeks to keep him as almost a private experiment, as if institutionalization permits medical experimentation (a linkage also explored to more satiric ends in The Cars That Ate Paris). Indeed, the telling irony of much of Patrick is its fear of the Disabled Other and its simultaneous anti-authoritarian criticism of the Medical Establishment and subsequent, almost subversive championing of the monstrous, dependent underdog it fears. This tension in Patrick in turn plays on another screen heritage of disability, the idea that disabled people must be kept as dependent as possible or will be a great threat to the inevitably patriarchal authority that determines their care (7).
Yet there are many less conventionally stereotypical issues to emerge from the idea of dependence in Australian cinema. In the quest to have disability “mean” something on a metaphorical level, it is in the attitude to dependence that representations of disabled people often carry tremendous social ramifications.
Indeed, the quality of dependence problematizes the traditional notion of the Disabled Other, especially in a country with a highly-socialized public health care system and seeking to define its own international as well as national independence. Disability itself as based on physical “difference” is thus not enough for much of Australian screen’s connotations of the Disabled Other: it is the associated condition of dependence that confirms and allows isolation, segregation and separation and yet also seeks to negotiate these dilemmas. In that, dependence poses a highly representative social paradox lending itself to use in films seeking a social allegory.
The question underlying such treatments of the dependent-disabled thus becomes “On whom are the disabled dependent?” with a subsequent question being “Why are they kept dependent?” Physical impairment may define the Disabled Other and begin the process of marginalization and psychological re-definition inherent in the “crisis of disablement”, but when such a helpless figure then becomes dependent on the very social forces that would define them as Other, those forces then face the paradox of responsibility for the care and sustenance of those they would marginalize – such is the condition of what might be termed the “Dependent Other”, that loathed and feared in Patrick but just as much subject to a process of both validation and anti-Establishment social criticism.
The topic of reconciling society (let alone a disabling society) with the Dependent Other thus posed an additional problem for filmmakers responding indirectly to the developing Disability Movement in the 1980s and 1990s. Disability and dependence in this field became a social issue – the subject being the challenge of responsibility for those deemed unable to care for themselves (physically, economically and socially). Dependence and obligation became allied concepts in this manner. Films dealing with disability have traditionally addressed this by proxy, an able-bodied character who allows partial entry into the world of the Other (8) and who tackles the question of the proper care of and responsibility for them. Ideally, this character is a bridging figure, hence the number of narratives allying spectator point of view to this character (9).
As such bridging figures are sympathetic and often “heroic” for their alliance with the “plight” of those dependent on them so the Disability Movement often condemns their championing at the expense of disabled people.
But it is their function as bridge which is telling, for they represent the connection with disabled people and in their response is often thus revealed the mechanisms for the construction of disability. Their origins may be pity-based, but in Australian film they do indicate disability as an increasingly inter-personal and social “problem” beyond an individual’s impairment. To break from an imposed dependence is thus seen in Annie’s Coming Out as an important preliminary political step towards full disability rights, the duty of all responsible people to enable as much as possible. However, only by the time of Dance Me to My Song a decade later does such a disabled character play out the right to her own self-determination.
To re-iterate, physical impairment may make the disabled “different” in an able-bodied society but it is the cultural connotation between disability and dependence that is needed to qualify the social level of disability as Australian cinema has sought to address, define and even satirize it.
For these films, the disabled-dependent character thus represents both physical difference (impairment) and socio-cultural difference (loss of autonomy in a culture that values self-sufficiency). In Australian cinema, those who define the former in effect create and control the latter aspects. Dependence is thus arguably the condition preyed upon and sustained by the Establishment (medical, social, political) in order to assert control over those it feels have lost the power of (and right to) self-determination. Such an Establishment also by definition therefore has the absolute power to define and enforce any standard of “otherness” it sees fit in order to sustain itself.
The creation and sustaining of the Dependent Other in effect thus compels a social under-class of sorts, with ultimate power resting in the hands of those with the ability to define just what constitutes “disability”, “dependence” and thus what (or who) warrants exclusion and special treatment within a supposedly representative Australian community.
This is of course the political argument behind much of the Disability Movement’s recent activism and is a theme present in Australian cinema in unusual instances, there indeed from the outset of the Australian New Wave of the early 1970s. What is perhaps surprising in Australian cinema as a distinct national body of work is that this attitude is often exposed as monstrous, even in films which use the traditional proxy figure to relate the filmmakers’ presumption of a disabled perspective of the world to an able-bodied audience. Sub-textually though, there is little appeasement of the non-disabled majority in these critical works.
In Peter Weir’s first feature, 1974’s The Cars That Ate Paris, this prototypical application of a social model of disability serves the needs of a poignant, pointed social satire. In this film a demented doctor, allegorically representing the Medical Establishment, surgically experiments on car-crash victims to satisfy his own abhorrent self-importance. The result is the creation of a ward of “veggies”, patients dependent on his supposed benevolence, funding and treatment to sustain them. The creation of these helpless, pathetic victims maintains the ego and status of those in authority, just as that authority would isolate them from the mainstream – hence the initial outrage (and symbolic, ironic applause) at a social gathering when the doctor insists on bringing the “veggies” (one of whom is in a wheelchair) as equal participants, as if they were almost his children.
Significantly, the one semi-normal “experiment” given some independence within the community soon threatens to jeopardize the patriarchal powers that sought to allow him even such minimal interaction.
Weir’s use of a collective, “the disabled” (physical, intellectual and psychological), is thus in terms of the depiction of a social hierarchy of sorts, with disabled people at the very bottom, defined as such by their helpless dependence; but that same underclass is exclusively the result of the Medical Establishment’s perverse need to preserve itself. The Medical Establishment alone defines what constitutes disability, validates it by the connotations of dependence it enforces upon it, all with the tacit approval of a patriarchal government, and will fall / fail if it loses such control. It is the creation of the Dependent Other that in turn permits such an isolationist agenda to exist.
Annie's Coming Out aka Test of a Love
This sense of a medical profession needing to re-enforce a state of dependence for disabled people is also carried through in 1984’s Annie’s Coming Out (10), where the doctor (significantly, another patriarch) insists on a link between physical disability and mental retardation in order to control the fates of those in his care, “helpless” children. It is the Medical Establishment that seeks to deny the right to self-determination by removing any socialization alternatives to permanent institutionalization. Significantly, the film seeks to draw a line between impairment and disability. The former is a matter of birth (which even the sympathetic female protagonist considers in terms of “damage” and “imperfection”) while the latter is again arguably a condition imposed by the Medical Establishment in order, as in The Cars That Ate Paris, to validate itself.
There is thus a telling moment in Annie’s Coming Out where a doctor says that they can easily get funding for medical equipment but not for any proposed socialization program which would in effect move towards the re-integration of these disabled children into the social process.
By insisting that physically disabled people are also by definition intellectually disabled, less than perfect in every way, the Medical Establishment also defines itself and secures its funding. In this brief scene, the film hits on a main socio-political criticism levelled by the Disability Movement, that the monies allocated them as a minority are consumed by the Medical Establishment’s agenda alone, based on “dependence”. Any alternative belief, including any independence of disabled people beyond such medical practitioners, is a threat to this status quo.
Although it still views disabled people as “different” and does not fully explore their own perspective, Annie’s Coming Out is in effect the first Australian feature film to realistically reveal an absolute horror at the Medical Establishment’s abuse of their power over disabled people. Significantly it seeks to chastise them for it, culminating in the legal profession’s acknowledgement of what is, literally and metaphorically, a disabled voice. This opposition between the Medical and Legal Establishments over the “recognition” of disability is depicted as a crisis of Australian Patriarchy. Patriarchal control is at a turning point, in which case the recognition of disabled people as equal in intelligence, communicative ability and in ultimate potential (if social change allows) is in effect the Australian screen’s legitimization of the burgeoning Disability Movement.
It is thus often in sub-textual opposition to the tradition of short documentary films which validate the organizations (medical and charity) which support the “cure” and treatment of disabled people (usually children in such films, which often bear the individual’s name as a title).
The film remains problematic for the Disability Movement’s agenda, however, in its continued stress on the archetypal able-bodied rescuer rather than on the abilities (or indeed points of view) of the disabled people whose right to self-determination is at issue. Yet the film finds a sense of eventual and profound triumph both at Annie’s ability to communicate and at how such communication is finally recognized, validated and thus forced into the legal and socio-political agenda.
Although institutional care has thus frequently not been a valid treatment for disability in Australian feature films, 1993’s Bad Boy Bubby captured an intriguing view of disabled isolation and institutionalization almost as a paradoxical idyll, finding a kind of kinship between the psychologically disabled protagonist (disabled as a result of a monstrously abnormal Oedipal socialization) and the severely physically disabled people he encounters one day. Their common bond, their shared implied language, is their common experience with enforced isolation and dependence. Just as the protagonist has an obsession with immobility, so does he respond to the “plight” of those with a lack of bodily control. It is thus the bond the protagonist finds with the disabled people in Bad Boy Bubby that is the cathartic trigger for his unspoken self-awareness, his growth to maturity and, hence, even his possible redemption and rise to some kind of patriarchal responsibility.
Bad Boy Bubby
The longing for communication underlies this sequence (even the nurses have difficulty understanding the physically disabled characters) and the tenderness makes it an interlude from the surrounding grotesque oppression – as if there is something holy about disabled people, such is their implied kinship in the film.
It is a kind of romanticized “Otherness” based on profound but pitiable vulnerability. The ultimate measure of a person is their response to the helplessness of others in this context, a similar trait to that of Toni Collette’s decision to “save” her disabled friend in Muriel’s Wedding. But there is no rescue here, just a shared awareness, an essential human bond and a need to communicate and relate to others: the need to share and belong underscores the cathartic sense of sentimental pathos here wherein the disabled, dependent other is paradoxically also idealized.
The motif of communication was also vital to the social criticism and hope for breakthrough found in Annie’s Coming Out, which sought to dramatize a systematic process enabling disabled people to achieve the autonomy and self-determination denied them by the culture that both sustains and loathes their perceived dependence. However, as mentioned, the film uses a proxy figure to achieve this, that of the able-bodied nurse – the idealized carer figure in this instance – who selflessly dedicates herself to the liberation of a disabled child. However, the character (and intelligence) of Annie comes through in reaction shots – hence when an elderly relative says that the disabled Annie should have been mercy-killed at birth and that no-one would blame the killer, the film cuts to the child’s reaction, an implied awareness of a horrifyingly disabling attitude.
Dance Me to My Song
Annie’s Coming Out is obsessed with the need for validation, and as such carries a socio-political importance in the evolution of Australian cinema’s representations of disability. Just as the Medical Establishment would keep disabled children dependent invalids (and are more intent to record details of their bowel movements than to explore any means of their possible socialization), it is society as led by the Legal Establishment which ultimately must respond to the question of disabled rights.
The carer figure here is an intermediary. There is a sad irony though in Annie’s triumph in this film: she must prove to the able-bodied majority that she is intelligent, communicative and deserving of these supposedly essential human rights. The fight for disability rights is thus construed on legal and humanitarian grounds.
Dance Me to My Song
The legal recognition of the validity of the means and content of Annie’s communications is what the film hopes will be a positive step towards de-institutionalization – towards the restoration of what it considers is a lost humanism regarding the treatment of disabled people, too long trapped in supposed “care”. Such a dilemma was foretold in the very title of the 1980 short film Captives of Care which proposed disabled people as a minority group being oppressed by authority under the guise of proper care – but sought to do so from the point of view of disabled people seeking their own collective emancipation and hence recognition / acceptance. Although this sense of collective empowerment remained absent from features, it did make itself felt in the increasing movement towards allegorical treatments of a disabled individual in Australian cinema.
Informed with a Disability Movement activist’s awareness to some degree, in order to develop this allegorical struggle between the Dependent Other and the inherently disabling Australian Society, Australian films dealing with disability increasingly began to re-address the assumed benevolence of the proxy character, the carer figure.
Thus, the heroic, almost self-sacrificial, symbiotic rescuer type established in American films especially was eroded in such Australian films as Proof, Dance Me to My Song and Walk the Talk. The carer figure in these films was of a different order – rather than benevolent enablers, they were disablers exploiting the presumed needs of disabled people to enforce their dependence once again. The psycho-drama of dependence thus emerged.
(11) The disabled person’s point-of-view in terms of cinematic style is traditionally denied in films dealing with disability. As point-of-view implies power, the conditions of powerlessness are enforced by the denial of the ability to wield a point-of-view. Although this is defined as an important legacy in the portrayals of disabled people, identified and examined in Norden, M.; op.cit; pp. 46-48, Australian cinema often struggles with both denial and the desire to approximate the disabled person’s presumed experience of an oppressive world. Even such a children’s film as Let the Balloon Go seeks in part to explore and mediate the disabled child as both object of, and controller of, the look. Indeed this film, discussed in another chapter, is more of a depiction of a disabled person’s assertion of their own self-determination than found in Annie’s Coming Out and proxy narratives. In select films thus, there is almost a progression or sense of the acquiring of a disabled point-of-view, however trepidatious this may be.
Once the domain of the Medical Establishment and threatened by the heroic actions of the proxy-figure, such disabling ambition was now the malevolent intent of the same proxy-figure.
This tension emerged in the battle of wills and wits between carer and dependent-disabled figure. There still was a challenge of responsibility but it had progressed an important step further – the disabled characters now had to assert their own right to self-determination against the individual caring for them. The turmoil between carer / personal care attendant and dependent-disabled character was thus a struggle for self-assertion and in its individualist conflict had physical, social, cultural and sexual ramifications. Spearheading this revisionist development was 1998’s Dance Me to My Song (12).
In some ways, Dance Me to My Song is a continuation of Annie’s Coming Out: the child figure with cerebral palsy in Annie’s Coming Out is now an adult (Heather Rose), achieving independence from institutional care and living alone but also within the broader suburban community. It begins with an evocation of female nudity as vulnerability (although the spectacle of the disabled-dependent nude Rose will slowly shift into that rarity in film – an eroticisation of the disabled body, implying such sexual objectification as a liberating factor) and reveals a disabled person somewhat emancipated as it were, but still heavily reliant on her female carer / personal care assistant for her physical day-to-day needs. The carer figure in this film is a petty monster: she does not do her job properly, abuses and belittles her client and is intent on reinforcing her client’s dependence on her – what was institutional thus has become personalized as a function of petty carer power.
Heather Rose
Rose depends on her personal care attendant. She endures this figure’s petty torments and cruelties partly out of a fear of being re-institutionalized. Dependence here is qualified between Rose’s individual physical need and a more dreaded fate – the fearful and continued legacy of the history of Institutionalization in Australia – but it can be properly surmounted.
Significantly though, the challenge for surmounting it rests with Rose alone: she must set events in motion in order to change her circumstance and find a self-expression still oppressed by others. It is the disabled person’s actions, independent of any benevolent carer proxy, that result in their greater emancipation, the assertion of personal and hence political responsibility. This film confirms the sense of progress in Australian cinema’s depictions of the dependent-disabled person and also, importantly, insists on a vividly realistic depiction of the day-to-day life of its disabled protagonist as she experiences it.
If the film is in turn to be interpreted as an allegory of the social model, then the figure of the carer represents the disabling force. It is this disabling force that thrives on dependence and would seek to enforce it at all costs; such, as has been demonstrated, is the nature of societal disablement. Disability then is not a matter of Rose’s cerebral palsy, but of those who respond to it. It re-invents the battle for the right to self-determination, making Dance Me to My Song the first Australian film to embrace the Disability Movement from a disabled person’s viewpoint. In that, it is almost radical in its agenda if not in its narrative structure. Significantly, the film moves to equalize both its able-bodied and disabled female characters by utilizing a tradition of melodrama – the romantic triangle.
Part of the carer’s power is her belief in her own sexual attractiveness. When Rose steals the able-bodied man from her, the jealous carer cannot sustain her view of Rose as disabled, dependent or inferior. In this sense, Rose’s assertion of her own sexuality is her equalization, a somewhat feminist application onto the Disability Movement.
Hence, the two women are constantly compared and contrasted, clothed and unclothed, as the film questions the nature of femininity, vulnerability and desirability. By the end of the film, Rose, by her own efforts, has found her sexuality, communicated her needs and surmounted her fear of a return to enforced dependence. Her disability has not made her a passive object. And in revealing the replacement carer, the film points to the need for tender professionalism in the care of disabled people: the carer proxy-figure is ideally a functionary aid, a literal personal care attendant and not a heroic rescuer.
But even when films sought to explore the consequences of social moves towards such emancipation, the quality of dependence was re-defined and re-invoked, still construed in part as a consequence of any disability. Such interactivity between the disabled person and the disabling carer would thus become a dominant factor in a number of other studies which re-configured disability in terms of the psychodrama (and thus the presumed inherent sado-masochism) of dependence. Taking off from Dance Me to My Song, though not as socio-politically progressive, these films sought to develop carer / disabled person relations as a psychological power-game, fought out via dependence.
Disabled person / carer (or now even romantic partner) relationships continued in 1997’s The Well and 2000’s Walk the Talk, which explored themes of emotional and psychological dependence when dealing with disabled characters not physically dependent on others.
However, they still clung to the idea of dependence as a necessary qualification of a disabled person’s psychological makeup. Thus, even with characters otherwise strong-willed and financially independent, there is still something in them alone which thwarts their “success” or re-integration. That something is again associated with their disability but is now expressed more as their emotional rather than physical dependence. The paraplegic woman in Walk the Talk for instance endures her con-man lover in what amounts to a combination of love-is-blind cliché and an assumption of her need for an able-bodied man’s love as a form of validation rather than self-assertion.
Walk the Talk reduces this to an almost pathetic masochism – the disabled woman will endure the disabling male even when it is clear to her that his beliefs are disabling her. This disabled masochism was exactly what was resisted by (though still sub-textually present in) Dance Me to My Song. Although this masochism is perhaps also evident to the intelligent, independent but needy woman, she still insists on supporting this disabling loser of a partner. The only reason the film can imply for her emotional dependence on his “cure” mentality is the psychological weakness presumed to accompany her disability. Hence, her subservient acquiescence with her partner’s disablism in the guise of properly caring for and orienting her is a masochistic form of emotional dependence, supposedly inherent both in her gender and in her disability.
Yet the real villain in Walk the Talk is the disabling male, unaware of how his so-called positivism reveals his contempt for those he needs to define as somehow lesser than himself.
A petty figure obsessed with his own self-importance as a carer / enabler in the New-Age Self-Help tradition, he seeks out those he feels are vulnerable in order to control them and shape them to what he considers their best priority: in this case making a paraplegic woman believe that all she should focus on is walking again – re-joining the “normal” world. He still sees her as different, as lacking. He thus associates with people “less fortunate” than himself in order to escape his own encroaching sense of personal failure. Like the carer figure in Dance Me to My Song, he is an inversion of the usual rescuer type, but unlike that film he finds no opposition from the disabled person his attitudes would so oppress (12). A breakthrough in terms of the development of an Australian Disability Cinema culture, Dance Me to My Song was written by and starred Heather Rose. Although directed by Rolf de Heer (perhaps responding to the evocation of disability in his earlier film of Bad Boy Bubby), it is credited as a Heather Rose film. This accreditation is itself a rare event and indeed the film has a firm place within the international Disability Culture Movement, even if its positive reception was mostly confined to select screenings and festival / art house audiences, being reportedly very poorly distributed outside of Australia.
The Well implied a more sinister and grotesque view of a disabled woman’s emotional dependence. It also made use of a symbolic disability short-hand: the limp as an indicator of emotional malfunction (13). The protagonist in this instance has a deformed foot resulting in a limp but is physically and financially independent, although has lived a very isolated and presumably asexual life, lauded over by her father. Her stunted sexuality, the result of an isolation and maladjustment signified by her impairment, leads her into a relationship with a much younger woman hired to take care of the house and property – the carer figure here. The disabled woman, like her counterpart in Walk the Talk, is almost voluntarily blind to any ulterior motives in the object of her attentions. Her disability thus underscores her pathetic dependence, her lack of a fully developed, independent psyche.
Emotional dependence is thus considered to still be a condition of physical disability and it is again the presumed “difference” of a disabled woman (14) that is used to validate her almost pathological fixation on the younger companion, to the point of covering up a murder.
The protagonist here longs to be mother, sister and lover to the young girl: to be in control, when she clearly is not. A feeling of slow stagnation saturates this movie’s depiction of what amounts to a Matriarchal psychosis, allying it to disability as an indicator of inherent social and sexual maladjustment. She is still isolated, but her own emotional deficiencies disable her and keep her in a state of dependence on another person. Tellingly, this is played out in a grotesque, sado-masochistic form of psychodrama wherein the dependent-disabled is here re-constituted as a psychological “Other”.
In these films, disabled characters live in part in reaction to the able-bodied people (and their personalities or standards) in their lives.
Even if the actual physical impairment of disability need no longer imply a dependence on social factors or medical treatment or even financial aid, it is the assumption of disability as a loss of the individual psyche mentioned at the outset to this chapter that is still at play in films which correspondingly seek to dramatize qualities of related emotional dependence. Nevertheless, the challenge of responsibility for an “Other” is thus transformed in Australian cinema into a challenge of self-determination, wherein the disabled characters must face their own emotional make-up, which is still defined in Australian film as a product of their disability alone.
As a nationalistic allegory, there is nevertheless at work an important re-configuring of dependence although the Dependent Other risks becoming in films a figure denoted in terms of melodrama and even hysteria, shifting into the terrain of psychological disability. Hence perhaps, there is a preponderance of female disabled figures in these scenarios of dependence. The obstacles to independence were once externally imposed but when recognized as such and held as a critique of a disabling Australian society slowly then transformed in Australian cinema into a matter of personal psychological makeup, the need for “the disabled” to find the strength to exit an existing limitation of the disabled self. This limitation is in turn depicted as a result of both the individual short-comings inherent in disabled people by their assumed lack of wholeness and as the processed result of the minimal socialization offered the Dependent Other.
Despite the reactionary undertones to this trend, the direction in Australian cinema’s evocation of disability and dependence is nonetheless quite evident, as is its intersection with the emerging union of Film and Disability Studies:
from the satirical jabs at the state of dependence of a disabled underclass in The Cars That Ate Paris to the loathing in Annie’s Coming Out for the system that would keep such people disabled and separate, to the pathos of dependence in Warm Nights on A Slow Moving Train and Muriel’s Wedding, to the longing for communication in Bad Boy Bubby to the self-determination in Dance Me to My Song and to the subsequent melodrama of supposedly inherent emotional dependence as a lasting impediment to normalization and an assured self-identity in The Well and Walk the Talk: the lingering “baggage” of disability as a cultural construct thus played out in these narratives.
The right to self-determination and the pathos when this is absent (whether inherent in disability as a personal condition or as a social imposition) underlies all films. Although it is also a noted factor in Disability Studies’ analyses of cinematic representations of disability that “disability” is often denoted as a problem of the individual, there is an underlying and unresolved ambiguity about the responsibility for disability (social and/or individual) running throughout Australian films dealing with physical disability and dependence. Australian cinema may have in part moved to embrace the social model of disability so beloved of the Disability Movement and indeed made much progress in terms of representing disabled people, but in its moves to a potentially grotesque psychodramatic assessment of the supposedly disabled psyche, it remains conflicted.
(1) This idea of the disabled person being responsible for their own tragedy is of course inherent in the so-called medical model of disability. It emphasizes individual blame and medical “treatment” alone at the expense of looking at the social barriers to the integration and self-determination of disabled people. The tension between the medical and social models is the founding political impetus behind the Disability Movement, as outlined in Oliver, M; Understanding Disability; MacMillan; London; 1996; pp. 10-37, and is responsible for the re-definition of the term “disability” from personal impairment to social restriction.
(2) Longmore, Paul K.; “Screening Stereotypes: Images of Disabled People” in Smit and Enns (eds); Screening Disability – Essays on Cinema and Disability; University Press of America Inc.; New York; 2001; p.6.
(3) This association of disability and “lack” has been considered a typical non-disabled form of cultural conditioning, in which screen characters play a large part, and was thus a point of entry for the initial union of Film and Disability Studies, a union examined as an on-going process in Smit & Enns; “The State of Cinema and Disability Studies” in Smit and Enns (eds); ibid; p. ix-x.
(4) The able-bodied “rescuer” of the helpless disabled person is an enduring character type, functioning as the supposed surrogate figure for a sympathetic audience and the means by which the disabled individual can “come to terms” with their condition. The type is analysed in Morris, Jenny; “A Feminist Perspective” in Pointon and Davies (eds); Framed – Interrogating Disability in the Media; BFI Press; London; 1997; p. 28.
(5) Dependence of course has related expectations concerning gender, and in terms of masculinity is almost an affront, the associated loss of autonomy and potency being a presumably unbearable horror. Such is discussed by Morris, Jenny; ibid; p. 23 as being an inherently humiliating condition for a male. Accordingly, Ellis’ disabled man is a self-pitying vision of complete inadequacy: a symbol of a destroyed heterosexual masculinity, even its nadir in a sense. The disabled character seems even oblivious to the implied incestual tension with his sister, which the sister in part reacts against. The pathetic dependent figure is absolutely loathed.
(6) Norden, M.; The Cinema of Isolation: A History of Physical Disability in the Movies; Rutgers University Press; New Jersey; 1994, p. 6 relates the patriarchal fear of disability in Freudian terms of a castration complex and in ibid, p. 54 discusses the Oedipal crisis in films dealing with disabled males, suggesting that unresolved Oedipal tensions are inevitably expressed by / projected onto non-disabled surrogate figures in attendance, a theory which can certainly be applied to Patrick.
(7) The evolution of this view that disabled people must be innately dependent, with its subsequent suggestions of malevolence if disabled people are not kept dependent, is identified by Norden in ibid; p.105.
(8) ibid; p. 221 explores the interpersonal and social dynamics of “responsibility” for disabled people in such proxy narratives. To develop the point: often, taking the “rescuer” figure perhaps even a step further, these proxy figures can enter into an almost symbiotic relationship with the dependent-disabled person in their care. Such inter-personal bonds would form the basis, in Australian cinema, for many subsequent psychodramas of carer / disabled person relationships.
(9) Although this proxy figure, often referred to as a “carer”, takes an active role and indeed responsibility for the disabled-dependent person in their care, their role as “carer” is problematic. Within the disabled community there is a distinction to be made between the “carer”, usually a family member, as the one who by circumstances takes on most of the “burden” of caring for an individual and the “personal care attendant”, who takes on many of the responsibilities of a carer for day to day physical maintenance but who is not closely tied to the person in their care and does not live with them or ideally have an emotional relationship with them beyond the purely functional. In Australian film, these distinctions are less clear, merging in a number of films which seek to address carer figure / disabled person relations in terms of the psychodrama of dependence wherein it is assumed that the emotional ties of a carer are, as in Warm Night on a Slow Moving Train, either an irreconcilable emotional bind or, as in Annie’s Coming Out, a noble and transcendent responsibility, even self-sacrificial. As the carer figure is often the point of entry into a disabled person’s world, it is through this figure’s responses and viewpoint that disability is hence mediated on an interpersonal basis and “carer” character definition thus a recent, developing issue in response to the politicization of “disability”.
(10) Like the film of 27A, which sought to expose the horror of institutionalization but through a premise involving psychological disability, Annie’s Coming Out was based on a true story. It was inspired by Annie McDonald, whose cerebral palsy led to her misdiagnosis as mentally retarded, a diagnosis resisted by one of her care workers. The film utilizes a character voice-over in its framing intent to convey the disabled person’s horrible experience of institutionalization as the socially disabling force the film forwards as causing the bitterness usually associated with disabled people’s experience of their own disability.
(11) The disabled person’s point-of-view in terms of cinematic style is traditionally denied in films dealing with disability. As point-of-view implies power, the conditions of powerlessness are enforced by the denial of the ability to wield a point-of-view. Although this is defined as an important legacy in the portrayals of disabled people, identified and examined in Norden, M.; op.cit; pp. 46-48, Australian cinema often struggles with both denial and the desire to approximate the disabled person’s presumed experience of an oppressive world. Even such a children’s film as Let the Balloon Go seeks in part to explore and mediate the disabled child as both object of, and controller of, the look. Indeed this film, discussed in another chapter, is more of a depiction of a disabled person’s assertion of their own self-determination than found in Annie’s Coming Out and proxy narratives. In select films thus, there is almost a progression or sense of the acquiring of a disabled point-of-view, however trepidatious this may be.
(12) A breakthrough in terms of the development of an Australian Disability Cinema culture, Dance Me to My Song was written by and starred Heather Rose. Although directed by Rolf de Heer (perhaps responding to the evocation of disability in his earlier film of Bad Boy Bubby), it is credited as a Heather Rose film. This accreditation is itself a rare event and indeed the film has a firm place within the international Disability Culture Movement, even if its positive reception was mostly confined to select screenings and festival / art house audiences, being reportedly very poorly distributed outside of Australia.
(13) In this case the limp underscores the protagonist’s feelings of repression and moribund desperation. Sutherland, Allan; “Black Hats and Twisted Bodies” in Pointon and Davies (eds); op.cit; London; 1997; p. 18 discusses various types of often minor physical disability, including the limp, as a kind of characterization shorthand. Such portrayals imply a deformed, or “crippled” body as an indication of a somehow “crippled” mind – in the Australian films under context here, the crippling factor is emotional dependence. However, in that The Well also clearly implies the protagonist’s lack of any real socialization (a parallel to Bad Boy Bubby in that sense), the “limp” itself may also signify the inferred process of social disablement as much as the supposed limitations of a disabled psyche. A limp was used as an indicator of guilt and a troubled conscience in the earlier Australian film Break of Day and is used as an indicator of psychological trauma and disablement in the first two Mad Max films.
(14) Hence, The Well slyly reminds the viewer of the protagonist’s physical disability (the needed visual correlative to her psychological difference and even pathetic perversity) at regular occasions, the most notable being a scene where the two women dance and the camera lingers on their legs, the one club-footed and the other “normal” – implying a kind of dancing with deviance. In the end, the film allies disability with emotional dependence, the illusion of self-control and perpetual, masochistic, victim-hood. Although the carer-figure (a possible lover also) once again is a manipulative person with ulterior motives, she is not the disabler (as was the carer-figure in Walk the Talk for instance): such is shifted back onto the disabled person as a self-destructive psychological imbalance inherent in their disability (even if such disability by now also carries inherent connotations of social imposition).