I need to write a shitty-first draft about overcoming and compensation myth based the The Butterfly Circus [Short Film HD] By Nick Vujicic, here is the link of the film. https://www.youtube.com/watch?

that representation structures reality, that the margins constitute the cen- ter, that human identity is multiple and unstable, and that all analysis and evaluation has political implications” (1997b, 19). With this in mind, I will pause here to create a quick overview of some of the myths of dis- ability that are ubiquitous across cultures and eras and that condition our understanding of disability (and thus of all identity and all bodies). This investigation of disability myths is an extension of my interrogation of the logics of normativity. Each of these myths works to mark and construct disability as surplus, improper, lesser, or otherwise other—and none of them actually directly de fi nes what “normal” is, except via an excessive exnomination. In this way, these myths reach into all bodies, yet they also very particularly structure roles for people with disabilities. I call these myths, but I also situate them also as stereotypes and tropes. These may not be fully “mythological,” in the rich rhetorical sense of myth I will try to put forward throughout this book. But these are myths in the manner of Roland Barthes’s Mythologies : meanings are attached to these images, and they become routinized and easily consumed (1972, 92).

Each one of these myths is also a misplacement of meaning. These are ste- reotypes because they are often narrow and in fl exible and render simple understandings. They are tropes because they shape stories and emplot.

They are rhetorical because they provide material for a wide range of expressions, whether through compressed analogies or longer narratives. 32 • Disa bi l i t y Rh e t or ic Regardless, these fi gures shape both stories and lives. As Joseph Shapiro has shown, “Disabled people have become sensitized to depictions of dis- ability in popular culture, religion, and history. There they fi nd constant descriptions of a disabled person’s proper role as either an object of pity or a source of inspiration. These images are internalized by disabled and nondisabled people alike and build social stereotypes, create arti fi cial limitations, and contribute to discrimination” (1993, 30). I borrow for my taxonomy from several sources, including Shapiro.

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson looks carefully and systematically at dis- ability in literature, and Ato Quayson (2007) similarly offers a “typology” of representations. 1 Michael Norden, Paul Longmore, and Leonard Krie- gel also look at disability stereotypes in fi lm, television, and literature. 2 The chart is greatly indebted to Mitchell and Snyder’s “Body Genres,” which maps out an “anatomy” of the common characteristics found in disability portrayals across genres of fi lm (2006, 188). 3 Disability studies scholar G. Thomas Couser describes the “preferred plots and rhetorical schemes” of disability in nonfi ction or memoir (2001, 79). These rhetori- cal schemes or myths tell familiar stories about disability from an ableist perspective. The use of all of these myths in discourse, then, both borrows from and shapes cultural beliefs about disability in the everyday. 4 Of course, this book will mainly focus on the ways disability can be positively and expansively represented and not on simple, negative dismissals. Yet sometimes these two polarities need to engage with one 1. In addition to her literary analyses, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (2002) also sug- gests that there are four dominant visual rhetorics of disability: the wondrous, the senti- mental, the exotic, and the ordinary or realistic. 2. See Norden 1994; Longmore 1985, 2005; and Kriegel 1987; among other surveys and sources for the analysis of disability stereotypes. 3. In turn, Mitchell and Snyder borrowed and revised this anatomy from Linda Wil- liams’s infl uential essay “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess” (1991).

4. Importantly, echoing all of the other disability studies scholars who have surveyed these ideas, Couser suggests that these schemes appeal to audiences because they reaf fi rm commonly held ideas about disability. “What characterizes these preferred rhetorics,” he writes, “is that they rarely challenge stigma and marginalization directly or effectively” (20 01, 79). MētisArchive and Anatomy of Disability Myths 33 another. In the fi eld of disability studies, an understanding of these nega- tive myths offers shorthand for the ways that disability is narrowly repre- sented or depicted. These myths offer evidence of some of the most basic and omnipresent ways that disability is rhetorically shaped. I will work through many of these myths here to further illustrate how disability studies and rhetorical theory should intersect. It is worth noting that most if not all of these myths interact with others in the chart. Also, it is important to state that although these myths engage in what might be called “negative critique”—the act of saying that disability is “not this, not this, and not this”—and though this litany may feel a bit rote to many disability studies scholars and students, or a bit trenchant to those who are new to the fi eld, laying out these disability wrongs generates a range of possible awarenesses, critical tools, and disruptions. 5 The fact that disability is so naturally and habitually associated with negativity in our society means that we cannot neglect to question these natural hab- its, and we cannot forget that the pause, re fl ection, and reconsideration we might engender will themselves be critical and creative opportunities. 6 5. I borrow from Elizabeth Povinelli’s Economies of Abandonment for this description.

Povinelli defends “negative critique” against the claims that such critique “lacks a direc- tion around which a practical politics could be built . . . is parasitical on a given normative world [and] re fl ects the precritical political positions of the author” (2011, 189). In response, she suggests that proposing a not this “makes a difference even if it does not produce a propositional otherwise” because it “makes the world unready-at-hand for those for whom it has worked smoothly” (ibid., 191–92). This should serve as an excellent model for the criti- cal work of disability studies, even when a focus is on “policing” ableism and normativity by arguing that disability is “not this” or that stigma, “not this” or that degraded position. 6. Tobin Siebers also suggests that a legacy of poststructuralism is what he calls “abso- lute critique, one in which the ability to run critique against itself is valued above all oth- ers”—the more radical the critique, the more emancipatory it must be, and this has resulted in the banishment of experience ( Theory 293). But Siebers argues against this, suggesting that disability studies can be one place where bodily experience can augment a critique in service of emancipatory goals. Povinelli’s “negative critique,” in disability studies, mani- fests itself in the absolute triumph of experience: disability is “not this” way that normate culture represents it, because its lived experience is different; or, disability is “not this,” because this representation or social structure is felt quite sharply and negatively within a 34 • Disa bi l i t y Rh e t or ic Fiona Kumari-Campbell and others might suggest that listing these dis- ability myths characterizes the strategic position of examining disab- lism —which is “limited” to challenging negative attitudes and offering corrections that would only assimilate disability into normative culture (20 0 9, 4).

7 But my suggestion, and my aim, in discussing each of these myths, is to relate them more broadly to logics of normativity and able- ism, moving beyond cultural representations that are right or wrong, and linking these narratives to “genealogies of knowledge” (ibid., 5). I will fi rst present the myths in brief form in a chart, then expand on each myth, and then undertake a lengthier “test” for these myths to end this interchapter. Myth Description Example Disability as Patholog y People with disabilities have been historically labeled, sorted, and arrayed on scales according to their deviation from standardized norms. In this way, perhaps the most prominent disability rhetoric is the medical model. There is almost always a moment in a narrative in which the disabled character is “explained” by a doctor or nurse, who provides a sort of WebMD overview of their pathology. Disability rarely circulates in popular culture without a medicalized expla- nation and de fi nition.

Kill-or-Cure Just as a loaded gun shown in the opening scenes of a movie will eventually be fi red, a disabled character Lennie from Of Mice and Men is a large man with an assumed mental disability.

Throughout the novel, death particular body or set of bodies. Somewhere between “negative critique” and “absolute cri- tique,” then, disability rhetoric does its work, from upon a material but malleable substrate between the triumph of a body and the triumph of a theory.

7. Kumari Campbell suggests that disability studies approaches that only challenge disablism “produce scholarship that contains serious distortions, gaps, and omissions con- cerning the production of disability” because they essentially only try to reform attitudes or compensate, and fail to recognize the more nuanced and pervasive ways that disability is constructed (2009, 4). MētisArchive and Anatomy of Disability Myths 35 Myth Description Example will either have to be “killed or cured” by the end of any movie or novel in which they appear. follows the character: a dead mouse, not one but two dead dogs, all foreshadowing his eventual tragic death.

Overcoming or Compensation The person with a disability overcomes their impair- ment through hard work or has some special talent that offsets their de fi ciencies.

Shapiro calls this fi gure the “s u p e r c r i p.” In Homer himself, we are to recognize a blind man who is a “gifted” poet and seer, his great memory and his story-weaving capabilities making up for his defect.

Disability as Object of Pity and/or Charity People with disabilities are represented as sad and impotent, a problem that can be solved via charity. Dickens’s Tiny Tim is the prototypical example from literature.

Physical Deformity as Sign of Internal Flaw Describing the body of an individual and accentuating its foreignness, abnormal- ity, or exoticness allow for insinuations of internal devi- ance or lack. Leonard Kriegel argues that Captain Ahab from Moby Dick “is not merely crippled—his leg torn from his body by the white whale—he is crippled in the deepest metaphysical sense. His injury became his self-hood” (1987, 18).

Disability as Isolating and Individuated The “emphasis on individual isolation as the overriding component of a disabled life” (Mitchell and Snyder 2001c, 198). People with disabilities in fi lm and literature most often live in hospitals and institutions, as though these are their natural habitats— they rarely have romantic relationships or enduring friendships and often are left alone at the end of the narra- tive, as Raymond Babbitt is in Rain Man . 36 • Disa bi l i t y Rh e t or ic Myth Description Example Disability as Sign of Social Ill Disability is symptomatic of a deviant society. Perhaps the most abhorrent example of this myth was put forward by televan- gelist Jerry Falwell, who suggeste d that “AIDS is not just God’s punishment for homosexuals, it is God’s punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals” (Press 2007, n.p).

Disability Is a Sign from Above Disability can be “taken as a signi fi er of sacred or ritual processes” (Quayson 2007, 46). This is one of the key tropes of the Bible and other reli- gious literatures, as well as Greek myth. Note that in Falwell’s attribution above, it is God who is punishing society.

Disability as Symptom of Human Abuse of Nature As with the idea that dis- ability is a punishment for an individual or social evil, disability is often used to re fl ect, even more “causally,” humankind’s degradation and neglect of the natural world and the environment. We recognize this myth often in superhero comic books: looking just at the villains in Batman, there is a long list of baddies who have been dis fi gured because they have treated the environ- ment poorly: Clayface, Two- Face, the Joker, Mr. Freeze.

Disability Drift and the Disability Hierarchy Physical disabilities are equated with mental dis- abilities and vice versa. For instance, a person in a wheelchair is also treated as cognitively or even psycho- logically disabled.

Disability Drop This myth interacts with the push to cure disability, over- coming, and the idea that people with disabilities In th e fi lm The Usual Sus- pects , Verbal Kint (played by Kevin Spacey) has a physical disability—he is labeled a MētisArchive and Anatomy of Disability Myths 37 Myth Description Example are “faking” or embellishing their disabilities. Characters with disabilities “drop” the act of being disabled as part of the climax of a narrative. “gimp.” It turns out, how- ever, that he is faking this disability and taking advan- tage of people’s perceptions of his weakness. The fi lm ends with a tracking shot of Kint walking away from a police station, scot-free, and his limp gradually disappears.

Disability as Pathology Pe ople w it h d i s abi l it ie s h ave be e n h i stor ica l ly labele d, s or te d, a nd a r raye d on scales according to their deviation from standardized norms. As a result of this, it became easier to justify their institutionalization and era- sure, and this contributed to the medicalizing of disability through an array of scient ifi c terms. In this way, perhaps the most prominent disabil- ity rhetoric is the medical model—abnormal bodies undergo a rhetorical accretion toward synecdoche, and an abnormal body becomes the sum of its dysfunctional parts. Through its sustained critique of the medicaliza- tion of bodies, disability studies allows the student of rhetoric to better understand the social construction of any body as—always, in part—a scient ifi c or medical artifact.

Disability is then “owned” and controlled by the doctor or scientist; it is no longer a personal experience or a generative aspect of one’s subject position. Science, medicine, therapeutic, and even pharmacological dis- courses and practices cast disability as a personal de fi cit or deviance to be cured. This myth of disability-as-pathology interacts with the trope of “kill-or-cure” (discussed below) as the only proper medical way to view disability is as something to be fi xed or eradicated. As pathology, disabil- ity can also never be understood as something positive. For example, there is almost always a moment in a narrative in which the disabled character is “explained” by a doctor or nurse, who provides a sort of WebMD overview of their pathology—if the doctor or nurse does 38 • Disa bi l i t y Rh e t or ic not deliver this diagnosis directly, then it is parroted through another character or a voice-over. In the controversial fi lm Million Dollar Baby , this happens the very fi rst time we view the protagonist in a hospital bed after she has been paralyzed. One of the very fi rst things she says is “I’m a C1 and C2 complete, means my spinal cord’s so broke they’re never gonna be able to fi x it. Gonna be froze like this the rest of my life” (2010, n.p.).

In Rain Man , when we are fi rst introduced to the character of Raymond, a male nurse is in the room to explain him, pointing out that “he’s an autistic savant .  . . high-functioning .  .  . . There’s a disability that impairs the sensory input . . . and how it is processed” (2004, n.p.) Just as it must be medicalized as soon as it appears in a fi lm, disability rarely circulates in our culture without a medicalized explanation and de fi nition, something that people also often demand: “What’s wrong with you?” One important point of interrogation for this myth is the analysis of shifting diagnoses. Disabilities such as Asperger’s syndrome or bipolar disorder are relatively new phenomena, medically. Recent changes in their de fi nitions have resulted in drastic changes in the lives of those diagnosed. These are not “mythical” disabilities by any means, but the experience of living with them is heavily mediated through discourses of medicine, psychology, and pharmacology. We also see that many of the diagnoses and treatments of Western disabilities have begun to shift to other parts of the world, and the impact that these diagnoses and their treatments have had on foreign cultures has been notable. Recog- n i zi ng t h i s i mpac t a l lows u s to v iew t he ways t h at d i sabi l it y i s c u lt u ra l ly speci fi c and culturally constructed through medicine and to understand how shifting medical markets might export forms of ableism and disab- lism across th e globe. 8 8. Conversely, as Marianne Kastrup, a doctor and the head of the Center of Trans- cultural Psychiatry in Denmark, has shown through her research on depression, “cul- ture in fl uences depressive symptomatology, explanatory models, help-seeking behavior, and societal response” (2011, 119). Just as the movement of the Western medical model might impact norms across cultures, so too will those cultures reshape the experience of disability. MētisArchive and Anatomy of Disability Myths 39 Kill-or-Cure Just as a loaded gun shown in the opening scenes of a movie will eventu- ally be fi red, a disabled character will either have to be “killed or cured” by the end of any movie or novel in which they appear. This death or cure will often seem to “redeem” a protagonist—the death will be sacri fi cial, or the cure will be credited to the hero. Adding some nuance to this for- mula, Mitchell and Snyder suggest that the “resolution” of disability in a comedy fi lm will be humiliation, in a horror fi lm obliteration, and in a melodrama compensation (2006, 188). Lennie’s death in Of Mice and Men offers a canonical example. Norden has also written about the “magical cure” theme in fi lms— for instance, in the rock opera To m m y, the “deaf, dumb, and blind” lead character regains all of his abilities. In Heidi, the hero’s friend Clara sheds her disability and jumps up and dances around at the end of the fi lm. The “kill-or-cure” myth also in fl ects current abortion and euthanasia debates and contemporary genetic science: society views disability as something that must be eradicated in one of these two ways. Recall Maggie’s medi- calized explanation of her paralysis from Million Dollar Baby, cited above:

she eventually concludes that because she cannot be cured, she should kill herself. Of course, the tenuousness and expendability of the disabled body are not just mythological. As a recent article in the Lancet showed, dis- abled adults are four times more likely to be victims of violence than non- disabled adults (Hughes et al. 2012, 1621).

Overcoming or Compensation In this myth, the person with a disability overcomes their impairment through hard work or has some special talent that offsets their de fi cien- cies. Shapiro calls this fi gure the “super crip.” In this myth, the connection between disability and compensatory ability is intentional and required.

The audience does not have to focus on the disability, or challenge the stigma that this disability entails, but instead refocuses attention toward the “gift.” This works as a management of the fears of the temporarily able- bodied (if and when I become disabled, I will compensate or overcome), 40 • Disa bi l i t y Rh e t or ic and it acts as a demand placed upon disabled bodies (you had better be very good at something). For example, in Homer himself, we are to recognize a blind man who is a “gifted” poet and seer, his great memory and his story-weaving capa- bilities making up for his defect. Dustin Hoffman’s depiction of Raymond Babbitt in the movie Rain Man provides another analogue: Raymond is autistic, but is capable of remarkable mathematical calculations and feats of memory. I will discuss both of these examples in chapter 2. Katie Rose Guest Pryal also writes about the trope of “creativity mystique,” wherein mood disorders are correlated with creativity. This trope is “a product of the era of modern psychiatry, suggests not only that mood disorders are sources of creative genius, but also that medical treat- ment should take patient creativity into account” (2011, n.p.). Pryal shows how conservative scienti fi c literature has begun to draw that correlation, but also how more fringe scienti fi c and pop-scienti fi c publications have begun to go so far as to suggest a causal link between mood disorders and creativity, or even “inverse-causation” wherein creativity causes mood disorders (ibid.). This research may greatly impact treatment options, but it also constructs mood disorders as phenomena that had better connect to genius. Emily Martin, in Bipolar Expeditions, also suggests that as we begin to see manic depression as an “asset,” we may be constructing two kinds of mania: a “good” kind characterized by successful celebrities like Robin Williams and a “bad” variety “to which most sufferers of manic depression are relegated.” The consequence is that “even if the value given to the irrational experience of mania increases, validity would yet again be denied to the “mentally ill,” and in fact their stigmatization might increase” (2007, 220).

Disability as Object of Pity and/or Charity Much of the language of disability relies on a semiotics of pity: myths of powerlessness that demand to be answered with charity. As Rosemarie Garland-Thomson shows, one of the key visual rhetorics of disability is “the sentimental.” This visual rhetoric “produces the sentimental victim or helpless sufferer needing protection or succor and invoking pity, inspi- ration, and frequent contributions” (2002, 63). People with disabilities are MētisArchive and Anatomy of Disability Myths 41 represented as sad and impotent, a problem that can be solved via charity.

The donator also extracts value from this exchange, feeling better about him- or herself, and more “able,” through giving (see Shapiro 1993). Dick- ens’s Tiny Tim is the prototypical example from literature. The Jerry Lewis telethon is one contemporary vehicle that most strongly reinforces this po- sition, though Lewis was recently ousted from his spot at the helm. In the article “Infantilizing Autism,” Jennifer L. Stevenson, Bev Harp, and Morton Ann Gernsbacher also show how highly visible and “successful” autism organizations currently rely on images of autistic children to evoke pity and inspire charity and this charitable giving is focused on a “cure” (2011, n.p.).

Physical Deformity as Sign of Internal Flaw Describing the body of an individual and accentuating its foreignness, abnormality, or exoticness allow for insinuations of internal deviance or lack. As Longmore writes, “Physical handicaps are made the emblem of evil” (1987, 66). Leonard Kriegel argues that Captain Ahab from Moby Dick “is not merely crippled—his leg torn from his body by the white whale— he is crippled in the deepest metaphysical sense. His injury became his self-hood” (1987, 34). This “internal fl aw” also often explains why a char- acter behaves badly (see “Disability as Evil” also, immediately below).

Whereas, traditionally, a “stigma” was a mark branded onto the skin (as was the custom with Greek slaves), or a mark indicating a history of dis- ease or abnormality (according to the medical de fi nition), more often we see physical signs of disability as indicative of mental or psychological problems, the outward “stigma” the product of an almost-hysterical tran- substantiation from interior to exterior.

Disability as Evil Often, in fi ction, a character with a disability is evil because he or she is “mad at the world.” In many cases, the evil or lack of the disabled fi gure is a way to establish the virtue and character of the nondisabled protagonist.

The disabled character can be a repository of evil or can be a trick mirror that reveals weakness or strength in a more central character. Shakespeare’s Richard III is perhaps the best example of this trope, and we also recognize this stereotype working across nearly the entire 42 • Disa bi l i t y Rh e t or ic canon of children’s literature, which bulges with dis fi gured pirates and witches, out fi tted with the requisite crutches and eye patches. Children are then encouraged to fear people with disabilities. For further discus- sion of Richard III, see my fi nal chapter.

Disability as Good Just as disability can be read as evil, disability can also be represented as pure goodness, through the creation of an equal but inverse one-dimen- sional character. Rhetorics of infantilization and paternalism often power this myth. The result of this myth is that people with disabilities are dis- allowed from being bad or fallible, and thus they cannot really be fully human—or if they somehow fail to live up to this standard, their failure is particularly pronounced. Tiny Tim is an example of a character rendered as pure good. This allows him to serve as a litmus test for the good of other characters and also allows him to be an object of pity and charity. Another entailment of this myth is that disability has to be profi table —Raymond in Rain Man has a “good” disability because his brother can capitalize upon it (through gambling). There is a binary relationship between disability-as-good and disabil- ity-as-evil as well: as soon as a disability is no longer pro fi table, curable, rehabilitable, infantile, and/or unassuming, it can be quickly made evil.

“Good” disabled characters who grow up or make demands can quickly become evil. As Colin Cameron writes, “Resisting categorisation in terms of one stereotype (passive, uncomplaining victim) simply leads to being identi fi ed in terms of another (bitter and twisted)” (2009, 385).

Disability as Ethical Test Both Couser and Quayson recognize that disability often “acts as some form of ethical background to the actions of other characters, or as a means of testing or enhancing their moral standing” (Quayson 2007, 36).

How a protagonist treats these disabled fi gures then establishes the hero’s ethos. Pat Thomson recognizes this as an “infuriating genre which might be deemed a ‘second fi ddle’ book. In these, there is indeed a disabled character but they exist only to promote the personal development of the MētisArchive and Anatomy of Disability Myths 43 main, able-bodied character” (1992, 24). The role of the Beast in Beauty and the Beast is central to the plot of the story in that we can gauge Beauty’s development of morality based upon her acceptance of the Beast. Circe in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird are also examples of this trope.

Disability as Isolating and Individuated Mitchell and Snyder argue that an “emphasis on individual isolation as the overriding component of a disabled life” has “arti fi cially extracted the experience of disability from its necessary social contexts” (2001c, 198).

The result is that disability can be rendered as a personal tragedy, or even a punishment delivered to one individual, and not the product of either chance or of social processes. The impact of this trope on all of our lives is apparent—when we each inevitably experience pain or debilitation, even temporarily, we are expected to keep it to ourselves, lest we become a burden upon others. As Tanya Titchkosky puts it, even though more than one billion people worldwide have disabilities, the impulse for isolation mandates that they be seen tautologically as “a huge number of the unfor- tunate few” (2011, n.p). People with disabilities in fi lm and literature most often live in hos- pitals and institutions, as though these are their natural habitats—they rarely have romantic relationships or enduring friendships, and often are left alone at the end of the narrative, as Raymond Babbitt is in Rain Man . This belief that disability should be isolating is reinforced by, and also just ifi es, the “warehousing” of people with disabilities in institutions, segregated classrooms, sheltered workshops, and so on. The individuated approach, in education, stresses that an individual with a disability can receive accommodations that are both speci fi c and temporary—accom- modating students one by one also means that the entire educational par- adigm resists widespread change.

Disability as Sign of Social Ill In this myth, disability is viewed as symptomatic of a deviant society. In this case, the external evidence of difference is used as an analogue for an ill or evil that is not isolated to the individual, but re fl ects a social problem. 44 • Disa bi l i t y Rh e t or ic As Nicole Markotic suggests, “A character presented as ‘less’ than able is not only a moral marker of social ill but is also a physical embodiment of cultural blunders” (2003, n.p.). Perhaps the most abhorrent example of this myth was put forward by televangelist Jerry Falwell, who suggested that “AIDS is not just God’s punishment for homosexuals, it is God’s punish- ment for the society that tolerates homosexuals” (Press 2007, n.p.).

Disability Is a Sign from Above Disability can be “taken as a signi fi er of sacred or rit ual processes” (Quay- son 2007, 46). This is one of the key tropes of the Bible and other religious literatures, as well as Greek myth, as I will explore in my discussion of Tiresias and Hephaestus in other parts of the book. Note that in Falwell’s attribution above, it is God who is punishing society. As a “sign,” disability can also be connected to traditions of scapegoat- ing or, in ancient Greece, the pharmakon. In this Greek rite, after a disas- ter (a famine, an invasion, a plague), a “cripple” was supposedly selected and expelled from the community. The disabled individual may not have necessarily been situated as the cause of the disaster, yet the death of this individual was seen as a way for the community to appease the gods, as a form of atonement or expiation. This tradition has been written about extensively by Burkert (1985) and Girard (1986), as well as Derrida (1981).

Disability as Symptom of Human Abuse of Nature As wit h t he idea t hat disabilit y is a pu n ish ment for a n i ndividual or social evil, disability is often used to re fl ect, even more “causally,” humankind’s degradation and neglect of the natural world and the environment. That is, the disability stands not just as a symbol, but also as a real supposed consequence: cancer and other diseases can be viewed as a consequence of certain forms of pollution, as are some “deformities.” Sometimes the causal relationship is “real”—but this often does not have to be proven for the disability to signify. We are offered this myth often in superhero comic books: looking just at the villains in Superman and Batman , there is a long list of bad- dies who have been dis fi gured because they have treated the environment poorly: Clayface, Two-Face, the Joker, Mr. Freeze (in Batman); Lex Luthor, MētisArchive and Anatomy of Disability Myths 45 Metallo, Parasite, Solomon Grundy (in Superman). 9 Of course, it is impor- tant to remember that these villains, in addition to their disabilities and dis fi gurements, also receive some superpowers as well. And although it is easy to look just at the ways environmental degradation leads to the dis fi gurement of the villains, the heroes’ abilities and disabilities are also often connected to a debased physical world, and their superpowers very often mean they can control nature fantastically (or can build prostheses to allow them to do so). As Franny Howes writes, “Disability is prevalent in comics but at the same time persistently erased, denied, and made invisible.” Indeed, even when the arguments are not explicit, disability appears in comics in ways that argue against oppression, question narratives of cure, and locate the tension and the continuum between disability and ability (2013, 24). This tension also often tightly fuses the physical body and mind of both heroes and villains to the (equally susceptible and mutable) natural world. One other argument that this myth can make is that, in the words of Law- rence Buell, “all Americans [are] not .  . . being poisoned equally”—or, in more inclusive terms, all humans are not being poisoned equally (2001, 5).

(And then, maybe even more inclusively, all beings are not being poisoned equally.) We know that exposure to pollution is not evenly distributed in our world and often breaks down along class and race lines—and those who pollute are not always those who “suffer” from the effects of their polluting. In this way, the “myth” of environmentally caused disability can be a way to hold up certain bodies as ecocritical evidence, and/or we can take this myth and convert it into a powerful rhetoric to interrogate the manner in which discourses of the earth’s de fi lement can mitigate or vitiate its contamination, but also how both discourse and disease enter real bodies. More simply, we need to recognize and understand disability myth and rhetoric as they operate in our relationships with the physical 9. Thanks to Franny Howes for sharing her considerable expertise on this subject and making all of these suggestions to me. Thanks also to Trevor Holmes, Lindsey Joyce, Wil- liam Lakeman, Joe Gooden, Sarah York, Dale Jacobs, and Eir-Anne Edgar for their incisive thoughts on this issue. 46 • Disa bi l i t y Rh e t or ic world, how we talk about this world, what we do to it, and what it does to us. See Stacy Alaimo’s excellent Bodily Natures (2010) or Mel Chen’s Anima- cies (2012) for more on this.

Disability Drift and the Disability Hierarchy In this myth, physical disabilities are equated with mental disabilities, and vice versa. For instance, a person in a wheelchair is also treated as cogni- tively or even psychologically disabled. Within the disability community, this has sometimes led to a problematic hierarchy of disability—wherein physical disabilities are situated as less stigmatizing than cognitive dis- abilities, and people are encouraged to make downward comparisons to others with supposedly more severe impairments. Disability “drift” also works to make the disability overpower all other facets of an individual’s personality. People often hold up Stephen Hawking as a positive representation of disability, as evidence that physical disability does not equate with diminished intellectual capacity. Hawking as a “super crip” proves this. 10 But this narrative, which argues against disability drift, also reinforces a disability hierarchy: physical disability is more desirable than mental or psychological disability. Mark Deal has written extensively about this hierarchy, looking at the attitudes of disabled people themselves toward other “impairment groups” (2003, 897). For this same reason, if we do see characters with disabilities in popular media, these people often are most acceptable if they come from further up the hierarchy—wheelchair users seem to be the most “acceptable” fi gures with disabilities. Yet these same people may often be infantilized and treated as though their disabilities are more than physical, creating a catch-22.

Disability Drop This myth interacts with the push to cure disability, overcoming, and the idea that people with disabilities are “faking” or embellishing their dis- abilities. Characters with disabilities “drop” the act of being disabled as 10. See, for example, Helene Mialet’s Hawking, Incorporated (2012). MētisArchive and Anatomy of Disability Myths 47 part of the climax of a narrative. Ellen Jean Samuels (2006) has looked extensively at this phenomenon in fi lm, literature, and culture, labeling it the “disability con” and linking it to persistent backlash against social assistance and entitlements for people with disabilities. Samuels exam- ines the “disability con” primarily within Melville’s work The Confi dence- Man but also through nineteenth-century racial masquerade.

In the fi lm The Usual Suspects , Verbal Kint (played by Kevin Spacey) has a physical disability—he is labeled a “gimp.” It turns out, however, that he is faking this disability and taking advantage of people’s percep- tions of his weakness. The fi lm ends with a tracking shot of Kint walking away from a police station, scot-free, and his limp gradually disappears.

The viewer realizes that his disability has been an act and that he is actu- ally the evil criminal ringleader Keyser Söze. Edward Norton plays a similar character in the movie The Score, pretendi ng to be a n i ntellect ually disabled janitor. Johnny Knoxville of Jackass fame also fakes a mental dis- ability in the movie The Ringer. In all of these examples, the character with a “fake” disability actually draws out and takes advantage of the stereo- typical attitudes of other characters. But when the disability is “dropped,” the idea that disability is in part “fake” is reinforced, and the challenge to the stigma around the disability loses much of its power. The concept of “malingering” also infers that people might fake dis- abilit y to get out of military ser vice or crimi nal sentences or to gai n some- thing else, like welfare. It is important to note that the concept of “faking” disability or “malingering” is a key shaping myth in the creation and implementation of social services: “Policy makers have historically sought to forestall fakery by making both the process of determining eligibil- ity and the experience of receiving bene fi ts—so to speak—arduous. They fashioned what amounted to ceremonies of social degradation for persons seeking or getting assistance” (Longmore 2003, 240). 11 11. In fi lm we also see disability “drop” happening across an actor’s career. After an actor has played a character with a disability, the next major role seems to be very notably able, as a form of “rehabilitation.” In the fi lm Tr o p i c Thunder , this propensity becomes the basis for a joke—after Ben Stiller’s character takes on a role that is seen as too disabled, his next role is as a Stallone-style action hero in the movie Scorcher VI: Global Meltdown . 48 • Disa bi l i t y Rh e t or ic The Disability Myth “Test” The “Bechdel Test” was developed by graphic novelist and zine author Alison Bechdel (2008) in her series Dykes to Watch Out For, as a way to quickly determine how female characters are positioned in a movie. The premise is relatively simple, and thus the results are often particularly upsetting. Simply, there are three criteria: ask whether there is more than one major female character in a movie, then ask whether these female characters talk to one another, and then ask if they talk to one another about something other than a man. The fi rst que st ion i s de sig ned to i nve s - tigate whether the fi lm actually has a sign ifi cant female presence, the sec- ond question furthers this fi rst question, and the third interrogates the nature of the female characters’ roles; together, they reveal whether the women in the movie are fully developed or just foils or love interests for the men. Do the women think for themselves? Is there an actual female community or social structure in the fi lm? Are women subordinated or supplemental? What happens when we begin to interrogate the depiction and rhetor- ical construction of disability in cultural texts in a similar way? The dis- ability myths listed on the last few pages can all, in some way or another, be incorporated into this test. Without necessarily using the tripartite structure of Bechdel’s test, we can instead try to identify as many dis- ability myths as possible in a given text. 12 We might apply this rubric to 12. A disability test might also ask whether there is more than one character with a disability in the fi lm—most often, the answer is no, because disability is seen as isolating and is also most often supplementary. Then we might ask if the characters with disabilities talk about more than their “problems” or “af fl ictions”? Do they talk at all? Are they seen as capable of forming romantic relationships, acting independently from the protagonists (in ways that do not cause tragedy), growing and changing as characters? We also might say that, in general, in fi lms with more than one character with a disability, all of the characters with disabilities are together and rarely talk to other characters who are nondisabled. This is a way to reinforce the isolation of people with disabilities. So let me try another iteration:

1. Is there more than one character with a disability in the fi lm?

2. If the answer to the fi rst question is yes, do the characters with disabilities interact with nondisabled people? MētisArchive and Anatomy of Disability Myths 49 a few popular movies and cable TV series from the past few years, just to try this out. For instance, the 2011 fi lm The Iron Lady immediately passes the Bechdel Test: in fact, the major male characters, after the fi rst half hour or so of the movie, exist purely in relation to Margaret Thatcher, played uncannily by Meryl Streep (who won an Oscar for the role). Yet beyond these rather unconventional gender dynamics, this seems like a rather conventional disability story. Thatcher has dementia, and the fi lm chroni- cles a “descent” further into this disease, mainly through her hallucinated conversations with her deceased husband. 13 The dementia de fi nitely iso- lates her—and the dementia also subsumes any of the other reasons she may be isolated. She is neither killed nor cured—in fact, the dementia gets worse. The disease “explains” why she is so cold and critical toward 3. In this interaction, do the nondisabled people do more than care for the people with disabilities? And do the characters with disabilities do more than explain their symptoms and impairments to the nondisabled characters?

I am thinking here of documentaries like Murderball, or fi lms such as Girl, Interrupted and One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest , which each in some way collect people with disabilities “outside” of society, in exceptional circumstances and microcultures. Such fi lms do answer the question “Is there more than one character with a disability?” but then go in the other direction. This may create some possibilities for valuing crip community, but also serve as ways of abjecting and justifying segregation. Or another way to set up such a quiz that gets at the simple kill-or-cure logic would be:

1. Is there a character with a disability in the fi lm?

2. Is the character still alive at the end of the fi lm?

3. If the character is alive, is she or he still disabled in the same way she or he was at the beginning of the fi l m, or h a s t h i s c h a rac ter be e n c u red, h a s t hei r cond it ion be e n a mel io - rated or overcome, or has it deteriorated signi fi cantly?

Another key question: are the characters with disabilities in a fi lm or television show pl aye d by ac tor s w it h d i s abi l it ie s? A l mo st a l l t he t i me, t he a n swer to t h i s l a st que st ion i s no. 13. The fact that Thatcher is so reliant on her husband’s advice and approval, even after he has died, can be read as undermining her agency. If the third question in the Bechdel Test is actually designed to determine whether the female character has an autonomous role t hat is not subordi nated to her relat ion sh ip wit h a ma n, t hen The Iron Lady functionally fails this part of the test. 50 • Disa bi l i t y Rh e t or ic her doting daughter (even though there could be myriad other reasons for the degeneration of this relationship that preclude her dementia). It also seems to explain why she is disaffected and aloof toward all she meets (even if this might simply be her general affect). In this way, by narrating the fi lm through her dementia, disability drifts back into the entire character study and life narrative, and we can begin to understand it more critically. 14 The dementia could be seen as either a symptom of a social ill or a sign that Thatcher is being repaid for her political sins. Yet the dementia also humanizes her, softens this iron lady so that the audi- ence may fi nd it dif fi cult to retain their previous attitudes toward her.

Although her conservative politics essentially wiped out state support systems in England, this character invites a charitable rereading. For some audiences. Certainly, many would resist this softening. But because the fi lm fi lters its retrospective lens through her dementia, the audience is at least strongly invited to let pity drift back across Thatcher’s entire life and political career. 15 Applying a disability rhetoric “test” to the fi lm, then, we recognize disability being mythologized through pity/charity, isolation, and evil. 16 We recognize disability being used as the sign of a social ill, 14. The Iron Lady is also a “biopic”—in chapter 3 I will examine the biopolitical dimen- sions of recent iterations of this genre, and I will also analyze them as forms of epideictic rhetoric. 15. It might be suggested that certain parts of her political career, particularly her rise to power and her popular “success” in the Falklands War—elements of her career that lend themselves to heroic montages in the fi lm—are not overwritten by her dementia in ways that other, later, parts of her career are in the fi lm. This allows her heroism to “stand alone” and to be “reliably” narrated. This, however, also allows the fi lm to conform to the genre rules of the tragedy, the falling action triggered by her disability. There may be an (inten- tional or unintentional) selection of which parts of her career can be unambivalently nar- rated and which need the fi lter of her dementia to be viewed charitably.

16. It is particularly interesting and ironic that Thatcher is shown having access to quite a bit of private care. This lies in direct opposition to the cuts to public supports for people with disabilities that she authored. Thus, the fi lm suggests not only that disability is isolating, but also that the individual is responsible for her or his own “care”—which is not a social con- cern. The opening scene from the fi lm also shows Thatcher out on the streets, trying to buy groceries. The scene suggests that she herself is tremendously vulnerable out in the public, MētisArchive and Anatomy of Disability Myths 51 and we witness the ways that disability can drift across other facets of a person’s personality—the “pure goodness” of disability as a concept or myt h i n fl ects the legacy of Margaret Thatcher, allowing us to at least par- tially forget who she really was as a politician. 17 Of course, The Iron Lady both is exemplary of the usefulness of a dis- ability rhetoric “test” and also extracts and displays its limits. Using the test and its tools can get us quickly to the representational heart of the fi lm, allowing us to recognize a range of rhetorical possibilities that rely on disability. Yet, on the other hand, texts always exceed our desire to solve them. Another way to say this: even if a text actually does want to represent disabilit y i n a purely negative, simplistic man ner or use disabil- ity as a tool of dissimulation, in many ways it will fail. Aside from this acknowledgment, and through it, I will continue to try to apply the test. One of the foremost critical successes of the past fi ve years has been the TV series Breaking Bad. There were ostensibly four major characters with disabilities in the show. Moreover, these characters are neither seen as automatically bonded together by their experiences nor seen as isolated from one another. The fi rst and most “obvious” dis- abled character is Walter White Jr., the son of the series’ “hero.” The show’s website identi fi es him as being “born with cerebral palsy” but also, in the same sentence, as a “typical high school kid” (2011). Walt Jr.’s character is in modern England. This too is ironic—it suggests that she should be locked up for her own safety, but it also totally reverses the idea that Thatcherism has been and continues to be a tremendous threat to the public, perhaps especially to the immigrants that she thought were “swamping” England, and with whom she now must communicate to buy her milk.

17. Of course, Robert McRuer (2013) and many others would strongly challenge this tendency to forget Thatcher’s political legacy, particularly in this current era of austerity measures and neo-Thatcherism in the UK and elsewhere. Yet at the same time, we would not necessarily want to see a fi lm that uses disability to render her purely evil, nor would we necessarily want to see a fi lm that elides the fact that Margaret Thatcher truly does suffer from dementia, nor would we really want this dementia to render her as a heroic, overcoming, fi gure—which The Iron Lady s e e m s to r e si st doi ng. I n m a ny way s, The Iron Lady is a terri fi c intertext for the fi nal chapter of this book, which examines The King’s Speech , and I will refer back to The Iron Lady in that section of the book. 52 • Disa bi l i t y Rh e t or ic indeed quite well rounded, and instead of traf fi cking many stereotypical disability myths, he twists them. He creates a website to raise donations for his father, who has cancer, making his dad extremely uncomfortable, as the last thing Walt Sr. wants is to be viewed as an object of pity and charity—but then he does not want any attention at all, really, considering that he is moonlighting as a large-scale drug manufacturer. It is worth not- ing that R. J. Mitte, who plays Walt Jr., has cerebral palsy himself, which is notable mainly because there are almost no actors with disabilities on TV or in the movies. 18 We also see that Walt Sr.’s cancer disables him at different times throughout the series. 19 Walt Sr.’s disability, because it is a persistent pres- ence, though his level of actual “impairment” oscillates, troubles tradi- t iona l represent at ion s of i l l ness as d i sabi l it y. I l l ness i s most of ten na r rated clearly in the direction of either kill-or-cure, and much less frequently through the ambivalent and unpredictable, temporary polarities of debil- ity and recovery that Walt experiences. Further, though Walt might seem to be “bitter” about his cancer, this bitterness translates into a sustained anger and into planned and deliberate action—the “bitterness” is not dis- abling, but rather it shakes him out of his routine and onto another radical path. And it is worth noting that this action is in part a necessity: he also 18. The series creator, Vince Gilligan, has said that he intended for Walt Jr. to be a strong character, one who does not follow the common disability trope of inviting pity from others or of pitying himself. Gilligan supposedly based the character on a college friend who had CP. (Mabe 2011, n.p.). This said, Walt Jr. does function as narrative prosthesis in a few connected ways. He is an “ethical test” for his father, and thus propels the plot. When Walt Sr. believes he is going to die from cancer, he justi fi es starting a lucrative career mak- ing meth through the belief that he needs to provide for his son’s care after he himself is gone. This reasoning makes the entire plot not just believable, but much more appealing than if Walt Sr. were just greedy. This said, as the series has developed, the question of Walt’s ethics has become much more nuanced, and we are invited to question what his true priorities and motivations are; the simple story of a man-gone-bad to provide for his disabled son sublimates into a range of other more dif fi cult possibilities.

19. You could also suggest that Walt Sr.’s meth-cooking sidekick Jesse Pinkman’s crystal addiction is also a disability in a similar way, impermanently impairing but persistent. MētisArchive and Anatomy of Disability Myths 53 needs to fi nd a way to pay for his cancer treatments. The provenance and morality of Walt’s actions are openly in question, but Walt’s character is not subordinated to his illness, cancer does not make him bitter and with- drawn or bitter and purely evil, nor does cancer make him a better person, a medicalized “warrior,” or a re fl ective philosopher.

The third major character with a disability is Walt Sr.’s brother-in-law Hank, the Drug Enforcement Administration agent who has also been pursuing him (though Hank does not know that the drug kingpin he pur- sues is his own brother-in-law until halfway through the fi nal season. In season 4, Hank has been shot and can no longer walk. Here it is worth quoting disability media critic S. E. Smith at some length, as she writes about a key episode: We’re seeing Hank after the shooting, Hank in recovery, Hank at home.

We’re not quite sure what is going to happen with Hank and where they are going to take his character, although I have high hopes, because Breaking Bad seems the most willing to actually do its homework with disability, and to try and do a good job with it. Whether this is a tem- porary disability, or a permanent one, right now, we are seeing Hank in a very vulnerable place. Hank is in the adjustment period. Acquired disabilities can bring up some strong emotions as people transition between different bodily states, identities, beliefs about their own worth and value. . . . We are uncomfortable in solidarity with Hank, who is clearly trying to navigate this new situation and to, yes, adjust to the changes he’s experiencing, to his new body, to a radically different life than the one he knows.  . . . The ways that people deal with the adjust- ment period are immensely variable, and I’m looking forward to seeing how it’s handled here. One of the problems with limited depictions of disability on television is that any appearance is taken as an authorita- tive one, which puts shows like Breaking Bad in a tough position because their decisions for characters may be mistaken by viewers and critics as de fi nitive statements on disability .  .  . . If Hank is depressed, which he appears to be, that’s clearly because of the character, not because the writers and creators think that disability is depressing, or even that the adjustment period is depressing for all people, although depression is 54 • Disa bi l i t y Rh e t or ic not uncommon. What they’re depicting here is true to many lived expe- riences, and I hope that their record of careful research and thoughtful handling of disability carries through, and that Hank’s journey contin- ues to be true to the actual experiences of people who share that disabil- ity, or who have experienced similar injuries. (2011, n.p) Clearly, Breaking Bad is a space for genuine rhetorical negotiations of disability. Hank is at times represented as desexualized by his disability— but in the episode “Half Measures” he loses a bet to his wife when she suggests she can get him aroused in a minute and he believes she can’t.

He does seem depressed to be disabled and fi nds physical therapy tre- mendously dif fi cult, but, as Smith argues, his “bitterness” seems to be a genuine aspect of his personality, not something that his disability has introduced. The disability sometimes seems to dissuade him from doing any further detective work, yet at other times affords him the time and space to reconsider new angles on open cases. When Hank does want to do undercover work, he enlists Walt to be his driver, and this irony creates incredibly tense moments in the series. Further, because Hank’s insurance will not pay for all of his medical bills (just as Walt’s insurance would not pay for the best treatment for him), this plot point situates the series quietly in the very middle of contemporary contradictions of biopower:

there is no shortage of medical and therapeutic interventions available, all positioned as matters of life or death, yet all marketed out of the reach of the social support system. Walt begins secretly using his drug money to pay for Hank’s treatments too. The irony is thick: in this day and age, you have to sell illegal drugs to be able to pay for the drugs that keep you vital or alive, to pay for the therapies that ameliorate your suffering or facilitate your autonomy. To be “successfully” disabled in late capitalism, it helps to be a meth millionaire. The other clearly disabled character, however, is less three-dimen- sional. Hector “Tio” Salamanca is himself a former drug kingpin and the uncle of several drug cartel members. He communicates through facili- tated means, ringing a bell when a nurse or assistant points at a letter of the alphabet. This facilitated communication is a major plot device MētisArchive and Anatomy of Disability Myths 55 throughout the series, and Tio’s ability to manipulate people’s expecta- tions of him shows evidence of “strategic ignorance,” a concept I will explore in more detail in chapter 3. Tio knows what is going on around him quite well; he just can’t speak in a conventional way. But he also won’t ever speak to police, and he holds a grudge very well, enabling and autho- rizing his nephews to hunt down Walt Sr. and Hank. Later, these nephews are the ones who shoot and paralyze Hank. By the explosive conclusion to the very last episode of season 4, Tio is dead. The way that he dies pro- vides interesting justi fi cation for applying something like the Bechdel Test to disability texts. The simple question we can and probably should ask of any disability text is, was the character killed or cured? 20 Far too many fi lms—from Dark Victory in 1939 to Million Dollar Baby in 2004—convey the message that living with a disability is simply not an option and end not just with the death of a disabled character, but with the message that this death is a mercy, maybe even a victory. 21 20. This is such a prevalent device that when a fi lm like The Station Agent (20 04) pl ac e s a disabled character played by Peter Dinklage on a set of train tracks at night, wander- ing drunkenly, the inevitability of his death feels so palpable that it is experienced by the viewer before it happens—and when we see he is still alive in the morning, we are left in a perhaps-ironic yet still deeply disturbing emotional space. It is hard to feel relief, because the surprise of the character’s survival seems only to highlight so many other fi lmic dis- ability deaths. 21. In fact, if you look at Clint Eastwood’s entire oeuvre as a director, you see that dis- ability almost always plays a role in the end of his movies, not just in Million Dollar Baby , where Eastwood himself pulls the plug on the hero, who insists she cannot live with a dis- ability. In Gran To r i n o , Eastwood plays the hero, a failing old man, who basically commits a kamikaze suicide at the end of the fi lm to make the world safer for his young neighbors.

In Mystic River, perhaps the most confounding of all of his fi lms, a mystery is solved at the end of the movie when we are asked to retrospectively understand that the “deaf boy did it” simply because he was mad at the world because of his deafness—even though the character (and this motive, which we are expected to accept unquestioningly) has not been developed at all in the entire movie. Mary Johnson’s excellent book Make Them Go Away: Clint Eastwood, Christopher Reeve, and the Case against Disability Rights (2003) further exam- ines Eastwood’s battle against the Americans with Disabilities Act in his own business life, linking hi s fi lmic representations to his personal politics). 56 • Disa bi l i t y Rh e t or ic Because when characters with disabilities die, we often see that they die not in subtle ways, but spectacularly. In Breaking Bad, Tio is used as a human bomb to kill the show’s villain. This reveals the essentially instrumental nature of Hector’s disability and of many disabled char- acters: he or she can literally be used as a weapon on a villain, as the “nuclear option” for the text’s plot. Of course, throughout Breaking Bad, many more “answers” to a disability test are also very much—and very interestingly—unanswered.

Dis Ex Machina This leads me, fi nally, to a concept I will call disability ex machina (or dis ex machina ). Dis ex machina signals one highly prevalent but underexamined species of disability myth in popular culture, and it leads directly from the concept of kill-or-cure that I have also been exploring. In this myth, disability is more than just a central theme or affective presence, more than just something that is assigned to a character; disability is instead (or also) a type of plot or narrative device, a structure and an action. I will offer a slightly more extended analysis of dis ex machina to conclude this chapter, adding it to my inventory of disability myths, but also linking it to a broader range of disability signi fi cation that I will expand upon throughout the book. The original de fi nition of deus ex machina in Horace’s Ars Poetica ref- erenced the “god in the machine,” used in Greek tragedy—gods literally appeared in a play to resolve the plot arti fi cially (1926, 191). The actors who played the gods in these plays were either lowered or raised onto the stage mechanically. Horace warned against this plot device, popularized (and overused) by Euripedes and others. More contemporary examples of deus ex machina include The Lord of the Flies, resolved when a ship appears on the horizon to save the deserted boys. The Harry Potter series is lousy with gods in machines, and one example of this is the saving grace of a sword in a hat, delivered to Harry by nothing less than a phoenix in The Chamber of Secrets .

Dis ex machina is a play on this lazy rhetorical convention, because disability is often used at the end of a fi lm or book to wrap things up.

For instance, Hector in the TV series Breaking Bad literally becomes the MētisArchive and Anatomy of Disability Myths 57 human bomb that explodes to end a season and a story line, killing the antagonist. I have already said enough about the dis ex machina of death:

contemporary texts continue to mass-manufacture this plot device. Cure narratives and “disability drop” also function as forms of dis ex machina— the cure of the character with a disability, or the revelation that she or he was faking it, functions to conclude the story, solve the crime, wrap up the loose ends. Yet at times dis ex machina can be more subtle.

In Julian Barnes’s auspiciously titled The Sense of an Ending , the 2011 Booker Prize–winning novel, when the narrator, Tony, discovers that a child born to his best friend and his ex-girlfriend’s mother was disabled, we are somehow supposed to be able to understand exactly why this best friend committed suicide. 22 The novel is most commonly read as a “mystery,” and the revelation of a disabled child offers one solution to the mystery. Of course, there is more going on in Barnes’s book than just a mystery, as you might guess from the title. 23 As the narrator’s best friend says at one point early in the novel, “History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation” (2011, 18). This book is all about senses and gestures, refractions, circular paths through memory. Thus, even the dis ex machina at the end of the book holds a subversive note. That we are led to believe that the narrator can now understand his friend’s suicide—he killed himself because he had an illegitimate child with an older woman, and this child was disabled—may very well be a mirage or even a critique of the impulse toward that easy assumption. At every turn, as he tries to 22. At this point, it would be totally fair to ask why I am analyzing so many winners and front runners and critical darlings. Isn’t it a bit problematic to only look at these highly “s u c c e s s f u l ” fi lms, thus reifying this canon? Yes, its problematic, and this problem will continue as I continue to analyze the “heroes,” heroic texts, and heroic spaces of intellectual history. But this is in part what I feel I have to do: I need to shake the centrality of our place- ment and the surety of our interpretations of these texts to make space within them (and in every direction away from them) for other meanings. 23. As Barnes would be fully aware, the book shares a title with Frank Kermode’s 1967 book of literary criticism, a book that attempted to connect the ways we imagine the end of fi ctions and the ways we imagine the end of the world (or the ends of our own lives). 58 • Disa bi l i t y Rh e t or ic understand his past, Tony is told he does not get it. He even suggests that this could be written on his grave stone: “Tony Webster—He Never Got It.” The reader thus cannot trust the narrator’s sense of the ending, and thus cannot have a solid sense of any ending. The rhetorical power of this uncertainty then begins to expand: Is Tony suffering from dementia?

Does this dementia exemplify the imperfection of any form of memory?

Does “the sense of an ending” ask us to read back across all of the ways that we think we ourselves “get it”? Sometimes dis ex machina is employed bluntly: Heidi’s friend Clara jumps up and dances around; the disabled character explodes. And dis ex machina , like other disability myths, not only gives us ways to read cultural texts, but also structures social institutions and attitudes. As I have explored elsewhere, one way to view the dis ex machina in a fi lm like Million Dollar Baby is that it tells people that if they become disabled, they will want to die —and it tells their caregivers to help them do so. Faili ng to question the fl aws in the machine in the conclusion of Million Dollar Baby, the movie was taken up by the public as an argument for the “right to die,” or the right to assisted suicide, in the wake of the Terry Schiavo case. 24 But also and at other moments, or through other valences, dis ex machina is imperfect and opens up as many meanings as it closes down.

Alice Hall has written about the open-ended narrative structures in Faulk ner’s fi ction, suggesting that “the representation of physically and developmentally disabled characters enable [ sic] him to explore alternative narrative spaces and forms of sensory perception in his fi ction but also to explore what literary techniques can achieve” (2012, 49). In Faulkner, the “fragmented body disrupts . . . aesthetic closure” (ibid., 45). The open- endedness of Faulkner’s novels or of The Sense of an Ending also speaks to a trend that we can read also back through the past few years’ worth of popular fi lms. From Lost in Translation to No Country for Old Men to Shame to Inception (not to mention the TV series The Sopranos), t he “op e n 24. See Dolmage and DeGenaro (2005). For more on the Schiavo case, see M. Johnson 2006. MētisArchive and Anatomy of Disability Myths 59 ending” is en vogue. The prevalence of open endings in fi lms and novels could be understood as a victory for uncertainty, a strike against the neat- ness of tropes and conventions, a willingness to retain (or even embrace) subtleties and weaknesses of sign ifi cation.

Often, the ending is left open because of disability: in Scorcese’s Shutter Island , or 2011 Oscar-nominated fi lms Ta k e S h e lt e r and Martha Marcy May Marlene , the ending is left open because we do not know whether the lead character is “crazy,” and the scenes at the very end of the fi lm accentuate or introduce this doubt. 25 In this way, the very meaning we are to take away from the fi l m i s togg le d by t he rhe tor ica l con st r uc t ion of d i s abi l it y— every moment of the fi lm needs to be read backward, critically, to parse whether the character’s psychological “abnormalcies” add up to a diagno- sis or rule it out, and this diagnosis would then reframe the entire action of the fi lm. 26 This manifestation of dis ex machina i s t he ver y oppo site of t he simple and lazy forms we often see, even if disability is also here used as a plot or narrative device, instrumentally. That is, the simple way to look at the role of dis ex machina is that disability, when it appears, will readily and apparently signify, using the language of disability myth. The more complex role situates disability itself as always a rhetorical process and allows the machine to manufacture a range of possible meanings instead 25. I use the term crazy here advisedly—the speci fi c “mental disability” of the charac- ter is undiagnosed in the fi lm, also perhaps intentionally, because the goal seems to be to construct a somewhat stereotypically “crazy” character, and “accuracy” does not matter so much as the gesture toward the character’s supposed unreliability. 26. This is not exactly a new device in fi lm. And it is worth noting that when the device is used, almost always the fi lm’s narrator is rendered unreliable by disability: in Memento the narrator has antiretrograde amnesia, in Fight Club the narrator is schizophrenic, and in Ta x i Driver we might consider Robert DeNiro to have post-traumatic stress disorder (though I should perhaps be more hesitant in diagnosing and labeling). Looking a bit fur- ther back, we see dis ex machina in the canonical Cabinet of Dr. Caligari . The epilogue of this fi lm reveals that the lead character, through whose eyes we see the action of the movie, is a patient in an insane asylum—the entire plot is thrown into doubt. Joan Crawford, as the protagonist of Possessed, also narrates the events of the fi lm, and we later fi nd out these are paranoid hallucinations. 60 • Disa bi l i t y Rh e t or ic of one simple one. The audience may be placed into the role of diagnos- tician, but the audience also recognizes diagnosis for what it is—often dangerous, subjective, even frustrating. The key “lesson” here is that disability representation can never really be narrowed down to a “test” or an inventory of tropes or myths. This moves us from looking for what is simply noxious in a representation to looking for what is anxious, from locating straight stigma to feeling for curved subtlety. We can object to dis ex machina because it explodes the reality effect of a given representation, or we can celebrate the idea that disability exposes the rhetoricity of reality, both in the text and in the bod- ies of its actors and audiences.

Conclusions Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (1999) explains that to read disability through the “representational system” she references, and that I have tried to map through my chart of disability myths, is also to recognize the hegemony of the norm. As I hope I have shown in this chapter, “normal” is the myth that sublets all other disability myths within its broader real estate. Subsequently, the myth of the norm is also what renders disability myths imperfect, faulty. Disability itself is not necessarily mythical—but because it is read through reference to an invisible and impossible norm, disability has had a very unsteady representational power. As Tanya Titchkosky has argued, “Texts never just get it right or get it wrong insofar as they are also a ‘doing’—right or wrong, texts are always oriented social action , producing meaning” (2007, 21).

So it is important to view each of my charted myths as more than just textual features but also as somewhat less than realized and sedimented attitudes.

27 None of these myths of disability “works” transparently or 27. As Garland-Thomson reminds us, even Aristotle understood that literature and poetry are normative: “Literary representations depend more on probability—what people take to be accurate—than on reality.” Garland-Thomson accesses Aristotle’s Poetics here to make a point about the presence of disability stereotypes in literature: how we produce “perceptual categories that may harden into stereotypes or caricatures when communally shared or culturally inculcated” But it could also be said that Aristotle was arguing that MētisArchive and Anatomy of Disability Myths 61 ef fi ciently. When these myths surface in narratives or in social life, they most often signal a breakdown in meaning. These fi gures are “shorthand” in all of the ways that word might metaphorically and ironically describe them. Hopefully, I have begun to show where meaning multiplies in the holes and gaps and errors. In The Sense of an Ending , Tony Webster “never got it.” In this spirit, then, a fi tting epitaph for this chapter might be this: Disability Rhetoric— Never Get It. literature is where we negotiate “what we take to be accurate” and where, just as some ste- reotypes “harden,” others crumble or sublimate (1996a, 11).