In Screening Stereotypes, Paul K. Longmore wrote,
“Disability happens around us more often than we generally recognize or care to notice…”
This is often true, even with variably embodied individuals as well. I have come to realize this, not only with regards to my own embodiment, but with my close variably embodied loved ones as well. This prevalence of overlooking and dismissiveness is very true …unless you have begun taking a form of disability studies course and find yourself thinking more and more critically of, not only your surroundings, but what you watch for leisure with the intention of ‘forgetting about class stuff for a bit’
Ah… an evening of re-watching some blue rays on a Saturday morning to relax and unwind from the hectic busy academic bustle of college life…
I am watching one of my favorite Marvel Entertainment movies, The Wolverine …everything is going well…Hough Jackman is portraying Logan handsomely and without disappointment…I find myself not think about much other than Logan being his usual charming sarcastic brute, until…we reach the climax of the movie’s plot, and I recall reading,
“Though many of the examples date from the period when this article was written, the same themes and characterizations, the same stereotypes, have persisted up to the present.”
The Critical Approaches to Lit-Cul class I am currently in, recently had this assigned reading that I am quoting from. It was published by the Temple University Press in 2003… We are in 2016…and the stereotypes and characterizations regarding disability we encountered throughout Paul K. Longmore’s essay (as I realize profoundly while watching The Wolverine) are still heavily steeped into today’s films and tv shows.
There is no denying that the story/plot behind this movie, disability was most definitely utilized as a “melodramatic device” by representing an association of disability with EVIL. Longmore explains that this form of characterization reinforces “three common prejudices against handicapped people: disability is a punishment for evil; disabled people are embittered by their “fate”; disabled people resent the nondisabled and would, if they could, destroy them.” All three can be teased out from this movie’s plot.
In The Wolverine, the villainous representation of disability is done through the main antagonist, Yashida. His story begins during WWII in a prison camp near Nagasaki, Japan. He is a young Japanese officer who Logan saves from not only seppuku (ritual suicide), but from the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki. Logan gets Yashida to climb down into a pit, as he grabs a metal door to cover Yashida. Seconds later a wall of fire sweeps into the well, and Logan is horribly burned. Yashida survives the bombing with only a small burn on his cheek, and watches in horror as the third-degree burns on Logan's body heal before his eyes. In these events the movie presents the first mentioned common prejudice in two ways. First by depicting the Japanese army as the ‘bad guys’, already making Yoshida ‘evil’. Second, Yoshida doesn’t go through with the seppuku which would culturally bring dishonor on him and his family, making him again, the ‘bad guy’. What’s his punishment you might ask? Well, sometime later in the movie, years… later in the plot, Yashida’s elderly body is being ravaged by cancer. So the punishment for being the ‘bad guy’ is a debilitating deadly disabling disease.
Fulfilling common prejudice number two, Yashida is characterized as a bitter old man who wants to ‘fight’ his ‘fate’, cheat death, and become more powerful that he has ever been. This embitterment is represented through his treatment of his own son, and his obsession with non-stop advancement with his cutting edge medical technology company.
This obsession brings us into the third reinforced prejudice. Yashida’s amazement with Logan’s unique mutant super embodiment turns in to selfish jealousy as he nears closer to his body’s health and ‘abled’ limit. having been obsessed with Wolverine's adamantium skeleton, Yashida had been stockpiling adamantium for years. Yashida life's goal since meeting Logan was to prolong his own life, at whatever cost, even if than meant killing Logan, his savior.
Now if realizing these three common prejudices in full effect was not disappointing enough, I realized that the plot end for Yashida is the representation of a stereotype or assumption that “disability makes membership in the community and meaningful life itself impossible…” by giving Yashida’s death the only possible solution. On top of that Yashida’s obsession with Logan’s vitality reinforces what Tobin Siebers calls the ideology of ability, but that would be a whole other worms best kept for another day.
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