Abstract
This exploration of disability directly applies Campbell’s understanding of “abledness” to the film Phenomena by Italian director Dario Argento. Phenomena (1985) explores, through the diegetic response to protagonist Jennifer Corvino’s ability to communicate with insects, the shifting cultural association between disability and deviance. The film begins with the traditional response to disability, what education psychologist Kaoru Yamamoto considers the cultural importance of classifying and interpreting disabled bodies by fitting them into a narrative of deviance for surveillance and control. Throughout Argento’s film, characters attempt to classify Jennifer; scientists seek to diagnose her “affliction” through the medical model of disability, while Jennifer’s schoolmistresses interpret Jennifer’s behavior as a disciplinary problem based in environmental factors. This represents the structural model of disability, but in each instance, the attempt to classify Jennifer fails to diagnose or discipline the supposed “deviant, disabled body.” Through this failure, the film dramatizes contemporary critiques of traditional models that examine disability, moving beyond to explore what Fiona Kumari Campbell has called “the maintenance of abledness” in sexed, raced, and modified bodies. By normalizing Jennifer’s ability, then, Phenomena offers a framework for examining the process through which elements of “abledness” become normalized, a concept which many theorists now argue should maintain the focus of disability studies.
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Notes
For example, Argento’s blind puzzle maker in his thriller The Cat o’ Nine Tails (1971) highlights which characters can and cannot “see” the truth in putting together multiple leads and evidence to find the killer. The blind detective is one of the most popular tropes concerning disabled characters circulated in literature and film. For examples, see Ernest Bramah’s stories featuring Max Carrodos and Baynard Kendrick’s stories featuring Duncan Maclain.
Originally the name of a Philistine god, “Beelzebub” translates literally from Hebrew as “lord of the flies.” Given Jennifer’s special relationship with insects, the Headmistress’s choice to connect Jennifer with Beelzebub as a means to highlight what she perceives as a deviant nature is not surprising.
For a discussion of the ways in which traditions of folklore and myth demonize people with disabilities, see Cohen’s (1996) “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)” and Lawrence D. Kritzman’s “Representing the Monster: Cognition, Cripples, and other Limp Parts in Montaigne’s ‘Des Boyteux’” in Monster Theory: Reading Culture. Indeed, many of the essays in this anthology catalogue the ways in which a variety of cultures, including Iceland and France, have historically marginalized those with physical traits deemed outside the realm of a culturally defined sense of normality, such as hermaphrodites or conjoined twins. Cohen (1996) argues that “by refusing an easy compartmentalization,” those with disabilities who are deemed monstrous or deviant “demand a radical rethinking of boundary and normality” (6). However, Cohen (1996) continues, when these traditionally marginalized people attempt to cross or redefine those boundaries, “escapist delight gives way to horror” (p. 17).
In the film, Jennifer recounts the story of her mother leaving on Christmas Day, which Argento’s mother also did to him.
Critics have famously called Dario Argento the “Italian Hitchcock” due to his stylistic and somewhat idiosyncratic editing and framing techniques evocative of Alfred Hitchcock. Indeed, most critics of his films tend to focus on film style or on psychological readings of his murderous characters (and how their madness becomes embedded in cinematic technique). Despite the fact that Argento uses disabled characters throughout his oeuvre as both heroes and villains, no one has discussed the role they play in his films. Two of the more famous examples are the paraplegic Dr. McGregor in Phenomena and the blind puzzle maker portrayed by Karl Malden in The Cat o’ Nine Tails (1971). Though Dr. McGregor meets an untimely end in the film, the puzzle maker saves his niece in a final perilous scene atop a medical building’s rooftop. In a career that has spanned almost five decades, Argento has focused primarily on making films of the horror or thriller genre and is one of Italy’s most popular filmmakers. In recent years, however, Argento has directed several poorly received films, leading some fans and critics alike to question his role in contemporary Italian cinema and horror cinema. For popular readings of Argento’s films, see McDonagh’s (2010) Broken Mirrors, Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento and Gallant’s (2001) anthology Art of Darness: The Cinema of Dario Argento.
In her chapter on the cochlear implant (CI), Campbell argues that CI technology developers use the rhetorical strategy of bandwagoning—that is, an attempt to strengthen an argument by convincing an audience that accepting the writer’s side will put them on the popular or apparently winning side—to silence the creation of “Deaf sensibility” and to promote hearing as a form of social capital (92). Campbell critiques this move by showing how it contributes to “the aim of CIs,” which is “to simulate (fabricate) ‘hearing’ in order to facilitate the assimilation of deaf individuals into the dominant hearing world, thereby ensuring the deafened become productive (ableist) citizens” (90).
This point resonates with many Deaf identified people’s experience of deafness as described by Campbell. Karen Lloyd writes, “To us [Deaf identified people], deafness is a natural part of life, it is something that has always been there and is an integral part of who we are. It is not something we have lost or that needs to be ‘cured.’ The Deaf community has a rich cultural heritage that revolves around its language, Auslan, and Deaf people who belong to this community enjoy a fulfilling and active social and cultural life” (qtd. in Campbell 2009, p. 92).
For more information on the use of the gaze in disability studies, see Garland-Thomson’s (2009) book Staring.
For example, the scene in which Jennifer’s schoolmates taunt her about her supposed powers shows the dangers of attempting to pass and the negative repercussions of getting caught. Campbell would see this attempt at passing—at trying to perform “nearabledbodiness”—as a result of compulsory abledness that leads to a kind of self-hatred.
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McDaniel, J.L. Disability and Deviance: Dario Argento’s Phenomena and the Maintenance of Abledness as a Critical Framework. Cult Med Psychiatry 37, 625–637 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-013-9345-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-013-9345-8