Cultures of Representation: Disability in World Cinema Contexts

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, several of these ‘disability road movies’ have been made all over Europe. They have attracted a large audience in European movie theatres and film festivals. This chapter focuses on the relation between the narrative and aesthetic specifics of this new ‘genre’. Moreover, it also situates this genre within the discourse of ‘normalcy’ as examined by disability studies scholars in Europe and the United States (see Waldschmidt 2006; Davis 2010). It connects issues concerning the definition of a genre by film scholars with an understanding of disability as a sociocultural product, with an analysis of these filmic narratives in selected Central European ‘disability road movies’ through a discussion of the dis/abled body as a starting point of the narration, where the disability is used as a ‘prosthetic contrivance’ (Mitchell and Snyder 2010: 99).

Most of the European road movies since Federico Fellini’s La strada (The Road, 1954) and Ingmar Bergman’s Smultronstrället (Wild Strawberries, 1957), however, show particular attributes that are determined by the territorial constitution of Europe as a multiethnic continent and the European tradition of the travel film. In contrast to the US, Europe consists of 47 sovereign countries, and hence the probability of crossing national borders within the narration of a European road movie is subsequently much higher than in the US-American road movie (see Laderman 2002: 248; Mazierska and Rascaroli 2006: 5). In crossing borders, the protagonists not only trespass territorial limits, but also permeate boundaries between culture and language groups. These in turn imply a multitude of possibilities through which to move the narration forward, e.g. by misunderstandings, confusions or mistranslations. At the same time, sequences of driving are shorter in European than in US-American road movies, with a narrative focus on what stands between the driving sequences: pauses, stopovers and breakdowns on the way to the destination of the journey (see Risholm 2001: 124). By doing so, the cinematographic language of the European road movie produces fewer panorama views showing the speed of the car in a vast, empty landscape crossed by a paved highway. Instead, it focuses on shots of the car standing still and people moving around or in it (see Risholm 2001: 123; Bräutigam 2009: 155). The protagonists of European road movies are less frequently shown as outlaws or criminals choosing to ‘hit the road’, either to hide from the police or other authorities, and mostly lack a fixed destination or even a home to which they could return (see Laderman 2002: 247). Instead, they tend to be on their way to a more-or-less precise destination, driven by a certain idea or purpose and informed by practical considerations related to work, immigration or holidays. Therefore, the representation of European road movie protagonists tends to emphasise collective forms of life and practical necessities rather than the desire for absolute freedom or to escape from legal prosecution, which is then shot against the background of a long highway (see Mazierska and Rascaroli 2006: 5). Summing up these characteristics of the European road movie, Laderman states that ‘the European road movie foregrounds the meaning of the quest journey more than the mode of transport; revelation and realization receive more focus than the act of driving’ (2002: 248).

This study takes three German and Belgian films released since 2002 as representative examples: Vincent will Meer (Vincent wants to Sea, Germany 2010), Hasta la Vista (Come as you are, Belgium 2011) and Verrückt nach Paris (Crazy About Paris, Germany 2002). These movies identify themselves or are identified by film critics as ‘road movies’, staging people with disabilities as their protagonists.³ What unites them in their narrative arc is a plotting in three parts: first, the point of departure, depicting the circumstances and the causes for the protagonists’ decision to ‘hit the road’; second, the escape from those circumstances and the road trip that follows the escape; third, the arrival at their (fixed or random) destination or place of longing. While this description of a typical road movie plot does not necessarily apply only to road movies including disabled people, I aim to show that in the subgenre of disability road movies, those three (probably heuristic) parts of the narrative arc are connected to an understanding of normalcy as a counterpart to non-normalcy. On the road these disabled protagonists confront and potentially transgress the social boundaries of the normalcy that governs their lives: but the question is whether these inner transformations and symbolic outer journeys will result in a wider social transformation.

In Hasta la Vista, the three young protagonists – Philip, Lars and Jozef from Belgium – are living with their families. Paraplegic Philip is his parents’ only child and he depends on them in several ways: they take control of their son’s whole life, including feeding, washing and dressing him – or even putting his palsied hand on his crutch when he goes to sleep. After another boring family vacation at the Northern Sea, he and his friends – terminally ill and wheelchair-using Lars and their almost blind friend Jozef – decide to go on a trip to Spain without their families, just as ‘normal’ youngsters their age would do. All three of them are represented as highly dependent on their families although living outside one of the ‘classical’ institutions as described by Goffman; nevertheless, their everyday life happens inside a given structure where their social function as ‘son’, combined with their respective disabilities, does not enable them to rebel against their parents. Therefore, their rebellion needs to be disguised: Philip, Lars and Jozef want to go to Spain, because they have heard of a brothel where female sex workers are not only very attractive, but also attending to men with disabilities. Under the pretext of a cultural and study trip, they initially book a fancy van including an experienced driver and male nurse, who cancels the trip when it is revealed that Lars’ tumor is steadily growing, thus giving him only a few weeks to live. Unfortunately, Philip, Lars and Jozef cannot be too spontaneous in their intention of ‘hitting the road’: they can’t drive themselves and need assistance for their daily necessities. Consequently, their breakout from their families is not only overcoming boundaries because of their wish to lose their virginity in a Spanish brothel (a ‘normal’ wish), but also because they realise their plan to leave their homes secretly and to start a road trip against their parents’ will. In the end, they hire another driver and leave their homes early one morning with only Lars’ little sister as a confidant.

The protagonists Vincent, Marie and Alexander in Vincent will Meer also live in a total institution, even though they are not represented as physically but rather mentally disabled. Vincent’s Tourette syndrome, named by his father as the reason for his mother’s early death, is shown as something that deviates from normalcy, namely from what one would call ‘decency’ or ‘modesty’. His stay at a clinic without a further specification is seemingly justified in the very first sequence of the film: while the people at his mother’s funeral are sitting quietly and devoutly in the cemetery chapel, Vincent is not able to control his tics and starts quivering and swearing – something no one would do if he or she was ‘normal’. Hence, the beginning of Vincent will Meer already establishes that Vincent is different. But he is not marked as ‘disabled’ until his angry father decides to get him ‘cured’ and brings him to the clinic, where he meets the obsessive-compulsive Alexander and anorexic and cardiac Marie. At the clinic everything is managed for the young inmates, who quickly become friends: mealtimes at the dining hall, therapies and shared dorms. A high fence surrounds the clinic; it separates and therefore divides the ‘non-normal’ people on the inside from the ‘normal’ people on the outside, and respectively the ‘healthy’ from the ‘disabled’. For Vincent and Marie, the decision to flee these walls is easy: Marie tells Vincent that she ‘found’ a car after both of them had been admonished by their therapist for unreasonable behaviour. Vincent’s late mother wanted to go to Italy right before she died, and Vincent was not able to fulfill her wish – although he had already packed her bags. Vincent therefore asks Marie to go to the Italian sea with him; Marie agrees and they secretly leave the clinic at night. Neurotic Alexander is following them, threatening them as he witnesses Marie and Vincent stealing the therapists’ car, so they force him to come with them in the little red Saab, although he is reluctant and screaming for help. The road trip begins, this time bearing the typical European road movie feature of a fixed destination.

In each of these movies it is obvious that there is a difference between the protagonists and their surroundings. Moreover, this is a difference that is linked to a physical or mental confinement, or one made evident via the interaction between the protagonists and their surroundings, where blame is placed on individual bodies and not on the wider society in which disability takes shape as a social relationship. The exposition at the beginning of each movie establishes the institutionalisation of the protagonists and produces a governed normalcy for those inside the institution as well as a normalcy beyond the walls as physical and metaphorical limits – a normalcy that ironically marks the inside of the institution as something outside the norm. All protagonists are effectively in search of something – independence, (sexual) self-determination, adventure – and all of them are unsatisfied with their social role as ‘non-normal’ people. As in most road movies, this is not only about breaking out of the normalcy and routine inside the institution, but about a personal search of identity and meaning of life. This happens by means of a confrontation with what is outside the institution, an outside that paradoxically has marked the insiders as ‘outsiders’ (see Bräutigam 2009: 30). Nevertheless, they are no outlaws in the classical definition of being outside the law itself. The three movies and their cinematographic exposition instead are driven by an existentialist subject matter. They are ‘quest road movies’, in which the protagonists leave the places they were assigned to by society and start breaking the standards and expectations of society (see Bräutigam 2009: 45). Their produced deviation from ‘normalcy’, and their disability, becomes the cause for narration, ‘a primary impetus of the storyteller’s efforts’ (Mitchell and Snyder 2010: 274). Their physical or mental divergence from a simultaneously produced normalcy becomes the background for a story precisely establishing this divide. The road trip thus begins as an adventure and as a transgression of visible and invisible boundaries (see Risholm 2001: 31).

For a ‘normal’ hero – as well as for the protagonists of Vincent will Meer, Hasta la Vista and Verrückt nach Paris – the journey on the road symbolically represents the feeling of absolute freedom and of having escaped from former lives. However, we have to pay attention to the divergences in disability road movies compared to the well-described genre of the non-disability road movie at this point: if the road movie carries the protagonist from his/ her everyday life into a non-everyday life, the trip may end either with a refusal to return (for example, due to a desire to continue the journey or even death) or with a repatriation into society whereby the protagonist re-enters everyday life again. This development applies to our three filmic examples, which capture their protagonists fleeing from their respective institution to experience something new and different from their everyday life. But we have to critically evaluate if their journey under these circumstances should rather be understood as an escape from not-normalcy into normalcy (and maybe back into not-normalcy) oppositional to what Ellen Risholm would call a ‘denormalization’ (2001: 116). Referring to the German theorist of literature and culture Jürgen Link, Risholm describes the main narrative of the (non-disabled) road movie as a ‘(not) normal journey’. Initially, this denotation means to her that the journey in a road movie is opposed to a ‘normal’ everyday trip (i.e. to the supermarket) and is instead identified by crossing the limits of normalcy. This category does apply to Vincent, Marie and Alexander; to Karl, Philip and Hilde; and to Philip, Jozef and Lars – although with a twist. In their case, the escape from the institution as a transgression of the limits of normalcy facilitates that very sort of everyday life that passes for ‘normalcy’ in non-disabled road movies. Having dinner in a restaurant, going out, having sexual relations – the banality of these presumed everyday occurrences are nothing normal to these disabled characters. However, they subsequently also denote part of a process of normalisation instead of denormalisation: anorexic Marie starts eating again, seeing that outside the institution and its strict rules she can decide by herself whether and what to eat; the three guys from Belgium get so inebriated that they can barely find their way to their hotel rooms and eventually sleep in one bed; learning disabled Hilde pays with her own money for the train tickets to Paris, thus deciding where she wants to go instead of being patronised by the asylum’s director. While those things would not be unusual occurrences in a well-developed scene in a ‘normal’ road movie, they are shown here as special in a world where normalcy and non-normalcy blur. Disability is thus produced as something extraordinary and as something that is worth being narrated as a response to the fear of the audience of being denormalised (see Waldschmidt 1998). However, the labelling as ‘different’ does not change due to the fact that the runaways are confronted on their journey with certain barriers in their environment whose overcoming is staged as a transgression of the impairment itself.

None of the three movies stages the protagonists as apparently pitiful creatures: paraplegic Philip in Hasta la Vista does not fit with the image of the ‘good cripple’ at all; instead, he is a cheeky and spoiled egomaniac who will not earn a lot of sympathy from the audience. He makes fun of his driver and assistant Claude, saying that she was a ‘fat mammoth’ when he thinks that she wouldn’t understand him. But his behaviour changes towards her after Claude saves the life of blind Jozef, who has fallen into a river at a resting place at the side of the road. Philip realises that he depends on her, and tries to be nice, while still remaining insubordinate and brazen, almost provoking a fight with Dutch tourists in a vineyard. In Verrückt nach Paris, the three inmates of the asylum from Bremen on their way to Paris also do not endear themselves too much to the audience, replacing droll or pitiful traits with street-smart and stubbornness. And in Vincent will Meer, a conflict between Alexander and Vincent emerges after having climbed a mountain; Vincent hits Alexander multiple times in the face until he starts bleeding. Vincent later explains that he only did this out of affection and worries. All this would not be a problem for a road movie – but the filmic narration emphasises again and again how ‘normal’ these ‘not normal’ people were. In doing so, the films are acting against an explicit individual or medical model of disability which defines a person by his or her impairment and as an object of medical and therapeutic treatment. However, neither do they take a clear stand for a social or cultural model of disability as demanded and widely discussed by disability studies scholars. Consequently, the significance attributed to disability within the movies oscillates between a ‘personal tragedy’ model (see Barnes and Mercer 2003: 2) keeping the characters from realising their potential, and a constant repetition of the affirmation of ‘normalcy’ à la ‘Look how normal these people are!’ (see also the ‘realistic mode’; Garland-Thomson 2001).

Remaining true to classic road movie narration, Vincent will Meer, Verrückt nach Paris and Hasta la Vista all feature the character of a chaser or persecutor trying to track the heroes down, acting as an antagonist. In classical US-American road movies such as Thelma and Louise (USA, 1991) or Easy Rider (USA, 1969), this antagonistic force is embodied in the police or legal authorities, who try to hunt down the protagonists – also by car – in order to capture them and seemingly re-establish social norms. In disability road movies, this role is taken up by the parents or staff from the clinic or asylum, who try to bring the escaped characters back into the institution – of course, seemingly for their own good – thus reaffirming the medical model of disability that sees disabled characters as a problem to be fixed or contained. Because the escape from the institution has usually occurred in secret, the chasers first have to find out where the fugitives are going. Consequently, road movies are full of mysteries, clues and red herrings, but also sudden encounters, wild car chases and narrow escapes. During the journey, not only do the protagonists undergo transformation by negotiating their identity along the distance traveled, their persecutors also pass through a kind of rite de passage, and may start to reflect on their own role as parents or assistants to the fugitive protagonists.

In Vincent will Meer the arrival at the seaside is not only connected within the dramatisation of the title character encountering his father and his therapist again; it also coincides with the breakdown of anorexic and cardiac patient Marie, who has to be admitted to the hospital. While she is in the emergency unit, Vincent gets into the car with his morally cleansed father who intends to take the road back to Germany. When Vincent asks his father to let him get out of the car so that he can go back to the hospitalised Marie, the movie aesthetically and narratively depicts the fundamental openness to a life outside the institution: as Vincent and Alexander start walking back towards the Italian town where Marie is, the camera turns to the left and zooms out. It shows a seemingly never ending width of horizon over the sea – a symbol for the renewed opportunity that Vincent and Alexander might have to direct their lives on their own terms. Consequently, the movie does not end with establishing institutionalisation as Seeßlen predicted; instead, it makes an effort to stress the autonomy of the decisions of its protagonists. It remains unclear, however, whether Vincent is taken back to the clinic or if he and his father are going to start all over again outside the institution.