Susan Flynn
One cannot consider contemporary American film without thinking of Hollywood’s ambiguous bodies that escape human imperfection by the fusion of biotechnology with the body. Enacting ‘American-ness’, the bodies on film are now jostled and coerced into a conspicuous optimisation; one that is the duty of each citizen, be it for power, profit or beauty. This somatic duty is the new form of ableism in Hollywood film.
American identity, rather than depending on a common ethnicity or language, seems to be defined by faith in a set of ideologies. American-ness is embodied by the Hollywood characters who espouse a range of perceived American traits: individualism, equality, liberty, democracy and American exceptionalism. Americans focus on these specific ideas of themselves to justify their lifestyles, plans and projects (see Crothers 2010) and the Hollywood film industry buttresses these internalised cultural beliefs. Individualism, an ideology which purports that each individual is responsible for himself and ought to utilise the capacity to improve his own circumstances, may be characterised by self-governance, self-determination, autonomy and progress (see Garland-Thomson 1997). Woven into culture and social institutions, individualism symbolises the freedom of the American way of life; rather than being static, economic political and cultural shifts continuously shape the notion of individualism (see Greene 2008: 118). Disparate threads may be identified that still share common structural antecedents and over-arching outcomes; although individualistic beliefs vary across social class, location and various identities, the notion of self-reliance is paramount. This chapter assumes a Marxist approach: individualism buttresses capitalism by fostering self-interest, inspiring the masses to hard work, while encouraging them to focus on their own material desires (see Marx and Engels 1978).
It was in the United States that individualism became a symbolic catchword of immense significance, celebrating capitalism and liberal democracy, free enterprise and the American Dream, and came to be seen as incompatible with the opposing claims of socialism and communism (see Lukes 1971). Propagated along with the new liberal nation, America embraced individualism as a corrective to the social hierarchies that immigrants left behind in Europe; the notion of social responsibility is also eschewed by this individualism: ‘Compared with the more socially minded Europeans, Americans are thought to place a higher value on self-reliance and individual initiative and to recoil from the idea of government responsibility for individuals’ well being’ (Gilens 2009: 32). Hollywood dresses itself in these ideological clothes, acting as a global transmitter which garners public fascination in the mythical notion of an individualist, free democracy where each citizen has the ability to improve their social standing by virtue of hard work (see Garland-Thomson 1997; Snyder and Mitchell 2006). The Jeffersonian notion of the individual’s self-direction and autonomy is still deeply rooted.
The view of America as ‘the land of the free’ refers to individuals unencumbered by political or religious tyranny. ‘Land of opportunity’ myths allude to autonomous individuals finding pathways to wealth, success, status, and the like. The bald eagle – a solitary hunter – is depicted as the official national symbol of a country of free, autonomous individuals. (Greene 2008: 122)
Furthermore, in this paradigm, each citizen is a microcosm of the American nation (see Garland-Thomson 1997). ‘Good’ citizens, then, are those who enact the correct amount of self-drive and determination, to improve their own position and the overall position of the nation. However, that depends upon a body that is fit and able: a neutral instrument of the individual will. The disabled figure complicates this fantasy (ibid.). The economic sphere is fraught with competition and celebrates the ‘survival of the fittest’, which literally and figuratively places people with disabilities at a disadvantage. The notion extolled by individualism whereby each citizen has the same potential for success, is predicated on the assumption that every citizen has the same material condition. Individualism, therefore, has a predilection for ‘normal’ bodies and so seeks to reject or ‘normalise’ those outside the realm of what is considered normal. American democracy, citizenship and majority consent depend on and assume a heterogeneous and autonomous subject who exercises free will for the betterment of himself and consequently all others.
America has long imagined itself as a technological leader and industrial power, moving from an agrarian society to a leading industrial power by the 1800s. Industry became central to the world image of America as a dynamic inventive culture and throughout the twentieth century technology became the hallmark of America’s modernism (see Clark 2006). The significance of industrial work and inventiveness is central to the mythology and perception of American-ness. Ideologies of what such work is, and who performs it, lead it to a critical juncture at which American-ness meets individualism. This focus leaves no room for persons with differing abilities. Films made in Hollywood, primarily for an American audience, reflect this centrality of individualised work: ‘[Mass media] are the cultural arms of the industrial order from which they spring. Mass media policies reflect and cultivate not only the general structure of social relations but also specific types of institutional and industrial organization and control’ (Gerbner 2000: 144). Mike Oliver (1990) suggests that the ideologies of individualism, medicalisation and normalisation are linked to capitalism’s rise and have shaped contemporary understandings of disability; the capitalist system established a hegemony of fully functioning bodies that has continued to perpetuate ableism in mainstream employment. Social critics posit that individualism justifies inequalities by suggesting that barriers to economic success are due to the psyches of individuals, rather than to social structures (see Greene 2008). Encouraging autonomy, individualism assumes each person is capable of rational and vigorous self-improvement. The assumption that every person has the ability to improve their social position leaves no room for those who may need care or assistance and perpetuates the myth of self-sufficiency, constructing some as dependent and others as autonomous (see White and Tronto 2004). A person’s ‘disability’, then, is his or her own responsibility. A neoliberal ethos prevails, which incurs a high degree of body management; those who do not sufficiently maintain their own bodies are held responsible for their non-well-being (see Mitchell 2014: 4). The political resonances of these ideologies have far-reaching consequences for people with disabilities. Constrained within its own system, Hollywood fails to provide a broad range of representations of disability. Any deviation from ideologies of individualism and equal opportunity is considered unseemly (see Kolker 1983).
Hollywood and the Reconstitution of Ideology
Much has been written about Avatar (James Cameron, 2009), perhaps due – at the time of writing – to its status as the most financially successful film of all time (see Bennett 2013). This film is an interesting example of biotechnology occupying a discursive position which facilitates American individualism; providing the opportunity to escape from the imperfect body, while making optimisation of the body a duty of individualism. In situating the disabled character in a diegesis which privileges able characters, the film recirculates medical model ideologies of the disabled character in need of diagnosis, intervention, cure or rehabilitation. Furthermore, in positioning biotechnical optimisation as the duty of the disabled citizen, Avatar enacts a drama of individualism where to ‘get on’ you must ‘get fixed’. The film celebrates the optimising potential which is provided by biotechnology, even though it confesses that not everyone will have access to its transformative ‘solutions’. In the opening voiceover Sully (Sam Worthington) reveals ‘they can fix a spine if you got the money. But not on vet benefits, not in this economy’. In dealing with the financial exigency by suggesting hard work and determination will allow every disabled person to acquire the necessary finances for biotechnical intervention, the film reconstitutes the ideology of individualism, using Sully’s body as a disturbing commentary on perceptions of disabled people’s lives.
Rather than society having responsibility for creating disability, the onus is on that person to improve their life prospects. From a Marxist perspective Hollywood films such as this contribute to the reproduction of the capitalist system and maintain the existing social structure. American individualism is visible in the conviction that everyman can ‘succeed’; attain professional, personal and romantic success by hard work and bravery. In fact, lack of success is suggested to stem from indolence and lack of moral citizenship, as is shown in the mise-en-scène; the differing depictions of Sully before and after he takes up his position with the corporation are visible in costume, performance and staging. The apparently apathetic former marine with his despondent slouch and casual ‘hoodie’ is transformed into a soldier with ‘potential’ when he takes the job on Pandora. Troubling for disability rights, as it removes any responsibility from society to better accommodate differing abilities, individualism also makes the disability a personal tragedy which must be overcome, and so is tied up with Medical Model ideology.
As the film makes clear, cures need cash, and so it is possible to surmise that even in the scientifically advanced future, there will still be disability and a class structure that will preclude medical ‘cures’ for the have-nots.
Avatar not only suggests that individualism is the answer to this problem but that moral worth equates with the willingness to become ‘able’: ‘American individualism is most clearly manifest in the conviction that economic autonomy results from hard work and virtue, while poverty stems from indolence and moral inferiority’ (Garland-Thomson 1997: 47). The film suggests that if one can be ‘fixed’ one
must desire and pursue that outcome; narrative closure depends on it. The happy ending emphasises the importance of the individual in determining his own future prospects, thereby managing to undermine the role of class, education or fate (see Crothers 2010).
Sully’s heroism testifies to American exceptionalism, an ideology bound up with individualism; the American working-class hero is the fair, if uneducated, everyman who brings peace. Sully’s innate sense of right and wrong apparently come from his humble beginnings in the US. When he orates to the Na’vi and encourages them to engage in a war to restore their freedom, he espouses the American notions of ‘fighting for freedom’ and caters ‘to the audience’s seemingly bottomless thirst for imagining themselves the heroes of world history’ (Reider 2011: 49). Re-hashing the rhetoric of the Bush administration,
Avatar’s Colonel Quarritch channels the American policies of ‘shock and awe’ and ‘pre-emptive strikes’ that articulate the national ethos of strong, assertive aggression. American exceptionalism is exposed in the narrative closure, which sees Neytiri’s rightful claim to power neutralised by the strong white American male. The ‘forces of good’ instilled in Sully during his military training, the supposed benevolent intent of US marines, arm him with the characteristics of the perfect American lone hero, saving the world, conquering lands and people; things he apparently could not do in his disabled state. The emphasis on nation and national fitness obviously plays into the metaphor of the body and the metaphor of the marine. If individual citizens are not fit and able, if they do not fit in, then the national body will not be fit (see Davis 1995). In most cinematic versions of American exceptionalism, the US is portrayed as having the good of the world as its primary concern, displaying a generous foreign policy that confirms the US as the leader of the ‘free world’.
1The Lone Hero and the Frontier
At the beginning of the narrative Sully is a disabled veteran, seemingly no longer an active member of society. There is no suggestion that a return to active duty in the forces is imminent. The death of his identical twin has provided the opportunity to gain employment, replacing him in the avatar programme. He is notably unqualified and in this sense he is an outsider and very much alone. ‘Frequently, a disabled body is represented as a metaphor for emotional or spiritual deficiency. Unlike normative filmic bodies that literally advance the plot, the disabled body often exists primarily as a metaphor for a body that is unable to do so’ (Chivers and Markotic 2010: 2). In order to advance the plot, Sully must seize the optimising potential on offer and become re-abled, thus driving forward the narrative and simultaneously enacting and celebrating individualism.
As a renegade avatar, he acts against his military and corporate superiors, raging against their colonialist attitudes to the destruction and plunder of Pandora. Lone heroes in this sense act against entire power systems, in a recognisable convention of ‘everyman’ rejecting the chains that bind him to his social position. In this way the lone hero often has a tenuous relationship with authority; flaunting it when he sees it does not represent the common good. Avatar’s ‘lone hero’ can only enact his hero status as an ‘able’ avatar; he becomes the cowboy at the frontier once he has thrown off the shackles of his disabled body. In this way his disabled body becomes the surface upon which the story of American individualism is written. The sturdy individualism of the cowboy with his disregard for convention defines a necessarily ‘able’ hero. Existing by and for himself, he lives at the borders of civilisation where ‘unconstrained by civil mores, he is able to restore morality with his six-guns and by doing things no civilized man dare’ (Kaulingfreks et al. 2009: 152). Cowboys embody a vision of American liberal ideology; seeking the greater good despite a disregard for social conventions, the cowboy works alone to benefit society.
The western as a genre appeals to American individualism simply because the triumph of good over evil justifies liberal politics which depend on self-reliance and independence (see Nichols 2008). The benefits of the cowboy’s individual action are shared by the community in a morality tale of self-reliance and duty to the common good. But the West, as the old adage says, is no country for old men; neither, as Avatar would have us believe, is it a country for people with disabilities. Crucial to the ideology of American individualism, the frontier fed the fantasy of the good life that every citizen could attain. The western genre enacted a mythical manhood that was built on strength, virility and individualism, a notion of the autonomous individual with the strength to survive and vanquish the indigenous ‘savages’. Professional intervention allows Sully to become such a hero; medical model ideologies and the spirit of capitalism in this way fortuitously allow him to be reborn as an able avatar.
In a classically ableist construction Sully is apparently alone, unemployed and unable to find love as a disabled man. In this way disability is portrayed as the symptom of individual attributes; the effect of his impairment. In scene one his apparent indolence and apathetic slouch add to the image of him as despondent and alone, human ‘waste’ that the military-industrial complex can recoup due to the shared DNA of his dead twin. As an ‘able’ avatar he finds love and furthermore reinforces traditional gender roles, as Neytiri’s rightful claim to power is diffused by her marriage to the American (able) man. Traditional gender roles are thus reestablished by Sully’s re-ableing. The frontiers of the uncivilised lands of Pandora provide the arena for the re-abled hero to reassert his manhood. The frontier has traditionally held a romantic attraction in American culture: ‘In marrying a native woman, the metaphorical symbol of the landscape, the white male literally marries the frontier, subordinating it to the patriarchal will’ (Wherry 2013: 2). In this way, Pandora thus becomes the conquered land and stands as a testament to individualism; the ‘he who dares wins’ mentality.
Giving Disability ‘The Boot’
At the beginning of scene two an extended close up of Colonel Quarritch’s boots acts as an establishing shot which alludes to the strict military regime that is goal-driven and highly organised.
The starkness of the shot alludes to the importance of feet and (able) bodies in the narrative as well as providing a contrast with Sully’s feet. Focusing on a body feature to define the characteristics of a character inevitably invokes cultural or ideological notions about such body parts and their efficacy. Quarritch promises to help Sully ‘get his legs back’, a prospect so far denied to him because of financial constraints. This is Sully’s motivation, a plan that will require a return journey to another planet and take six years of cryo sleep each way. Accepting such a deal reveals not only that Sully had nothing of importance to do on Earth, but those twelve years of sleep is a fair price to pay for ‘new legs’.
Fig. 1: Quarritch enters discussing the strict military regime.
Fig. 2: Sully’s avatar feet caress the earth on Pandora for the first time.
Sully’s new feet are at the forefront of the shot when he awakens as an avatar for the first time. Now an ‘able’ avatar, he enacts a thrilled fascination with his feet, which become the symbol of his new mobility. Shunning the cautions of the lab workers, he escapes outside, joyously running through the lush open spaces of Pandora. Sully’s new feet, the symbol of the ‘able’ body, enact both celebration and spectacle. The shot of the new feet caressing the brown earth alludes to the new-found mastery of the body.
The ‘working’ feet, a source of excessive sensation, articulate the worth of the new body. The editing of the shots, which draws attention to specific body parts, is thus complicit in a judgement, as the sub-division of the body into a set of discontinuous functions speaks to a ‘fetishistic fragmentation of the embodied person’ (Shildrick 1997: 53). This fragmentation allows the (able) feet to become a motif of the narrative, their blue fleshiness a panacea to the Earthly ills that have apparently caused, among other ills, the ‘problem’ of disability. In this very Foucauldian sense, the body is the canvas upon which history is written; molded by regimes of power. The singularity of the ineffective (disabled) feet divorces Sully from the shared identity of American-ness; the disability cannot be accommodated by American individualism and so it must be left behind.
Science and the Duty of ‘Cure’
Sully is objectified by scrutiny and intervention, subjected to normalising judgement which constitutes impairment as a deficit; as such he occupies an in-valid social position. As is the tradition of Hollywood disability films, ‘capitalism is introduced as a system that facilitates the successful re-integration of the characters into society’ (Fore 2011: 5). Seizing the opportunities that biotechnology offers thus becomes Sully’s American duty.
It is indisputable that new technologies are radicalising social life while also mediating personhood. Biotechnological advances now propose individualised ‘solutions’ and proclaim disability ‘as a designation for the non-(re) constructed bodies of the Old World’ (Kumari Campbell 2009: 45). Avatar glorifies the solutions that biotechnology offers through the marriage of individualism with the transformative potential offered to Sully. To ‘get his legs back’ he must seize the opportunity to transform; the return to normalcy thus depends on his own actions. Furthermore, when Sully becomes an able Na’vi, he joins a tribe connected to one another, plugged-in to a healing force which enables each of them to upload information from each other and from a central source; a simple metaphor for the power of technology to reboot and re-enable broken bodies. The need to plug-in suggests that one must get ‘fixed’ to be part of the community.
Sully’s avatar bears only a trace of the disabled human; deeply encoded in the avatar’s performativity are the longing to be ‘able’ while enacting the uncertain borders between human and unhuman. Modern audiences, sold on the notion that everything is fixable, are lulled into this vision of the repairable body. Through such narratives, biotechnology may be seen as the servant of American individualism; the body is a site at which new technologies radicalise opportunities, making the spoils of mythic America open to self-service. The price is scrutiny; surveillance is internalised in the disabled body as ‘cure’ is provided, functionality is restored as internal privacy is lost. Disabled bodies are thus seen as matter that biotechnology can recoup.
The film is morally unambiguous; Sully must optimise to repair the difficulties in his own micro world and consequently in the macro world of the earth/Pandora struggle. Hostile forces can only be brought to heel by the enactment of individualism which inculcates intervention and control; the normalising judgement of professional opinion and supposedly rational intervention. In this way, the individualist position incurs professional interference at the most intimate level, drawing the professional into the body and the mind of the disabled character, quantifying, measuring and logging both physical and mental activity while the disabled subject is sealed in his sarcophogeal control booth.
Avatar’s vision of the future is replete with modulations of the body. The intersection of physiology and technology result in a quintessential post-modern fantasy of instantaneous transmission, a radicalisation of mind and matter and of organic and mechanical. This raises questions about how we see the future of disability and its representation, how we align our hopes for a medically and scientifically advanced future with the reality of imperfect bodies. In the dystopian future of Avatar, the disabled body is viewed as waste that a military industrial complex can recoup. Sully is given the ability to acquire a prosthetic alien-soldier body not as compensation for his disability but in spite of it; his genomic capital as the twin of his dead scientist brother makes him the only possible match for the cloned body, a technology far more expensive than his own ‘defective’ body. This disturbing disruption of bodily integrity and mental privacy upsets the concept of personal identity but also commodifies the human body. In this case, a disabled one is ‘colonised’ by the military corporation, becoming ‘whole’ through its surrender to the colonising forces. The transcendent qualities of CGI and biotechnology here pose a troubling solution to the delicate human organism. The film’s vision of the future as enveloped in genetic fundamentalism is thus a frightening development of the current fascination with genomic capital. This fetishising of DNA has a dangerous consequence for disability; it suggests that ‘defective’ genes that lead to an impairment may be screened out, leading to a dehumanisation of the individual where he or she is reduced to a quantifiable set of molecules.
Avatar’s alien culture features an alternative ecological-economic model; a symbiotic network where peripherals such as plants and animals can interface with each other. In Pandora, the natural world is considered as a single living organism, as opposed to the capitalist agenda of Earth, with the competing interests of individuals and corporations. The collapse of boundaries between abled and disabled, human and machine is representative of film’s move towards a Baudrillardian postmodern uncertainty; due to the competitive individualist logic and paternalistic ethos of biotechnology and its conspicuous largesse. Biotechnology’s ability to reconstitute normality is thus a heavily loaded anthropophagic strategy.
When we consider the body which occupies Hollywood film, we consider a deeply politicised space, as film bodies enact difference or docility. Contemporary Hollywood films trade on the post-eugenic fashion of extreme efforts to fix people with disabilities, in this way alleviating the need for society to be more inclusive (see Snyder and Mitchell 2010). That the body is a site of power is not a new notion, but contemporary Hollywood film enacts a new representation of subjectivity that is open to manipulation at the material and somatic level. The bodies of film now transform and transcend; social control is achieved through them in internal surveillance. The massive success of the science fiction genre and its use of surveillance and control of bodies illustrates that such subject matter captivates the social imaginary. Surveillance, once the gloomy Orwellian nightmare of the future, is now omnipresent in our filmic visions of the future (see Flynn 2015). In our cultural imaginings, and consequently in film, bodies are now ‘open’ to intervention and at this nexus individualism creates a duty. The twenty-first century has brought a multiplicity of life-optimising technologies: ‘These new forms of life, these new ideas of what kind of persons we are and could or should become, are emerging at the multiple intersections between the imperatives of the market and the drive for shareholder value, the new imaginations of the body and its processes’; the new imaginations of the body ‘must be understood as hybrid assemblages oriented towards the goal of optimisation’ (Rose 2007: 105, 17).
Hollywood films of this century enact these new imaginations of the body, as they depict its need of biotechnical intervention, its transformation and its transcendence of the human/machine boundary. This is played out most spectacularly in films like Avatar which place ‘life’ somewhere at the boundary of human/machine, reducing life to a series of codes.
Biology is now inextricably linked with information technology and has become in its own right a science of information. It is not interested in man, but rather in his elementary components, apparently without concern for the negative consequences of this conception of the human, given that it dissolves the subject, and perhaps even the human condition itself. (Le Breton 2004: 2)
Life is now seen as a sum of information; reducible to numbers, our humanity is calculable, alterable and reducible. This century’s vision of life is data; images of coding sequences and DNA form the contemporary view of life itself, privileging the order and sequence of the imagined pattern of ‘life’. Scenes of computerised diagnostics and highly complex gene sequencing feature in Hollywood’s science fiction narratives (
Source Code, 2011;
Elysium, 2013;
Transcendence, 2014), as well as contemporary crime dramas where ‘proof’ is envisaged at the molecular level, such as the ‘scientific’ close-ups of the
C.S.I. television franchise. This view of ‘molecular’ life also opens up the human to scrutiny; ‘flaws’ become disjunctures where intervention is necessitated and ontology becomes mediated.
As can be seen in Avatar the enactment of individualism and of ‘good citizenship’ thus incurs a vision of oneself as eminently malleable at the molecular level. ‘Thus we can see that in advanced liberal democracies, where individuals are enjoined to think of themselves as actively shaping their life course through acts of choice in the name of a better future, “biology” will not easily be accepted as fate or responded to with impotence’ (Rose 2007: 26). Hollywood films reject the state of ‘disabled’, instead instilling a duty in the disabled character to individualise, thus enacting a biopower which places the onus on the individual to garner biomedical/techno scientific assistance. Genomic sequences are now seen to transcend life itself (Transcendence) while life is made ‘manageable’ by pharmaceuticals (Love and Other Drugs, 2011; Dallas Buyers Club, 2013). Family medical histories and genealogies become open to expert opinion and adjustment as though ‘good parenting’ depends on preventing the birth of a ‘defective’ child (Gattaca, 1989). Finding cures for disabled or ill children becomes the duty of the parent (Elysium). Individualised solutions to diegetic crises dull the responsibility of society and incur medicalising discourses.
Avatar is intimately concerned with the molecular; Sully qualifies for the job on Pandora only through the shared DNA of the dead twin. The film fantasises ‘geneticism’: the allure of the imagined power of the gene. Sully’s project of ‘getting his real legs back’ (one can imagine that these will be somehow scientifically created), incurs the necessity to submit to the hyper intrusive process of transformation. This vision of genetics in the film is implicated in the salvation of humanity.
It involves a radical identification of evil in biological terms, along with a ruthless drive to eliminate it, not by social or political means but by employing an array of genetic tests and suitable means of biological engineering. This uncompromising vision of genetics is one expression of a powerful imaginary current that runs through our contemporary societies. (Le Breton 2004: 4)
The genetic potential of the film colludes in the creation of Sully’s disability as abject. Sully’s diegetic imperative is to acquiesce to the transformation potential of science; firstly into an avatar and then in the plan of getting back to earth and retrieve his ‘real legs’. The individualised solution to Sully’s disability is the commitment to the programme which transforms him into an avatar and hence eventually transforming back into his ‘able’ self.
Individualism beyond the Diegesis
As this discussion has shown, Avatar places an individualist duty on the disabled character to ‘better’ his prospects, in line with American ideology. Beyond this diegesis, the 3D spectacle and ‘performance capture’ technology produce a kinetic aesthetic that draws audiences into a peculiar ‘gaming’ subjectivity, further inculcating individualism. Drawn individually into the cinematic experience, the spectator is now swallowed up by the digital world and must identify with the (dis)abled protagonist, existing vicariously through him because, as in the gaming ethos, we want the character to win; virtual digital bodies exceed their limitations and are encouraged to do so. Hollywood’s 3D technology thus facilitates the spectator’s longing to live through an avatar as a heightened active self: ‘The aspiration to reach the most controllable cinematic image is motivated by the desire to enhance the virtual heroic action-body performance in order to dramatize the progress, failure, and success of its journey towards mastery through a spectacle of physical endurance and control’ (Cohen 2014: 57).
The technological novelty engages the cinematic scopic gaze, forces the spectator to look at the digitally enhanced character as a single character removed from the social system in which he exists. This suits the normative regime of American individualism; the sensory impact and spectacle are heightened and the spectator is drawn to the individual’s action, rather than any social or cultural context. Society is conveniently discharged from any responsibility and the heroic able body is produced as solution. In this way, ‘the display of heroic physicality by the iconic body provides a vision of an empowered human functioning at the extremes’ (Cohen 2014: 58). Avatar’s 3D technology thus privileges physical supremacy and within the narrative of purportedly positive transformation, the disabled body is expelled from the diegesis in favour of the digital body.
The CG bodies of the (able) Na’vi move fluidly through the digitally created landscape enacting a freedom from the constraints of the human body. Although digitised, the Na’vi enacts spectacular corporeality in contrast to the relative stasis of the humans. Audience sympathy is thus invested in these supremely able bodies. Cameron’s use of the avatar as a device central to the story eases and facilitates the transfer of audience sympathy toward the CG body. This identification causes the (normative) audience to empathise with Sully’s motivation.
Almost every culture sees disability as a problem in need of a solution (see Mitchell 2002: 15). American film, however, utilises disability as a crux to drive forward a normalising and optimising logic, incurring the American notion of individualism to inspire people with disabilities to fix themselves. In a screen age where military misadventures create disabilities, disability is seen as the challenge that the individual must overcome. Biotechnology fortuitously offers the pacifying lure of repair and reboot. Such narratives heighten mainstream culture’s discomfort with disability, providing sanitised, simplistic models of its eradication.
America’s cultural ambivalence toward people with disabilities, visible in popular film, can be seen as a symptom of the aggressive logic of a capitalist nation. The ubiquitous American body, depicted as a site of cultural, ideological and financial investment, chooses transmutation over disability, is subjugated and is remade in the name of the land of opportunity. This chapter has proposed that American individualism is manifest in the depictions of disability as a personal obstacle, one which may be overcome by the biotech solutions on offer in this new millennium. Failing to interrogate disability as a social issue, Avatar places disability in an isolated body, an individual psyche. The complexities and intersections with society and culture go unexamined in this fiction of repair and re-boot.
NOTE
FILMOGRAPHY
Blomkamp, Neill (dir) (2013) Elysium. 109 minutes. TriStar Pictures/Media Rights Capital. USA.
Cameron, James (dir) (2009) Avatar. 162 minutes. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation/ Dune Entertainment. USA.
Jones, Duncan (dir) (2011)
Source Code. 93 minutes. Vendome Pictures/Mark Gordon Company. USA.
Niccol, Andrew (dir) (1997) Gattacca. 106 minutes. Columbia Pictures/Jersey Films. USA.
Pfister, Wally (dir) (2014) Transcendence. 119 minutes. Alcon Entertainment/Straight Up Films. USA.
Vallée, Jean-Marc (dir) (2013) Dallas Buyers Club. 117 minutes. Truth Entertainment/Voltage Pictures. USA.
Zwick, Edward (dir) (2010) Love and Other Drugs. 112 minutes. Fox 2000/Regency Enterprises. USA.
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