Untouchable
‘Disabling’ cinema’s contract on contact in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21783318 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Gregory Brophy (Bishop's University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 19 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 123-144 |
| Publication date | 2021-04-03 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | New Review of Film and Television Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1740-0309 • E-ISSN: 1740-7923 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/17400309.2021.1874205 |
| OpenAlex | W3135475186 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 19 |
Historically, cinematic spectacles of acquired impairment have expended much energy negotiating the gender trouble that disability provokes in male bodies, typically infusing narratives of rehabilitation with fantasies of gender reconstruction. These gender crises arise because hegemonic expectations about masculine identity as synonymous with autonomy and dominance conflict with the normative social scripts framing disability as a state of helplessness and dependence. This paper explores the fraught intersection of disability and gender in Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, a film that adapts the memoirs of Jean-Dominique Bauby to evoke a visceral experience of ‘locked-in syndrome.’ Drawing upon Vivian Sobchack’s phenomenological conception of ‘film’s body,’ I develop a more particular account of the ways in which male bodies are embedded in social networks that grant affective intensity and political charge to the sensuous experience of touch within cinema. In what has to be the most extraordinary use of literal first-person perspective in the history of cinema, the film deploys the conventionally untouchable camera body to explore the intimacy and terror of being touched (intrusions to which both patient and viewer must yield), mounting a challenge to popular cinema’s dominant gaze, and the normative body it so often assumes on behalf of viewers
Aesthetics · Art · Gaze · Literature · Movie theater · Narrative · Normative · Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Visual arts · Cinema and Media Studies · Gender Studies · History · Law · Psychology · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism · Spanish Culture and Identity
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |