Rebuilding the Wounded Self: Impairment and Trauma in Isabel Coixet’s The Secret Life of Words and Pedro Almodóvar’s Los abrazos rotos

Despite advances in the legal and social spheres over the last forty years, disability continues to pose a problem for feature film screenwriters and directors who struggle to portray it in ways which avoid negative stereotypes.¹ Rather than treating illness and impairment as an integral part of human existence (most of those who live past a certain age will have a direct experience with either or both), they often appear in feature film as exceptional events that serve as vehicles to speak about other often political concerns. Conceived of as an interruption or threat to a certain view of health or normalcy, disability, illness and trauma are ascribed powers of revelation and transformation which are meant to give narrative symbolic weight. Yet more writers and artists are breaking with this ancient tradition (one need only think of Oedipus to see how blindness has been ascribed symbolic importance). Film in particular is a visual medium that offers a rare opportunity to put a face on disability and illness or trauma.

This essay brings together two of Spain’s most international contemporary filmmakers—Pedro Almodóvar and Isabel Coixet—to examine how they approach disability, its connection to trauma and the question of how to rebuild (or accept) a wounded self. Aside from the fact that both directors are from Spain one might point out that much separates them: while Coixet is from Catalonia and has made the vast majority of her films in English (often with Spanish actors), Almodóvar—who is from La Mancha and the most famous representative of Madrid’s Movida—has never made a film in a language other than Castilian. While Almodóvar is arguably the most famous Spanish director of all time and certainly one of the most studied,² Coixet—despite having worked with major international actors and having garnered awards and accolades—has a decidedly discreet if loyal following. Stylistically speaking, much separates the flamboyant, graphic approach of Almodóvar from Coixet’s toned-down realism and often somber topics. Despite the prominence of illness and disability in her work, however, it has never been approached from the perspective of Disability Studies.

Both Coixet’s and Almodóvar’s films combine social activism with the artists’ own views of the world; and both films fit somewhat within the paradigm that Mitchell and Snyder have termed “narrative prosthesis,” inasmuch as they define it as a phenomenon whereby

disability has been used throughout history as a crutch upon which literary narratives lean for their representational power, disruptive potentiality, analytical insight.

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These theorists combat disability’s historical portrayal as “deviance,”³ something which plays a central role in understanding “narrative prosthesis,” and insist on the difficulty of dealing with disability in a way which avoids symbolism.

There are some important similarities between the two otherwise disparate films which interest me here, Coixet’s The Secret Life of Words (2005, produced by Pedro and Agustín Almodóvar’s company, El Deseo) and Almodóvar’s own Los abrazos rotos (2009). The most noticeable thing they they share is the centrality of disability (blindness and deafness), which is in both cases the result of a past trauma.⁴ Haunted by the past, the films’ protagonists must decide to accept this trauma as a persistent wound—and they subsequently struggle to rebuild their damaged senses of self. Both films highlight the importance of self-mastery, but the question of how to define oneself with respect to impairment is also central to establishing a bridge between trauma and disability.

Bridging Trauma Studies and Disability Studies

Disability and Trauma Studies are distinct fields in the humanities that represent two different projects that do not usually dialogue with one another. Recently, however, critics such as Tobin Siebers and James Berger have worked to correct for this disciplinary isolation. Berger argues that both are emergent fields of study that would benefit from combination—they necessarily share certain elements given that disability is often the result of trauma (such as...