Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body

2. Phantom Limbs: Film Noir’s Volatile Bodies

Chapter 2 Phantom Limbs Film Noir’s Volatile Bodies They had the crutches to stare at. They never really looked at the man. —Barton Keyes in Double Indemnity Specular Distractions
In Jacques Tourneur’s ‹lm Out of the Past (1947), a deaf boy (Dickie Moore) protects Jeff Bailey (Robert Mitchum) from police and gangsters who, for differing reasons, are pursuing him for his role in a murder. Jeff is subsequently killed by the femme fatale, Kathie (Jane Greer) when she discovers that he is handing her over to the police as the killer. When Jeff’s current girlfriend, Ann (Virginia Huston), asks the deaf boy whether Bailey had intended to return to Kathie, the boy nods, telling a lie that frees her from her emotional dependence on the hero and permits her to marry a local policeman. In The Fallen Sparrow (1943), Kit (John Gar‹eld), having been tortured in prison during the Spanish Civil War, is haunted by one of his tormentors, a man with a“dragging foot”who has followed him back to the United States. The sound of the man’s dragging foot reduces the shell-shocked Kit to shuddering hysteria until, faced with evidence that his pursuer is a Nazi spy, the hero confronts him in a ‹nal shootout. In The Blue Dahlia (1946) Johnny Morrison (Alan Ladd) has returned from World War II to ‹nd that his wife, Helen (Doris Dowling), has been unfaithful to him. After an argument between them, Helen is killed, and suspicion points to Johnny, but more particularly, to his wartime buddy, 58 Buzz (William Bendix), who was injured in the war and suffers from what we would now call post-traumatic stress syndrome. Buzz’s mental disability , although not evident all the time, causes him to become violent whenever he hears certain kinds of loud music.1 These examples from classic ‹lm noirs could be expanded to include numerous ‹lms from the 1940s and 1950s in which a person with a disability plays a supporting role, serving as a marker for larger narratives about normalcy and legitimacy.2 The deaf boy in Out of the Past mirrors Jeff Bailey’s ›awed, yet stoical integrity, providing a silent riposte to the ›ashy glamor of and tough-guy patter between the other males in the ‹lm. The ‹gure of the limping Nazi spy in Fallen Sparrow enables the director , Richard Wallace, to use disability to shift Kit’s problematic leftist collaboration with Republican Spain to World War II patriotism. Buzz’s disability in The Blue Dahlia annexes the era’s concern about soldiers psychologically damaged in the war. In the latter case, the U.S. Navy and the ‹lm Production Code censors vetoed screenwriter Raymond Chandler’s original ending for the movie in which Buzz is the killer of Johnny’s wife. They felt that in 1945, representing returning navy vets as psychotic killers was not in the interest of national healing.3 In most cases disabled ‹gures play cameo roles, much as black, Latino, or Asian ‹gures provide a racialized counternarrative to the hero’s existential malaise. In Eric Lott’s terms the proximity of a racially marked character assists in “darkening” the white hero, linking him to more subversive or morally suspect forces within the society at large. A similar troping of able-bodied disability appears in ‹lms based around a male who, although internally wounded, must nevertheless be physically able to walk down the mean streets of cold war America.4 This phenomenon can be partially explained by what David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder call “narrative prosthesis,” the use of disability to enable a story. The disabled body serves as a“crutch upon which literary narratives lean for their representational power, disruptive potentiality, and analytical insight” (49). If narrative closure depends on restoration of the able-bodied individual (to health, society, normalcy), the disabled character represents a form of deviance necessary for marking the body’s unruliness . But disability may often facilitate other narratives not so easily represented . Moreover, it may utilize the disabled body as a site for social panics about volatile bodies in general, diverting the public gaze from one Phantom Limbs 59 stigmatized identity onto another. Hence my title, “Phantom Limbs,” refers to the residual sensation of narratives that the ‹lm cannot represent or reconstitute. We might say that the phantom limb phenomenon is the affective response to narrative prosthesis, the way that trauma...