Cinema and Social Change in Germany and Austria

4 Subversions of the Medical Gaze: Disability and Media Parody in Christoph Schlingensief’s Freakstars 3000

4 Subversions of the Medical Gaze: Disability and Media Parody in Christoph Schlingensief’s Freakstars 3000 Morgan Koerner Abstract Christoph Schlingensief’s 2003 film Freakstars 3000 is explored here as an intervention in the current discourse on disability in Germany. A parody of mainstream television and the freak-show performance tradition, Freakstars 3000 documents a casting and variety show for disabled participants. Originally shown as a series on German television and later cut into a feature film, Freakstars 3000 critiques the exclusion of disabled actors from mainstream media. The film subverts medical definitions of disability and assumptions that preclude people with disabilities from the realm of performance, and it extends representation of them in Germany into the genre of sketch comedy. Dear film fans! Step right up and see cool young people who, with talent and 100 percent commitment , fulfill their dream of a big music career. Step right up and hear German eccentrics who, while they sing, nonchalantly point to the big problem of the non-disabled. During the shooting, actors were consistently abused and forced to portray disability . Every attack and every crackup is therefore guaranteed to be authentic and not repeatable.1 C hristoph Schlingensief’s film Freakstars 3000 (2003) begins with the above epigraph, an ironic disclaimer that heralds both the film’s aesthetic and its central theme of disability. Originally filmed as a television series in 2002 and cut into a film in 2003, Freakstars presents an American Idol-style casting show for disabled participants who are tested, evaluated, and 59 chosen or rejected by an able-bodied jury that includes the director Schlingensief . The film’s title and epigraph immediately announce two strategies at work in the film: on the one hand, Freakstars 3000 parodies casting shows and, more generally, provides a framework in which disabled performers critique the able-bodiedimperativesofmainstreamtelevisionandsimultaneouslyestablishtheir own media presence. On the other hand, the title and epigraph also parody the freakshow,asensationalformofobjectificationandexploitationofdisabledbodies .Thisparodicallusioncontinuesinthefilm’sopeningcredits,whichareaccompanied by circus music and end with cackling laughter. The ironic references to the freak show situate the spectator in an uncomfortable position and raise ethicalquestionsaboutthefilm .Butinsteadofansweringthequestionofexploitation, the film’s epigraph further confuses the viewer with the claim that the performers were forced to act disabled and that their abuse makes the actions in the film more authentic. The film not only parodies mainstream media, it also raises ethical questions about disability in a highly ironic and ambiguous fashion. The ironic and irreverent tone of Schlingensief’s film is difficult to situate into recent discussions on film and disability studies. In their monograph Cultural Locations of Disability, Sharon L. Snyder and David T. Mitchell describe how disability and its cultural locations are viewed through the lens of science, medicine, and rehabilitation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (5–10). In a chapter on cinema, they add that “film spectatorship borrows from these weighty disciplinary practices in that bodies marked as anomalous are offered for consumption as objects of necessary scrutiny—even downright prurient curiosity” (157). Disability in mainstream cinema places the audience in a position similar to the medical expert who must categorize the disabled individual; depending on the film’s genre, the spectator might read disability as the “body out of control” (comedy), the monstrous or avenging outsider (horror), or an object of pity and sentimentality (melodrama) (164). The cinematic emphasis on decoding individual disabled bodies, however, hides the systems of medical categorization that define disability as impairment and “discount [the disabled]fromthestartfrombeingabletocoexistwiththeirnon-disabledpeers” (174). In other words, the spectacle of individual disabled bodies distracts audience attention from the very cultural systems that define those bodies as abnormal in the first place. Interestingly, in their brief discussion of mainstream cinematic genres, Snyder and Mitchell quickly reject comedy as a site for “freak show like titillation” and the humour of superiority (166). The implication here is that the genre of comedy cannot escape the model of corrective laughter, of humour as a means of exclusion or rehabilitation. While this generalization is perhapsunderstandableinthecontextofHollywoodcinema,itneglectscomedy’s CHALLENGING VIEWING HABITS 60 ambiguous potential as a subversive force that might undermine medical taxonomies ,challengethespectator’sattemptstodecodedisability,andopenupnew perspectives and possibilities for the representation of people with disabilities. The following essay considers Christoph Schlingensief’s film Freakstars 3000 as an example of subversive comedy starring disabled actors. The film turns the tables on able-bodied mainstream media, critiques different media genres, and expands representation of disabled people into sketch...