The Cinema of Isolation: A History of Physical Disability in the Movies (review)

This encyclopedic survey of one hundred years of films featuring the disabled is interesting and informative, despite the author’s frequent editorial asides. Professor Norden unapologetically sets the book’s tone in the opening lines of the preface: “Every history is an act of interpretation laden with biases, and this one is no exception” (p. ix). He states his thesis in the following sentence/paragraph on page 3: “In the case of people with physical disabilities, the movie industry has perpetuated or initiated a number of stereotypes over the years as part of the general practice of isolation—stereotypes so durable and pervasive that they have become mainstream society’s perception of disabled people and have obscured if not outright supplanted disabled people’s perceptions of themselves.” Fortunately, not all his writing is like this.

The book livens up when Norden illustrates different disabled archetypes using familiar and not so familiar movies, actors, directors, and screenwriters. The main types are the disabled as obsessive avengers (The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Phantom of the Opera), sweet innocents (A Christmas Carol and Johnny Belinda), and saintly sages (The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and Bad Day at Black Rock). I was stunned by the number of films featuring the disabled and was interested to learn of Hollywood’s “Freak Show” period. I had always found the short-statured singers and dancers in the Wizard of Oz to be incongruous, but Norden provided the context.

The good news, as he somewhat grudgingly acknowledges, is that society has made substantial progress in protecting the rights of the disabled and in being sensitive to how they are characterized in popular media.