Hannah Shewan Stevens provides an overview of the good, the bad, and the ugly when it comes to disability representation on the big screen.
Once, disability was simply a descriptor, but over time, disabled people have created a community and a culture under this banner, allowing our creative identities to thrive.
Unfortunately, the film industry has a long history of ignoring or misrepresenting this rich diversity of life experiences.
This Disability Pride Month, as we celebrate our vast global community, let’s dive into the history of disability in cinema – the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Back to the start
The history of disability representation in cinema starts with a trope that still endures: the faker.
The 1897 French short film The Fake Cripple depicts a seemingly disabled man begging in the street, who is later ousted as a fake by a police officer. It’s difficult to know the real-world impact at the time, but it’s unlikely that the narrative warmed folks up to the notion of believing disabled people.
While few creatives would take such an approach now, the narrative cemented a common trope that people continue to use when attacking “benefit scroungers” today. And we’ve seen it on screen again more recently, too: in the rightfully panned 2005 movie The Ringer, the main character tries to erase his debts by posing as a disabled competitor for the Paralympics. One hundred years later, some writers still see no issue with perpetuating the belief that disabled people fake it for personal gain.
In 1907, The Faithful Dog became one of the first movies to manipulate disabled narratives to break the hearts of non-disabled people. The movie follows a blind, homeless man who dies despite his dog’s valiant attempts to help him. It’s a perfect illustration of the assumption that many people still have about disability: our lives are pre-destined to be miserably unfulfilled.
This, too, has modern comparisons – far too many, actually. The first that springs to mind is the trauma-porn-packed romcom Me Before You (2016), where the disabled main character opts for assisted suicide, even though his finding love and joy had been a core theme of the movie before that point.
An extension of this trope is first visible in A Blind Woman’s Story (1908), which follows a blind woman who is helpless until a non-disabled man swoops in to save her from destitution. These narratives fixate on the idea that disabled people cannot save themselves without the help of a non-disabled saviour.
Movies like The Upside (2017) illustrate this particular trope’s longevity. In such movies, the disabled character’s persona comes second to the writers’ desire to use them to inspire the other characters and the audience. This particular branch of the disabled stereotype tree is called ‘inspiration porn’.
Simply put, this nasty little narrative is when disabled people are placed on pedestals to inspire others with their courage in the face of suffering. The audience is inspired to “get on with it,” and the non-disabled characters feel inspired to achieve beyond their means because “at least they aren’t disabled”.
Despite not being coined until 2014, by Stella Young, inspiration porn’s history is far older than that. We see it in Stratton Story (1949), a biopic about a disabled baseball pitcher, and it’s played out a million more times since. My Left Foot (1989) is a classic example, where the writers use Christy Brown’s life to instil a message of resilience but conveniently leave out that his wife was alcoholic, unfaithful and possibly abusive. That wouldn’t have been very heart-warming, after all.
Later, this ill-formed narrative morphed into what I like to call the “morbid manic pixie dream girl.” We’ve seen it dozens of times: a beautiful young person, typically a woman, becomes terminally ill, and their illness encourages a healthy love interest to go off and live an amazing life. The sick person is never a character, only a source of inspiration.
Moving on to the next phase of tropes
As time moved on, cinema had to come up with some new tropes and tricks to depict disability – because just telling disabled stories would’ve been too dull.
A Christmas Carol (1938) encapsulates the perfect disabled child trope, with the adorable Tiny Tim pulling at the audience’s tear ducts as his angelic nature contrasts with one incurable physical blight.
Contrasting the angelic disabled trope is the oh-so-worn-out trope of the scarred or disabled villain. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. It pops up in everything from Frankenstein and The Lion King to Detective Pikachu and just about every single James Bond movie, a franchise incapable of villainising a character without using a scar as a bat signal for the audience.
To round out the archive of miserable disabled depictions on screen, let’s shine a brief spotlight on the portrayal of autistic people. Rain Man (1988) is a classic example, which has caused countless people to assume that all autistic people are savants. And we can’t forget the car crash of a film Music! (2021). Sia’s dismal attempt at moviemaking not only caricatured autism but promoted the use of a dangerous “calming” method involving sitting on someone having a meltdown until they stop.
Wait, there’s good stuff, too!
It’s easy to let the doom and gloom overwhelm us when reviewing the history of disability in cinema, but glimpses of starlight stand out amidst the blackout.
Freaks (1932) is a half-and-half example. The groundbreaking film stunned audiences with its huge cast of disabled actors and spends much of the running time exploring their daily lives. However, the ending has drawn criticism for stepping into the “villainous disabled person” trope. At the climax of the movie, a non-disabled woman is turned into a freak by the group as an act of revenge for conning one of them.
A hopeful start, at least. The Best Years of Our Lives (1948) joined the gang with an outing that sought to show a snapshot of life with an impairment after the influx of amputees following World War Two.
Coming Home (1976) came next. The movie shattered two glass ceilings by having a disabled wheelchair user have sex on screen and by doing away with the perfect victim trope. Instead of bearing his disability silently, the main character rages against the thing that disabled him (the Vietnam War) and lives his life unapologetically.
Before highlighting some of our more recent film wins, we must also visit the history of disabled representation in documentary films. While non-disabled writers stumbled around in the dark spinning tales, documentary filmmakers used reality to spotlight disabled people’s experiences.
Perhaps the most famous example is Titicut Follies (1967), a documentary by Frederick Wiseman that exposed systemic abuse against disabled patients at the Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. The authorities fought to suppress the film’s release for years, claiming it interfered with patients’ privacy. Most of the public was unable to see the film until 1991 after the majority of patients had died.
Later documentaries like Crip Camp (2020) and King Gimp (1999) placed disabled people at the heart of their production, delivering groundbreaking films that refused to bow to stereotypical assumptions.
Thankfully, some of this positive change has started to appear in modern movies. Run (2020) perfectly explores the terror of parental control and the physical impact of disability without stereotypes getting a look in. A Quiet Place (2018) and the Oscar-winning CODA (2021) most notably put the deaf and hard-of-hearing community front and centre in filmmaking.
There are even a few excellent examples of disabled reality in the TV world now, too, but the good examples still don’t outnumber the bad ones – not even close.
Yes, movie producers no longer seem as unsure of the star power of a disabled actor, particularly thanks to the legendary work of actors like Peter Dinklage. Yet, there is so much still to be done. Disabled creatives continue to struggle to be seen in the industry, and non-disabled actors keep snatching up disabled roles to wave at the distributors of the golden statues.
Change is happening, just a little too slowly for disabled people’s liking. Like any other group, disabled people deserve to see their lives depicted accurately. Film is a powerful tool that could encourage non-disabled people to recognise and understand the barriers disabled people face daily, but only if utilised properly. Let’s hope the future of disability in cinema continues to grow brighter and that it never retreats back into its trope-laden past.
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