Misrepresentations In Film Analysis

It’s no secret that medium of film act as mirrors. Hollywood is a powerful institution that saturates so much of our lives. While gazing at the screen, films continuously reflect and affirm our humanness back at us. Cinema is a mechanism that is greatly responsible for shaping our perspective of The Self. The emotional language spoken in film media draws us profoundly into the narrative and gives us an access point for understanding aspects of our human experience as we gaze at it echoed back at us. But if one could not accurately “find themselves” in the mirror of representation, rarely if ever, what would that be like? One of the primary issues at hand when diving into disability in film are the problematic representations. When there are differently abled characters in a story, their lives are often misrepresented to the point where they become unrecognizable to people that live with that particular disability. These misrepresentations – stereotypes - reiterate harmful constructions of normalcy and compulsory able-bodiedness that are constantly perpetrated through society.
When one looks critically at the way bodies and characters are represented in film, it is interesting to see how that there is disingenuous intention at play. Cinematic pieces that write disabled characters in the story line often do so under the guise of narrative prosthesis. The disability is often constructed in binary to a hegemonic idea of normalcy exactly in order to give it power. Movies also rely on psychoanalytical concepts of
The narrative of the victim is leans heavily on disability like a crutch, “for it’s representational power, disruptive potentiality, and analytical insight” (Mitchell-Snyder, 49). The disability itself is not explored to understand the human experience. Rather, it is deployed as an enabling crutch that is hidden behind the perpetual struggle of the disabled