Popcorn Disability: 'Johnny Belinda' vs. 'Magnificent Obsession'
Jane Wyman double-dipped in the disabled well for two kinda different movies
Popcorn Disability is my new upcoming book looking at disability in the movies coming out in 2025. As a prelude to that, I’ve decided to review some of the movies I’m watching as I work on the book. Some these will eventually make their way into the finished product and some won’t.
If you’ve seen a disabled character in the movies, 9 times out of 10 it’s a man. Seriously, a 2023 study by Annenberg said the majority (69.1%) of characters with disabilities in 1600 of the top-grossing films of 2009 to 2019 were male-identified and 76% were white. As a kid, I never saw disabled women, let alone a disabled woman that looked like me, someone that couldn’t pass for able-bodied.
Most of the disabled women I saw in movies had what I’ve labeled “pretty disabilities.” This isn’t to say that their disability is glamorous; it’s that the disability the actress (who is generally not disabled in any way) is tasked with portraying is one that allows her to physically stay conventionally attractive AND pass for able-bodied. It’s easier to have a hot girl playing non-verbal, blind or Deaf because there aren’t any physical presentations of said disability on the surface. They can still be perceived as desirable (fuckable) whether they’re playing the disabled damsel in distress or not.
Now, there are many performances where the performer has a pretty disability and is fantastic. I love Marlee Matlin’s performance in Children of a Lesser God and I love the performance I’m talking about today: Jane Wyman in 1948’s Johnny Belinda. The problem is that, overall, presenting disabled women as still adhering to traditional, able-bodied beauty standards makes those of us who don’t look like that struggle to find our own desirability and place in the world. When you don’t have anyone who looks like you showing codes of conduct and rites of passage in film, you’re led to believe you aren’t meant to participate in them at all.
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