The disabled body has a storied history in cinema, which stretches back to Classical Hollywood and continues to emerge in contemporary film. Indeed, the reflective nature of the filmic narrative affords it an ability to portray disability in a very “cognitive” manner, wherein Michael Bérubé believes that disabled bodies and the field of disabled studies can “reread” both films blatantly and indirectly about disability as texts of “self-representation,” even if in purely allegorical terms (576). This exploration of allegories of disability in cinema is highly beneficial for critical endeavors. Such openness to readings means that both traditional depictions of disability that occur in films like Freaks (Tod Browning, 1932), as well as allusions to themes of disability in contemporary blockbusters, afford a larger dialogue on non-abled identities. In the past, a film like Browning’s cult classic depicted its characters with great sympathy, while also managing to portray them as what Martin F. Norden calls “obsessive avengers” or monstrously vindictive figures whose desire to be abled-bodied resulted in angry outbursts and violent revenge (113).
While films of this nature are now regarded as exploitative, it remains difficult to find positive representations of disabled identity, let alone literal narratives of learning to live with disability. Within this reality, the emergence of the Iron Man films offered an initial promise of a big budget, popular cinematic look into the experience of a figure whose movement from ableness to injury warranted the possibility of an allegorical and filmic look into the disabled body on film. Yet, the Iron Man franchise, despite having a character whose body is physically altered and limited after an accident, pulls from the tropes of disabled filmic bodies without ever truly engaging with the disempowerment tied to becoming less than able. Within Iron Man (Jon Favreau, 2008) and Iron Man 2 (Jon Favreau, 2010), along with The
Avengers (Joss Whedon, 2012), viewers are provided with a superhero narrative that alludes to disability, establishing Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) as a new form of heroism that appropriates disability tropes only to simultaneously undercut them with Stark’s refusal to accept anything but normative able-bodiedness. In the Marvel comic books, Stark, after a life-threatening wound, relies on his Iron
Man armour for survival. However, in the film, Stark is not depicted as debilitatingly disabled, furthering the franchise’s evocation yet rejection of disability. In the film, after his accident, Stark’s privilege remains intact and never reflects the immobility and trapped feelings attached to a representative cinematic treatment of disability. The films, as such, become a study of disability denial, reaffirming its social otherness by the ways in which Stark navigates the films, culminating in his impossibly instantaneous removal of his own injury at the end of Iron Man 3 (Shane Black, 2013). Beginning with Stark’s constant marginalization of all things ‘other,’ and moving towards an attachment to the hyper-ableness and masculine privilege afforded Stark within his Iron Man suit, what could have been a proactive
and exploratory disability narrative is undermined. Instead, the franchise becomes a reminder that heroics and power necessitate hegemonic privilege – a particular irony, considering that superhero films, by their very nature, purport to protect and advocate those without the ability to do so.