Have you ever looked at a person with a limp and said: I wonder how that reflects this person’s values and character? Of course not, asshole. That’s not how life works. If someone has a limp, they likely got drunk and fell in a ditch or something. That’s why I like film (and the arts in general). In the hands of a thoughtful craftsman, everything means something, so when a person has a limp in a movie, there is a reason.
My favorite example of this is in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. A photographer, L.B., is stuck in a wheelchair after an accident on the job. While he is homebound and stifled by crippling boredom, he decides to partake in some good, old-fashioned, family friendly voyeurism. In his intrusive escapades, he discovers that his neighbor has killed his wife and is trying to cover it up.
While it is a convenient way to set up the situation of a man with limited mobility, the wheelchair really is a physical representation of L.B.’s internal fear of immobility and lack of autonomy.
His occupation forces him to constantly travel and live in potentially difficult conditions and he uses this as a way to avoid settling down with his girlfriend, Lisa. Though she proves to dedicated, courageous, and clever (pretty ahead of her time for the 1950s), he claims that their lifestyles are too different and uses it as a way to prevent commitment, his broken legs becoming an elegant way of symbolizing his fear of what married life would be like: restrictive and dull.
Not wanting to settle down with her seems borderline un-American.
I have also heard theories that L.B.’s legs symbolize his impotence (broken bones haha), and there certainly is some truth to that, but it seems reductive to boil the entire movie down to him not being able to get it up.
Although it is common to see physical ailments reflective of internal turmoil, it is equally, if not more common, to see the physical as a way to hide internal beauty.
Beauty and the Beast is the big one, as is Hunchback of Notre Dame, and really any children’s movie teaching this classic lesson.
These are great examples, but I either do not remember them well enough to discuss (except for that one part in Beauty and the Beast with the singing candle, that part was sick). The movie I do remember is the much more mediocre (and something that I will surely be embarrassed about writing on in a few days), High School Musical.
I know, no physical ailments plague Troy Bolton, but the opposite is true. His looks, popularity, and basketball prowess hold him back from following his dreams of being an actor and chasing the nerdy girl, Gabriella. This limitation extends to many in the school including Zeke wanting to be a baker and whoever “Martha Cox” is to wanting to be a… rapper(?) Here are the lyrics if you want to dissect further.
Yes, I am getting too invested in this.
I understand that this is a Disney movie, but the point stands that it’s about the value of a person coming not from their outsides, but their insides (God, that sentence was poorly written). What I mean is that people’s perception of you can impact who you think you are and can pigeonhole you into a life that you don’t want. It is the same concept with The Beast and Quasimoto, except I wanted to talk about the greatest power couple of the 2000s and not a furry (sorry).
The body can serve many purposes. It can guide you to understand a person or it can cloud your impression of them. In my experience, the outside rarely reflects the inside. The habit of our culture to judge on appearance should be delegated to entertainment. People I meet always have a habit of not being exactly who I think they would be initially and these created stereotypes can be damaging to the individual and those around him.
The Flexible Body 