Shortly after publishing On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin confessed, “The sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me feel sick.”[1] In an increasingly austere age, the peacock tail should become all the more nauseating.[2] The genetic crime balks at the original bedfellows: natural selection and the survival of a species. It is no secret that genomic technologies are becoming increasingly sophisticated, making easy targets of the assumed “crimes” against an auspicious “survival of the fittest.”[3] As metaphorical peacock tails, the human variations we call disabilities have been framed as “editable” codes on the path to perfection. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson refers to this advancement in genomics as “velvet eugenics”: with a soft glove, gene editing promises a future without disability, which is to say, a world bereft of disabled people.[4]
The moral and ethical implications of any eugenics logic—no matter how austere, quiet, or soft—are well-documented and debated. However, one underexplored view of an engineered population might suggest that the survival of the human species depends, in part, on the continual flourishing of so-called “detrimental” genetic mutations and human variations. Taking the Netflix film Bird Box (2018) as a cultural imagining of human flourishing in the face of existential crisis (and against the backdrop of the recent global pandemic), we suggest that eugenics tout court are counterproductive to the survival of the human species. Emerging work in evolutionary biology around drivers such as “genetic drift” and “genetic flow” promise a shift away from the weaponized logics of selection and fitness at the same time cultural products such as film and narrative challenge our assumptions about which bodies and minds are best equipped to survive future crises.[5] Despite geneticists regarding most mutations as detrimental, some are eventually understood to be beneficial. After all, it remains the case that “mutation is ultimately the source of all adaptive variation.”[6] Bird Box invites viewers to welcome the unexpected, embodied differences that are often coded as deleterious to human survival, even in the face of death and potential extinction.
The film follows Malorie Hayes as she and her two children attempt to find safety in a post-apocalyptic world besieged by supernatural entities that, if seen, cause the spectator to become violent, ending in self-harm and death. The narrative begins with Malorie when she first discovers she is pregnant five years prior, which coincides with the potentially world-ending events. In this way, the film makes it impossible to disentangle the internal narrative of motherhood with the external apocalyptic threat. Indeed, it is a film that touches on many important topics relevant to the health humanities, such as mental illness, maternity, reproduction, trauma, ecological disaster, and disability.
Throughout the film, “sighted” characters don blindfolds to simulate blindness as a way to ensure they cannot see the unknown entities. Malorie’s journey is much like a disabled person’s: using tools around her and “life hacks” to survive a hostile environment, she must iteratively recalibrate her embodied relationship to space and setting. Vision is the vehicle for the apocalyptic threat that stalks humanity; in this new context, the ability to see is rendered a liability, “maladapted” to human survival. By the end of the film, Marlorie and her two children safely make it to the film’s final sanctuary, a former school for the blind, whose inhabitants were especially suited to survive in this new, unexpected environment. There, they are greeted by the many blind members of this emergent, flourishing social order and given refuge from the many dangers to their survival.
As with most popular thrillers, Bird Box’s representation of disability is far from perfect. Rebecca Willoughby rightly criticizes the film’s dependence on the ableist link between mental illness and corruption, which paints the neurodivergent as “literal agents of evil… as those with mental disturbance seem unaffected by the nefarious invisible creatures, and in most instances actively seek to force the potentially fatal visions on others.”[7] Similarly, Kaiti Shelton underscores how actually-disabled characters in the film are underdeveloped and used to drive the plot, and reminds us that the true failure of the film occurred in its aftermath with various internet “Bird Box Challenges,” where sighted individuals would record themselves performing mundane tasks while blindfolded.[8] Such challenges miss the mark completely, especially given the fact that characters in the story are not attempting to be blind or experience the identity of blindness. Rather, the blindfold is an assistive technology vital to the characters’ survival in an unknown and adverse environment.
Attempting to explain the entities, characters rehearse several types of explanations: religious ideas of rapture and government conspiracy theories, to name only two, both of which are provided within an ever-present medicalized framework of eugenics. The solution by film’s end, however, subverts these tired (yet tireless) narratives by making the mythological “able-body” newly disabled: “The aggressive confrontation between the natural world and the imperiled human communities within it can only be resolved if those communities can reorient themselves in less intrusive ways to forms of creaturely life that manage to escape the clutches of these enigmatic predators.”[9] Survival depends not on more of the same, however “perfect” we believe it to be, but rather on integrating diverse embodiments and perspectives, which, in turn, increases the likelihood that a species may adapt to sudden changes in environment or predicament.
In the pursuit of an ideal body, humans ignore the inevitable outcome of all long-lasting survival: that of illness and disability. This irony of eugenics should be lost on no one. Humans are notoriously adaptable creatures, and arguably no member of the species is more resourceful or innovative than the disabled. Survival, as the film suggests, requires heterogeneity—a kind of fluctuating “fitness” beyond the individual and keenly responsive to shifting environments.[10]
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[1] Darwin, C (1860) Letter 2743 Darwin, C. R. to Gray, Asa, 3 Apr 1860. http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/entry-2743.
[2] Though not the first, Thomas Byrne Edsall’s The Age of Austerity (Anchor, 2012) read the writing on the wall more than ten years ago; see also Mark Blyth’s Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea (Oxford UP, 2013).
[3] See the excellent Human Flourishing in an Age of Gene Editing, eds. Erik Parens and Josephine Johnston (Oxford UP, 2019).
[4] PloughCast 22: Velvet Eugenics and Parenting Kids with Down Syndrome, Made Perfect, Part 4, Plough (January 25, 2022)
[5] Branch, Haley, Amanda Klingler, Kelsey Byers, Aaron Panofsky, and Danielle Peers. “Discussions of the ‘Not So Fit’: How Ableism Limits Diverse Thought and Investigative Potential in Evolutionary Biology,” American Naturalist 200(1), (July 2022): 101-113. DOI: 10.1086/720003
[6] Bao, Kevin, Robert Melde, and Nathaniel Sharp. “Are Mutations Usually Deleterious? a Perspective on the Fitness Effects of Mutation Accumulation,” Evolutionary Ecology 36(5) (October 2022): 753-766. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9559781/
[7] Willoughby, Rebecca L. “The Blind Leading the Blindfolded” in Seeing the Apocalypse: Essays on Bird Box, eds. Brandon Grafius and Gregory Stevenson (Lehigh UP, 2021): 49.
[8] Shelton, Kaiti. “The Real Challenges of the Bird Box Challenge,” Future Reflections: Perspectives, American Action Fund for Blind Children and Adults. (Winter, 2019). It should be noted that the producers of Bird Box hired Blind consultants as well as Blind actors for the film. Furthermore, while these critiques capture most of the disabled community’s reception of the film’s representation of blindness, it is not universal; see, as one example: Matt Lafleur, “‘Bird Box’ Is Worth the Hype, Especially for the Disabled,” Friedrich’s Ataxia News (January 9, 2019).
[9] Momcilovic, Dragoslav. “It’s Too Bad We’re Not Horses” in Seeing the Apocalypse: Essays on Bird Box, eds. Brandon Grafius and Gregory Stevenson (Lehigh UP, 2021): 115.
[10] We are struck by Mia Florin-Sefton’s metaphor of “playdough” in this very journal, especially when thinking about fluctuations in adaptability: the “mold” parades itself as perfectly fixed, forgetting the ductile substance that enables its current shape in the first place.
