In an early shot from Lulu Wang’s 2019 film The Farewell, the camera focuses on the movie’s elderly protagonist in what is clearly a medical setting. In Wang’s script, the acting directions state that “Nai Nai sits alone in a hospital gown awaiting her X-ray.” There, “she has a coughing fit.” Although a disconnected arm…
Tag: Film
The Horror of Noncompliance: Instructional Language and Unruly Bodies in “The Substance” (2024)
Image Credit: “The Substance – Official Trailer.” YouTube, uploaded by NEON, 14 February 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNlrGhBpYjc. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), as Victor Frankenstein starts building a female companion for his monstrous creature, he realizes: “…she might become ten thousand times more malignant than her mate and delight, for its own sake, in murder and wretchedness….
Rethinking “Survival of the Fittest” with Bird Box
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…
(Dis)articulation: “Broken Ladies” and the Anatomized Female Body
Articulating symptoms of illness often first requires dis-articulation: this part hurts; this one thing happened; I started feeling this, then this; are these things related? First narrativized as a series of observations, symptoms separate out into individual signs (one symptom, after all, could be the effect of one cause, but a different symptom could be…
X-ray Retouched: Medical Visualities in Barbara Hammer’s Sanctus
Flesh and bone, bodily hair, tissues, liquids, skin and nerves. For the experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer (1939-2019), a pioneer in the disruption of heteronormative cinema, the body became a matter of experience and experiment throughout her life. As a person who dedicated her life to making “invisible bodies and histories visible” (Hammer 2010), Hammer attended…
The Way of Seizures
Note: This essay contains spoilers for Avatar: The Way of Water. There’s little I love more than surprise neurology in mainstream media. One such surprise occurred recently when one of the main characters in Avatar: The Way of Water has a seizure. Seizures are the proverbial bread and butter of pediatric neurology, and while…
Ixcanul (2015) and the Precarity of Health Care in Iximulew (Guatemala)
Tiffany D. Creegan Miller, PhD // Ixcanul (Jayro Bustamante, 2015) is a film about a young Kaqchikel girl who lives with her parents in a humble shack on the edge of a coffee plantation on the slopes of a volcano where she and her father work during harvest seasons. The film was made in close…
Derrière(s): Chronos and the Gay Male
Dr. Brian J. Troth // “Le passé est passé. The future is now.” These temporal adages, for all intents and purposes platitudes uttered without much thought, suggest that we are obsessed with moving forward, going so far as to prematurely announce the impossibility that the future has already arrived. Yet we are also apt to…
Monstrous Myths of Disability in M. Night Shyamalan’s Glass
Diana Rose Newby // Warning: This piece contains mild spoilers for the film Glass. Difference is the bread and butter of the superhero genre. And to a degree, so is disability. Think X-Men’s paraplegic Professor X; the blindness and depression of Marvel’s Daredevil; the facial scarring that catalyzes Harvey Dent’s murderous mental illness; Iron Man’s super-powered…
“Mrs. Grey Will See You Now”: The Legacy of Victorian Pregnancy
Livia Arndal Woods The film adaptation of E.L. James Fifty Shades Freed was released this week.