Freaks: The Grotesque and the Carnivalesque

Garland-Thomson (1997) notes that the incorporation of anomaly into rituals serving a positive social purpose is the one potentially constructive method by which anomaly is dealt with by social groups (p. 37), and in this sense, Brottman’s (2005) analysis of Tod Browning’s classic 1932 film Freaks provides a strong grounding for the carnivalesque grotesque as an affirmative means to read the “abnormal” content and form of fantastic films. Freaks is an especially notable film in this respect because, unlike most fantastic films, it is perhaps one of the most critically discussed films within disability studies—a notorious counterexample to social realism that is nevertheless a sort of canonical entry within the field’s discourses of inquiry. Freaks is of great interest to disability studies because it is such a complicated and contradictory film, exploitatively displaying actual sideshow “freaks” within a “horror” narrative, yet also trying to show the freaks as sympathetic and much more human than the nondisabled circus folk who try to harm them. Framed as a sideshow barker’s lurid introduction to an astounding monstrosity revealed only at the end of the film, Freaks tells the story of a dwarf circus performer (Hans) who falls in love with a nondisabled trapeze artist (Cleopatra); when Cleopatra tries to poison Hans for his inheritance money, the other “freaks” join together to kill Cleopatra’s cruel lover and disfigure the woman so that she becomes “one of them” (and is subsequently revealed by the sideshow barker as the monstrosity he has been introducing at length). In her excellent analysis of the film, Hawkins (2000) notes how Freaks began as a mainstream horror film (directed by Tod Browning after the success of 1931’s Dracula and his series of films with the late Lon Chaney playing various disabled characters) before being marketed as an exploitation film, and later being rediscovered as an art film in the 1960’s (p. 167). Although the film attempts to present the “freaks” as ostensibly sympathetic characters, not as monsters, the revenge plot “reinscribes the film as part of the horror genre, [and] it also reinscribes the freaks as monsters within that genre” (p. 157).

For my purposes, Brottman’s (2005) discussion of the film as carnivalesque grotesque in both form and content is most useful in illustrating my speculations on the fantastic film (although a fantastic film need not necessarily be noticeably aberrant in form, given the commonly recognizable narrative conventions employed in many genre-localized and/or Hollywood-produced films). Here is a film that is at once a horror movie, but alternately an exploitation film, an art film, and a cult film; as Hawkins (2000) points out, it did not succeed as a mainstream horror film, nor as an exploitation film, but only found its niche as a hybrid form reclaimed by art and cult audiences, being especially celebrated by the Surrealists (p. 148). Not only does it cross boundaries in consumption, but Brottman (2005) notes how it also crosses boundaries in its formal qualities by employing the use of real live “freaks,” making the film a sort of uneasy hybrid between documentary and fictional narrative, difficult to market and marginalized by both genre audiences and exploitation audiences (p. 19). It is a film that blurs “any distinction between actors and acts, between performers and performance” in its desire to produce bodily affect (p. 3). As part of her study of “offensive films,” Brottman (2005) is using Freaks in somewhat different ways from my look at the wider class of fantastic films, but some of her observations still ring true. Specifically, the blurring between body/mind and liminal/subliminal (through the “realized” processes of imagination) on both a diegetic and spectatorial level in fantastic films enacts a comparably distorted distinction between performers and viewers, especially when direct appeals to bodily affect are used. In violating and rejecting the “normative” verisimilitude (as portrayed in social realist films) arguably experienced by collective (i.e., dominant: white, middle-class, male, nondisabled) society, fantastic films represent a strange mix of individual (authorial) and collective (cultural) fantasies, whether by recreating nightmares, dreams, desires, or needs—and although fantastic films thus tend to operate upon the same cultural prejudices (descended from myths and fairy tales) that impair the disabled body, this quality of wavering between the individual and the collective aligns such films with Mikhail Bakhtin’s valuable concept of the carnivalesque.

As Brottman (2005) explains, the “freakish” grotesque (which “begins where exaggeration reaches fantastic dimensions”) has long existed within the socially sanctioned space/time of carnival, a period of ritual and festivity in which social customs and values are temporarily inverted, marked by “displays of bodily deformity” as central motifs; this medieval tradition has descended into more contemporary carnival forms, such as freak shows (p. 45-6). These contemporary forms especially include the socially sanctioned act of film spectatorship, in which viewers temporarily suspend everyday reality by indulging in entertaining onscreen fictions that typically follow (at least to some extent) the ritualized patterns of filmic narrative. Fantastic films seem to exemplify this carnivalesque function because (unlike social realist films) they challenge and invert the very nature of social reality, existing as “escapist” fantasies and cinematic anomalies. Garland-Thomson (1997) notes that when the “visual fantasies and extravagances” of the grotesque figure are transferred into a realistic framework, “the grotesque becomes equated with physically disabled characters,” at once aestheticizing and depoliticizing disability (p. 111-2). Although the disabled body is often used in metaphoric ways in social realist films (e.g., to examine demasculinization and dependence), we can see this at work more strongly in fantastic films where disabled bodies seem more removed from political discourses, existing instead as signifiers of a fantastic mise-en-scene. In an age where medicalization of the disabled body has led to the demise of freak shows, the fantastic film emerges as a carnivalesque space where “freakish” bodies are still exhibited exploitatively to a nondisabled audience who can view the disabled body with a minimum of guilt due to the depoliticizing effects of a “normative realism” violated by imaginative fantasy. Wavering at the cusp between classical horror films and classical exploitation films, Freaks represents perhaps the quintessential cinematic correlation between freak shows and the carnivalesque quality of fantastic films; framed by a sideshow barker’s invocation, the main narrative uses a documentary-style “normative realism” (sympathetic to the “real” freaks) that finally topples over into a horror narrative (in the revenge plot), as if the very presence of fantastically “freakish” bodies were enough to necessitate a horrific sensationalism to finally mark these ostensibly “sympathetic” freaks with an irreconcilable otherness.

Despite the negative connotations linking freak shows to fantastic films, the transgressive qualities of the carnivalesque figure (represented as disabled bodies in fantastic films) also offer potentially fruitful readings. As Garland-Thomson (1997) says, “Bakhtin’s concept of the disorderly body as a challenge to the existing order suggests the radical potential that the disabled body as sign of difference might possess within representation” (p. 38). Like the hybrid nature of the fantastic film, the disorderly carnivalesque body is so potentially transgressive because grotesquerie breaks down individual body definition at the collective level of ritual. According to Brottman (2005), the grotesque—and by extension, the abject and interstitial—has the potential to cause not only fear and horror but humor and laughter, due to its quality as “evidence of an absence of bodily control, witnessed most vividly by the collapse of bodily boundaries and the external appearance of things that should properly be kept inside the body” (p. 12). In fantastic films (especially ones that affect the viewer’s body), the manifestation of imaginative effects within a framework of “normative realism” is transgressive for this very reason: within the ritualized space of fantastic film spectatorship, the liminal and subliminal commingle, violating bodily boundaries between internal (imagination) and external (reality) in ways that individual viewers experience collectively (as part of a wider audience), reflecting a blend of individual (authorial) and collective (cultural) fantasies. Brottman (2005) argues that the horror and laughter alternately evoked by the grotesque and carnivalesque figure (whether in freak shows, films, or elsewhere) releases a sense of repressed otherness linked to “human ambivalence about the material bodily stratum,” our widespread cultural fascination with “freakish” bodies (p. 46), and the horror “of being human and of having a human body” (p. 48). Even as it plays upon fears about the potential for bodily disablement [4], the grotesque carnival figure is therefore liberating because it paradoxically erases distinctions between individual humans (whether disabled or nondisabled) by invoking the collectively shared human state of corporeal embodiment. Within the rituals of carnival, as in the fantastic film in modern society, the grotesque figure becomes the “fantastic” marker through which one’s individual experience gives way to a collective vision as bodily boundaries collapse with the temporary inversion of shared cultural values. In the case of Freaks, Brottman (2005) argues that Browning’s carnivalesque film erases binary distinctions between “human monsters” and “monstrous humans,” instead positing all people (including the film’s viewers) as “freaks” within the collective state of corporeal embodiment: “a set of deformed caricatures whose individual identity is no longer recognizable, bound forever to other strange bodies and misshapen, atrophied selves” (p. 29).

While this critical employment of the grotesque carnival figure may be potentially affirmative in one sense, the Bakhtinian carnivalesque also has definite shortcomings. It is only a temporary inversion of social values, sanctioned by a society’s ruling powers. Brottman (2005) describes carnival as “a kind of safety valve, with an essentially conservative social function,” notably observing that “the potential of carnival for radical rebellion is, in the end, politically limited, as it is, after all, licensed misrule” (p. 151). Furthermore, the resumption of everyday “normative” life immediately following carnival serves to aggressively reconstitute dominant social values and individual bodily boundaries all the more strongly. Thus, for all of the unifying and liberating potential that the grotesque and the carnivalesque temporarily offer, traditional negative social values against “freakish” bodies and realized collective visions are resolidified. As I mentioned earlier, the fantastic film as carnivalesque may work to destabilize strictly realistic narrative forms and patterns through blending the liminal and subliminal, but its common treatment as an “improper” body of cinema further normalizes the dominant narratological traits found in social realist films. The fantastic film may temporarily violate dominant appeals to verisimilitude (through its vividly exhibited visual difference), but the carnivalesque nature of the comparatively “deviant” fantastic film inadvertently reinforces the form and content of dominant realistic verisimilitude. However, certain fantastic films (e.g., non-mainstream, paracinema, cult/horror, body genre) like Freaks contain continually taboo and abject material that is often the subject of controversy and censure; therefore, the most radical and “deviant” of these films represent an only semi-sanctioned carnivalesque performative space that may be especially fruitful for transgressive potential because of its constantly illicit and inverted quality.

As my discussion of the grotesque and the carnivalesque around Freaks should illustrate, fantastic films offer intriguing openings for potential positive readings of disability representation. However, virtually all such openings are problematic and double-edged, whether due to the primary exploitative qualities connecting fantastic films to freak shows, or due to some other complicating factors. Nevertheless, the often-contradictory nature of disability representation in fantastic films is worth far more critical attention than most critics and scholars seem to allow, so there is still much academic work to be done in many of the areas into which I will try to shine the faint light of speculation.

Edward Scissorhands: Camp, Cyborgs, and Subversive Identification

Grappling with Edward Scissorhands (Tim Burton, 1990) raises similar issues as Freaks, but with some different points of interest. Burton’s film tells the story of the eponymous young man with scissors for hands, the unfinished creation of an eccentric scientist, who is taken down from his solitary castle home to live in suburbia; the townspeople are at first anxious, then accepting of him, and finally turn hostile as the boyfriend (Jim) of Edward’s teenage love interest (Kim) frames Edward as a dangerous criminal. Made following the huge financial success of Burton’s Batman (1989), this is a small and very personal fantastic film that was produced by a major Hollywood studio for a mainstream commercial audience, but which finally found a devoted cult audience (especially amongst Burton enthusiasts, a group with crossover interests in gothic subculture). Scissorhands is a hybrid, cross-generic film mixing elements of fairy tale, Gothic horror, and teen romance into a modern fable about the need to look past outward appearances. As Burton (2000) says, it is a film made as a reaction against the way society judges and categorizes people according to preformed conceptions about normative external appearance (p. 87). Although the film is inspired by nondisabled director Burton’s feelings of ostracism as an adolescent living in a California suburb, Edward is also clearly meant to denote a “freakish” disabled character; in classic fairy tale fashion, his outwardly grotesque disability becomes symbolic of an inner emotional deficit—feelings of exclusion and an inability to be understood and loved.

Garland-Thomson (1997) notes how half-formed and interstitial supernatural figures found common expression in the grotesques of Gothic fictions (p. 112), and Scissorhands seems to follow in this vein. Edward’s isolated domain is a supposedly “haunted” Gothic castle standing high above suburbia like a relic stretching back into a repressed, half-remembered past connecting the fantastic to the “real” world. As in several other Burton films (e.g., Vincent and Frankenweenie, both 1982), the Gothic tradition of mad scientists and failed creations from Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein is reworked in Scissorhands. Edward’s “dangerous” appearance also conjures up images of the grotesque from more modern horror narratives, most notably reminiscent of the razor-fingered “Freddy Kruger” from Nightmare on Elm Street fame. Burton (2000) notes how the film explores the rather close “parallel between suburban life and a horror movie,” whether in the townspeople’s mob mentality or their hostile reactions to apparent outsiders (p. 99). The townspeople’s varied reactions to Edward are in many ways similar to common reactions by nondisabled people to grotesquely disabled performers in freak shows: a voyeuristic desire to look and stare, revulsion and horror at the “perversion of nature” (as one person calls Edward), semi- and fully-mocking condescension, pity and sympathy, and an overvaluation of the disablement as exotic and fetishized. People repeatedly treat Edward’s disability as a correctable medical condition, recommending various doctors that Edward might try in order to “fix” his incomplete state. As I have suggested elsewhere, the (permanently) disabled body in fantastic films is often treated as somehow “supernatural” because it by definition lies outside the curative capabilities of science (i.e., the medical model of disability), remaining continually disavowed and misunderstood as “abnormal,” and this trend continues within the Gothic/horror tropes at play in Scissorhands.

In addition to using the grotesque as a Gothic/horror signifier, the film exemplifies a strong and obvious camp sensibility. [5] As in the films of John Waters, the suburban mise-en-scene of the film consciously exhibits a plethora of kitschy artifacts (e.g., 1950’s interior decorating and costuming) within the stiflingly placid conformity of normative life (e.g., emphasized by the identical pastel houses, the clockwork routine of day-to-day functions, and the broad character stereotypes). The casting is also a major source of camp, providing actors playing well against type; for example, while Vincent Price reprises his familiar mad scientist role here (albeit as a sympathetic and kindly old man, not the murderous villain he played in some of the campy Roger Corman productions of the past), other actors, like Johnny Depp (the dashing star of the TV series 21 Jump Street) as Edward and Anthony Michael Hall (the nerdy character in the popular John Hughes comedies of the mid-1980’s) as the jock boyfriend, take roles which invert their well-known onscreen personas. Camp’s strategies of playful subversion are especially important given the opportunity that such a “parody of normalcy” might play for persons with disabilities whose bodies already mark them as “abnormal.” By subverting and violating what is considered “normative realism,” camp readings of the grotesque figure in fantastic films may provide a politically viable space in which the concept of the normative body is mocked and destabilized in the face of the unruly disabled body. Flinn (1999) notes that the body of camp fails or refuses to maintain its boundaries, just as in the Bakhtinian carnivalesque. “Like the disunified grotesque, camp also works to violate the standards of ‘good taste,’ allying itself with filth, the profane, and an overall sense of disreputability” (p. 447), operating like the abject and interstitial disabled body. One example of a useful way to read Scissorhands through the lens of camp is to see how the normative community only grows to value Edward through his use as a tool (e.g., for dog grooming, hedge trimming, barbecuing, haircutting, etc.) and as a functional and productive worker within society; the film’s sardonic portrayal of normative society highlights the reality that persons with disabilities face in employment discrimination, and stereotypes of persons with disabilities as economically dependent and incapable of contributing to a capitalist society.

However, the excesses of camp also have a potentially negative flipside. Flinn (1999) states that “the grotesque body in camp is a wild arid laughing body, but it is also one laughed at” (p. 448). Although anxious laughter at the grotesque carnival figure may, as Brottman (2005) says, release a sense of repressed otherness that temporarily highlights the collective human condition of corporeal embodiment (p. 46), the carnivalesque lens of an overarching camp reading also serves to mock the disabled body itself as a part of the text being campily ridiculed. The move from the grotesque individual to the collective vision therefore also works in reverse (especially as post-carnival “normalcy” is resumed), moving back from a collectively experienced otherness to a derision of the “deviant” grotesque body.

Like Freaks decades earlier, Edward Scissorhands attempts to both “humanize” the monster (Edward) and reveal the monstrosity of normative, nondisabled society (suburbia); however, Scissorhands also falls short of this goal by containing Edward within the narrative patterns of horror and fairy tale. Edward is initially just as spellbound by suburbia as we are by his Gothic domain. In a campy inversion, the everyday normative world of suburbia becomes a fantastic world for Edward to discover; while he wishes to join the “normal” world, no one from the town wishes to inhabit his Gothic world, which suggests that a marked otherness only operates in one direction, against a bodily norm. At one point he tells a TV audience that he would like to become “like everyone else” by undergoing “corrective surgery” on his hands, even if conforming to a bodily norm would cost him his fame and “exceptional” individuality. Wishing to give up his disabled identity and conform, Edward wants to become part of the same “real world” that has been campily reframed in the film as monstrous; this desire by our hero to be “normal” serves to naturalize the monstrous qualities of the “real world” (a world seemingly trapped in the years before the 1960’s liberation era) as inevitable and necessary for social integration.

The horror and fairy tale elements of Scissorhands become especially marked and stultifying near the end of the film. The townspeople have turned against Edward, calling him a “freak” and a “cripple” as they slowly drive him back up to his castle, as if safely containing him within the confines of the fantastic world from which he originated. While the townspeople have formed an angry mob reminiscent of the final scenes in James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931), Edward’s adoptive family worries for his safety but thinks that Edward might be better off “up there” in the castle. They think that Edward is lacking in the moral fabric necessary for social life, fearing that he may even cause violence; in light of an earlier flashback scene showing the scientist trying to teach etiquette to the incomplete (and obviously uninterested) Edward as sketches showing his creation’s inner construction flap in the wind, this suggests that Edward’s physical deviance might be linked to a deviant mentality. Almost as if to confirm this suspicion, Edward finally kills Jim while trying to protect Kim, realizing the horrific potential of Edward’s dangerous impairment; this “sort of junior high or high school revenge fantasy” (Burton, 2000, p. 96) of Burton’s operates the same way as the revenge plot in Freaks, tipping the sympathetic tone of the film towards horror and inadvertently confirming the “monstrosity” of the disabled figure. But while Freaks ends with a return to the sideshow barker’s framing narration, Scissorhands ends with a return to the story being framed as a fairy tale being told by a now-elderly Kim to a grandchild. Just as horror films typically end with the monster being dispelled and driven back where it came from, Edward is removed from normative society, ending up alone in the castle again, his crime dooming him to the permanent ostracism and lack of love that unfortunately seems to be the lot of so many disabled characters in film. The fairy tale, as a source of “very extreme images” for Burton (2000, p. 94), also contains Edward within the framework of an instructive or moralistic fantasy somehow divorced from normative reality. Although both Freaks and Scissorhands end with framing narratives that either contain the grotesque figure within the familiar tropes of horror and fairy tale, even as the “freaks” in each film continue to still exist “somewhere out there,” Scissorhands at least ends more ambivalently with its framing story told by someone who loved Edward, rather than the exploitative sideshow barker of Freaks.

Garland-Thomson (1997) argues that the grotesque body can be freed from its negative connotations in the related posthumanist concept of the cyborg, as popularized by Donna Haraway. A cyborg is a hybrid human/machine entity that transgresses the boundaries between organic and mechanical, self and other. This theoretical figure represents the modern body’s state of near-constant intersection with artificial technology, marked by a “permanent partiality” that defies binaries of gender, race, and normality. Furthermore, this sort of transformative hybrid self “is often consonant with [the] actual experience” of persons with disabilities, who are often enhanced by prosthetics, wheelchairs, or other technologies (p. 114-15). Constructed from mechanisms somewhere between man and machine, Edward represents a cyborg figure—especially in his presence within a reworking of Frankenstein, perhaps the first and foremost literary formulation of a cyborg figure. The cyborg links internal (self) and external (other) via the mediating role of technology, somewhat like the fantastic film’s linking of the liminal and subliminal; indeed, it should not be forgotten that film spectatorship in general is a common cyborgian interfacing of human (the viewer) and machine (the cinematic apparatus), but particularly when bodily boundaries are more evidently dissolved (as in the fantastic film’s realization of imaginative processes). The cyborg represents one of the most politically viable theoretical formulations for persons with disabilities (see, for example, the work of Ju Gosling), and yet it too has its obvious (if temporary) limitations. Although it is a popular concept within the academy and select circles, the liberating qualities of the cyborg figure are not yet widespread within society at large, and therefore it is difficult to indicate the potential for actual political change that such a theoretical concept might provoke. More likely, as Edward Scissorhands shows, the interstitial, apparently less-than-human qualities of a human/machine hybrid are likely to be a source of horror and mockery until further political change occurs. As in Frankenstein, the visible melding of flesh and technology is commonly rendered abject—not only in fictional representation but also often in life, as shown by the stigmatization and reductive categorization of persons with disabilities according to their mode of technological interface.

In Edward Scissorhands, it is hard to tell whether Burton’s role is that of Frankenstein or the scientist’s creation. Although he is the creator of the film, it seems quite apparent (though he personally denies it) that actor Johnny Depp is also a cinematic alter ego, not only in Scissorhands’ fantasy of Burton’s adolescence, but in other films like Ed Wood (1994) and Sleepy Hollow (1999). According to Burton (2000), Depp was right for the part of Edward because he could relate so well to the film’s themes of inverting outward appearances. As he explains: “The words ‘freakish’ and ‘freak’ have so many interpretations, and in a weird way [Depp] sort of relates to freaks because he’s treated as one” as a handsome and supposedly difficult actor (p. 92). In the fantastic film, an individual authorial vision is often employed to conjure up the imaginative worlds that are realized on the screen, and Tim Burton is a director who has built a career out of repeatedly doing this over a body of work produced within the Hollywood studio system. “Hollywood is so strange,” says Burton (2000). “For a community made up of so many freakish outsiders, it’s oddly conservative” (p. 84). Surely the financial bottom line is a major factor in the industry’s conservatism, for many fantastic films are produced outside the studio system, even in opposition to Hollywood standards. The cult/paracinema types of fantastic films are notable for this, as are the art and avant-garde types; in fact, many fantastic films are low-budget or independent productions. With classical Hollywood narration premised upon maintaining a “seamless” normative realism, fantastic films typically exhibit form and content that runs counter to dominant Hollywood mainstream realism. Although Burton works within the studio system (but also in many ways against it), filmmakers (and/or auteurs) like him are typically the masterminds of fantastic films, bringing the magical, wondrous, horrific, and surreal to life. Working against dominant Hollywood realism, the creators of fantastic films bring an imaginative artistic perspective into their films that marginalizes them as different; likewise, the audiences of many types of fantastic films (e.g., cult/horror) are also a marginalized minority. With both Depp and Burton themselves posited as “freakish” outsiders within Hollywood, perhaps it is no surprise that Scissorhands uses a disabled hero as its fantastic centerpiece. In making films that are markedly different (and therefore supposedly deviant) in comparison to Hollywood realism, the independent, rebellious, or individualistic creator of the fantastic film may identify with the film’s disabled characters because both are in a position of social ostracism. In fact, the common use of disabled bodies in fantastic films may be because the grotesque/interstitial/abject figure is a taboo symbol marking and (perhaps even defiantly) denoting the oppositional, marginalized status of the film and filmmaker. But if the image of the disabled body is used exploitatively for its subversive taboo qualities, it retains its politically negative qualities, preserving the disabled body as a grotesque symbol exhibited by nondisabled filmmakers for nondisabled audiences.