During this same period, I was preparing for the annual NEMLA (Northeastern Modern Language Association) conference up in Massachusetts. My self-appointed task was convincing a bunch of academics that they should embrace the developmentally disabled, that they should move beyond nominal acceptance of the intellectual other (postmodernism, after all, claims to value every kind of voice) and extend a more tangible invitation to the population. Yes, I know. I was asking those who worship knowledge to consider embracing a population defined in part by their compromised intellects. A tall order, to be sure. The week before the presentation, realizing I hadn’t the time to draw together all the disability criticism and philosophy I’d been reading into a coherent argument, I decided to supplement my claims with a bit of storytelling. Looking for stories about intellectual disability that would (presumably) be familiar to a general audience, I turned to film. Sure made for a pretty slideshow.

You can guess where this is going, can’t you? In the midst of filling my head with abstractions about an array of deficiencies once branded “idiocy”—and rewatching relevant classics like Being There and Rain Man—I took in Napoleon Dynamite for a third time. The obvious associations just couldn’t be avoided. As one of my students recently chuckled, “everyone in that film is an idiot!”

This undergraduate’s words obviously demand that we make a distinction between developmental disability and, well, “stupidity,” but they raise a related, more interesting distinction between what is funny and what is not. If the film were full of individuals with actual intellectual disabilities brought on by genetic irregularities, gestational problems, or later life trauma, we wouldn’t allow ourselves to roll in the aisles . . . would we?

Napoleon’s expectoration of the invective “idiot” each time someone frustrates him amuses us not only because he is actually the movie’s central, most foolish figure, but because he represents the kind of imbecility we have no qualms about ridiculing. I believe this is, at least in part, because many of us identify with him. I too had a Trapper Keeper in the mid-80’s, doodled fantastic creatures and monsters, thought a sai looked cool hooked into my belt loop, had difficulty talking to pretty girls, chewed Big League Chew instead of tobacco, and envied guys with shocks on their bicycles. Of course, such things characterized my middle school more than my high school years, but then, Napoleon’s atavism is part of his charm. This atemporal hero lives in a comically anachronistic zone replete with top-loading VCRs and old-style Casio watches, as well as web chat rooms where correspondents can send large images via email. And he sports the funniest mannerisms, behaviors we recognize as nerdish, not indicative of real dysfunction. The way he leads with his head when he runs, his arms held stiffly against his sides; the eternally scrunched-up brow; or the half-closed, glazed orbs which peer out from behind thick glasses—characteristics which in an identifiably disabled individual would elicit discomfort or compassion, here provoke belly laughs. And well they should.

The humor elicited by films like Being There (1979) and Pumpkin (2002) proves more problematic, relying as they do on the kinds of prescriptive, delimiting roles traditionally relegated the “idiot” figure in western fiction. While Being There is undoubtedly, irresistibly hilarious (Peter Sellers’ Chauncey “Gardener” is much more nuanced than his earlier fool, Inspector Clouseau), it relies heavily on tropes like the idiot as seer, and idiot as bumbling plot catalyst. Funny, but disturbing. Unlike, say, blaxploitation films that provide African-Americans an opportunity to make money off self-parodies, films that pass able-minded actors off as intellectually disabled and then mock provide no opportunities—direct or indirect—for empowerment. In fact, these types of films can disrupt attempts to take this population seriously. Especially when the comedy is as dark as that in Pumpkin, which begins by playing on the idiot as a helpless, sentimental site for others’ acts of pity, and ends with a magical-realistic transformation of the once mobility impaired, stuttering hero into a sexually virile athlete. I’m still trying to process Yellow Brick Road, which Ben and I caught a couple days ago at the Full Frame film festival in Durham. I love that the directors took such a compassionate approach in documenting a group of intellectually disabled adults who once a year put on a play for the public, but I can’t help being uncomfortable with the number of times the film made us laugh . . .

9 April 2005