In cinema, the intersection of disability and queerness tends to best cluster around the villain. Well, I say ‘best’ but we’re not exactly spoilt for choice. And, while I recognise this treatment can fortify stigma against my communities, there is something in me that’s drawn to the dark side—like blondes, ‘baddies’ seem to have more fun.
I imagine this impulse is a product of the representations I’ve been allowed. I accept what film has taught me to accept and in an effort to have some agency in the matter, I’ve decided to like it. I must have learnt how narratively efficient it was to make your crooks crooked from a young age, certainly before I had any awareness of my own queerness, and perhaps before I really understood much about my disability.
In cinema, the intersection of disability and queerness tends to best cluster around the villain.
Take two of the defining Disney villains of my childhood so subtle is the reliance on crip villainy that the characters are named after their deformities. Captain Hook (Peter Pan, 1953) is the mincing pirate whose wrought-iron prosthetic connects to the limpest of wrists, and there’s Scar (The Lion King, 1994) whose facial difference scarcely interrupts his elevated high-drag eyeshadow.
This double-coding of marginal aberration similarly defines Raoul Silva, the villain of the 2012 James Bond film Skyfall.
Joining a long line of Bond villains written with the mindset that inner wickedness can’t help but manifest physically, he is the first for whom queerness is made explicit—which is to say, graduating from the implications that come with cat ownership, to actually making a pass at Bond. Carefully, Silva undoes Bond’s shirt and flutters his fingers over a scar—one of many 007 has sustained in the line of duty. History is written on the body, and for Silva, the marks of trauma turn erotic.
The event that scars Silva is the event that transforms him into a villain. A former British agent who hacked the Chinese government, Silva was handed over to Chinese authorities by the head of MI6 in exchange for other captured agents and a peaceful handover in Hong Kong’s sovereignty. Tortured for months, Silva finally opts for escape—a cyanide capsule hidden in his back tooth. But he does not die. “Life clang to me like a disease” says Silva, describing how the cyanide burned his insides physically and, in tandem, psychologically.
*
Art imitates life, and the queer-coding and cripping up of baddies on screen is reflective of society’s longstanding propensity to be both homophobic and ableist.
Reeling back to 1951, when we watch Hitchcock’s classic Strangers On A Train it’s easy to see how Robert Walker’s Bruno Antony is all the more ‘evil’ for his silk robes, hatred of parental figures and over-eager interest in the life of tennis star Guy Haines. But it is worth considering that the very next year in 1952, the American Psychiatric Association released the DSM-1 listing homosexuality as a “sociopathic personality disturbance”. If homosexuality is a disease, Bruno’s bloodlust and coded queerness are one in the same: the products of an unwell man.
Art imitates life, and the queer-coding and cripping up of baddies on screen is reflective of society’s longstanding propensity to be both homophobic and ableist.
Fast forward to 2012, and while Skyfall may have been made in a country that had long since disentangled homosexuality from disease, it draws on a lineage of film language that dates back through its pathologisation.
*
Beyond simple visual clues to hidden evil, sexual deviance and disability are causative agents, or inevitable repercussions, of transgression. It’s a pattern that came well before cinema.
Take Oedipus, whose name literally means ‘swollen foot’. Born under a prophecy that he would kill his father, his ankles are bound together and pierced so that he would stand no chance of survival when left out to die.
Oedipus’s lifelong lameness becomes a defining characteristic—almost certainly the reason he so easily solved the Sphinx’s infamous riddle that posits a walking stick as a ‘third leg’. It follows him, limping, to the murder of his father and the sexually transgressive act of sleeping with his mother. His punishment is another scoop of disability, self-inflicted blindness, completing the physical-sexual-physical aberration sandwich that defines the story of Oedipus. Disability is at once predictive, and punitive, for the sexual wrong.
*
As the queers and crips are cemented as figures of evil, so too are their opposites cemented as figures of good.
A very particular type of love becomes the defining happy ending of twentieth-century cinema—passionate, powerful, happy, heterosexual love. Moreover, it’s sold to us as ‘eternal love’. With its promise to last forever, whispered between gorgeously symmetrical and abled leads, the idea of eternal love trades on one certain path to immortality—procreation.
Whether shown on-screen or implied beyond the credits, cinema’s happiest of happy endings often mean babies. Good, honest, happy, heterosexual love produces good, honest, happy, healthy children. Those who exist outside this paradigm—the gays opting out of procreation, the lame and invalid offspring opting out of the expectation of health—are in opposition to the happy ending.
Perhaps that speaks to how queerness and disability became so narratively muddled with evil. We could never sell the happy ending. Who else is there left to play, but the villains?
*
I’m left with the question of how much I’m allowed to like these messy, evil, queer, disabled villains.
I often imagine film filled to the brim with queer, disabled heroes—but I can’t help wondering whether I’d be a bit bored by them. Much like straightness and abledness, goodness sometimes feels a bit… simplistic.
Villains disrupt, and in their disruptions, shift the status quo. The acts of movie villains tend towards horrific violence, things I’d never begin to imagine doing—yet I connect more broadly with the desire for chaos, the desire to shake things up in a world made for the people who get the happy ending.
When I see a queer, disabled villain, I see a template for how I might destroy the world as it is—but in my version, the ‘good guys’ don’t win. I do.
That these identities are employed by cis, het, abled creatives as shorthand is the sticking point. The profits of our affinity with the campy, the unnatural, the abject and the evil are not coming to us, but to those who get to see themselves in the happy endings, those who get to see themselves as the good guys.
It’s motivating, really. In my desire to correct the scales, righteous anger and a need for revenge sustains my own writing. When I see a queer, disabled villain, I see a template for how I might destroy the world as it is—but in my version, the ‘good guys’ don’t win. I do.
I guess you could say it’s my villain origin story.
In cinema, the intersection of disability and queerness tends to best cluster around the villain. Well, I say ‘best’ but we’re not exactly spoilt for choice. And, while I recognise this treatment can fortify stigma against my communities, there is something in me that’s drawn to the dark side—like blondes, ‘baddies’ seem to have more fun.
I imagine this impulse is a product of the representations I’ve been allowed. I accept what film has taught me to accept and in an effort to have some agency in the matter, I’ve decided to like it. I must have learnt how narratively efficient it was to make your crooks crooked from a young age, certainly before I had any awareness of my own queerness, and perhaps before I really understood much about my disability.
In cinema, the intersection of disability and queerness tends to best cluster around the villain.
Take two of the defining Disney villains of my childhood so subtle is the reliance on crip villainy that the characters are named after their deformities. Captain Hook (Peter Pan, 1953) is the mincing pirate whose wrought-iron prosthetic connects to the limpest of wrists, and there’s Scar (The Lion King, 1994) whose facial difference scarcely interrupts his elevated high-drag eyeshadow.
This double-coding of marginal aberration similarly defines Raoul Silva, the villain of the 2012 James Bond film Skyfall.
Joining a long line of Bond villains written with the mindset that inner wickedness can’t help but manifest physically, he is the first for whom queerness is made explicit—which is to say, graduating from the implications that come with cat ownership, to actually making a pass at Bond. Carefully, Silva undoes Bond’s shirt and flutters his fingers over a scar—one of many 007 has sustained in the line of duty. History is written on the body, and for Silva, the marks of trauma turn erotic.
The event that scars Silva is the event that transforms him into a villain. A former British agent who hacked the Chinese government, Silva was handed over to Chinese authorities by the head of MI6 in exchange for other captured agents and a peaceful handover in Hong Kong’s sovereignty. Tortured for months, Silva finally opts for escape—a cyanide capsule hidden in his back tooth. But he does not die. “Life clang to me like a disease” says Silva, describing how the cyanide burned his insides physically and, in tandem, psychologically.
*
Art imitates life, and the queer-coding and cripping up of baddies on screen is reflective of society’s longstanding propensity to be both homophobic and ableist.
Reeling back to 1951, when we watch Hitchcock’s classic Strangers On A Train it’s easy to see how Robert Walker’s Bruno Antony is all the more ‘evil’ for his silk robes, hatred of parental figures and over-eager interest in the life of tennis star Guy Haines. But it is worth considering that the very next year in 1952, the American Psychiatric Association released the DSM-1 listing homosexuality as a “sociopathic personality disturbance”. If homosexuality is a disease, Bruno’s bloodlust and coded queerness are one in the same: the products of an unwell man.
Art imitates life, and the queer-coding and cripping up of baddies on screen is reflective of society’s longstanding propensity to be both homophobic and ableist.
Fast forward to 2012, and while Skyfall may have been made in a country that had long since disentangled homosexuality from disease, it draws on a lineage of film language that dates back through its pathologisation.
*
Beyond simple visual clues to hidden evil, sexual deviance and disability are causative agents, or inevitable repercussions, of transgression. It’s a pattern that came well before cinema.
Take Oedipus, whose name literally means ‘swollen foot’. Born under a prophecy that he would kill his father, his ankles are bound together and pierced so that he would stand no chance of survival when left out to die.
Oedipus’s lifelong lameness becomes a defining characteristic—almost certainly the reason he so easily solved the Sphinx’s infamous riddle that posits a walking stick as a ‘third leg’. It follows him, limping, to the murder of his father and the sexually transgressive act of sleeping with his mother. His punishment is another scoop of disability, self-inflicted blindness, completing the physical-sexual-physical aberration sandwich that defines the story of Oedipus. Disability is at once predictive, and punitive, for the sexual wrong.
*
As the queers and crips are cemented as figures of evil, so too are their opposites cemented as figures of good.
A very particular type of love becomes the defining happy ending of twentieth-century cinema—passionate, powerful, happy, heterosexual love. Moreover, it’s sold to us as ‘eternal love’. With its promise to last forever, whispered between gorgeously symmetrical and abled leads, the idea of eternal love trades on one certain path to immortality—procreation.
Whether shown on-screen or implied beyond the credits, cinema’s happiest of happy endings often mean babies. Good, honest, happy, heterosexual love produces good, honest, happy, healthy children. Those who exist outside this paradigm—the gays opting out of procreation, the lame and invalid offspring opting out of the expectation of health—are in opposition to the happy ending.
Perhaps that speaks to how queerness and disability became so narratively muddled with evil. We could never sell the happy ending. Who else is there left to play, but the villains?
*
I’m left with the question of how much I’m allowed to like these messy, evil, queer, disabled villains.
I often imagine film filled to the brim with queer, disabled heroes—but I can’t help wondering whether I’d be a bit bored by them. Much like straightness and abledness, goodness sometimes feels a bit… simplistic.
Villains disrupt, and in their disruptions, shift the status quo. The acts of movie villains tend towards horrific violence, things I’d never begin to imagine doing—yet I connect more broadly with the desire for chaos, the desire to shake things up in a world made for the people who get the happy ending.
When I see a queer, disabled villain, I see a template for how I might destroy the world as it is—but in my version, the ‘good guys’ don’t win. I do.
That these identities are employed by cis, het, abled creatives as shorthand is the sticking point. The profits of our affinity with the campy, the unnatural, the abject and the evil are not coming to us, but to those who get to see themselves in the happy endings, those who get to see themselves as the good guys.
It’s motivating, really. In my desire to correct the scales, righteous anger and a need for revenge sustains my own writing. When I see a queer, disabled villain, I see a template for how I might destroy the world as it is—but in my version, the ‘good guys’ don’t win. I do.
I guess you could say it’s my villain origin story.