ABSTRACT
Mainstream American commercial cinema does not have an especially good heritage of portraying the disabled. As Martin F. Norden makes clear in The Cinema of Isolation, his history of physical disability in the movies, the representation of a number of different disabilities in Hollywood features bears little relation to the actual experiences of those living with the disabilities in question. Norden notes that “the movie industry has perpetuated or initiated a number of stereotypes over the years . . . stereotypes so durable and pervasive that they have become mainstream society’s perception of disabled people and have obscured if not outright supplanted disabled people’s perceptions of themselves” (3). He generally damns an industry that finds disability most useful as a narrative vehicle for telling stories of the nondisabled and that displays little conscience when engaged in such misrepresentation.
