The Disabled Villain: Why Sensitivity Reading Can’t Kill off This Ugly Trope

 Photo by Angela Papuga / Staff / Getty Images

Some years ago, I decided to read all of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels. It may have been a fit of nostalgia for the Roger Moore films I grew up watching, or perhaps I was bored with writing short stories for a minuscule readership and wanted to know what mass-market success read like.

It was quite an experience – and one I found myself recalling recently, when I read that Fleming’s books were being revised, chiefly in order to remove some, though not all, of the casual racism. Also some of the misogyny, though likely not all of that either.

My first question, on reading the news, was what kind of reader exactly was the publisher, Ian Fleming Publications Ltd, envisioning. Presumably someone who would, were it not for the most explicit slurs, really enjoy the ethnic stereotypes. Or someone who would, were it not for the full-on rapes, really enjoy the pervasive sexism. (Come to think of it, there are probably quite a few of these readers.)

The other question that struck me was this: what on earth are they going to do about disability?

As a wheelchair user, I could not help noticing that the original Bond books had, shall we say, an interesting relationship to embodied difference. It was a feature of Fleming’s writing that would be all but impossible to alter through the interventions of a sensitivity reader, hired by the publisher to make the books more palatable to contemporary readers. Fleming’s attitude to disability was encoded not only in words and phrases, but in characterisation and plot – that is, in the stories’ most fundamental qualities.

It is not a novel observation that Bond villains tend to be, to use a less sensitive register, disfigured and deformed. Dr No with his steel pincers instead of hands, Blofeld with his scars, Hugo Drax, the villain from Moonraker, with his facial disfigurement and his pathetic attempt to conceal it with a “bushy reddish beard” (reddish hair may itself count as a deformity in these stories). Were they not successfully self-employed, most of Bond’s enemies would likely qualify for disability benefits.

Even as Fleming’s storylines have in the Bond films been progressively stripped of their racism and misogyny, disability has remained an essential aspect of their characterisation. This is particularly jarring in the recent Daniel Craig movies, which are otherwise marked by a sensitive approach to many other issues.

In Skyfall, Javier Bardem’s Raoul Silva is a striking example of the narrative logic at work. He at first appears handsome and polished (if effete, which in Bond territory is always a warning sign), but something about his face seems a little … off. He then reveals himself as a villain by removing a set of hidden facial prosthetics. As his visage literally collapses, his inner monstrosity comes into view. Now Bond, and the audience, can see who he really is. And that is the main function of disability in these stories – an outwardly visible sign of an inner quality.

This particular trope, wherein a character’s moral and physiological natures mirror each other, is as universal as it is ancient. It is reflected in the philosophy of Plato, in commonplaces like “a healthy mind in a healthy body”, and in the foundational texts of the cultural canon. In Buddhist tradition, too, disability has been construed as an impediment to understanding and enlightenment – and even, for some, as a punishment for actions in a past life.

As disability scholars David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder have pointed out in their books Narrative Prosthesis and Cultural Locations of Disability, using disability as a means of characterisation is an intrinsic feature in the storytelling tradition. It provides not only a shorthand for separating good characters and bad, but explains their motivation and narrative function.

Sometimes, this connection between embodiment and motivation is made fully explicit. In the opening monologue of Richard III, Shakespeare’s version of the king – made significantly more disabled than his historical counterpart – takes pains to establish that he will be the villain and not the hero of the play. This, he argues, is a logical consequence of his embodiment:

I, that am curtail’d of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deformed, unfinish’d, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them;
Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun
And descant on mine own deformity:
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.

What is a sensitivity reader to do with this? Does it make a difference if the Yorkist king is referred to as “differently abled” and not a “cripple”?

Undoubtedly – but I don’t think the change would be for the better, and for reasons beyond the clanging sound of euphemism. In many ways it would be worse. The fundamental problem lies not with the words used to describe the character, but with the attributes ascribed to him. And if those attributes are demanded by the logic of the narrative, we are facing a challenge that can be unexpectedly subtle.

A few years ago, having written a disability memoir, I had a spell of minor celebrity in Norway, appearing on the local equivalent of Have I Got News For You and some other TV shows. Following this, I received an unexpected phone call. It was from a casting agency who wanted to have me read for a small part in a television series called Occupied. The show (occasionally available on Netflix) was derived from an idea by Jo Nesbø about a Russian invasion of Norway – an idea that seemed a little more fanciful in 2019 than it might today.

I said yes to the audition, of course. I was curious, flattered, and wanted to know whether I would completely embarrass myself. But I also wanted to know what the experience of playing a disabled character in a mainstream television series would be like.

My character, Ivar Salvesen, was initially conceived as an assistant of sorts to the Norwegian prime minister, mainly in the script for purposes of exposition. His job was partly to feed information to the prime minister, and thus to the viewers, on key plot developments. But as the drafts progressed, he – spoiler alert! – turned into a villain. He became the head of an unscrupulous consultancy, vaguely reminiscent of Cambridge Analytica, promising to deliver the parliamentary election – before proceeding to collaborate with various shadowy characters who threw acid at the prime minister’s political enemies.

Whether the change in Ivar’s character was accidental or a result of the writers coming to appreciate my villainous nature I will never know. But for whatever reason, he joined the ranks of Dr Strangelove and the usual wheelchair-using baddies. When I pointed this out to one of the other actors, she seemed thoroughly surprised. “Oh, I never thought of that. He just seemed to be written as a sort of classically cerebral, calculating villain. That sort of type.”

Well, yes. That sort of type. Cerebral, calculating. Compensating, perhaps, for some essential inner flaw. Concealing, possibly, his hatred of able-bodied humanity. We know the type.

The series was set in modern, progressive Norway, so no one referred to my character as a “cripple” or with any other kind of slur. That did not change the essential fact of characterisation. And no sensitivity reading on the verbal, or even conceptual level, could change that.

My acting adventure taught me much about the deep, often reactionary aspects to popular storytelling. But it was also educational in other, unexpected ways. Chiefly, it gave me some insight into why mainstream stories often resort to shorthand when it comes to representations of disability.

Like many western European productions, Occupied was partly filmed in eastern Europe, specifically in Lithuania. I was wary of travelling there, as I am always wary of travelling as a wheelchair user. The logistics are complicated at best, involving labyrinthine booking procedures and endless bureaucratic requests or information about one’s wheelchair: How wide is it? How heavy? What kind of batteries does it have? This information, which must be supplied, is promptly forgotten by the airline, and has to repeated to sometimes befuddled, occasionally hostile check-in staff.

In addition, there was only one airline with a direct flight from Oslo to Vilnius, and, like most low-budget airlines, it was notoriously bad at disability accommodation. I did my due diligence, spending hours online in order to find out the exact dimensions of the cargo doors for the plane on this particular flight, probably being flagged as a “person of interest” by some agency or other in the process. I also talked to my sister and her then boyfriend, both professional actors, who assured me that transporting an electric wheelchair from one place to another was a very minor challenge for a large-scale TV production. This, at least, was mildly reassuring.

The plane trip was as troublesome as I’d predicted. The airline had no record of my need for assistance, and for unexplained reasons I spent an hour waiting on the tarmac in a freezing cold Ambulift, the cargo container on wheels that modern airports use to transport disabled passengers along with in-flight meals.

But it turned out that the professionals were right. Once I was in Lithuania, transportation was smoothly arranged by the production company. Even though the only wheelchair-accessible van they’d been able to hire in the capital, Vilnius, broke down the day before I arrived, they were able to find another one at the other end of the country. There was a simple reason for this efficiency: once I’d been cast, a lot of money was staked on my being on set, on time, and so a solution was found. Unlike in real life, where there are no consequences to, say, keeping me waiting on the tarmac.

And so I was able to act, to my limited ability, in a range of scenes set in the prime minister’s office, in the hospital where my character had helped put one of his enemies, and even in the government limousine that took us both to the hospital.

This final scene we shot was by far the most interesting one to me in terms of disability representation, though it had nothing to do with the good/evil binary. My character used an electric wheelchair. (Of course, I’d be hard pressed to play a character who didn’t.) This was no problem in the office and hospital scenes; plenty of room. But it would not fit in the back seat of a limo.

So there I was, in a regular car seat. This was almost as exotic an experience for me as trying to say my lines “without trying to act”, as I’d very sensibly been instructed. I rarely move from my wheelchair when in transit, which is usually in vans that are as boxy and as ugly as an Ambulift. The luxury car seat felt infinitely more soft and comfortable by comparison. Gradually, helped along by one of my fellow actors, a veteran and very patient professional, I relaxed into the scene.

Something kept bothering me, though, and eventually, around take three or four, I couldn’t help asking the director certain questions.

The scene in the car would lead into a scene outside the hospital? Yes.

And in the scene outside the hospital, Ivar would be in his electric wheelchair? Yes.

But right now, in the limousine, he was not in his wheelchair? Yes.

And in the following scene, the wheelchair would in fact, it seems, be waiting for him? Yes.

So how exactly would the wheelchair get there?

There could, of course, be a number of explanations. There might be multiple wheelchairs. The prime minister’s staff might have spirited the wheelchair away, rushing to have it in place. The Secret Service did this for Franklin D Roosevelt, providing commando-style accessibility where none existed previously. Alternatively, I suppose, the wheelchair could be strapped to the roof of the limousine, out of frame. It certainly wasn’t visible, or even alluded to.

The director, a friendly and thoroughly experienced man, someone who’d worked with international stars such as Christina Ricci and Jonathan Rhys Meyers, considered my question. After a long pause, he suggested that we may have to gloss over this one.

This was clearly the right answer. If the narrative in Occupied was to progress at all, we couldn’t dwell on every logistical conundrum that a wheelchair user would face in the real world. We wouldn’t have got past Ivar’s first scene. Or, Beckett-style, we wouldn’t have got to his scene at all. He would have been infinitely delayed, waiting for assistance to get out of bed in the morning, waiting for accessible transportation to take him the prime minister’s office, trapped on the phone with one public office or another. This would not make for good TV.

Still, having navigated the airline’s dark joke of a disability service system, and having come to Vilnius to sit in the back of the very nice car, I couldn’t help but envy Ivar just a little bit. His life was obviously easier than mine on a number of counts, owing to his trick of living in a fictional universe where disability was merely a character trait.

I have a six-year-old. When reading to him, I routinely edit the books we enjoy together. Sometimes I edit for clarity, sometimes for brevity, sometimes for scariness, and sometimes for racism and misogyny. (We haven’t got to Ian Fleming yet, I should say.)

Sometimes, though, I am at a loss. Reading Roald Dahl, who was born to Norwegian immigrant parents and is as popular in Norway as he is in the UK, we had fun with many of his books. Fantastic Mr Fox was a success, and on balance I decided to leave the three grotesque farmers as they were. We enjoyed Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, too, though I had to improvise in many places, particularly when it came to the Oompa-Loompas origins as a “pygmy people from Africa”, happy to work for Willy Wonka without pay. (It should be noted that Dahl himself revised this particular aspect of the story in 1973, but in the 2015 Norwegian translation, they still hail from a “big, dark jungle” and have only grubs to eat.)

With George’s Marvellous Medicine, though, we couldn’t get past page three. The baddie in this story is George’s horrible and horribly decrepit grandmother, on whom George takes his revenge by concocting his medicine. There is no way to soften Dahl’s description of the grandmother, because without it, George would have no motivation and the story would have no point. And so I followed Philip Pullman’s sensible suggestion to let some of Dahl’s worst stories “fade away”, rather than trying to edit them past recognition. I did not need to read it, and my son was happy not to have to hear it. There were better stories for us to explore.

We are in fraught territory here, living – as all generations do – through historical change. I grew up on JRR Tolkien’s stories, and my nostalgic love for them hasn’t dimmed, even as I’ve come to appreciate their troublesome aspects. They are fairly explicitly racist when it comes to skin colour, drawing on the same trope of physiology intertwined with morals that underpins so much characterisation of disability. Does it matter whether Tolkien’s Haradrim are evil because they are dark, or dark because they are evil? Not so long as the two qualities are inextricable.

Tolkien’s way with non-human races has also been thoroughly explored and critiqued – particularly the degree to which he drew on antisemitic stereotypes in fashioning his dwarves. Here, too, there is no quick fix. Even the word itself is a problem. It would be absurd to rename the dwarves of The Lord of the Rings “people with restricted growth”, since that is quite simply not what they are.

There is, of course, a fantasy universe which does feature at least one character with restricted growth, created by another author with the same middle initials. In his series of fantasy novels A Song of Ice and Fire, on which the TV series Game of Thrones was based, George RR Martin plays off and subverts Tolkien’s legacy in a number of ways, but to my mind never as interestingly as when depicting Tyrion Lannister.

Although Tyrion is called an “imp” by other characters, he is clearly a person with restricted growth, not a fantasy creature. And in the novels as well as the series, he faces what the disability scholar Tom Shakespeare has called the “predicament” of disability, even though he lives in a fantastical world. Portrayed by Peter Dinklage, Tyrion becomes a memorable character partly because of the precise way in which this predicament is presented. Tyrion cannot meet the medieval standard of masculinity and martial prowess. He has to live by his wits and must be extremely sensitive to social nuances – an all too familiar consequence of disability.

I am not championing one double R over the other; I am simply pointing out that sensitivity reading has both its purposes and its limitations. Sensitivity reading “on the fly” is an invaluable tool for parents reading to children. It can even be a useful exercise for authors who revisit their work at a later stage. It is less helpful, I think, when it is used by commercial entities to obscure the cultural history of storytelling.

It is no accident that the biggest recent debates over sensitivity reading have been initiated by two companies that strive to maximise the value of the intellectual property of dead authors. Their real sensitivity is to the market. One of them, the Roald Dahl Story Company, was acquired by Netflix to help it combat the biggest such company of all – the house that Walt Disney built.

Disney has been on a decades-long acquisition rampage, absorbing the Marvel and Star Wars universes, among many others. Thus the Disneyfication of culture has proceeded from the fairly dark European fairy tales with which it began to more recent mythologies. Many new works of genuine quality have emerged from this process, but it has also been one of endless repetition – and homogenisation. Very different strands of folk culture and popular culture are uprooted from their specific historical contexts and subjected to the demands of global marketing campaigns. Equally important, there is less oxygen for genuinely original stories. It makes little difference if the label has been changed but the product inside the box is essentially the same.

We can and should exchange new words for old slurs, particularly when the effects are obviously positive. Some disabled people have reappropriated the term “cripple”, and are using it for politically progressive purposes. “Crip theory” is a burgeoning field of academic inquiry. Even so, I am quite happy not to be called crippled in everyday life. This is not only because of the word’s derogatory meaning, but because “cripple” in its conventional meaning implies something essential about one’s status – something that is inextricably linked to one’s body, independent of circumstance. I prefer “disabled” partly because that word leaves room for multiple interpretations of what I am disabled by – including, crucially, society. Most days, I am first and foremost disabled by a lack of accessibility.

Showing my age, I am less keen to enter into a debate on the merits of “person with disabilities” versus “disabled person”. And to my middle-aged ears, “differently abled” is clearly a euphemism, and a reactionary one at that, a term that does as much good to alleviate disabling policies as “underprivileged” does to fight poverty.

Language is powerful, but never on its own. It is entwined with politics, culture and history. If we replace older and ostensibly more stigmatising words with newer and softer-sounding labels, but do nothing to change the context in which the words appear, we leave the job half done. Arguably, we also risk new words and euphemisms being overtaken by old stigmas, in which case the fundamental problem of representation remains. Politely calling a Bond villain a “differently abled person” does nothing to undo the link between their embodiment and their villainy.

No, I don’t want to read an Ian Fleming novel in which a differently abled person overcomes his physical challenges in order to become an inspirational example of world-threatening villainy. I’m much happier reading the old books as products of their time, and then moving on to stories new.