Michael Davidson

Phantom Limbs: Film Noir and the Disabled Body

In Out of the Past (1947), a deaf boy (Dickie Moore) protects Jeff Bailey (Robert Mitchum) from police and gangsters who, for differing reasons, pursue him for his role in a murder. Jeff is subsequently killed by the femme fatale, Kathie (Jane Greer), when she discovers that he is handing her over to the police as the killer. When Jeff ’s current girlfriend, Ann (Virginia Huston), asks the deaf boy whether Jeff intended to return to Kathie, the boy nods, telling a lie that frees Ann from her emotional dependence on the hero and permits her to marry a local policeman. In The Fallen Sparrow (1943), Kit McKittrick (John Garfield), having been tortured in prison during the Spanish Civil War, is haunted by one of his tormentors, a “man who limps” who has followed him back to the United States. The sound of the man’s dragging foot reduces the shell-shocked Kit to shuddering hysteria until, faced with evidence that his pursuer is a Nazi spy, he confronts him in a final shootout. In The Blue Dahlia (1946), Johnny Morrison (Alan Ladd) has returned from World War II to find that his wife, Helen (Doris Dowling), has been unfaithful to him. After an argument between them, Helen is killed, and suspicion points to Johnny but, more particularly, to his wartime buddy, Buzz (William Bendix), injured in the war and suffering from what we now call posttraumatic stress syndrome. Buzz’s disability, although not evident all the time, causes him to become violent whenever he hears certain kinds of loud music.1 These noir examples could be expanded to include numerous films in which a person with a disability plays a supporting role, serving as a marker for larger narratives about normalcy and legitimacy.2 The deaf boy in Out of the Past mirrors Jeff ’s flawed yet stoical integrity, providing a silent riposte to the glamour of and tough-guy patter between the other males in the film. The figure of the limping Nazi spy in The Fallen Sparrow enables the director, Richard Wallace, to use disability to shift Kit’s problematic leftist collaboration with Republican Spain

On the outskirts of form: cosmopoetics in the shadow of NAFTA1

In Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu’s 2006 film, Babel, the historical geography of globalization is presented through a series of interlinked stories about a crisis of communication among widely dispersed individuals.3 A Japanese businessman gives a rifle to a Moroccan herdsman who has served as the former’s guide on a hunting expedition in northern Africa. The herdsman gives the gun to his two sons so that they can ward off jackals that are preying on their herd of goats. While engaging in target practice, one of the boys shoots at a bus carrying tourists, striking an American woman, Susan (Cate Blanchett) and causing her husband, Richard (Brad Pitt), to staunch the bleeding while attempting frantically to contact the American embassy for medical aid in a remote mountain village. Once Susan is helicoptered to a hospital, Richard phones his undocumented Mexican nanny back home in San Diego and asks her to take care of their children for a few more days. The nanny, Amelia (Adriana Barraza), had planned on returning to Tijuana to witness her son’s wedding. Lacking any alternative childcare, she takes the two American children with her across the border. After the wedding, she returns late at night with her nephew, and when the border guards become inquisitive about the presence of two American children in the back seat, the inebriated nephew guns the car across the border, leaving Amelia and the children in the California desert.

Familial Networks as a Source of Electoral Advantage: Evidence from the Philippines

In this paper we map networks of family relationships among voters and political candidates covering one whole city in the Philippines to examine how familial networks serve as a source of electoral advantage. We rely on local naming conventions to asses blood and marriage links. Using these familial networks, we first simulate a hypothetical election were family relations is the only basis for choosing a particular candidate. We compare the predictions of this hypothetical election to actual election results. Next, we use survey data on 895 randomly selected voters to examine whether familial distance is important for individual vote. We find that familial networks matter both for candidates’ electoral performance and individual voter behavior.