Desire Ability: Upgrade and Me Before You

For obvious reasons, I can’t hear, read, or think about the film Upgrade without bringing to mind the character Upgrayedd from Idiocracy, “with two D’s, as he says, for a double dose of his pimping”. Sadly, Upgrade was not the Upgrayedd-centered Idiocracy spinoff fans have (I assume) been clamoring for; it is, instead, a laughably bad and immensely entertaining sci-fi horror film from the writer-star of Saw, Leigh Whannell. As the credits rolled I likened it to a SyFy Channel original movie with better production values, and then my friend likened it to a Black Mirror episode, which is apt enough. While the film is nothing if not a Twilight Zone-esque fear of technology feeding into our worst human characteristics, the film is also as much about disability as it is about a pretty dick-ish supercomputer.

Upgrade is science fiction’s answer to Me Before You, a film that roused the ire of disability activists for its representation of the undesirability (to the point of suicide) of being disabled; I use this comparison not in the sense that both feature quadriplegic men or even that both films present disabled life as not worth living. I make the comparison in a more ephemeral sense, that the films perform comparable function in what Tobin Siebers calls “the ideology of ability” [1], complex functions that can’t necessarily be reduced to so-called negative representations.

Let’s briefly review each film: Me Before You is a film in which a woman falls in love with a quadriplegic man who kills himself in order to allow her to live a life without him; Upgrade is a film in which a man who becomes quadriplegic as a result of the same attack that killed his wife receives a deliverance from disability in the form of what Martin Norden would call “a miraculous cure”. Both films, in featuring (and justifying) the suicide or attempted suicide of their protagonists, reinforce the idea that, as Tobin Siebers writes, “[i]t is better to be dead than disabled”; if Upgrade avoids justifying its protagonist’s escape from disabled life, it is only because the film, alongside audiences who have even a cursory knowledge of the film going into it, very obviously knows that Grey is about to be cured.

But there’s more to each film; both Me Before You and Upgrade perform complex operations in which disability gives way to ability. In Me Before You, this is the process of him moving aside for her, presumably so that an able-bodied man might come into her life. In Upgrade, this is the process of Grey’s body being given movement again thanks to STEM (a rather unsubtle technophobic acronym for an evil computer). Disability doesn’t just exist to be rejected; it exists to highlight ability and to make ability apparent. In a sense, this is the purpose of most representations of ability, at least those that come from abled perspectives. Me Before You and Upgrade engage the process by which the typically unmarked body comes into sharp relief: as Siebers says, [i]f one is able-bodied, one is not really aware of the body. One feels the body only when something goes wrong with it.”

Ace Ratcliff suggests that “[n]on-disabled directors and actors seem obsessed with the fantasy that disability is something that must be changed, fixed, or redeemed—and the simplest solution is usually our deaths” [2]; the suicide and attempted suicide in both Me Before You and Upgrade bear this out. In science fiction, though, this can often be through a technologically enhanced cure, as is the case in James Cameron’s Avatar. Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water, as Ratcliff points out, features an incredibly frustrating sequence in which Eliza imagines herself speaking in her mind, reflecting the presumed desirability of ability over disability, but the twist of The Shape of Water is actually that Eliza doesn’t wind up being “cured” of her deafness, even though her fish boyfriend has magical healing powers. Upgrade plays with the familiar trope of the cure only to find it monstrous, but sadly, that only leads to the conclusion that perhaps Grey would have been better off dead after all.

The twist of Upgrayedd is that the “miraculous cure” turns out to be not so miraculous at all and, perhaps, not even particularly a cure: Grey discovers that STEM orchestrated his paralysis in order to be grafted onto him so that STEM might take control of his body, which STEM increasingly does throughout the film, to Grey’s horror. In the end, Grey loses control of his body and mind, and the frighteningly sociopathic STEM now has a human form from which to, presumably, continue to be an evil supercomputer. We can argue that this parallels the suicidal finale of Me Before You in which Will commits suicide to pave the way not only for Lou not to be held back by him but also, by the logic of heterosexuality and ableism, for an able-bodied man to take his place.

Both Me Before You and Upgrade, it should be noted, deal with able-bodiedness in masculine terms, ability rendered as a primarily masculine trait with disability then functioning as a kind of emasculation. This, in particular, is why Will Traynor cannot be a viable heterosexual partner for Lou, and why Grey’s paralysis accompanies the death of his wife: disability shuts down heterosexuality not only because physically disabled people are usually depicted as asexual (outside of rare films like David Cronenberg’s Crash, Pedro Almodóvar’s Live Flesh, or The Shape of Water) but also because disabled men cease to be “real men” within hetero-ableist frameworks (it’s no coincidence that the scene that precedes Will’s accident, thus establishing his former able-bodiedness/masculinity, begins with him in bed with a woman).

In this sense, then, these films are about desirability, literally both the quality of being desired (a quality which adheres much more to abled bodies than to disabled ones) and the desire for (hyper)ability, particularly when disabled. The function of desirability in this sense is to justify the disabling structures of our society and where possible maintain their invisibility. Disabled people are supposed to want to not be disabled.

The ultimate problem with both films is of course that disability is a crux of the narrative, a hinge on which the films turn, what David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder might call a “narrative prosthesis” [3]. Disability is made to be the very conflict on which the film is predicated: conflict between ability and disability, a productive friction caused by the unspoken truth that disabled people must not want to be disabled.

It is rare to find a film involving disability that doesn’t operate on the “narrative prosthesis” model. Like most marked social categories, disability is only present when one is hyper-aware of it, and narrative is hyper-aware of disability whenever it is present. The issue to be solved, then, is not even one of positive or negative representation. Even positive representation works to the same marked quality of disability, reinforcing the disabling positions of a society. One need only look at any number of “inspirational” disability movies and the way they thoroughly other the disabled character (usually just one) to see this.

Instead, we should be looking towards films that simply let disabled people be.

Sources

1. Tobin Siebers, “Disability and the Theory of Complex Embodiment—For Identity Politics in a New Register”, in The Disability Studies Reader, 4th edition, edited by Lennard J. Davis
2. Ace Ratcliff, “Already Whole: How Hollywood’s Biggest Hits Shut Out Disability”, at Bitch
3. David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, “Narrative Prosthesis”, in The Disability Studies Reader, 4th edition, edited by Lennard J. Davis