GIMP
ON GIMP: SOME THOUGHTS ON MURDERBALL
By Ryan Knighton
“Before the Oscars strut by, a disabled author tries to
understand Murderball’s underperformance at the box office,
and its secret life."
Though Murderball is gunning for best documentary at this year’s
Oscars, the much-touted film about wheelchair rugby continues to underperform.
Whereas its darling competitor March of the Penguins has charmed more
than $100 million from audiences, Murderball has scored a mere $2
million to date. That’s not the ten to twelve million anticipated
by backers. Co-producer and distributor Jeff Sackman is reputedly
scratching his noggin and wondering what gives. It’s a good
question. By the way, shouts out to parents who rented the birdie
movie over and over, as begged.
Clearly the film’s subject should be enough to put bums in seats.
Theater seats, I mean. Directors Henry Alex Rubin and Dana Adam Shapiro
followed a team of fantastic and often frightening wheelchair athletes,
a gang of fascinating characters who find both hope and pleasure in
an Olympic sport unlike any other. The game of Murderball, for those
who don’t know – and apparently that’s quite a few
– is best described as part rugby, part demolition derby, and,
well, a lot of cyberpunk nightmare.
Basically, and not to exaggerate, players chase after a ball and knock
each other into further spinal cord trauma. That’s it. Good
fun. Scoring goals is somehow involved, too, but I couldn’t
catch the finer points over the din. The main equipment necessary
is a reinforced wheelchair capable of withstanding and delivering
serious contact. Road Warrior should come to mind. Without question,
Murderball lives up to the name its Canadian inventors coined. The
game can kill you. Balls are involved, too. Ahem. I’ll get to
those in a minute.
Lack of hype doesn’t account for the relatively poor numbers.
Along with appearances on such sweet spots as The Today Show and Jay
Leno, Murderball’s disabled gladiators spent a slap-happy hour
with Larry King Live. For further publicity, Mark Zupan, the film’s
central beefcake, even went so far as to play wheelchair joust with
the damaged dudes of Jackass. Among other embarrassments, Steve-o
wheeled his face at high speed into Zupan’s extended fist, albeit
not hard enough. Penguins can’t do any of that..
Being a disabled guy myself, and a very belated fan of this movie,
I’m particularly curious why it isn’t reaching a bigger
audience. I suspect it likely has little to do with the movie’s
quality, or its marketing, but everything to do with our typical claptrap
about disabled folks and their inspirational stories. Even I’m
bored by that, if not repelled, and I’m supposedly one of those
people with inspiration to share. Makes me feel dirty. Besides, being
disabled is enough to bend a guy out of shape without misrepresenting
him, too.
So, as persuaded by the revues, I could only assume the film was about
our usual take on disability, and that it told the usual story of
men who overcame the odds and found a new life in the screwed-up bodies
that betrayed them. Blah, blah, blah. Sure it’s all true, and
full of good feeling, but not the whole story. The predictable rhetoric
that dogs Murderball makes it clear that many – myself included
-- are too easily incapacitated by our expectations. Did I ever doubt
that I would learn about dignity and the triumph of the human spirit?
Not for a moment. What else could a wheelchair flick be about? Quite
a lot, it turns out.
The film’s hard sell couldn’t be more plain. Living with
a disability has challenges other than our bodies. For one thing,
the public demand for warm fuzzy feelings about our accomplishments
is overwhelming, even though that story is too tired, too convenient,
and too much about able-bodied viewers and their own fears. That’s
why I too didn’t want to see Murderball. I thought I’d
seen it already. Many times, in fact.
Then I discovered its secret: Murderball is fundamentally about men,
and rather nasty, wounded ones at that. It might even be about men
who aren’t in wheelchairs – the ones not watching the
movie -- and about their nostalgia for a kind of masculinity I can
only describe as more or less icky. Were the secret to get around,
I bet the flick would find a different viewership. A bigger one. Similar
films have.
Intentionally or not, Murderball catches “the disabled man”
as a contemporary gender metaphor. It’s not the first movie
to explore that anxiety, either. Just glance at the syrupy canon and
you discover that men frequently take up this role, and wrestle with
ill-fitting bodies galore.
The infirmary is full. Tom Cruise, in Born on the Fourth of July,
isn’t the only explicit representation we have of a man who
is angry about his lost identity, nor the first to flirt with Oscar
in the process. I’m also thinking about the blinding guilt of
Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman; Sean Penn’s desexualized man-child
in I Am Sam; and even the lesser-blessed portrayals, such as the Ben
Affleckted Daredevil, in all his stifled, disfigured rage. Crippled
men and their crippled manhoods. Could it be a post-feminism genre
of its own? What kind of Awakenings did Robert De Niro have in that
movie, anyway? Could he have left the hospital, the sequel probably
would have found him in the woods drumming with Robert Bly, or maybe
organizing his local chapter of Promisekeepers.
Though not enjoying nearly the financial success of its kin, Murderball
takes up some of those familiar gender anxieties, and more directly,
in fact.We’ve all known and suffered the tattooed, sailor-mouthed
Mark Zupan’s of this world, but, curiously enough, we can’t
help admiring this one. As he quips in the film, “If somebody’s
talking trash, I’ll say c’mon and hit me. I’ll hit
you back. “. The audience laughs, then cheers. Both are important.
Zupan’s bravado comes almost immediately after the opening scene,
one in which he quietly wrestles his awkward, muscular body into a
pair of pants. It is an intimate spectacle and an uncomfortable one
to watch. In that lies the fresh chemistry, and the film’s intelligence.
These men are at once vulnerable and volatile. A safe contradiction.
What also worries and compels me here is the disturbing hint of satire,
too. Lurking in the film is perhaps a caricature of a kind of masculinity
that, were Zupan to stand up and deliver his promised drubbing, wouldn’t
leave him nearly as charismatic. In fact, he’d seem, well, just
your average, yobbish alpha-maile. His chest-beating, however, is
somehow tempered by the wheelchair holding him down. Adding to the
caricature is Zupan’s recent endorsement deal with Reebok. His
image is now captioned by the Popeye philosophy of “I Am what
I Am.” For able-bodied men to identify is quite telling. Eminem,
for one, is reportedly hoping to play Zupan in a dramatic biography.
Makes sense, what with Eminem’s own provocative contradictions.
Don’t forget, try as you might, that he’s the self-proclaimed,
dedicated father who upset more parents than Elvis and his pelvis.
That’s slapstick, and so is disability when properly stripped
of its heartwarming affirmations.
If nothing else, testosterone has never seemed sexier, nor more acceptable,
and Murderball is not the film you might presume. Its disability models
a powerful powerlessness. That’s something to watch, and watch
with an eye to the bigger picture. The film’s importance occurs
in the context of a country that was seriously wounded in 2001, and
has struggled ever since with its own rage and vulnerability. It’s
no wonder Zupan was declared by Entertainment Weekly to be a new action
hero. His contradictions are not his own.
As for those pesky Academy Awards, the film’s got my vote, but
for all the reasons we’re not talking about. The prospects are
good. We know Oscar loves bad boys, outlaws, self-made men and the
disabled all the same. Just not as much as penguins, maybe.
Ryan Knighton is the author of Cockeyed: A Memoir.
He is also blind.
©2006 Ryan Knighton
No portion of this article may be reprinted without permission from
the author
BACK
