Meta for "The Walk": Normalcy vs Capacity
When I was sixteen, I had this dream. I was driving my dad's car, a beat-up early-nineties Jetta, stick shift. I was driving down one of the hilliest roads in our town, which lead past where one of my best friends lived. I was terrified that I would be out of control, but somehow I managed to drive that car successfully around hairpin turns and down seventy-degree drops. For most sixteen year olds, a dream of driving would be unsurprising, but I was not most sixteen year olds. For one thing, I hadn't even started learning how to drive, and didn't really care. (In fact, at twenty-seven, I still can't drive.) Oh, and I'd just had major surgery on both of my legs, was one week home from a two-week hospitalization, slept and ate and spent my days in a hospital bed in the living room, could barely transfer to a wheelchair, and wouldn't be able to walk unassisted for another four years.
I asked a friend who knew about dream interpretation what she thought the dream meant. "Dreams of cars usually represent control," she said. "Most of the time people dream of not being able to drive the car, though."
********
Everyone in "The Walk" agrees that there is something different about becoming a crip. You've lost something, and not just the limb or limbs or the functioning of your spinal cord. The disagreement rests on the question of what, specifically, you've lost. The man who is speaking at the beginning of the support group, who tells the story of his dream, sets the tone for one way. What he craves is normalcy. He wants to feel just like he used to: to pick up his daughter, to play with his son. The other men in the circle nod and agree.
It's Rappo who disagrees. He publicly mocks the man's dream of normalcy:
RAPPO: I pity all you guys, I really do. With your handicap basketball and your wheelchair races. You all act like we're normal people.
ANOTHER MAN: We are normal people.
RAPPO: I don't know if you've had a look in the mirror lately, my friend, but you are missing a leg.
Rappo's disability is more extreme than those of the other men in the room, but he doesn't differentiate himself from them on that grounds. They, like he, are radically not normal, radically different and transformed into something new. Being a crip isn't being a normal guy with a disability: it's being a freak, and Rappo flies his freak flag high. He refuses rehab; he refuses prosthetics; he refuses to play along and be polite in group. His refusal to accept the longing for normalcy is so disruptive that he must be removed from the space after he launches his critique. There is no way for him to exist alongside the men who just want to be normal, and the group leader actually apologizes for him after he leaves. In many ways, Rappo here is speaking for the more radical wing of the disability rights movement: there is a culture, an identity to being a crip, such that we can never be precisely normal again. We have a different way of living, a different set of experiences, and we deserve to have them recognized.
Rappo also knows he lost something: he lost the ability to act. Physically, his losses are obvious: he can't feed himself, move himself around, do much without physical assistance. But that loss is secondary to the far larger one: the loss of being considered a full human being, with one's own desires to act. This is something most disabled people struggle against: people simply assume you can't do things like open doors, carry your own things, cut your own meat. There was a ramp that was by no means ADA accessible between the two wings of my high school on the second floor; I had a manual wheelchair, but I had built huge muscles and, with a running start, could get myself up it, so when I wasn't walking between classes with a friend I handled it myself. But at least once a week, someone I didn't know would simply push me up the hill, without asking. My ability to control my body--and for most wheelchair users, their chairs are an extension of their bodies to one extent or another--was taken from me. This is what happens to Rappo when the nurse chastises him for not "holding still" when his IV comes out; he's not supposed to do things that jibe with their notion of how he should behave, or what other people need him to be doing.
The way all the disabled characters are talked about throughout echoes this language of incapacity. General Callahan calls them "once brave men we can do little but feel sorry for," which assumes that they cannot be incorporated into any sort of normal society. And neither the nurse ("You must be making a mistake....See for yourself. He's a quadruple amputee") nor Scully ("He can't walk, let alone kill somebody") believe he could be in any way responsible for the murders. Rappo's murders, in addition to being vengeance for "all the grunts and all the crips and all the boys who came home in a box," make him capable of acting yet again. Everyone assumes he can't do anything, so he does whatever he can, and what he can do is exact revenge. I know the feeling, the burning desire to take whatever you can just because you can: what folks not in wheelchairs don't know is that it's a lot easier to covertly make out with your girlfriend in empty classrooms if she can sit on your lap just about anywhere, and that handicapped elevators offer excellent opportunities for privacy. (Plus, the crips get to be late to class with absolutely no repercussions.)
As in so, so many episodes of The X-Files, Mulder is able to look at Rappo and see what he is doing; he doesn't assume Rappo is incapable of action at all, and recognizes his desire for revenge. He actually argues with Rappo, assumes that he makes choices, can be reasoned with. But then comes the closing monologue. There are two different versions of this; the television closed captioning and the DVD captions/actually spoken version are just slightly different. But both position Rappo outside the sphere of action. In the TV captions, Mulder speaks of the spiritual toll of war on those who fight it, that the violence ends up destroying what makes us human; Rappo is monstrous, no longer a possible interlocutor but a monster to be feared. In the spoken monologue, Mulder says that "Leonard Trimble's mission was not to kill his enemies... but to shatter their lives... to keep them alive. To suffer the pain that he felt. To see the view from his wheel chair." But what view is that? In Mulder's discussion of phantom limbs, and the juxtaposition of Stans's disfigured face, we see the suggestion that it is physical suffering he wishes to impose. But that's not it at all. Rappo strips the men he targets of their capacity to act. They become powerless to save their families, powerless to kill themselves, powerless to do anything but trudge down the paths of their lives. The view he wants them to see is the view from incapacity, and, in doing so, he finds his own ability to act. Through the destruction he brings, he liberates himself. It's not that Leonard Trimble has lost his soul, and feels its phantom aching onward. It's that the only way he can get that forgotten soul back, can regain his own humanity, is through reaching out and grasping not for normality, but for power. Certainly he abuses it, but his reach, in any case, is far from incomprehensible.
I asked a friend who knew about dream interpretation what she thought the dream meant. "Dreams of cars usually represent control," she said. "Most of the time people dream of not being able to drive the car, though."
********
Everyone in "The Walk" agrees that there is something different about becoming a crip. You've lost something, and not just the limb or limbs or the functioning of your spinal cord. The disagreement rests on the question of what, specifically, you've lost. The man who is speaking at the beginning of the support group, who tells the story of his dream, sets the tone for one way. What he craves is normalcy. He wants to feel just like he used to: to pick up his daughter, to play with his son. The other men in the circle nod and agree.
It's Rappo who disagrees. He publicly mocks the man's dream of normalcy:
RAPPO: I pity all you guys, I really do. With your handicap basketball and your wheelchair races. You all act like we're normal people.
ANOTHER MAN: We are normal people.
RAPPO: I don't know if you've had a look in the mirror lately, my friend, but you are missing a leg.
Rappo's disability is more extreme than those of the other men in the room, but he doesn't differentiate himself from them on that grounds. They, like he, are radically not normal, radically different and transformed into something new. Being a crip isn't being a normal guy with a disability: it's being a freak, and Rappo flies his freak flag high. He refuses rehab; he refuses prosthetics; he refuses to play along and be polite in group. His refusal to accept the longing for normalcy is so disruptive that he must be removed from the space after he launches his critique. There is no way for him to exist alongside the men who just want to be normal, and the group leader actually apologizes for him after he leaves. In many ways, Rappo here is speaking for the more radical wing of the disability rights movement: there is a culture, an identity to being a crip, such that we can never be precisely normal again. We have a different way of living, a different set of experiences, and we deserve to have them recognized.
Rappo also knows he lost something: he lost the ability to act. Physically, his losses are obvious: he can't feed himself, move himself around, do much without physical assistance. But that loss is secondary to the far larger one: the loss of being considered a full human being, with one's own desires to act. This is something most disabled people struggle against: people simply assume you can't do things like open doors, carry your own things, cut your own meat. There was a ramp that was by no means ADA accessible between the two wings of my high school on the second floor; I had a manual wheelchair, but I had built huge muscles and, with a running start, could get myself up it, so when I wasn't walking between classes with a friend I handled it myself. But at least once a week, someone I didn't know would simply push me up the hill, without asking. My ability to control my body--and for most wheelchair users, their chairs are an extension of their bodies to one extent or another--was taken from me. This is what happens to Rappo when the nurse chastises him for not "holding still" when his IV comes out; he's not supposed to do things that jibe with their notion of how he should behave, or what other people need him to be doing.
The way all the disabled characters are talked about throughout echoes this language of incapacity. General Callahan calls them "once brave men we can do little but feel sorry for," which assumes that they cannot be incorporated into any sort of normal society. And neither the nurse ("You must be making a mistake....See for yourself. He's a quadruple amputee") nor Scully ("He can't walk, let alone kill somebody") believe he could be in any way responsible for the murders. Rappo's murders, in addition to being vengeance for "all the grunts and all the crips and all the boys who came home in a box," make him capable of acting yet again. Everyone assumes he can't do anything, so he does whatever he can, and what he can do is exact revenge. I know the feeling, the burning desire to take whatever you can just because you can: what folks not in wheelchairs don't know is that it's a lot easier to covertly make out with your girlfriend in empty classrooms if she can sit on your lap just about anywhere, and that handicapped elevators offer excellent opportunities for privacy. (Plus, the crips get to be late to class with absolutely no repercussions.)
As in so, so many episodes of The X-Files, Mulder is able to look at Rappo and see what he is doing; he doesn't assume Rappo is incapable of action at all, and recognizes his desire for revenge. He actually argues with Rappo, assumes that he makes choices, can be reasoned with. But then comes the closing monologue. There are two different versions of this; the television closed captioning and the DVD captions/actually spoken version are just slightly different. But both position Rappo outside the sphere of action. In the TV captions, Mulder speaks of the spiritual toll of war on those who fight it, that the violence ends up destroying what makes us human; Rappo is monstrous, no longer a possible interlocutor but a monster to be feared. In the spoken monologue, Mulder says that "Leonard Trimble's mission was not to kill his enemies... but to shatter their lives... to keep them alive. To suffer the pain that he felt. To see the view from his wheel chair." But what view is that? In Mulder's discussion of phantom limbs, and the juxtaposition of Stans's disfigured face, we see the suggestion that it is physical suffering he wishes to impose. But that's not it at all. Rappo strips the men he targets of their capacity to act. They become powerless to save their families, powerless to kill themselves, powerless to do anything but trudge down the paths of their lives. The view he wants them to see is the view from incapacity, and, in doing so, he finds his own ability to act. Through the destruction he brings, he liberates himself. It's not that Leonard Trimble has lost his soul, and feels its phantom aching onward. It's that the only way he can get that forgotten soul back, can regain his own humanity, is through reaching out and grasping not for normality, but for power. Certainly he abuses it, but his reach, in any case, is far from incomprehensible.