Modern Freak Shows…

Why do we talk about freak shows as if they were a thing from the past? Freak shows still exist today and they are just as horrendous, useful and interesting as they have been then. While people don’t go to circus side shows anymore, they do pay hefty fees for their TV channels.  Modern freak shows are ever present in the form of documentaries about people who suffer from strange genetic anomalies or disabilities.

One example that I stumbled upon is a show produced in Britain by CHANNEL 5 called Extraordinary People . Goal of the show is to reveal people with disabilities who manage feats previously thought impossible for them to achieve. They show dwarves and giants, conjoined twins and fetus in fetu, people without faces, blind people who can walk like they could see, autistic people who are mathematical geniuses and children with half a brain. While all the episodes concentrate on a specific, often medical, event in the lives of the showcased “freak”, their life’s story is told. It is always highlighted that they accomplish to live as normal a life as possible despite their difficulties. Does that ring a bell?

The more episodes I watched the more I wondered why documentaries such as these are as popular as ever. In Thomson’s Freakery she points out that the freak shows of the 19^th century were a very useful tool to create the abstract sameness a voter in a democracy needed to be. By looking at the strange other the audience became one in their normalness and turned into the mass of equalized people needed to support a fledgling democracy. Is democracy today then still so feeble to be in danger of failing? The answer, sadly enough, has to be a resounding YES. As economic crisis after economic crisis hits the world the cultural divides between the poor and the rich, the labor and the middle class, the uneducated and the educated turn more solid every day.  By providing examples of the obviously different such documentaries artificially generate a unity among all the cultural groups. And as a result democracy can withstand another onslaught. Hurrah!

What I found even more interesting than supporting our political system was the level of control that the medical establishment acquires through these freak documentaries. In Extraordinary People most episodes are centered around a medical problem, may it be the question what this one person suffers from or whether the “freaks” can be “normalized” without killing them. So, similar to the issue of intersex people , the medical establishment seizes the power to decide who counts as normal and who doesn’t. What if it wouldn’t be necessary to differentiate between normal and abnormal? Would democracy even work if the deviant and freakish wouldn’t exist? And do the needs of the many really outweigh the needs of the few?

To a degree freaks will always be a curiosity. But the degree to which we treat them as human beings and not as a medical condition, that has to be cured, is up to us. After all, don’t we teach our children to accept anyone for who they are? This is the lesson society will have to learn to create a better future.

The Elephant Man meets District 9

As we watched and discussed the Elephant Man two weeks ago, I remembered the story of another movie I had watched in a seminar before. The seminar is about South African literature and apartheid. Therefore we watched the movie District 9, which whole story you can read here. To cut a long story short, it’s about aliens who live in some kind of ghetto, the District 9, in Johannesburg, but should be deported to another district far outside the city, because of beginning riots between humans and aliens. A group of men, who are led by Wikus van de Merwe, are sent to District 9 to force the aliens to sign eviction notices to relocate them. During this task Wikus gets contaminated by some alien liquid. A few hours later, his arm, which had contact with the fluid, turns into an alien arm (which makes him able to use the aliens’ weapons, which are only usable with alien-DNA). As a result, Wikus becomes ‘national property’ and is examined to find out more about the aliens’ usage of weapons.

In this point I saw a really important parallel to The Elephant Man. Both men become totally objectified and are no longer seen as humans. Like Merrick, Wikus gets institutionalized and no longer has any right of self-determination. Nobody talks to him anymore; he is only seen as an object from which the government could benefit. Even his death would be accepted (by his own father-in-law) to profit by his DNA and making the government able to use the aliens’ weapons. There you can see another parallel to the Elephant Man’s life, because he was dissected, examined and exhibited as soon as he died.

Unlike the Elephant Man, Wikus succeeds to escape from the hospital, but he is then showcased as contagious and ‘abnormal’ on television, so that the people on the streets don’t see his human side anymore and don’t help him with his escape. Without even talking to him to get to know more about his transformation, the government makes a ‘freak’ out of Wikus.

Like the Elephant Man, Wikus is afraid of his own sight and tries everything to become ‘normal’ again. He even tries to cut off the ‘abnormal’ part of himself, but realizes that it is also a part of his body and that it belongs to him.

Wikus also tries to contact his wife all the time, so we get to know that he has still the same ‘human’ feelings as before. Even if he doesn’t look the same as before or as other people, he is still the same man.

Of course, I watched this movie in my course in terms of apartheid; you simply have to replace ‘alien’ by ‘black’ and you will get the story about the relationship between Blacks and Whites during the years of apartheid. But nevertheless, it’s a movie about the ‘Other’, of which humans are afraid of and so I think it’s also relevant for this course. Due to his transformation, Wikus is no longer seen as a normal human, even though it’s just one part of him, which differs obviously from the ‘normal’ body. Like in the story of the Elephant Man, a different appearance of the body seems to convert a person into something ‘abnormal’, which has to be kept at bay from the public life. But as one can see in those two films, Wikus and Merrick have the same feelings as other people and are therefore not different from others, even if they might look different.

Biology, Genetics, and the Grotesque or “Don’t you believe in science?”

When people hear that I’m researching and teaching on the grotesque body, the reaction is usually a mixture of surprise and genuine curiosity. Recently, I was having one of these conversations with an acquaintance. Somehow we started talking about “strong man” competitions and how they are typically dominated by northern Europeans. Then we talked about the prevalence of (eastern) Africans in long-distance running and similar phenomena. While we agreed on the diagnosis (yes, Kenyans have been very successful of late in long-distance running), our explanation for this type of athletic prowess in certain ethnic/national/racial groups was vastly different. His theory? It’s all genetics. Africans, he said, are genetically determined to be successful in sports that require endurance rather than strength- if anything, they can be “just bodybuilders,” not weight-lifters. Europeans are naturally stronger, but not good at running. Oh, and Americans are fat because we get it from the British… When I expressed my profound skepticism