Wonder Twins Power Activates State Violence
A Disability Approach to Wonder Man (1945)
Wonder Man (1945) – Disability
November always makes me miss my late grandfather who in my mind was the spitting image of Danny Kaye. Around this time of year, I happen to watch White Christmas (1954) not only because of my dissertation on Christmas films, but also because it now has that added nostalgic value of my grandfather singing and dancing and acting the fool. So, for a bit of a twist, since I write about White Christmas all the time, I thought this week I’d switch it up a bit and go with a Kaye film I’d never seen in honour of that man I love so much: H. Bruce Humberstone’s Wonder Man (1945). The Review Roulette wheel landed on Disability as our lens for this week, which unexpectedly fits so well onto this film.
This bizarre little film showcases Kaye in a dual role, playing both comic, singer, showman, and all-around performer Buzzy Bellew, as well as his brother Edwin Dingle. Buzzy was witness to a murder carried out by racketeering gangster Ten Grand Jackson (Steve Cochran) who sends his henchmen to murder Buzzy in his dressing room and dump his body in a river. Because Buzzy and Edwin are “super twins”, Edwin begins to hear music and Buzzy’s voice, drawn to the location of his brother’s murder where Buzzy’s ghost possesses Edwin momentarily and encourages him to avenge his death by testifying as Buzzy against Ten Grand Jackson. Vengeance is complicated by each brother’s love interest (one of whom is played by Kaye’s future White Christmas partner Vera-Ellen) demanding time of the single body with the double mind.
If we look at this from a disability perspective, it’s quite a straightforward interpretation of the film and deserves not to be overcomplicated this week. Everyone who interacts with Edwin/Buzzy is convinced he has a mental condition. The language in this film goes beyond harsh and encourages excessive violence against individuals whom we would now say need medical attention. There is a gradual ramping up of the language and threats as well, going from a gentle perplexed look when Edwin stops making sense verbally to calling him “insane”, assuming that he is homeless and advising him to sleep in Grand Central Station, and saying “you’re nutty as a fruitcake. First thing you know two men in uniform will be coming to carry you off.”
In one scene, Edwin is visibly talking to himself on a public bench, but to the audience’s view he is speaking to his brother’s ghost. A woman also on the bench takes Edwin’s rambling not as cause for questioning if he is okay, but as a come on, causing her to scream for help from her partner (who had left her there because she wouldn’t PUT OUT on the BENCH at like 7pm in New York City – but this isn’t a feminist review; see below).
In another scene, Edwin, when trying to convince the DA of his incredible story, is smacked and manhandled by police and the DA. Edwin tries to tell him that two men, the henchmen who murdered his brother, are after him and asks for police protection to which the DA says, “Holy jumping Republicans, throw this maniac out of here! Throw him into the river! Do anything with him!" and "Police protection? I'm issuing a general order to every policeman in New York City to arrest you on sight - shoot you if necessary - if you so much as come near them. Throw that idiot out!"
Finally, Edwin had told his love interest, Ellen (Virginia Mayo), that he has ochlophobia and explains it as a “morbid fear of women.” After his concerning behaviour and after Ellen had wished he’d be carried off to a cell, she tries to smooth things over by explaining that Edwin is not “really out of his mind”, but rather she had upset him, and he has this “morbid fear of women,” using a phobia to place blame on herself (again, not a feminist review, but come on; see below).
From people dismissing Edwin/Buzzy immediately to actively threatening not only murder but also state-mandated murder because the DA believes Edwin to be a danger, the messaging of this film is that anyone with mental health needs might be a danger to those around them. Obviously, Edwin is being plagued by an actual ghost and is not having a mental health crisis, I am not saying he is. What I am saying is that everyone in the film thinks he is and for the film to have been made accessibly for the audience and for people watching the film to recognise this as a reasonable and therefore funny response to the misunderstanding that they are keen to, it must then follow that these were acceptable views to enough of the audience for it to play well.
In addition to these upsetting views and murder threats to someone who conceivably in this filmic world needed medical attention and not gaslighting about his mental state, there’s one other disability in the film played for a laugh. One of the henchmen, in order to be comic relief, more incompetent, and less of a real threat to our star, is partially deaf. But the funny twist is that the other henchman is sick of repeating things for his partner. Isn’t that funny? Isn’t it comedic that a person with hearing loss is made fun of for not being able to keep up with conversation? They thought it was in 1945 at least.
I seldom cast judgement on films for not having the same morals we might have today. In this instance and with films depicting disabilities, however, I will always point out the shortcomings of those depictions because we have made very little progress in our films or public thinking about disability since then. According to a 2015 report, US police were 16 times more likely to murder a person with an untreated mental illness than someone without. While we as a nation are much more aware of this now and Hollywood would be very hesitant to make a comedy with multiple scenes of police harassing or physically assaulting a person they believed to have a mental illness, calling out a filmic depiction like this that historically encouraged violence, especially state violence, against the mentally ill is important.
Because I’m Never Done When I Say I Am
Feminist
It’s a 1945 film and that’s extremely evident from the casual racism and sexism in all of this film. Apart from the woman left on a bench for not wanting to be felt up in public and the use of a fear of women as some sort of reason to blame women for a man’s behaviour, there’s more! Some moments or lines worth highlighting include Ellen, the librarian love of Edwin who keeps up with him intellectually and understands his academic work on the history of human knowledge, says “if I had any mind at all, I'd be a brazen hussy.” GIRL. WHAT? Bit of a spoiler here, but as Buzzy is dead, his love interest, Midge (Vera-Ellen) is stood up at the altar, unaware of his death and just decides to marry a different man on the spot because he’s been nice to her. These women are not multi-dimensional. In the same vein as the final paragraph above, misogyny in this way deserves to be called out as these depictions were, and still are to far too many, normalised for much of the audience.