MESA Banner
“To Crip” the Blessed: Disabily Representation in The Marriage of the Blessed
Abstract
This paper challenges the representation of psychosomatic disabilities as metaphors in Iranian mainstream war cinema, focusing on The Marriage of the Blessed by Mohsen Makhmalbaf (1989). This film is one of the first antiwar Iranian feature films that depicts the plight and the aftermath of the eight-year War between Iran and Iraq (1980-1988). The production of the film started a couple of months before the end of the War and its plot revolves around the life of a shell-shocked veteran soldier/photographer who returns home after serving at the battlefront. The incongruities between the protagonist's beliefs and what he fought for, and what he is witnessing in the city exacerbate his psychological sufferings. In the end, he had to be hospitalized in a mental asylum crowded with other shell-shocked soldiers. The film challenges the heroic and ideologized image of janbaz (literary means someone who sacrifices his body for God) and instead attempts to portray the complexities of the everyday life of the soldiers with disabilities after the War. Despite the film’s candid criticism and fresh point of view about the War that distinguishes it from other contemporary war productions, this paper argues that it reduces the disabled body to a metaphor to critique Iran's post-war sociopolitical condition. The body in pain, in other words, turns into a "narrative prosthesis" and a device of characterization. Building upon David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder theorization on the pervasive use of disabled bodies in cinema and literature as a device for "fixing" and "normalizing" what is "aberrant," this article expounds that Makhmalbaf's film fails to "expose" the "crippling" system and itself turns to an ideological manifestation that undermines the physical and psychological sufferings of the veterans of the War.  
Discipline
Media Arts
Geographic Area
Iran
Sub Area
Theory