Chained for Life (2018)
Chained for Life, by Aaron Schimberg, shares a name with another film and that is not without some deliberate purpose. Schimberg’s film is not a remake but a reclamation and interrogation of a type of film that showed the limits of good-intentioned art about non-normative groups of people where they are merely subjects and not authors.
The prologue to the 1952 Chained for Life, an exploitation film meets rather ludicrous crime procedural, begins with a directive to its audience. “This story has a real problem!” a middle-aged judge says in his monologue to the viewer as he sits down in his office. Directed by journeyman Harry L. Fraser and produced by Poverty Row veteran and jack of all trades George Moskov, this sixty-nine-minute film is more social experiment than anything else. Imagine a Stanley Kramer “problem picture” in low-budget William Castle clothing. The film presents a dilemma with one-half of a pair of conjoined twin sisters, Dorothy and Vivian Hamilton, on trial for the murder of her (Vivian’s) lover. The dilemma is if she, Vivian, is sentenced to death, should her sister, Dorothy, portrayed as having no culpability in this crime, have to suffer the consequences. Presented as one, the Hilton Sisters, their real names Violet and Daisy, they were a real-life traveling act from Britain who sang and performed across the world. By this point, the twins were in their forties and had their fame taper off dramatically. Sideshows and vaudeville were dead arts and their most widely known appearance was in the film was Tod Browning’s Freaks, two decades before. This Chained for Life did not deliberately teeter on the question of exhibitionism or exploitation, as Browning’s film did. The 1952 film is an oddity, a strange mixture of in media res murder trial that goes back in time and a showcase of the twins singing. There are some charged moments, like a soft-focused dream sequence where Dorothy detaches from Vivian and stands out of their shared bed, in many ways freed. But then dream ends and Dorothy is in tears of guilt. The twins are shown in an argument about seeking medical help: Vivian does not want to be treated like a guinea pig and concerned that separation could kill them while Dorothy wants to live her own life. This scene stands out among the rest of the film. It is as though the audience is intruding on an actual debate the sisters may have had many times over throughout their lives. Chained for Life ends unresolved, calling for its audience to decide—the film’s cynical ploy to stoke conversations. Real society did fail the Hilton sisters, abandoned and barely scraping by until their deaths in 1969. They live forever in a format of film that were not much better than how society mistreated them their whole lives, oscillating between outright exploiting them and this bungled attempt at humanizing them.
Not all movies are in the goofy B-movie package of 1952’s Chained for Life, but it proves to be depressing in realizing how dialogues and messages generated from making films on ableism and disability remain pretty trite and unevolved. Tod Browning’s Freaks may always be forever an anomaly in terms of unleashed id in such a troublesome, unnerving film, but as demonstrated above, even films that highlight prejudices faced by these sideshow characters become themselves a different type of sideshow: films that stumble into situations that then commit the same sins they seek to criticize, as is the case with 1952’s Chained for Life. Schimberg’s Chained for Life features a film within the film called God’s Mistakes, about patients at a hospital who undergo various experimentations by a doctor. The cast for these patients for God’s Mistakes includes non-professionals previously believed to have been “phased out” members of society such as “bearded ladies” and “Siamese twins,” who work alongside the more professional actors who are in the roles of doctors, nurses, and one blind patient, played by Mabel Fairchild (Jess Weixler), who is looking for her big break.
Mabel is not blind but a working, able-bodied actress whose films pop up from TV from time to time, but not yet in the realm of fame to be taking franchise roles in mainstream Hollywood. She takes this role, presumably as one of the bigger names in God’s Mistakes’s cast, to work with the mysterious, enigmatic art-house director known simply as Herr Director (origins not completely known, possibly German and had allegedly been part of a circus troupe in his youth), who is making his English-language debut.
Chained for Life (2018)
When a journalist comes to interview Mabel, questions arise with her being cast to play a person with a disability. Mabel gets defensive but not hostile, more politician-like in spinning a yarn on her philosophies and processes as an actor. “Acting is acting,” is a common mantra for Mabel and the other able-bodied actors. She brings up film history, from Orson Welles in blackface as Othello to Daniel Day-Lewis as the real-life painter with cerebral palsy Christy Brown in My Left Foot, as to why she was not troubled by taking the role. They did it, they were brilliant, why not I? Blindness is not her literal being, but for Mabel, it is—in her own words—a metaphor. One can think back to the not so recent past and connect what Mabel says to actress Scarlett Johansson being quoted in the magazine As If responding to backlash to her roles, that included her dropping out of playing a real-life trans man Tex Gill for a film, saying, “You know, as an actor I should be able to play any person, or any tree, or any animal, because that's my job and the requirements of my job.” Mabel may come off resolutely tone-deaf in her defenses of the role, but it is hardly an uncommon revelation to find among those in her position. Chained for Life gradually chips away at that point of view, but in doing so breaks away from social realism or a traditional narrative framework and is all the better for it.
The film presents the makings and backstage quality of God’s Mistakes less in the tradition of Truffaut’s Day for Night and more in the key of The Sylvia North Story, the film within the film of David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr.Chained for Life hits on the uncanny and unpredictable with aplomb, from the start dropping the audience in on the film within the film. Mabel’s co-lead in God’s Mistakes is known as Rosenthal, a man with neurofibromatosis, a condition most commonly associated with “the elephant man” Joseph Merrick. He is played by Adam Pearson, who in Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin was the lone man spared by Scarlett Johansson’s cold alien. Pearson was memorable there, where his difference was only slowly understood by Johansson’s alien. It is in after their scene that she foregoes continuing her hunt of men. Instead, she chooses to embrace what the human world offers even after Pearson’s character obliquely disclosed the prejudices he faced and lack of love he has been given by this same world. Rosenthal’s dynamic with Mabel touches a little on this in terms of introducing a character with little to no understanding of the way he and others like him have to live with. He comes to Mabel at first vulnerable in his inexperience with acting, in a scene that then becomes a mutual acting exercise of emotions that Rosenthal has experienced—often looks of horror—only to have him ask Mabel to convey a reaction of empathy. It is difficult for her to do, she briefly freezes, but is able to give him something. “Empathy is a lot like pity,” he says, “but all the same, I’m touched.” Their relationship forms a bond, but the film goes to great lengths to de-romanticize the relationship. Mabel is portrayed not as somebody getting her teachable moments in earnest, but instead having to reckon with herself in moments where her insularity is exposed. There are other moments where her conversations with other able-bodied people about the rest of the cast who are not Rosenthal reveal that her prejudices still go unchecked by people who are not the audience.
Schimberg shows how the outside world is at best indifferent and often quite culpable for upholding the prejudices and standards of beauty, ableism, and normativity. The non-professional actors get sequestered to stay in the hospital God’s Mistakes is shooting in because the hotel the rest of the cast stays in is not handicapped accessible. Schimberg also aesthetically takes filmmakers to task for how they shoot otherness in how Herr Director gives a note to Rosenthal to be framed for his camera in order to become a monstrosity on-screen, which becomes all the more contrasting when Schimberg often films Rosenthal and Mabel’s scenes and exchanges in equal treatment, resembling Jonathan Demme close-ups. It is when the attention is not paid to these non-professional actors that the real truth and candidness to their condition are voiced without pretense. The film really opens up. The group begins to write and make their own movies and stories they want to tell about themselves, rather than be a projection of how one pretentious filmmaker sees them. These scenes do not announce themselves, often being introduced and gradually revealing themselves to be ideas for films. The real and unreal becomes blurred as Schimberg has his cast make a statement about representation and calling out the much-paraded fallacy that the reason there are no films made about people like them is because they have no stories to tell. They are out there.
Schimberg has made a film that is often self-referential, playful, and incisively pointed about film’s role in representation and mis-representation in minority groups. He does it with a touch of thoughtfulness and careful precision that manages to avoid being overly didactic or taking the form of a problem picture to resolve these clear, chronic ills within cinema. Mabel is not so much an ally but more keenly aware than ever of her anxieties and judgments around those different from her. Chained for Life will have resonance with many people from many different stripes who have often felt gut-punched by how cinema has portrayed and informed their community’s experience. Often funny, consistently bizarre, surprisingly sweet, and resolutely provocative, there is perhaps no other American film released this year that meditates this intensely on what it means to feel seen in film.