Disability Representation in Shazam
[Be advised: spoilers ahead]
There’s a moment in The Princess Bride when Westley, in his Dread Pirate Roberts costume, refuses to tell Inigo Montoya his name. Inigo pleads, “Please, I must know!” Westley replies curtly, “Get used to disappointment.”
That phrase sums up my expectations about disability representation in today’s media. I approach movies, TV, even the news, with the flinching dread that comes with sniffing leftovers to find the source of the funky smell in the fridge: I know I’m going to see something truly upsetting, and no matter how prepared I think I am, I’m probably going to gag and feel badly about my life.
I hadn’t heard anything about disability in the recent DC Comics release, Shazam. Our family can be counted on to support superhero movies with our box office dollars, and though DC has been pretty hit or miss in recent history, the early reviews emphasized how much pure comic-book fun Shazam is. So we hit the 10am matinee with high hopes.
My first exhausted sigh came when the bad guy indicates his commitment to evil cosmic powers by inserting a cursed eyeball. As usual, the disfiguring injury makes his moral failings visible, one of the most common interpretations of a disability in fiction. The fact that it’s his eye suggests that his blindness extends to what he’s become and what consequences may emerge from his embrace of dark powers for revenge. And that milky, sometimes glowing, eye strikes fear into everyone who sees it, even before he commits his evil acts.
My anxiety about the role of disability in Shazam doubled when we met Freddie, one of Billy Batson’s new foster siblings. Freddie uses a cane because of an unspecified leg problem, and his disability serves a few functions up front. First, it signals that Billy’s new foster parents welcome all kids, even ones with problems. Second, it sets up the school bullies as particularly loathsome when they single out Freddie for abuse, abuse that will be avenged by Billy/Captain Marvel.
What I didn’t expect was the way Freddie hangs a lampshade on many common tropes around disability and the everyday ableism our society dishes out. Abled people often demand information about a person’s disability, despite the violation of privacy this entails, and Freddie exploits that expectation to mess with Billy, lying to him for his own amusement. And even as Billy tries to figure out his new powers, Freddie points out that his disability gives him his own kind of invisibilty, manipulating adults’ ableist assumptions to get out of trouble that no superpower can excuse.
In the midst of all this subversion, I knew the other shoe would drop eventually. And sure enough, Billy eventually hits Freddie with the “you’re just jealous of my powers” line. As a disabled person, the knowledge that Billy counts fixing Freddie’s disability is one of the powers he’s thinking of is deafening in its silence. It’s hard to ignore that Billy includes his physical perfection among things Freddie would envy. Freddie doesn’t call Billy out on this, and it’s the kind of wound that could fester in someone who already feels left behind by his friend’s experience.
When the Marvel “family” is transformed in the climactic scenes near the end of the movie, Freddie is flying when the lightning recedes. I was unclear on whether they’d given all the powers to each sibling, and I had a reflexive reaction to the choice of giving the “freedom” of flight to the disabled character. Superhero powers that “fix” a disability are par for the course, in the same way that sci-fi interpretations of transhumanism and medical advances assume that every disabled person will take advantage of that technology to fix any physical defect. It becomes apparent that all the Marvels have some version of all Billy’s powers, which helped to moderate the pain in seeing that trope repeated. But each character is shown expressing a part of their personality using their new ability, and Freddie’s comment about his disability being the only thing some people see remains subtext as his physical limitations are read as a personality trait.
The most important moment for disability representation comes after the villain is defeated, though. And it’s this:
Freddie stays disabled. He goes back to his child self without hesitation, without trying to negotiate a more lasting change to his body. The knowledge that respite is possible remains a powerful escape hatch, but the support he most needs — his family and his friendship with Billy — existed before that was available. Freddie and the people who matter most already consider him a whole person, and he doesn’t need a superpower to patch over something that the abled world considers defective.
Sure, I’m so used to disappointment that any positive representation of disability comes as a pleasant surprise. But I’ll take it.
