{"id":494364,"date":"2023-10-08T22:52:58","date_gmt":"2023-10-09T05:52:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/?p=494364"},"modified":"2026-02-12T17:18:40","modified_gmt":"2026-02-13T01:18:40","slug":"one-of-us-tod-brownings-freaks-disability-culture-and-the-criterion-for-inclusion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/2023\/10\/08\/one-of-us-tod-brownings-freaks-disability-culture-and-the-criterion-for-inclusion\/","title":{"rendered":"One of Us: Tod Browning\u2019s Freaks, Disability Culture, and the Criterion for Inclusion"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of Us: Tod Browning\u2019s Freaks<\/i>, Disability Culture, and the Criterion for Inclusion<\/strong><\/h3>\n

 <\/p>\n

Angelo Muredda<\/h4>\n

Content warning: usage of a slur for little people\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Spoilers for the film Freaks<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The burden of disability representation felt heavy when, like a number of film critics, academics, and programmers from equity-seeking groups, I was invited last fall to contribute my ballot for the ten greatest films of all time in the once a decade <\/span>Sight and Sound<\/span><\/i> roundup. How, I wondered, should I make use of my rare opportunity to speak as a representative for a small but vocal community of disabled film critics, given the meagreness of our cinematic representations to date outside of bad biopics and inspiration porn? I fretted over whether to acknowledge this paltry tradition by going out of my way to honour the rare exceptions to the rule, championing the likes of William Wyler\u2019s masterful postwar drama <\/span>The Best Years of Our Lives<\/span><\/i><\/a>, one of only three films in the history of Academy Awards to have yielded an Oscar winning performance of a disabled character by a disabled actor, or boosting the more modest charms of Andrew Bujalski\u2019s <\/span>Beeswax<\/span><\/i><\/a>, a mumblecore dramedy about the romantic and economic foibles of a pair of identical twin sisters, one of them a wheelchair user played by actual wheelchair user Tilly Hatcher. Honesty eventually won out, as I found myself compelled to stump for the film that best indulged my own taste for the pulpy and the complicated, Tod Browning\u2019s <\/span>Freaks<\/span><\/i><\/a> (1932), the most infamous disability film of the first half of the twentieth century and in some ways still the most progressive.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

An early noir about a group of disabled carnival performers who enact swift and terrible vengeance upon the non-disabled grifters who prey upon one of their own and in so doing, offend them all, <\/span>Freaks<\/span><\/i> is still an equally amiable and nasty piece of work nearly a century after its debut. Though it\u2019s about as tasteless as its reputation suggests, from its risqu\u00e9 intimations of the linked sex lives of conjoined twins (sideshow stars Daisy and Violet Hilton) to a grotesque denouement that sees an able-bodied woman (Olga Baclanova\u2019s villain Cleopatra) violently transformed into a parody of her former beauty, <\/span>Freaks<\/span><\/i> offers an embarrassment of riches in its wide-ranging depictions of disability. It does so through the diverse bodies and star personas of its cast, including Harry and Daisy Earles of <\/span>the Doll Family<\/span><\/a>, sibling entertainers with dwarfism, <\/span>Johnny Eck<\/span><\/a> (who spun his sacral agenesis into a successful career as \u201cThe Amazing Half-Boy\u201d), silent film actor with dwarfism <\/span>Angelo Rossitto<\/span><\/a> (who had more than 70 film credits to his name), Schlitzie, a sideshow veteran with microcephaly, and Prince Randian, widely known in his successful carnival career under P.T. Barnum as \u201cThe Living Torso,\u201d due to his multiple limb differences. Revisited from a cultural moment where disabled performers are still largely absent from the films that ostensibly tell their stories, Browning\u2019s film maintains its incredible distinction as an ensemble film about disability that actually features performers whose embodied experiences of the world match those of their characters. More pointedly, it does so through a narrative that is not a mere recycling of disability tropes but an exploration of the solidarity forged by being disabled in community, albeit a community on the fringes.<\/span><\/p>\n

While my <\/span>Sight and Sound vote<\/span><\/a> wasn\u2019t enough to ease it into the top 100, the film that sullied Browning\u2019s career before coming a favourite on the midnight circuit is back in the spotlight thanks to the Criterion Collection\u2019s <\/span>recent announcement<\/span><\/a> of <\/span>Tod Browning\u2019s Sideshow Shockers<\/span><\/i>, a stacked package collecting a restoration of <\/span>Freaks<\/span><\/i> and two lesser-seen Browning pictures set in the same world of carnivals and con artists, 1925\u2019s <\/span>The Mystic<\/span><\/i>, and 1927\u2019s marvellously strange and rich <\/span>The Unknown<\/span><\/i>, starring frequent collaborator Lon Chaney as a knife thrower whose desire to be with a woman who abhors hands sees him desperately amputate his own. And while the announcement this July promised, as Criterion editions typically do, a bevy of contextualizing special features, including commentaries from Browning expert David J. Skal, an interview on pre-Hollywood Core horror by the Edgar Award-winning crime writer Meg Abbott, and a liner essay by pre-Code film historian and critic Farran Smith Nehme, comparatively little attention was paid at first to the film\u2019s unique place within the history of disability representation, and its status as a problematic favourite amidst disabled cinephiles, performers, and filmmakers. Only after a some complaints from disabled writers like <\/span>Film Freak Central<\/span><\/i> editor and founder, <\/span>Bill Chambers<\/span><\/a>, who wrote that <\/span>Freaks<\/span><\/i> \u201cis a key disability text, it\u2019s ours,\u201d did they throw us the kind of bone a carnival ringmaster might toss to one of his performers, quietly adding <\/span>a 2019 episode<\/span><\/a> of disabled critic and Indiewire editor Kristen Lopez\u2019s podcast <\/span>Ticklish Business<\/span><\/i><\/a> about disability representation in the film. The added feature is an illuminating conversation and its inclusion is a good gesture, made without fanfare or apology. But its belatedness and loneliness on the disc makes for an odd celebration of a film about the communal power of the disabled and disenfranchised, which is apparently only recognizable as such in retrospect.<\/span><\/p>\n

This film emerges from Browning’s background as a circus entertainer, its cast a close-knit freak show performance troupe, including actors Browning had worked with prior to his filmmaking career. Insofar as the ensemble has a single protagonist, it\u2019s Hans, played by Harry Earles. Hans falls in love with Cleopatra, an able-bodied trapeze artist who condescendingly dotes on him, jilting his long-suffering girlfriend Frieda \u2014 played by the actor\u2019s sister Daisy, perhaps the most shocking thing about this \u201csideshow shocker\u201d \u2014 in order to marry her. Cleopatra turns out to have bad intentions, which are immediately sussed out by everyone but Hans, plotting to poison and murder her mark and collect his inheritance, then elope with her violent, hulking able-bodied companion, Hercules (Henry Victor). The troupe\u2019s skepticism toward Cleopatra comes out in an early moment where Angeleno, played by Rossitto, expresses the freaks\u2019 credo: \u201cIf you mess with one of us, you mess with all of us.\u201d Despite that premonition, the generous Angeleno and company welcome Cleopatra into the fold on their bacchanalian wedding night, the film\u2019s most famous and oft-quoted sequence. Angeleno dances on the banquet table, leading a chant of \u201cOne of us\u201d as he offers Cleopatra a drink from his cup. Setting the final act\u2019s events in motion, Cleopatra violently refuses, calling them \u201cdirty, slimy, freaks.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Criterion\u2019s early miscalculation about the cultural cache of <\/span>Freaks<\/span><\/i> in disability circles, where the film has more or less been accepted as one of a handful of films that might be embraced as of \u201cone of us,\u201d or at least one for us, might be a product of the film\u2019s initial marketing, which appealed to the morbid instincts of the freak show passerby with questions such as “Can a full grown woman truly love a MIDGET?\u201d That sheepishness about framing the film as a work of disability culture may likewise be a relic of the film\u2019s scandalized critical reception upon release, which has had an outsized afterlife in lieu of its financial failure and spotty distribution history. The tendency at the time was to characterize Browning\u2019s mere depiction of these characters in plots centred on romance, sex, and revenge as inherently distressing. On his audio commentary for the Warner Home Video DVD release in 2004, Skal suggests that the film\u2019s depiction of actual rather than simulated physical deformity turned onscreen audiences off, which is borne out by the contemporaneous critical reaction of <\/span>Kansas City Star<\/span><\/i> critic John C. Moffit, <\/span>who complained<\/span><\/a> that \u201cit takes a strong stomach to look at it.\u201d <\/span>The Hollywood Reporter<\/span><\/i>, too, fixated on the film\u2019s supposed challenges to the appetite, calling it an \u201coutrageous onslaught upon the feelings, the senses, the brains and the stomachs of an audience.\u201d Breaking from the digestive metaphors but similarly marking a division between the viewer and the debased images onscreen, <\/span>Variety<\/span><\/i> proposed that the film\u2019s efforts to align its viewers with the interests of a disabled cast of characters were simply unrealistic: \u201cit is impossible for the normal man or woman to sympathize with the aspiring midget.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

These reactions are not reviews of <\/span>Freaks<\/span><\/i> so much as meta-commentary from anxious nondisabled spectators about the concept of representing performers with anomalous bodies as having their own drives and desires. Though much has been made, including by Skal, of the awkward place the film occupies as a pre-Hays Code horror film that nevertheless had a number of its more unsavoury developments censored, reducing it from a full 90 minute running time to the 64 minute cut most are familiar with, little effort has been paid among film historians to square this moral criticism with prevailing cultural, medical, and political discourses about disability in the 1930s. Yet one cannot separate these comments about the physical repulsion of seeing such figures onscreen from the prevailing wisdom and legislation of the time. That spans the Ugly Laws, forced sterilization, the warehousing of disabled individuals in asylums, and the actual history of freak shows, itself a complicated subject spanning the exploitation of P.T. Barnum and the self-fashioning of disabled performers within that system. The Hilton sisters alone are a fascinating study of agency within exploitation in this respect, having captured the public imagination to the point of performing with Bob Hope and Charlie Chaplin and later co-starring in 1952\u2019s <\/span>Chained for Life<\/span><\/i>, a gaudy courtroom drama loosely inspired by their lives, all while privately fighting a good part of their lives for legal emancipation from their abusive guardians. Seen from a disability studies perspective in the harsh light of these developments, which do take a hard stomach to look at, <\/span>Freaks<\/span><\/i> is a radical text that dares to centre a wide range of disabled characters (and their singular bodies) without nondisabled interlocutors to explain them for what Rosemary Garland-Thomson might call normate audience. Nondisabled viewers, as Lopez points out on the podcast, have to either identify with the titular freaks or settle for the \u201cable-bodied buffer\u201d of the gentle non-entity Venus (Leila Hyams), a kindly sounding board for Freida, and Phroso (Wallace Ford), who passes as able-bodied despite his stutter.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Criterion\u2019s curatorial focus on the film\u2019s circus setting and Hollywood\u2019s history of censorship make sense as starting points for a collector looking to fit <\/span>Freaks<\/span><\/i> on their shelf. But in not commissioning new disability perspectives on the text, and in inviting only a single voice after the fact, they\u2019ve missed not only the communal nature of the film\u2019s disabled politics but also the opportunity to position the set as a critical contribution to disability culture, where the film has had its longest afterlife. The programming note in the packaging, a key part of Criterion\u2019s appeal as a collector of important classic and contemporary films, makes much of Browning\u2019s penchant for this \u201cpungent backdrop\u201d and \u201csordid tales of outcasts, cons, villains, and vagabonds,\u201d essentially providing a positive update of both the earlier publicity and the film\u2019s initial critical rejection, repackaging the pungent and the sordid as features of Browning\u2019s ethos, not bugs. It\u2019s true that Browning roots around in the pungent in <\/span>Freaks<\/span><\/i>: there\u2019s a primal earthiness to the central violent set piece, where one by one, the performers crawl and drag themselves through the mud and in the rain to converge upon Cleopatra. There\u2019s a particular jolt to the striking image of Randian\u2019s Living Torso holding the fateful knife that will be used against her in his mouth. But the carnival is more than mere backdrop for Browning, a former carnival barker, contortionist, and vaudeville comedian \u2014 who, on the note of his sordidness, often performed in blackface, lest we get too romantic about his sideshow career. It is likewise more than just setting for the cast of <\/span>Freaks<\/span><\/i>, many of whom are playing fictionalized versions of their professional selves, adapting their acts for the screen.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

So what is <\/span>Freaks<\/span><\/i>, if it is neither an indigestible, unrelatable assault on the nondisabled viewers\u2019 senses nor purely a time capsule for the indulgences of early Hollywood? Criterion is not wrong to characterize its final moments as sordid. Even the most generous assessment of the film\u2019s thematic and narrative machinations has to disentangle the same contradictions of representation and exploitation that power the institution of the freak show itself: it\u2019s an exploitative tradition that also employed and gave a platform to a large number of disabled performers, recreated in an exploitation film that both platforms and lingers over the bodies of disabled performers. Certainly, characters such as the Hilton twins, who each go on a chaste date with a different man over the course of the film, and intersex performer Josephine Joseph\u2019s Half-Woman-Half-Man are observed with an interest bordering on the prurient, albeit of a sympathetic kind; Hercules\u2019s violent treatment of the latter is firmly rejected by the community and, tacitly, by Browning, even as the camera seems to share his gawking interest.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Yet the cast are performers, used to and even expert at being looked at; they know their angles and work them, far from just serving as objects of titillation. Though the cast was ill-treated by the production, famously asked, in an apocryphal story, to <\/span>eat outside in a tent<\/span><\/a> at a promotional event lest they be allowed to mingle inside with the studio brass, there is an air of respect to the camera\u2019s gaze upon them. The film becomes a kind of sanctioned backstage glimpse of how they live between shows. For long stretches, <\/span>Freaks<\/span><\/i> plays like a warm, ambling hangout movie, humanely observing the off-stage lives of performers and taking in their adaptable, anomalous bodies as they perform the mundane tasks of life, as when the Half-Man tenderly pours a glass of wine for his partner the Armless Girl (Frances O\u2019Connor), who delicately lifts the glass to her mouth with her foot, or when the Living Torso coolly lights his own cigarette by striking a match that\u2019s pinned between his teeth. There is a delicacy to these moments, a sense that we are glimpsing something rare and private and natural, that gives the film\u2019s depiction of disability an almost documentary realist quality, even as we know we are watching performers who make a living out of being regarded.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

If <\/span>Freaks<\/span><\/i> is a horror film in spite of these lovely moments, then it\u2019s about the horror of its ableist villains\u2019 predatory gaze upon disabled bodies, which they view as meal tickets. Its terror lies not just in the freaks\u2019 final actions but in the nondisabled performers\u2019 successful infiltration of their tight circle, which begins when they appeal to Hans\u2019s desire to be loved by an able-bodied woman. \u201cShe\u2019s the most beautiful big woman I\u2019ve seen,\u201d he muses, starry-eyed, when he first looks up at her, cuing us in to the dangers of perception. Much of the film\u2019s reception in disability studies has focused on these reversals of perspective, which subvert Hans\u2019 internalized ableist visual hierarchy. Sally Chivers has written about the distance between the way the film was packaged by MGM as a horror film featuring \u201ccreatures of the abyss\u201d and the actual text before us, which if anything locates its viewer within, not above, that abyss, among disabled people who seem rather human and not especially creaturely. She points out that the film\u2019s cult reputation, which persists in ironic repertory screenings even today, has presented the characters as repulsive attractions for the audience to take a lurid but sympathetic interest in, in spite of the film\u2019s own subversive depiction of looking, which encourages us to see the beautiful as suspect and the disabled as normal. Nicole Markoti\u0107 has similarly noted that the film\u2019s genre thrills come largely from the viewer\u2019s incomprehension at being placed in uncomfortable spectatorship positions. Browning, she suggests, forces the viewer\u2019s sympathetic identification with the troupe when Cleopatra throws their friendly invitation in their faces, leading to messy feelings when they ultimately do violence to her.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Forcing us to align ourselves with the film\u2019s disabled subjects rather than those able-bodied buffers is one of Browning\u2019s trickiest accomplishments in <\/span>Freaks<\/span><\/i>, and it\u2019s one Criterion might have heeded more deliberately in their framing of the film\u2019s cultural significance. Much of the complicated love for <\/span>Freaks<\/span><\/i> in the disability community comes from the rarity and the variety of its perspectives on disability. In Salome Chasnoff\u2019s 2020 documentary <\/span>Code of the Freaks<\/span><\/i>, Sins Invalid performer Mat Fraser says that the film holds up partly because it shows so many different kinds of disabled bodies. It also captures, he says, \u201cthe camaraderie and edgy outsider necessity of collective difference.\u201d In a <\/span>Medium essay<\/span><\/a> on the exclusion of disability in the arts, Paralympian and actor Sarah Houbolt treats <\/span>Freaks<\/span><\/i> as a kind of ancestor to the work she does, something disabled actors frequently lack. \u201cWatching the film for the first time,\u201d she says of her recent redemptive viewing, \u201cgave me a legacy to follow, a cultural heritage uncovered, and a need to ensure that our history is fully known, and told by us.\u201d Aaron Schimberg, a director with a facial difference whose film <\/span>Chained for Life<\/span><\/i> is riffing not only on the earlier so-titled film about the Hiltons but on <\/span>Freaks<\/span><\/i>, and its place in the history of disfigurement in film, is more ambivalent but no less effusive in his praise. In an <\/span>interview with the BFI<\/span><\/a>, he speaks of <\/span>Freaks<\/span><\/i> as a necessary starting point: \u201cI wanted to interrogate my ambiguous feelings towards that movie. It\u2019s a masterpiece, it\u2019s profoundly stupid, it\u2019s humanistic and empathetic, it\u2019s totally ridiculous and insulting. But a masterpiece!\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Clearly, <\/span>Freaks<\/span><\/i>\u2019 peculiar representational riches, anthropological interest in onscreen depictions of anomalous bodies and under-documented performers, and complex and unresolved play with narrative perspective help it meet the criterion for cultural importance for the disabled performers, filmmakers, and critics who view it as foundational to their work and their cinephilia. Like the freaks at the banquet, we accept it, in all its messiness and contradiction. To characterize Browning\u2019s film as primarily an object tucked away in the early Hollywood cabinet of curiosities, though, ready at last to be put on a more respectable shelf, is to elide that edgy outsider necessity Fraser mentions. As Chambers says, <\/span>Freaks<\/span><\/i> is ours, and it continues to fall to us to claim it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

ABOUT<\/strong><\/h4>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"A
A close-up photo of Angelo, a man smiling with dark metal glasses and a short beard. He is wearing a navy blue sweater layered over a striped collared shirt.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

 <\/p>\n

Angelo Muredda<\/strong> (he\/him) is a Toronto-based teacher, film critic, and programmer whose writing on film has appeared in outlets such as\u00a0Cinema Scope,\u00a0The National Post,\u00a0The Walrus,\u00a0Now Magazine,\u00a0SHARP Magazine, and\u00a0Film Freak Central. He has curated film series and educational workshops for Reelabilities Toronto and holds a Ph.D. in English on representations of disability in Canadian literature and film from the University of Toronto. He teaches in the Department of English at Humber College, where he is also Reviews Editor for the Humber Literary Review. He lives in downtown Toronto with his partner and his cat. You can find him on X, formerly known as Twitter, at @amuredda<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Support Disability Media and Culture<\/b><\/p>\n

DONATE<\/b><\/a>\u00a0to the Disability Visibility Project\u00ae<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of Us: Tod Browning\u2019s Freaks, Disability Culture, and the Criterion for Inclusion   Angelo Muredda Content warning: usage of a slur for little people\u00a0 Spoilers for the film Freaks … Continue Reading One of Us: Tod Browning\u2019s Freaks, Disability Culture, and the Criterion for Inclusion<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":494363,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6701202],"tags":[2005041,58990044,587153082,587153203,587152492,587153202],"class_list":["post-494364","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-guest-blog-posts","tag-disability-culture","tag-disability-representation","tag-disabled-film-critics","tag-enfreakment","tag-film-criticism","tag-freaks","post-has-thumbnail"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/angelo.png?fit=1600%2C900&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4H7t1-24BC","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494364","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=494364"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494364\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/494363"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=494364"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=494364"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=494364"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}