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CounterPunch
January
25, 2003
Extinguishing
Frida
Kahlo's Missing
Withered Leg
by MARTA RUSSELL
Usually I leave Hollywood alone. Dramatic film
has not been a medium of historical accuracy. Getting around
to seeing the movie "Frida," however, put me in a comment-making
mood. No, it drove me to speak up as a fan of Kahlo's.
Julie Traymor's film "Frida"
is based on Hayden Herrera's biography of Frida Kahlo, a Mexican
painter who was disabled, Latina, female, bisexual and a Communist.
The actor Salma Hayek portrays Frida.
What drags me to the computer is the
obliteration of polio from the film. When the audience sees shots
of Frida as a young person still in preparatory school, she is
shown as completely able bodied. Skipping, running with no impairment
to her gait, pushing herself agilely up on her toes, legs exposed
there is no trace of the polio Kahlo had contracted at age 6.
So I dug out my old copy of the biography,
now dog-eared and falling apart at the seams to check how that
foundational part of Frida's life had been depicted.
Although a fellow cripple like myself
can take issue with Herrera's account of Frida, particularly
when the historian takes it upon herself to engage in amateurish
psychoanalyzing about Kahlo's "infirmity" (of which
I can locate none in her being), the biography clearly documents
the polio:
"The reason for the change was illness:
when Frida was six years old, she was stricken with polio. She
was to spend nine months confined to her room. 'It all began
with a horrible pain in my right leg from the muscle downward,'
she remembered."
Then: "when Frida was up again,
a doctor recommended a program of physical exercise to strengthen
her withered right limb," writes Herrera (emphasis mine)
and a letter written by Kahlo states "The leg remained very
thin."
In the film after she and an elderly
Leon Trotsky climb the steps of Indian ruins that would leave
a marathon runner out of breath, Trotsky asks Frida what happened
to her. This question is so familiar as to be a cliche to disabled
persons. Frida explains that she is not sure after so many surgeries
(some 32 of them) what has caused her condition what but she
says, "the leg. the leg is the worst."
It is now more widely recognized that
physicians' prior advice about what to do about polio - use it
or lose it - was quite wrong. It is more like use it and then
lose it. Much of the pain Frida experienced can be attributed
to post polio and overuse syndrome. In addition, Kahlo's San
Francisco physician diagnosed her with congenital scoliosis of
the spine. All this came before the dramatic trolley car accident
where Frida was impaled by an iron handrail that broke her spine
in 3 places and exited her vagina.
This collision is the moment in which
Traymor determines that Kahlo has an impairment yet still we
do not see Hayek limping. We see her do a seductive dance in
high heels! In reality Kahlo wore three or four socks on the
thin calf and her right shoe was built up to compensate for the
smaller limb. How much more interesting the dance scene could
have been had the limp been a part of the choreography. To flaunt
that right leg - that would have been revolutionary. Historically
incorrect (surprise) what does the omission say about disability?
Why did the filmmaker decide to obliterate the polio? Did Hayek
have anything to do with it?
I ask because when Daniel Day Lewis accurately
portrayed the writer Christi Brown in the movie "My Left
Foot" by conforming his body to that of Brown's who had
cerebral palsy Joan Collins characterized Lewis as making himself
"ugly in every way." Why would the handsome Lewis want
to do that, Collins wondered.
Did Hayek, whose voluptuous eat-me-up
body is displayed nude on the big screen at every possible opportunity,
object to having one of her legs be "withered" by reality?
For truly Frida's right leg was smaller than her left.
One can only speculate but this seems
a plausible explanation since the leg factor is brought up in
the film by Frida's husband Diego Rivera's first wife Lupe when
she cries to Diego, "you give up these legs" stroking
her own thigh "for these matchsticks, these peg legs"
grabbing at Kahlo's skirt.
It is Rivera who has the most succinct
line in the movie. When Frida first undresses before him, she
says "I have a scar." Rivera replies "You are
perfect."
Ahh, I suppose we should be grateful
that nobody wanted Kahlo dead in this movie. It was not the era
of the Derek Humphreys, the Peter Singers or removed bioethicists
who dictate who has quality-of-life and who does not. Had it
been, no doubt the "saviors" would have rushed in with
the "right to die" chemicals soon after the trolley
car incident, when Kahlo found herself in bed in pain. It was
in the aftermath she found the makings to become a serious painter.
As renown Rivera himself noted, "she is much better than
me."
When I went to get a new copy of Herrera's
book, I found it with Hayek dressed up as Kahlo on the front
cover. "Now a major motion picture from Miramax films"
it read. The old cover with Frida's self-portrait with her monkey
was gone. The commercial film industry had extinguished Frida
and replaced her with Hayek. Kahlo the Communist who disliked
Americans because for them "the most important thing was
to have ambition" might have remarked frankly "what
else can one expect from Gringolanda?" I would add "from
temporarily nondisabled Gringolanda."
Marta Russell
has been a producer and a photographer whose investigative reporting
earned her a Golden Mike Award for Best Documentary from the
Southern California Radio and Television News Association in
1994. She was honored as co-producer/correspondent for the KCET
(PBS) Life & Times documentary entitled, "Disabled &
the Cost of Saying 'I Do" on marriage disincentives in Social
Security policy.
Disabled from birth, Russell began writing
when her disability progressed and she no longer worked in the
film industry. Russell's commentaries have been published in
the San Jose Mercury News, the Los Angeles Times, the San Diego
Union Tribune, the Austin American-Statesman and other newspapers
around the nation. Her academic work focusing on the socio/economic
aspects of disablement has been published in the BERKELEY JOURNAL
OF EMPLOYMENT AND LABOR LAW, the JOURNAL OF DISABILITY POLICY
STUDIES, and DISABILITY & SOCIETY amongst others. Disability
articles have appeared in New Mobility Magazine, Ragged Edge,
and Mouth, the voice of disability rights. She was nominated
for a MAGGIE award in 1995.
Russell's first book, BEYOND RAMPS, DISABILITY
AT THE END OF THE SOCIAL CONTRACT (Common Courage Press, 1998)
received an Honorable Mention from the Outstanding Books Awards
presented by the Gustavus Myers Program for the Study of Bigotry
and Human Rights in North America at Boston University. She can
be reached at: ap888@lafn.org
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