Film Matters: Please tell us about your article that is being published in Film Matters.
Charlie Mc Evoy: My article discusses the 1955 film, The Man with the Golden Arm by Austrian director Otto Preminger. The Golden Arm is a typical noir is many ways – dark, gritty, set on the back alleys of Chicago and boasting a fantastic jazz score. What is surprising is that the protagonist, played by Frank Sinatra (Frankie) is addicted to heroin. This plot point has, however, in my opinion, served to overshadow the most interesting element of the film, which is that Frankie’s wife (Zosh), is a ‘’fake’’ wheelchair user and that this characteristic serves to almost singularly doom Frankie to a life of addiction and booze. I argue that the film constructs Zosh as a kind of crip fatale, with all of the destructive impulses and deceitful wiles of the femme fatale, but none of the allure.
FM: What research and/or methodologies do you incorporate in your article?
CM: My article draws really heavily from disability studies. The books, Narrative Prosthesis by Sharon Synder and David Mitchell and The Cinema of Isolation by Martin Norden, and the essay, “The Cripple in Literature” by Leonard Kriegel, were really standout texts for me. I also drew from a number of primary sources in order to try and contextualize attitudes and conceptions of disability in midcentury America. The online library of the Disability History Museum was a great resource in this regard.
FM: Describe the original context for/when writing this article while an undergraduate student.
CM: I was doing a year abroad at the University of Vienna and had just completed a module on dis/ability history in twentieth-century Austria when I began another on the influence of Austrian-Jewish émigré directors on American film noir. The module was unusual enough as there were no lectures per se, just weekly screenings of movies at the Austrian Film Institute, which is quite a grand and historic theater. I was instantly drawn to The Man with the Golden Arm. It baffled me that a film with such explicit themes of drug addiction would have even been made in Hays Code America; but the more I reflected on the film, the more the character of Zosh stood out to me – how superficial and throwaway her disability is in the film, but also how central it is to all of Frankie’s woes. I really wanted to understand what was going on, what the film was saying about disability and why Zosh ‘’had’’ to die in the finale.
FM: What does your writing process look like?
CM: At the time that I wrote this article, it had the strongest theoretical grounding of anything that I had ever done. So it felt very ambitious and took well over a month of reading and research. For me, the writing process always begins with a good plan, correlating all my theses and themes together and organizing and reorganizing the flow of the paper. My goal is always to lead the reader step by step to a final conclusion, always building incrementally upon the previous section in the next, so that the reader and I emerge with a transformed understanding of the subject. I’d like to think that I achieved that here.
FM: How have your personal experiences shaped and influenced your writing?
CM: It was really important for me to focus on Zosh as a disabled woman and highlight how big an impact her gender had on her portrayal as a disabled character – in effect, that these two characteristics are in a double-sided relationship of cultural production. Recognizing this kind of intersectionality is always important to me; it is something that I encounter a lot as a gender-diverse person. It helps pick out the fault lines of past cultural conceptions and thus contributes to a questioning of our own.
FM: What are your methods for finding diverse and relevant sources?
CM: I try to find a balance between intuitive and systematic research by reading around my primary sources as much as possible, looking in all directions for correlations and leads. Library research guides and subject specific groups can be great in this regard. I check all the major library, research, and archival databases that I have at my disposal and if I find anything interesting in my reading, I will follow it up in the footnotes and try to find any other related sources. I keep tracing all these little threads throughout the research process until I feel that I have developed a substantial body of work.
FM: Why is including marginalized voices in research important to you?
CM: I think that it can be incredibly enriching to enter old texts from a new direction and embracing marginalized voices is an integral part of that. There is very little scholarly literature about The Man with the Golden Arm, presumably because it is unremarkable to many viewers. In acknowledging the narratives surrounding impairment (which are so naturalized as to almost be imperceptible) in the film, however, you give a new significance to an old text.
It was particularly necessary to draw from the works of disabled scholars, since of course Zosh is an extremely superficial and unauthentic portrayal of a wheelchair user. Like her impairment in the film, Zosh’s voice is “false.” That is to say, she is a puppet for abled-bodied judgments of disabled people.
FM: What aspects of the writing process were most challenging? Why?
CM: I like to think that I do a lot of my writing before I ever even open up Word, because my essay plans tend to be so detailed, but of course I do encounter challenges in the process. Where the neologism, crip fatale was going to be introduced in the article was an issue in both the writing and editing. I originally thought that it was going to come in at the final culmination of my analysis, but it made more sense to move it to the middle of the piece, and finally to define it in the introduction.
FM: What’s a resistance point you hit in your writing, and how did you move past it?
CM: I try to write very intentionally, so I hit a resistance point at almost every sentence or paragraph. I have to really sit and think and begin to not only believe but feel what I am saying. So it takes me a lot of time, probably like ten minutes per sentence, but ultimately that is time that I am willing to spend in order to find my own voice.
FM: What do you enjoy most about your article?
CM: It’s funny, it is an article that I wrote, but my favorite part is probably the quote at the beginning, from “The Cripple in Literature” by Leonard Kriegel (an essay featured in the 1987 anthology, Images of the Disabled: Disabling Images).
It’s a simple quote, but so fervent, so full of passionate rage. Though it was not written with The Man with the Golden Arm in mind, it sums up the whole conundrum of the film. Preminger wanted to make the film to show the human side of heroin addiction. That it wasn’t some social Darwinist inevitability that people like Frankie Machine (Frank Sinatra) would become dependent on drugs or alcohol, but a consequence of social, economic, and personal circumstance. Yet, in order to prove this highly progressive point, the film teaches its audience that impairment makes women unlovable, oppressive, murderous, and doomed. Through its “rebellion,” the film reinforces the preexisting judgments of the mainstream.
FM: How has the Film Matters editorial and publication process impacted the development/evolution of your article?
CM: I really enjoyed the editorial process with Film Matters. I think that article went back and forth between the board and me around four times. The editorial input helped me to refine the article and improve its presentation as a film studies piece, with regard to author names, citations, etc.
Sometimes it’s easy to get in your head as a writer, to see things from only your perspective with all the knowledge, research, and context that you have. Having the editorial board give feedback on the clarity and flow of the text allowed me to make adjustments, which I think have contributed to a much more cohesive article.
FM: What audience do you hope to reach with your Film Matters article and/or what impact do you hope it has on the field of film studies?
CM: I hope that if any students or scholars are researching The Man with Golden Arm in the future, or even Otto Preminger, or images of women in film noir more generally, that this article will serve to broaden their perspective of the topic or trigger new questions for them. I would love if it helped introduce more people to disability studies and crip theory.
FM: How has your department and/or institution supported your work in film and media?
CM: The European Studies degree has a heavy focus on cultural history. I think I would always probably consider myself a cultural historian (in training) more than anything else. But film scholarship is a major part of cultural history and research on films as historical sources, as well as the historical impact of cinema itself, has always been encouraged by the Center for European Studies.
In 2022, the university awarded me the Germanic Studies Prize for my essay, “Sissi – A Nation Between Ages” on the 1956 “kitsch” classic, Sissi: Die Junge Kaiserin/The Young Empress by Ernst Marischka. This was a real encouragement for my ability as a film scholar.
FM: How has your faculty mentor fostered your advancement as a film scholar?
CM: Dr. Heinrich really opened my eyes regarding disability studies. The conferences, which she encouraged the class to attend during the year, have had a big impact on my scholarship since. Even though I wrote this essay for another professor’s class, she was still super interested and supportive all the same.
FM: What advice do you have for undergraduate film and media scholars?
CM: Be curious! Question the things that go unquestioned. Explain the things that don’t get explained. If you find a word, a phenomenon, a narrative that you don’t understand, look it up! It might just become your dissertation.
FM: What are your future plans?
CM: I have been admitted into the master’s program for History at Oxford University, so I will be pursuing that in the 2024/25 year. I’ll be studying in the Women’s, Gender and Queer History strand and conducting my dissertation on the lives of nineteenth-century Anglo-Jewish writers, Judith Montefiore, Grace Aguilar, and Amy Levy. Jewish women’s history is another one of my great interests (I have a lot of research interests, maybe too many!). I am super excited for this, but I will still remain a cultural historian, so I am sure this won’t be the last time that I’ll be writing about film!
Author Biography
Charlie Mc Evoy is a recent graduate of European Studies at Trinity College Dublin. The third year of his degree was spent at the University of Vienna, where he began writing the current paper. He recently submitted his undergraduate dissertation on ecofeminism in the Victorian anti-vivisection movement.
