Opinion On suffering

About suffering they were never wrong,/ The Old Masters,” Auden once wrote. The movies strive to be the same. Despite the razzle dazzle, Hollywood has often trained its gaze on the terrible loneliness of being trapped in your body, or being trapped in your mind. And some of its most memorable Oscar-winning moments are about individuals transcending physical or mental afflictions — Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man, singing “I saw her standing there”, Russell Crowe as mathematician John Nash in A Beautiful Mind, finding reason in “the mysterious equations of love”. Such a transcendence, perhaps, is found only in the movies.

Portrayals of tragic debilitation have rarely failed to touch a chord with the Academy. This year, Eddie Redmayne won Best Actor for playing Stephen Hawking, both before and after he was diagnosed with ALS, in The Theory of Everything. Best Actress went to Julianne Moore in Still Alice, for her role as a professor of linguistics who has Alzheimer’s. Country singer Glen Campbell, who has battled the disease for three years, was unable to attend though he had been nominated for Best Original Song. Tim McGraw went on stage in his place, singing “I’m Not Gonna Miss You”, Campbell’s last tribute to his family before sinking into the twilight zone.

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There are, of course, places and experiences the movies cannot reach. Why don’t people with disabilities play characters with disability, many have asked. Movies about disability have been accused of mimicry, of giving audiences the “phew moment”, or the relief of knowing that it is only a healthy, handsome actor pretending to be crippled and helpless. Perhaps moments of transcendence are only moments that sublimate people’s fears about illness by turning it into art. But the movies also contain the hope that some would pause to consider these other lives and realities before, in Auden’s words, they “sailed calmly on”.