Frida (2002) Full Movie

[Ronald Frison]

DirectorJulie Taymor says that her choice to direct Frida (2002) was made, in part, by the "prospect of striking a balance between the realism of a period piece set in the Twenties, Thirties and Forties and the interior landscape of this woman's mind" (Bosley 1). To convey to the audience a combined sense of Frida Kahlo's subjectivity, artistry and biography, Taymor employs digitally altered scenes to recreate her paintings which then come to life within the narrative. Taymor also suggests a recurrent theme in Kahlo's oeuvre, the permeability of death and life, while layering Frida's inner realities, her maimed body, and aspects of her culture, both modern and traditional. Ultimately, Taymor's focus on Frida's disabled body helps film audiences understand the complexity of Kahlo's life journey, one that continues to be constructed even after her death.

Cultural distinctions of disability as abnormal or deviant persist within embodied formations of difference. As David Mitchell puts it, "the disabled body surfaces as any body capable of being narrated as 'outside the norm'" (17). The disabled body conveys social and physical distinctions from what is considered normative and therefore less culturally attractive. What disability studies of the past twenty years have argued is that public attitudes often present obstacles as significant as the physical limitations themselves. The homogenization of a society that continues to glamorize beauty and health within prohibitively narrow limits does much to render disability as deficiency rather than as difference.

While the discourse of disability in the media undergoes continual renegotiation, Hollywood has typically characterized disability in terms of lack or loss. While the medical and biological models in disability studies are being replaced or supplemented by socio-political models,4 television remakes of classic films such as The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1981) or The Phantom of the Opera (1983), where disfigurement and disability is equated with deviancy, suggest that cultural attitudes of disability are slow to change. Such films, where the disability (physical deformity of face and body) goes hand in hand with maladjusted behavior, an inability to fit in with the rest of society, suggest that disability is often equated (incorrectly, by the able-bodied characters within the film) with an essential loss of humanity.5 The quest of Quasimodo to become a part of society is never realized, largely because that society cannot stand his different appearance, his deformed face and arched back. His participation in the membership of the church is relegated to what might be considered marginal at best. In the film, he lurks in the labyrinths of the cathedral's corridors and skylit passageways where the audience discovers that his mental and emotional capacities are equally disabled. The Phantom of the Opera, too, dwells on the fringe (or rather underbelly) of society; he is refused membership into the community who flock to the Opera House above his subterranean haunts to escape quotidian realities via romantic fantasy. Neither cinematic protagonist can hope for a normal life because their disabilities, their different physical bodies, represent their mental and emotional incapacity to fit into their respective communities. As Longmore observes, "we are let off the hook by being shown that disability or bias or both must forever ostracize severely disabled characters from society" (135).

Hollywood or Hollywood-influenced movies sometimes suggest, on the other hand, that the difference that inheres in a disabled body is acceptable if it contributes in a gainful way, sometimes even a patently commercial way, to the collective good. Frida Kahlo produced art of amazing staying power and commercial appeal. Not only is there scarcely a book store in America where a book concerning Kahlo or her art cannot be found, reproductions of her art also adorn the walls, nooks and crannies of numerous public places.6 While most of Frida's bequest to capitalism occurs after her death, Taymor's film evokes some of these best known reproductions through its occasional use of "3-D paintings or paintings that come to life" (Frida 113), wherein what appears to be a static image of one of Frida's paintings becomes an enactment by the actors within the (commercial) film.7 The conflicts between high art, socially committed art and capitalism are suggested most strongly in relation to Diego Rivera's work (he has to relinquish his commission in Rockefeller Center because of its Marxist elements), but some of Frida's popular appeal is again conveyed through the inclusion of her picture on the cover of the August, 1939 issue of French Vogue magazine.8

But Frida's painted cast, her aestheticized, disabled body, metonymically represents much larger concerns and speaks to an array of intersecting discursive traditions: national, postcolonial, feminist, Marxist, postmodernist, (bi)sexual, surrealist, and magical realist. Such a mingling of discourses elevates the disabled body to the plural discourse of post-modernity and suggests that as we uncover how identity is rendered multiple, we uncover how difference really operates: through the underlying and overlapping of discourse, rather than as a mere aspect of otherness. Kahlo's art remains influential precisely because it contributes to such an array of discursive traditions. In mingling Kahlo's art and life, Taymor's film mobilizes a discourse of the disabled body that elevates difference in ways that speak to that paradoxical urge in America both to individuate and to unify.9

Taymor contests stereotypical depictions of the disabled body in the ways she organizes the narrative around Kahlo's body as the subject of Frida. Nearly every scene in Frida depicts the artist (as portrayed by Salma Hayek), starting with a scene from the end of her life when she is bedridden and has to be carried in her four-poster bed through the streets and onto a flat-bed truck so she that can attend (as we learn when the scene continues at the end of the film) her first and only one-woman show in Mexico.15 The film then flashes back to Frida's days as a schoolgirl. She runs through busy city streets, noisy institutional hallways, and bustling family gatherings. These opening scenes reflect the strong physical energy of Kahlo's youthful body. But the film then re-enacts the accident that almost ended her life at the age of eighteen, when the bus she was riding collided with a trolley car. This scene establishes a prominent theme of Frida: life is not distinct from death, but rather, an extension of death; every moment in her life follows on from this near death experience.16 Afterwards, as she lies sedated on the operating table, the young Kahlo dreams she is being operated on by doctors who resemble animated "Day of the Dead" skeletons.17 When she awakens, we hear the real doctors saying "The spinal column was broken as were the collarbone and two ribs. The pelvis is broken in three places. The metal rod [i.e. a handrail from the bus] entered the right side of the body and came out the vagina."18 Frida's disabled body becomes the axis of the telling of a life that teeters towards death unstoppably. Her lengthy convalescence, subsequent operations with extensive recuperative periods, and chronic periods of pain suggest that Frida Kahlo's art and life have become iconic to the world not despite her disability, but because of it.

In the film's depiction of the accident itself, the distorted sequencing of the film moves to a crawl, allowing the spectator to connect the objects on the film simultaneously to Frida's body, emphasizing Frida's subjectivity, how she registers knowledge about self and others in the moment of time and space she occupies.19 Toward this end, the film slows at the precise moment that the look of impending disaster appears on Frida's face, allowing for such a coalescence of meaning to occur.

Such cinematic pauses augment the distance between Frida and the object she is encountering, suggesting Frida's perspective and offering a theory of subjectivity that relates knowledge to the domain of the body. As Elizabeth Grozs puts it, "for the subject to take up a position as a subject, it must be able to be situated in the space occupied by its body. This anchoring of subjectivity in its body is the condition of coherent identity, and, moreover, the condition under which the subject has a perspective on the world" (47). A subject's body is defined by plurality: It is physical (real); it is mental (symbolic); it remains in various states of negotiation to people, places, things and even discourses. Its power is rendered by the totality of its complexity. The body avails itself as the hub of subjectivity by the way it completes complex psychic negotiation and depends upon distance so as to separate itself from the various objects it encounters. This real and symbolic separation of subject from object is marked paradoxically by loss and gain because the subject symbolically splits when psychic negotiation occurs.20 One way to look at this psychic process the subject experiences is through the theory of split-subjectivity made famous by Jacques Lacan.21 When we enter the mirror stage as an infant or toddler, we begin to perceive our selves symbolically, in other words, in relation to how others perceive us. For that symbolic process to happen, we experience loss: we symbolically lose our wholeness in the sense that we do not feel a connection to the physicality surrounding us. As "split subjects" we connect in part to our real bodies and another part to whatever we choose; the entire process is simultaneously voluntary and involuntary. Since we have experienced wholeness early in our lives, we long to go back to that unity through symbolically attaching ourselves to experiences, people, ideas, anything constituting a given relationship. However, unity is forever an illusive experience; we can never attach completely to anyone or anything, although we continue to try. Once we become subjects, we continue to orient ourselves by experience and knowledge gained through a plethora of relationships. These relationships can be seen as objects too. While these relationships vary in how meaningful they can be said to be with respect to any one person, place, object, institution, or discourse, relationships nonetheless involve a primary aspect of subjectivity, that of positioning. How we position ourselves to circumstances and events as they occur is one aspect of perspective, while how we position ourselves after they occur is another.

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