Per review

Disability has a notable presence in many films. It is often portrayed as a misrepresentation far from the truth. In the film Daredevil the movie perpetuates the overcoming/compensation myth via the creators’ cinematic techniques. Showing characters that are human in appearance and personality performing inhuman feats of strengths is a key component of superhero media. Movies such as Daredevil only increase the misconception that all blind people have increased other senses, especially hearing. The superpowers that heroes have effectively hide most effects of their disability. The Actor Ben Affleck plays the main role as a disabled lawyer named Matt Murdock. The movie was released on February 14th, 2003 and the director was Mark Steven Johnson. The main story involves a boy and his father who is in trouble with the mob. The father is a fighter who the boy wants to be like. There is a terrible accident that makes the boy blind when he becomes a teenager. The boy learns to use his other senses which are even stronger now because of the blindness.

The boy’s father dies because of the mob. His father was a “devil” in the ring which gave the boy an idea to create a costume to fight the bad guys. He becomes the daredevil which stops all the bad guys and conspirators. But the bad guys don’t even know that he is disabled or know who he is. The physical appearance and looks are very important in portraying any character to the audience. Directors and writers often use the same techniques to perpetuate the disabilities seen on screen. Pairing superpowers and disabilities make it easy to discuss physical difference as a spectrum with the normal body at its center. “Even superpowers, which are ostensibly fictional, obsess our culture, influencing everything from medical breakthroughs to the Olympics. In addition, because of this mutual focus on normativity, stories about superpowers are where some of the most exciting and widely circulated narratives about disability emerge.” Row-Heyveld, Lindsey helps prove how these appearances are important through her teachings.

In some scenes, the only indicator that Matt is blind is the bandana he wears over his eyes to conceal his identity. But, otherwise, to the audience, his fight scenes look like a nondisabled man fighting a group of nondisabled men. The audience is left to merely assume that Matt is able to accomplish this and other feats of strength through his methods of information gathering. As a result, because of the ‘realistic’ actions, Matt’s disability is frequently dropped during fights or chase scenes.

Matt Murdock is deceptive in the movie to conceal his true self. Murdock wears dark sunglasses and uses a long white cane with red markings on it to show everyone else that he is blind, even though it is evident that he can walk without the cane and does not need to wear the glasses. The stereotypical cane is not something that most blind people use. During the movie Matt Murdock meets a girl in a coffee shop. He uses his blindness as an opening to make her smile and lower her guard. Then she becomes his girlfriend whose name is Elektra played by Jennifer Garner. Perhaps the most common misconception about blind people is that they always want to feel other people’s faces to gauge what they look like. Daredevil is no exception. Murdock meets Elektra and takes her to the top of a specific building - his favorite viewing location of the city when he was a young child. Here, they have an intimate moment and he hesitantly reaches towards her face to touch it. She leans into his hand and he runs his fingers down her nose and the side of her face. Moments later, it starts to rain and he asks her to stay because “each raindrop makes a sound the first time it falls on a surface. Just then, it’s like … I can see again.” The ability of a blind person to ‘see’ through the sound of raindrops reflects the first stereotype of superhuman hearing.

This radar sense is especially important in the movie for Matt Murdock to move around. Alaniz, José talks about his radar in her book Death, Disability, and the Superhero. “Daredevil’s radar sense—an alternative means of interacting with the world—is superior to normal human vision: with it he can sense around corners, fight in the dark, and maintain a 360-degree field of perception at all times. In short, Murdock/Daredevil succeeds not in spite of but because of his disability/superpowers; rather than vulnerabilities to be hidden away, they form a crucial part of his identity.” This redar sense is what offsets Matt Murdocks disability of blindness.

Works Sited

Alaniz, José. Death, Disability, and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond University “WHAT CAN WE EVER HAVE TO FEAR FROM A BLIND MAN?!!” Disability, Daredevil, and Passing. Press of Mississippi, 2014. Project MUSE.muse.jhu.edu/book/35350 pp. 69-86

Daredevil directed by Mark Steven Johnson, 2003

Row-Heyveld, Lindsey. Pedagogy. "Reading Batman, Writing X-Men: Superpowers and Disabilities in the First-Year Seminar." vol. 15 no. 3, 2015, Project MUSE.muse.jhu.edu/article/589296 pp. 519-526