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ABSTRACT
The horror thriller Don't Breathe (2016) follows three robbers as they invade the home of a blind Navy SEAL veteran who violently battles against them. Among the robbers is Rocky, a white woman desperately seeking financial security. Don't Breathe depicts Rocky's body in various states of physical immobility, signifying her vulnerability. By only recognizing the vulnerabilities of poor white women's bodies, the film leaves unrecognized the vulnerabilities of others, especially poor bodies of color and disabled bodies. Furthermore, through Rocky, the film suggests that white women can benefit from the violent aid of white patriarchy precisely because their vulnerability/immobility receives recognition.
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Notes
1 “Don’t Breathe (2016),” The Internet Movie Database, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4160708/ (accessed June 21, 2020).
2 Jordan Phillips, “Thousand Words: The Horrors of Sensory (Dis)Ability—Disabled Power in Hush and Don't Breathe,” The Big Picture Magazine, http://thebigpicturemagazine.com/thousand-words-the-horrors-of-sensory-disability-the-actualisation-of-disabled-power-in-hush-and-dont-breathe/ (accessed January 2, 2020).
3 Brian Hadsell, “Quiet Places: Disabilities in Horror Movies from Hush to Don't Breathe,” TVOvermind, https://www.tvovermind.com/quiet-places-disabilities-horror-movies-hush-dont-breathe/ (accessed January 2, 2020).
4 Dominick Evans, “Don’t Breathe, Ableism, and Non-Disabled Indifference,” Dominick Evans, http://www.dominickevans.com/2016/08/dont-breathe-ableism-and-non-disabled-indifference/ (accessed January 2, 2020); Dominick Evans, “Don't Breathe Uses Blindness as a Plot Device while Casting a Seeing Actor,” The Center for Disability Rights, http://cdrnys.org/blog/advocacy/dont-breathe-uses-blindness-as-a-plot-device-while-casting-a-seeing-actor/ (accessed January 2, 2020); Silver Screen Disability, “The Victim of Don't Breathe,” WordPress, https://silverscreendisability.wordpress.com/2016/10/09/the-victim-of-dont-breathe/ (accessed January 2, 2020); John Wiswell, “Evil Isn't a Disability: 10 Cloverfield Lane, Donald Trump, and Don't Breathe,” Fireside Fiction, https://firesidefiction.com/evil-isnt-a-disability (accessed January 2, 2020).
5 Wiswell, “Evil Isn’t a Disability.”
6 Butler et al., “Introduction,” in Vulnerability in Resistance, eds. Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay (Durham, North Carolina: Duke UP, 2016), 1–11.
7 Butler, “Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance,” in Vulnerability in Resistance, 19.
8 Marianne Hirsch, “Vulnerable Times,” in Vulnerability in Resistance, 81.
9 Anu Koivunen et al., “Vulnerability as a Political Language,” in The Power of Vulnerability: Mobilising Affect in Feminist, Queer, and Anti-Racist Media Cultures (Manchester, UK: Manchester UP, 2019), 1–26.
10 Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, North Carolina: Duke UP, 2014).
11 Sarah Hagelin, Reel Vulnerability: Power, Pain, and Gender in Contemporary American Film and Television (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 2013), 15.
12 Dreama G. Moon and Michelle A. Holling, “‘White Supremacy in Heels’: (White) Feminism, White Supremacy, and Discursive Violence,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 17, no. 2 (2020): 253–60.
13 Bernadette Marie Calafell, “From College Dropout to Monster: Kanye West and the Politics of Monstrosity,” in Monstrosity, Performance, and Race in Contemporary Culture (New York: Peter Lang, 2015), 97–115.
14 Dawn Marie D. McIntosh, “From White Ladies to White Trash Mamas: (Re)Locating the Performances of White Femininity,” in Interrogating the Communicative Power of Whiteness, Eds. Dawn Marie D. McIntosh, et al. (New York: Routledge, 2019), 110.
15 Moon and Holling, “‘White Supremacy in Heels,’” 256.
16 Jennell Johnson and Krista Kennedy, “Introduction: Disability, In/Visibility, and Risk,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 50, no. 3 (2020): 162.
17 Vanessa B. Beasley, “The Trouble with Marching: Ableism, Visibility, and Exclusion of People with Disabilities,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 50, no. 3 (2020): 166–74; Daniel C. Brouwer, “From San Francisco to Atlanta and Back Again: Ideologies of Mobility in the AIDS Quilt's Search for a Homeland,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 10, no. 4 (2007): 701–22; Tasha R. Dunn, “Digging In: White Trash, Trailer Trash, and the (Im)Mobility of Whiteness,” in Interrogating the Communicative Power of Whiteness, 117–32; Lisa A. Flores, “Stoppage and the Racialized Rhetorics of Mobility,” Western Journal of Communication 84, no. 3 (2002): 247–63; Leslie J. Harris, “Rhetorical Mobilities and the City: The White Slavery Controversy and Racialized Protection of Women in the U.S.,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 104, no. 1 (2018): 22–46; Alyssa A. Samek, “Mobility, Citizenship, and ‘American women On the Move’ in the 1977 International Women's Year Torch Relay,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 103, no. 3 (2017): 207–29; Sarah Sharma and Armond R. Towns, “Ceasing Fire and Seizing Time: L.A. Gang Tours and the White Control of Mobility,” Transfers 6, no. 1 (2016): 26–44; Armond R. Towns, “Geographies of Pain: #SayHerName and the Fear of Black Women's Mobility,” Women's Studies in Communication 39, no. 2 (2016): 122–26; Alessandra Von Burg, “Mobility: The New Blue,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 100, no. 2 (2014): 241–57.
18 Von Burg, “Mobility,” 242.
19 Samek, “Mobility, Citizenship, and ‘American Woman on the Move’ in the 1977 International Women’s Year Torch Relay,” 223.
20 Brouwer, “From San Francisco to Atlanta and Back Again,” 703.
21 Harris, “Rhetorical Mobilities and the City.”
22 Beasley, “The Trouble with Marching.”
23 Samek, “Mobility, Citizenship, and ‘American Woman on the Move’ in the 1977 International Women’s Year Torch Relay,” 211.
24 Sharma and Towns, “Ceasing Fire and Seizing Time.”
25 Sara Ahmed, “A Phenomenology of Whiteness,” Feminist Theory 8, no. 2 (2007): 159.
26 Dunn, “Digging In.”
27 Brouwer, “From San Francisco to Atlanta and Back Again,” 703.
28 Towns, “Geographies of Pain,” 123.
29 Flores, “Stoppage and the Racialized Rhetorics of Mobility,” 252.
30 Carol J. Clover, Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1992).
31 Clover, Men, Women, and Chain Saws, 49.
32 ibid.
33 For scholarship critiquing the ubiquitous whiteness of the Final Girl, see: Kinitra D. Brooks, Searching for Sycorax: Black Women’s Hauntings of Contemporary Horror (News Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 2017); Robin R. Means Coleman, Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to Present (New York: Routledge, 2011); Lucia Mulherin Palmer, “The Final Girl at the U.S.-Mexico Border: The Politics of Saving and Surviving in Undocumented (2010),” Postmodern Culture 28, no. 1 (2017), https://muse.jhu.edu/article/703244; Kelly Wilz, “Getting the Final Girl Out of Get Out,” Women's Studies in Communication 44, no. 3 (2021): 323–39.
34 Means Coleman, Horror Noire, 52.
35 Beasley, “The Trouble with Marching,” 172.
36 ibid, 170.
37 Jasbir Puar, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (Durham, North Carolina: Duke UP, 2017), xxiii, emphasis added. Although our analysis does not address representations of Black identity in Don't Breathe, the film does suggest an ideological association between whiteness and mobility. This association, in turn, reflects an ideological distancing between Blackness and mobility that has often historically resulted in the denial of subjectivity and agency to Black bodies and persons.
38 Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press), xv.
39 McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, xv.
40 Christina V. Cedillo, “Disabled and Undocumented: In/visibility at the Borders of Presence, Disclosure, and Nation,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 50, no. 3 (2020): 203–11; Jay Dolmage, Disabled Upon Arrival: Eugenics, Immigration, and the Construction of Race and Disability (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State UP, 2018); Ellen Samuels, Fantasies of Identification: Disability, Gender, Race (New York: New York UP, 2014); Sami Schalk, Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women's Speculative Fiction (Durham, North Carolina: Duke UP, 2018).
41 Dolmage, Disabled Upon Arrival.
42 ibid.
43 Richard Dyer, White: Essays on Race and Culture (London: Routledge, 1997), 152.
44 Dyer, White, 153.
45 Robert McRuer, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (New York: New York UP, 2006).
46 McRuer, Crip Theory, 2.
47 Eunjung Kim. “‘A Man, with the Same Feelings’: Disability, Humanity, and Heterosexual Apparatus in Breaking the Waves, Born on the Fourth of July, Breathing Lessons, and Oasis,” in The Problem Body: Projecting Disability on Film, eds. Sally Chivers and Nicole Markotić (Columbia, Ohio: Ohio State UP, 2010), 141.
48 Dominick Evans, “Don't Breathe, Ableism, and Non-Disabled Indifference.”
49 Samuels, Fantasies of Identification, 70.
50 Hagelin, Reel Vulnerability, 6.
51 Samek, “Mobility, Citizenship, and ‘American Woman on the Move’ in the 1977 International Women’s Year Torch Relay,” 214.
52 This representation of the (cis)female reproductive body as vulnerable is fitting in that, as Hagelin notes, the term “vulnerable” was first used in Shakespearean literature to characterize the womb (Hagelin, Reel Vulnerability, 2).
53 Harris, “Rhetorical Mobilities and the City,” 26.
54 Kyle Christensen and Scarlett L. Hester, “The Horrors of White Male Innocence in IT (2017),” Critical Studies in Media Communication 36, no. 5 (2019): 506.
55 Hagelin, Reel Vulnerability, 3.
56 ibid, 1.
57 ibid.
58 Casey Ryan Kelly, “It Follows: Precarity, Thanatopolitics, and the Ambient Horror Film,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 34, no. 3 (2017): 239.
59 Sarah Projanksy and Kent A. Ono, “Strategic Whiteness as Cinematic Racial Politics,” in Whiteness: The Communication of Social Identity, eds. Thomas K. Nakayama and Judith N. Martin (New York: New York UP, 1999), 149–76.
60 Rachel E. Dubrofsky, “Monstrous Authenticity: Trump's Whiteness,” in Interrogating the Communicative Power of Whiteness, 155–75; Amanda Nell Edgar and Holly Willson Holladay, “‘Everybody's Hard Times Are Different’: Country as a Political Investment in White Masculine Precarity,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 16, no. 2 (2019): 122–39; Casey Ryan Kelly, Apocalypse Man: The Death Drive and the Rhetoric of White Masculine Victimhood (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State UP, 2020).
61 Isaac Rooks, “Panic in Detroit: Don't Breathe and the Fears of Old Cities, Homes and Men,” Elder Horror: Essays on Film’s Frightening Images of Aging, eds. Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2019), 23.
62 Madison Stacey, “Social Media Reacts to Viral Video of ‘Elizabeth from Knoxville,’ Who Illegally Breached U.S. Capitol,” WBIR, https://www.wbir.com/article/news/twitter-reacts-to-elizabeth-from-knoxville-who-says-she-got-inside-capitol-in-viral-video/51-cda4bc47-66a2-4559-8caf-0dd872fb1c27 (accessed January 9, 2021).