Abstract

This dissertation explores how a film’s soundtrack musically cues audiences to sonically experience the physical sensations of a disabled character’s impaired bodymind and the ethical implications that follow. To accomplish this goal, I reread and reimagine phenomenological film theory, specifically the groundbreaking work of Vivian Sobchack, to investigate how a disability studies perspective challenges and expands that scholarly tradition. Phenomenological film theory has conventionally privileged a universalized understanding of the body as the bedrock for its theoretical scaffolding. However, this study explores what happens to our academic a priori when we account for the impaired phenomenologies of the disabled bodyminds represented on screen or present in the audience. I conduct a reparative reading of Sobchack’s concept of the “film body” in order to uncover how this cinematic embodiment shapes and is shaped by rhetorics of (dis)ability. Sobchack unequivocally argues that the film body cannot be disabled as we do not speak of the concrete materiality of the cinematic apparatus in the same terms as when discussing human bodies. Importantly, this approach inadvertently naturalizes the normative, able-bodied sensory perspective of the film body as ideologically neutral. This study takes the moments in which Sobchack invokes ability and debility seriously in order to deconstruct how the film body assumed by phenomenological theory uncritically reifies an able-bodied subject position. The dissertation consists of two large parts: theory (Chapters Two and Three) and praxis (Chapters Four, Five, and Six). Chapter Two disassembles Sobchack’s theory, showing how it uncritically asserts that the normative, able-bodied sensorium of the film body is a universal sensory perspective. This belief overlooks how filmmakers have historically constructed the cinematic apparatus to simultaneously reflect and exceed human capabilities. By heralding this capacitated film body as the default, her study inadvertently positions an impaired phenomenology as aberrant. Chapter Three reclaims Sobchack’s work by proposing the concept of rendering (dis)ability. This expansion accounts for the constant ways in which filmmakers manipulate the apparatus in order to simulate a sensory perspective that exists somewhere between our societal conceptualization of ability and disability. Drawing upon the work of sound theorist Michel Chion, I invoke the term rendering to demonstrate how the soundtrack frames how audiences perceive what the (dis)abled body looks, feels, and sounds like based on their encultured beliefs concerning (dis)ability. Consequently, Chion’s notion of rendering privileges how sound is an instrumental way filmmakers communicate embodied knowledge to the audience. The tactile elements of the soundtrack reach out and touch the audience, allowing them to phenomenologically mimic the (dis)abled bodies on screen. The latter half of the dissertation puts this theory into practice by analyzing how filmmakers render an archetypal disabled figure: the sentimental savant. According to Stuart Murray, the sentimental savant is primarily a white, cognitively disabled man who compensates for his lack of intelligence through a virtuosic performance of sentimentality. This examination looks at four case studies—Being There (Ashby, 1979), Rain Man (Levinson, 1988), Forrest Gump (Zemeckis, 1994), and I Am Sam (Nelson, 2001)—to chart the musical strategies filmmakers employ that incite audiences to feel the physical sensations of the character’s neurodiverse brain. Chapter Four tracks the historical path and function of the savant in Hollywood films. Finally, Chapters Five and Six engage in a close, musicological reading of the four films in order to map how composers and sound designers leverage the soundtrack to phenomenologically mimic the disabled character’s sensorium. Ultimately, these four films sonically construct easily legible and stereotypical disabled bodies that serve to reinforce an able-bodied subject position. I conclude the dissertation with a brief coda that imagines potential futures where the cinema cherishes an impaired phenomenology.

Committee Chair

Todd Decker

Committee Members

Cynthia Barounis; Esther Viola Kurtz; Neil Lerner; Patrick Burke

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Author's Department

Music

Author's School

Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

Document Type

Dissertation

Date of Award

4-27-2026

Language

English (en)

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Available for download on Monday, April 24, 2028

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