ABSTRACT: This paper provides a postmodern reading of Miloš Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing and the intertextual doubles expressed through depictions of disability, masculinity, and race. Drawing upon the scholarship of Jay Dolmage, Gordon Slethaug, and Vershawn Ashanti Young, I discuss how disability is used in these films as a prop for socio-economic issues. Unpacking the intertextual doubling of disability as ‘problem space,’ gender performance, and death metaphor illuminates how these films employ disability myths to explore issues of historical and cultural tension. The disability myths of isolation, social ill, internal flaw, ethical test, and enactment continue to actively stereotype people with disabilities and use their bodies as metaphors for violence. 

CITATION: Van de Kemp, Jessica. “Disability on Screen: Intertextual Doubling in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Do the Right Thing.” Interviews with a Photographer and a Filmmaker (Cinematic Codes Review 2.2). Ed. Anna Faktorovich. Brownsville, TX: Anaphora Literary Press, 2017. 90–111. Print.