A comparative study of the meaning of disability in Iranian and Hollywood movies

In the present paper, some Iranian and Hollywood made movies and a sample of disabled individual have been studied. It seems this kind of study does help to understanding the social conditions and characteristics of disabled people.In order to address the issue of social construction of disability in some Iranian made movies and the stereotypical images of people with disabilities, three Iranian films titled "Painting Pool", "Here Without Me", "Eternal Children", and three Hollywood made titled "Me Before You", "I am Sam" and "Rain Man" were selected to analysis. Conceptually, In addition of Stuart Hall's concept of representation and Goffman's concept of stigma we tried to analysis the selected films based on Grimas’s narrative theory.Our findings indicate that, in general, negative stereotypes of people with disabilities are still the main theme of narrating disabled people in the analyzed Iranian movies. Although Hollywood films have adopted a more critical approach, but we still see some stereotypes such as pathetic, additional burden and imposition on society, fear of the disabled and its consequences, and isolationism in characterizing the disabled people. In sum, the analysis of the action function showed that the depicted disabled people have the opposite function in the cinematic narration. In this regard, we can conclude that disability is often represented as an obstacle in achievement of hero’s wishes.