Soderbergh's Ableist Mish-Mash

Side Effects is a gleefully hateful fever dream

Steven Soderbergh’s Side Effects (2013) is an interesting take on disability because it deliberately pretends to be one kind of stereotypical disability narrative—the disease of the week—in order to fool you when it pulls out the other stereotypical disability narratives—the manipulative fraud/psychotic disabled villian.

The film doesn’t undermine these competing tropes the name of better disability rep; instead it multiplies them to achieve a truly grotesque crescendo of vicious ableism. But it’s interesting to see the way that the supposedly positive representations and the standard negative ones fit together so seamlessly. If you’re not one of the good ones, you’re one of the bad ones—and as such, you deserve the worst the carceral system, and for that matter the film system, can do to you.

(Lot of spoilers coming if you care.)

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The film starts out as what looks like a tale about a patient struggling (and presumably overcoming) a painful mental illness with the help of a sensitive and competent doctor—something like the Oliver Sachs inspired Awakenings (1990), perhaps.

Emily Taylor (Rooney Mara) is a twentysomething young woman whose husband Martin (Channing Tatum) has been in prison for four years on an insider trading charge. He’s released and they hope to restart their lives. But she is afflicted with painful depression and anxiety. After a suicide attempt in which she runs her car into a wall, she is assigned a hospital psychiatrist, Dr. Jonathan Banks (Jude Law). Banks tries her on a range of medications which leave her nauseated and libido-less. Finally, in consultation with Emily’s former psychiatrist Victoria Siebert (Catherine Zeta-Jones, oozing sensuality), Banks prescribes a new medication, which works miraculously—except that it makes Emily sleepwalk.

Up to this point, Emily is very much in the mode of the sweet, brave, afflicted, disabled person who is designed to jerk tears and inspire. She’s more socially ept than Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man, but ultimately she’s the same kind of character—someone who suffers and struggles in order to elevate or educate the “normal” audience and the more standard protagonist (in this case Dr. Banks.)

But then the film takes a sudden plunge and twist; during her sleepwalking, Emily unintentionally stabs her husband to death (with a plunge and a twist, as it were). She wakes to discover his body, and the film becomes a courtroom drama. Banks works with Emily to try to free her, and eventually manages to help with a plea deal where she’s declared not guilty by reason of insanity. She’s confined to a mental institution under Banks’ supervision for a given period, and then can be released if he declares her safe.

In the meantime, Banks’ association with the case, and the public perception that his treatment must have caused the murder, destroys his life. He loses his private practice; he is kicked off a lucrative drug trial. And worse, he becomes obsessed with the idea that Emily was lying to him—beginning an investigation which alienates his colleagues and eventually his wife.

It turns out, though, that Banks’ suspicions are correct. Emily was enraged at Martin for getting caught and going to prison and ruining her life. She started an affair with her first psychologist, Siebert, and the two of them cooked up a plot where Emily faked side effect symptoms to give her cover for killing her husband. Meanwhile, Siebert made a killing (as it were) on the stock market by anticipating that the stocks of the company which made the drug Emily was taking would tank.

Emily, then, is not the sweet innocent disabled trope after all. Instead, she’s a murderous, seductive, conniving femme fatale—and also, I think, the psychotic murderer, a la Psycho or (as a later iteration) Gone Girl. And finally Emily is all those evil fakers like Kint in The Usual Suspects or Niles Caulder in Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol run, who pretend to be disabled in order to take advantage of the protagonist’s misguided pity.

Switching Emily from innocent disabled to malevolent disabled is a fun suspense plot trick. But the emotional resonance relies on, and underlines, the way that this disabled and that disabled are variations on each other rather than different poles. As a disabled person, Emily, in the economy of the film, is supposed to be subordinate and dependent; she’s supposed to support Banks’ story (and his pocketbook). Her symptoms, her side-effects, are part of her, but they don’t belong to her, but to Banks, whose job it is to solve them and make of them, and her, a new, grateful, well person. Disability is about the abled person who manages, treats, and guides it, rather than about the disabled person who can’t own herself, or be herself, until she is cured.

Emily is meant to be subordinate—and when she stops being subordinate, when she reveals she was never subordinate in the first place, she becomes a monster who must be destroyed. The last third of the film is a sadistic revenge fantasy, in which Banks uses his position as Emily’s doctor to torment her with all the tools of the mental health system. He injects her with drugs, while lying about what they do; he denies her access to phones and visitors; he threatens her with electroshock therapy; he prescribes her drugs which will leave her incapacitated and make her hair fall out.

All of this is justified on the grounds that Emily is not insane. She is, as she says, “malingering”, and therefore Banks is supposedly justified in violating his medical oath and ethics. The film does not pause to ask what it means that the mental health regime, when inflicted on a well person, is indistinguishable from torture. Moreover, it does not recognize that historically violent, abusive treatment in sanitoriums were excused precisely on the grounds that the mentally ill were supposedly refusing to control themselves. In punishing Emily for not actually being sick, Banks is simply reproducing and reiterating the actual violence committed against mentally ill people, who were routinely thought of as not actually being sick.

Emily is duplicitous because she does not fit abled people’s vision of what sickness looks like—which especially means, in this case, that she is not sufficiently helpless, self-abnegating, or self-effacing. She doesn’t act the way a disabled person is supposed to act—except when she’s acting. Therefore she’s not disabled and deserves to be treated with all the cruelty and violence meted out as a matter of course to disabled people.

The film is, again, very invested in Emily not being disabled. But Soderbergh, generally a master of the little details, slips up here. Emily initially meets Siebert as her patient; she goes to the doctor because she is depressed. The movie treats Emily’s decision to seek help as a kind of whim, but it would make sense to be badly affected when your husband is carted off to prison, and she says she was despairing.

Even with the film putting its whole weight on the scale, it's hard to escape the conclusion that Emily maybe kind of did feel she needed to see a therapist. And Siebert then sleeps with her; a massive breach of professional ethics which the film blames almost entirely on Emily, who herself claims to be the seducer.

Obviously, you can’t say that Emily is “really” the victim here; Emily isn’t real, and the plot is what the plot is. But what you can say is that Soderbergh has built the movie as an abled revenge fantasy on a disabled woman, who is to be elaborately, violently punished for being insufficiently innocent and insufficiently disabled—and also, possibly, in the noir tradition, for being too queer and too female.

Soderbergh’s film is well-made, well-acted, and compulsively watchable. But given the mission and the message, that only makes it uglier. Side Effects, like Psycho before it, is a carefully wrought engine of hate.