By now, news of physicist Stephen Hawking's death is common knowledge. Like Elisa in Guillermo del Toro's the Shape of Water, Hawking was disabled. Both circumstances were out of their control.Elisa has been mute since birth from an unexplained injury to her throat. Hawking was completely paralyzed as a result of the progressive effects of ALS, a disease of the neurons that control the voluntary muscles. He lost his voice in 1985 after coming down with pneumonia while at a CERN conference in Geneva. Looking at all of the articles describing Hawking's impact on the world and in his field, I came across words like "visionary", "renowned", "brilliant."
Hawking has said, "Mankind's greatest achievements have come about by talking, and its greatest failures by not talking."Other than the loss of her voice, Elisa has no other physical disabilities and is able to function normally. Her mind, like Hawking's is unaffected. She is highly intelligent, appreciates music and culture, and teaches sign language to the creature so they can communicate. The rudimentary tools she has at her disposal limits the number of people she can communicate with. Hawking is able to reach a much wider audience because he has more sophisticated tools at his disposal. He is celebrated because of his intellectual achievements in spite of his disability while Elisa, a female janitor in a male dominated workplace, is insignificant and virtually invisible. Even if she had a voice, as her co-worker Zelda does, she still has no way of changing things.
The audience makes the assumption that Elisa works at such a lowly job because that is the only kind of work that she is able to get with her disability. It is not lack of aptitude that limits her. She desires connection but isolates herself, realizing that other people will not take the time to understand her challenges and expect her to adapt to them, rather than trying to adapt to her. Harsh experience has bred caution in her and she would prefer to stay safe and unnoticed in an insignificant position than to put herself in a position where she can be hurt further.
Adversity affects people in different ways. For sensitive people like Elisa, it is particularly traumatizing and the lack of effective support or empathy makes recovering that much more difficult. As a teenager, I got my driver's license, along with many of my peers and drove independently for several years until a serious car accident in my late 20's left me disabled for several months. Although I recovered from the physical injury, the experience left me terrified of driving. The emotional effects lingered for years, as they do for many victims of PTSD. I never sought psychological assistance and instead found other ways of coping, just as Elisa does. I became dependent on friends and family to get around, effectively curtailing my independence. Although people knew what had happened to me, they could not understand why I wasn't able to get over it and start driving again. This only succeeded in isolating me further.
I still longed for freedom and independence, as Elisa did, but my negative experience obstructed my ability to find a solution. On his website http://www.hawking.org.uk/the-computer.html, Hawking describes how computers and assistive technology have given him the lifeline he needed to do his work. I recently bought a vehicle that came equipped with technology that would help me in performing many of the functions associated with operating a motor vehicle and with advanced safety features to minimize serious injury. A smartphone with built in GPS provides verbal navigational assistance without my having to read a map and remember a long sequence of directions.Those two things gave me the confidence to drive again, which helped to restore my sense of self worth.
Unfortunately, Elisa was not as lucky. If del Toro's objective was to increase awareness of and elicit sympathy for the plight of the disabled, that message has not come through. Those who have access to better resources, as Hawking and I did, have a built in advantage even with a disability. Elisa's gender and her inferior economic status are her real disability, not her inability to speak.
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