Marked Man: Fantasies of the Able Body in Fritz Lang's M

Abstract

abstract:Fritz Lang's 1931 film M intervenes in a historical moment rife with anxiety over able-bodiedness and eugenic fitness. By staging a confrontation with a killer whose madness is not outwardly apparent, the film exposes the system of visual distinctions through which the able-bodied assure themselves of their own normality. M's depiction of sensory disabilities, moreover, links the question of ability to the film's media-technological context. Lang's film explores how modernity's shifting economic, environmental, and technological conditions destabilize the regime of able-bodiedness, as well as how a society attempts to shore up that regime by forcing difference to become visible.