Laura's Physical Crippledness in Repfrence to Movies and Scripts

In The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams, Laura, the daughter is said to have "one leg slightly shorter than the other and held in a brace” (Williams xvii). While the stage directions dictate that her leg defect is only suggested on stage, other things are also said to only be on stage through pantomime and acting. This includes Tom’s “imaginary fork” and the rest of the silverware (Williams 6). Clearly, Laura’s leg not being in a brace does not mean that she is not crippled in the physical sense. While I agree that she does have an emotional crippling as well it irks me that it her physical impairment is perceived as so small. Yes, she is not paralyzed, but she does have a physical impairment large enough to warrant her leg being in a brace. In class we watched a movie interpretation of the play. The fact that the actor playing Laura did not walk with much of a limp does not mean that the character in the text of the script does not have a significant limp. It is imperative that we remember that the movie we saw is just another interpretation, and not the script itself. In fact, many parts of the lines and stage directions were changed to fit the interpretation. Thus, I cannot bring myself to use the choices made for the movie as a means to draw substantial information about the characters. If we are looking at a text, then film adaptations must be seen as possibilities for interpretation and not as a part of the text itself. To enter the idea of caesura, interpreting the movie as the text would be like playing telephone with more people. Instead of having the original phrase whispered in your ear and going off of that, you would be trying to decode someone else’s interpretation of the original word. For instance, if you start with the phrase “It’s raining cats and dogs” and the next person hears “It’s raining peas and carrots”, then they will tell you “It’s raining peas and carrots”. Hence, you will not be interpreting the original phrase, but something completely different. Thus, if you were trying to analyze the phrase “It’s raining cats and dogs”, you would not want to use the other person’s “It’s raining peas and carrots” instead. While the two phrases may be related, an analysis of the second is not equal to an analysis of the first. Both can lead to valid conclusions about the time in history or the speaker’s feelings about rain, but they will not be the same. In conclusion, the movie version of The Glass Menagerie we saw in class, was interesting in terms of seeing an interpretation of the script, but not justification for Laura’s physical defect being miniscule.