Reviewed by James L. Cherney, Westminster College

Stuck On You, the latest offering by the Farrelly brothers (Dumb and Dumber, Shallow Hal), recounts the story of conjoined twins, Bob (Matt Damon) and Walt (Greg Kinnear), who leave their Quickee Burger restaurant in Martha's Vineyard for Hollywood so that Walt can pursue his dream of an acting career and Bob can meet May, his long time email pen pal. After falling in with Morty O'Reilly, a rather sleazy manager, Walt is cast in what turns out to be a porn film. Leaving the set in dismay, he wonders whether he will ever be seen as anything but a gimmick. Yet he is delighted when hired to star in a television crime "drama," and does not realize he is being used again – this time to tank the show so his co-star Cher can get out of her contract. But Cher's plan goes awry when the show is a hit and Walt becomes a celebrity. As the story of Walt's success unfolds, Bob manages his relationship with May, hiding his conjoined status from her through unlikely devices as they go on a series of dates. When her discovery of this deception threatens their relationship – and Walt learns that Hollywood may never take him seriously – the two successfully undergo a risky procedure to separate themselves. Once the initial freedom wears off, Bob and Walt find themselves longing for their previous relationship, and they find ways to recreate their physical connection.

This film clearly challenges some conventional ableist ways of seeing. When a rude customer in their restaurant becomes offended by a waiter with a mental disability, Bob and Walt reveal their conjoined status and "put the freak in his place" by having the customer thrown out. In this moment, the film positions the ableist as freak and identifies as "normal" that society which accepts difference. Supporting this perspective, people in wheelchairs, using crutches, or displaying other bodies with physical disabilities appear throughout the film. Their presence is unremarkable, everyday, and suggests the film struggles against the Hollywood tendency to erase physical disability. More visible is the way that Bob and Walt are nicely played as people first. In part, this arises from the actors' strong performances, but viewers should not discount the several opportunities the film gives the audience to identify with the characters as human beings. These refreshing tendencies challenge the conventions of ableist cinema.

In contrast, the film also relies on presenting Bob and Walt as spectacle, titillating the ableist voyeur. Walt's performance of the one-man play Tru, for example, becomes ludicrous as he moves across the stage with Bob shuffling in tow, his head down as if he was not there. A scene when Walt becomes drunk gets new laughs out of old gags, because conjoined twins perform them. In short, while the film often resists the overtly ableist orientation that makes fun of and stigmatizes the deviant body, it never allows the audience to completely forget that the conjoining of Bob and Walt's bodies is a "natural" joke.

Finally, Stuck shows what might appear to be positive images of disability, but these images clearly exemplify the supercrip stereotype. In their restaurant, Bob and Walt's coordinated skill enables them to flip and assemble burgers with astonishing speed. In a bar fight scene, the twins cooperate to defeat a whole gang of attackers. In flashbacks to their youth, we see the same stereotype in its traditional context of sport, as Bob and Walt excel in boxing, football, and hockey. The film reinforces this celebration of their prowess with the slapstick display of their ineptitude once they have been separated surgically. Separate, they have trouble doing all the things they did well together; separate, they initially cannot even walk.

Overall, the film engages disability in a number of ways, not all of them laudable. But it remains an interesting text to examine, especially as its display of disability seems substantially more complex and thoughtful than much of the earlier Farrelly brothers' work. Ultimately, I believe the film attempts to join conventional ableist ways of viewing with a more critical gaze, a project as problematic and layered as the difficulty Bob and Walt face in their lives as conjoined twins. In this way, the film presents Bob and Walt's conjoined bodies as a metaphor of the way our ableist culture complicates basic relationships between people with disabilities and the temporarily ablebodied. Although often considered in isolation, these groups are stuck to each other; living that relationship often means that we need to recognize that connection, especially in whatever strategies we adopt to change our ableist culture.