Configurations

Jérémy Clapin’s 2019 animated film, I Lost My Body, tells the story of a severed hand navigating its way through Paris, back to its body.¹ The French graphic story begins with a young man, Naoufel, after a traumatic work-related injury and tracks his life in two parallel narratives: a flashback leading up to the traumatic event, and the life of Naoufel’s hand, which escapes from a specimen bag in a Parisian medical lab to find Naoufel’s body again. Clapin’s feature debut hovers between love story and thriller, while posing valuable questions for the medical community and particularly its application in medical education. Revisiting this graphic narrative from a health humanities and bioethics angle illuminates opportunities for rich discussion around cultural representations of the body as it relates to wholeness, markedness, and agency.

The genre of “graphic narratives” includes film, television, and comic books, among other mediums that traditionally tell stories of particular characters or experiences.² More recently, these graphic narratives have expanded for adult audiences, tackling topics like politics, trauma, medicine, and sexuality, as seen in The Best We Could Do, Waltz with Bashir, Mom’s Cancer, and Fun Home. These animated films and books grapple with complex questions in ways traditional textual or cinematic experiences may not be able to do. In the case of I Lost My Body, the fictional account invites viewers to radically exercise their imagination.

The beginning of the film is an experience of disorientation: the story begins in medias res, leaving the audience confused about timeline, plot, the sudden imagery of blood, the symbolism or significance of the buzzing fly, and whether the man will live or die. The film starts from an unknowable traumatic incident that leaves viewers to their own devices, simultaneously making them aware of their own projections and [End Page 109] expectations of the strange and unexplained event. In the first minutes, discomfort is aroused in the viewer through the suppression of colors in the animation, the subtle movements of Naoufel’s eyes, and the incessancy of the fly. When the frame suddenly turns black and white, a flashback unravels with the motif of the fly bridging temporal leaps. Viewers are asked to suspend their desires for plot, character, and fate of the injury from this early point in the narrative. Even when the secondary narrative reveals a severed hand escaping from a specimen lab’s refrigerator, the link to Naoufel’s injury remains tenuous and the specificities of the injury are shrouded in mystery.

The emotional and sensorial invitation of the viewer’s body into Naoufel’s world relates to Susan Sontag’s ideas in Regarding the Pain of Others. She writes: “So far as we feel sympathy, we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering. Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence.”³ While Sontag writes this quote in the context of witnessing war photography, the framework is applicable to I Lost My Body. Sympathy is evoked in subtle ways in the animated film: the musical and visual cues, romantic and family plotlines, the relatability of Naoufel’s character. However, what is perhaps most effective about the film is the obscurity around Naoufel’s traumatic injury, which urges viewers to continually imagine the inciting accident. This sustained imagination of another person’s trauma fosters a sense of culpability or responsibility so as to not claim innocence or impotence, despite feeling sympathy for the protagonist.

As the film progresses, the isolated hand evolves into an increasingly central figure. The severed hand navigates the French metropolis, fighting off pigeons and rats, going up and down stairs, and taking the subway. The familiarity and characterization of the hand engage the viewer’s body on a visceral level—it is impossible not to become aware of your own hands, whether they are crossed in your lap or resting on a table, as you watch the film. The hand begins to show characteristics we might attribute to human personality: fear, sadness, longing, and love. These characteristics raise...