Mankind creates archetypes. They govern how we make the infinite world governable. When mankind first came face to face with his corporeal existence tied to an infinite world, his finite brain/mind created a creator. This creator he made man finite. In man's construction of himself he, the creator, is always away from and greater than man. Looking at cinema is a way of recreating ourselves. Many film critics have used psychoanalysis as a tool to dissect cinema. This article's aim is to look at how Psychosis, that is mental illness, is depicted within cinema. Its aim is to step away and as a third party, to speculate on how we as audience come to believe in our judgment about the performance of actors engaged in portraying psychosis.
Since Psychiatry and Psychology have both informed me in this research on Psychosis in Cinema, the corporeal is sometimes equated with consciousness. Dreams seem real and what is on the screen is often taken as real. Still psychoanalysis has an evolution of its own Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and Jacques Lacan all battling over me. Indeed all film critic mix and match attributes of them all. On the other side of the coin, where cinema exists, my cinematic forefathers have been Alfred Hitchcock and David Cronenberg. Certainly other movies referenced herein are those of directors other than these two; yet somehow like a Greek tragedy playing on a Saturday matinee, these two remain my Greek gods. All this is factored in as guides for later reference. Guidance is what we all need as I attempt to unravel for you PSYCHOSIS IN CINEMA.
As far back as the original Bad Seed(1956) I became interested in what made such a cute little girl so bad. It was not that she represented evil for me because I had not then learned of the concept of evil. I knew death, because I new killing. I knew killing because I knew absence. Fast forward and the next movie that registers was WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE (1962). I could not translate what these films meant to me then as I was untutored in how cinema works. In this post I wish to delve not only into how cinema works to offer us characters with mental illnesses but to also reverse the question and look back at ourselves. How do we inform ourselves that the actors are portraying the illness correctly. That is, how does a non schizophrenic person know when a performance of a schizophrenic is well done?. It is beautiful how these movies came back to me while writing the above lines. Movies like traumatic experiences lay beneath. Do we use them and their traits to read other films?
Lets use this first clip from WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE as a introductory test. Well return to it later to discuss what I think I saw in it after you have read this post.
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It is well documented that the cinematic experience envelops viewers in such a manner that the suspension of disbelief takes over. In essence we are disabled. But are we doing this to ourselves? Have we recreated worlds that we know. Is this primordial? Are we and the writers who create movies merely sharing the same beliefsystems? There was once a time when a writer could assume that his audience was sane enough to form their own imagination through literature. Nonetheless, how is it that we all share ideas about what a fictional character looks like? When it comes to cinema, have we surrender our own imagination to the screen and it tells us what to believe; or is there something connective about the entire human experience. When it comes to mental illness, what accounts for our pleasures and our approval of performances depicting them? Is it that people/audiences have had relatives who have exhibited like behavior? Is that correct? How do we come to embody the attributes of a clinical psychologist when we are lay people?
The fact is, few of us ask ourselves these questions. Yet when Russell Crowe portrayed the late mathematical genius John Nash, how did we know it was schizophrenia? I stated above that David Cronenberg serves as a forefather for me in this endeavor. That is, this endeavor is to look at bits and pieces of the history of cinema and its relation to mental illnesses. In answering a question about schizophrenia I favor the movie SPIDER staring Ralph Fiennes. Once upon a time a questioner asks Cronenberg about Spider by phrasing his question with the term “mentally ill...” Cronenberg in his usual fashion rejects the term and instead states, 'I never said I dealt with mental illness [in Spider] I was dealing with a character'. Why did Cronenberg re-present the question to himself in this manner?
HAVE A SEAT.......LETS BEGAN YOUR SESSION
We in the west liberate ourselves from the strictures of words by first questioning meaning. Between our known world and us stands words and images as signs and symbols. But words do not affect the objects they define for us. We come to rely on words so much so that we interpret objects to embody the words we use to define them. Cinema reverses this, it acts upon us. Yet have we created it to fool us while entertaining us away from our fears? Film not only mimic through sound what we hear, it reinforces what we believe. That is what we must question.
If we trace the evolution of mental illness, we find that our understanding of mental illness all come from institutions that we hold in high regard: we place an enormous amount of trust the them - Church, Governments and the Medical Professions. Yet these professions need our minds to feed off and the fend off our own self awareness. They do not always serve by providing services, they also serve by giving meanings. Film makers are no less human than we are. They are feed the same food for thought. Perhaps this is how we regulate meaning. What we see in movies reinforce what we read in newspapers and watch on the evening news. Yet the medium of cinema is rich with failures. Meaning change, looking at old movies show the emperor's nakedness.
THE CHURCH:
Since the beginning of recorded history, mankind has grappled with mental illnesses. Once thought to be evidence of a spiritual matter, where one could be influenced by demons; some humans were considered already trapped in netherworld beyond the capacity to fit in. As an aid to families who did not know what to do or could not afford care, the mentally ill were put under the control of those in quasi-religious asylums. Let us return to a David Cronenberg movie. This time A DANGEROUS METHOD. Here we jump ahead forward to the 19th century. Remember right now we are focusing on THE CHURCH and its role in the development of the treatment of mental illness. As a footnote, from time to time, I must spring forward to our time in cinema. In A DANGEROUS METHOD, Kiera Knightly play the part of Sabina Spielmen who has been diagnosed as Hysterical. One of the criticism of the mental health profession, in particular, the DSM V ( Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th Edition) is that we the masses are not aware of the fact that mental illness are not fixed. They change with society.
Hysteria defined: in its colloquial use, describes ungovernable emotional excess. Generally, modern medical professionals have abandoned using the term "hysteria" to denote a diagnostic category, replacing it with more precisely defined categories, such as solemnization disorder. In 1980, the American Psychiatric Association officially changed the diagnosis of "hysterical neurosis, conversion type" (the most extreme and effective type) to "conversion disorder".
Thus in movies we assume asylums for the criminally insane have always been apart of the history of medicine. Not so. Critics of Hysteria know it was often used to control women considered 'disobedient' to their husbands . Men would have their wives imprisoned. Also those who were deemed mad, were housed with criminals and paupers So from where does this word Hysteria come and why was confinement the solution?
If we imagine the earlier horror movies like Dracula or even Frankenstein we find that these were our cinematic introductions into asylums. Early in the 13th century THE CHURCH was who cared for those who were afflicted with mental issues. Segregated creep into European minds and these draconian practices are now summed up as "the bad apples". later during the Nazi reign, the term would become unfit. Still during the dark ages, others who failed to adopt Christianity were deemed Heretical. Women had always been considered the weaker of the two sexes. That is why in early cinema Dracula only preys upon women.
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How did women come to symbolize the subject of Heresy?
The first known usage of the term in a legal context was in AD 380 by the Edict of Thessalonica of Theodosius I,[15] which made Christianity the state church of the Roman Empire. Prior to the issuance of this edict, the Church had no state-sponsored support for any particular legal mechanism to counter what it perceived as "heresy". By this edict the state's authority and that of the Church became somewhat overlapping. One of the outcomes of this blurring of Church and state was the sharing of state powers of legal enforcement with church authorities. This reinforcement of the Church's authority gave church leaders the power to, in effect, pronounce the death sentence upon those whom the church considered heretical.
What mankind learned from the days when the Church wielded its sole authority over the mentally-ill was torture.
The Inquisition was a campaign of torture, mutilation, mass murder, and destruction of human life perpetrated by Christians and their Jewish root. The Church increased in power until it had total control over human life, both secular and religious.
The Vatican wasn't satisfied with the progress made by regional leaders in rooting out heresy. Pope Innocent III commissioned his own inquisitors who answered directly to him. Their authority was made official in the papal bull of March 25th, 1199. Innocent declared "anyone who attempted to construe a personal view of God which conflicted with the Church dogma must be burned without pity".
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Before we turn away from the beginning of this dark chapter, let is look at another from THE NAME OF THE ROSE. For it captures what was to become the sin of cinema. In it we see Christian Bale stop to consider altering his course. He is under the tutelage of a wise adage played Sean Connery. The girl is the embodiment of women in cinema. Having survived to the end of the movie, she reminds the young lad of the touch. His sexual liaison which almost killed her,. Yet though he is moved. He decides to move on down the road. She, like most women in cinema and the mentally ill in asylums are left shrouded in the midst. In time the asylum care was to dominate the care for mental illness. It would not be until sometime in the 19th century that reform would come.
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GOVERNMENT
We have already read how the CHURCH was aided by the STATE but the CHURCH got carried away in its applications of warehousing care. Hollywood does not churn our movies that depict asylums while they were under control of the Church. Why should it? That would call for too much conjecture. Nonetheless, we are reminded that words control and today images convey fuller understanding about both the mentally-ill and their care. Words along with the definitions of illnesses change. Keeping individuals considered mad and possessed by demons chained or in various aspects of confinement would not be done away with...not entirely and still not yet. These undocumented accounts serve well enough. Somewhere along the line of time, roughly the 17th century, European abolished the feudal system. Mercantilism required city dwellers. But with city came those who could not make the changes from agricultural to a factory lifestyles. As class stratification develop and paupers (poverty) came into existence, Kings began to wrestle control from the CHURCH and asylums (still looking rather dungeon-like to the modern man) would become hospitals.
Remember the when you first heard the word lunatic?
Philosophers such as Aristotle and Pliny the Elder argued that the full moon induced insane individuals with bipolar disorder by providing light during nights which would otherwise have been dark, and affecting susceptible individuals through the well-known route of sleep deprivation.[Until at least 1700 it was also a common belief that the moon influenced fevers, rheumatism, episodes of epilepsy and other diseases
Lunacy like hysteria is no longer used among medical personnel. However it once was considered a worthy description for the mentally ill.
In the British jurisdiction of England and Wales the Lunacy Acts 1890–1922 referred to "lunatics", but the Mental Treatment Act 1930 changed the legal term to "person of unsound mind", an expression which was replaced under the Mental Health Act 1959 by "mental illness". "Person of unsound mind" was the term used in 1950 in the English version of the European Convention on Human Rights as one of the types of person who could be deprived of liberty by a judicial process. The 1930 Act also replaced the term"asylum" with "mental hospital". Criminal lunatics became Broadmoor patients in 1948 under the National Health Service (Scotland) Act 1947.
On December 5, 2012 the US House of Representatives passed legislation approved earlier by the US Senate removing the word "lunatic" from all federal laws in the United States.[1] President Obama signed this legislation into law on December 28, 2012.
"Of unsound mind" or non compos mentis are alternatives to "lunatic", which was the most conspicuous term used for insanity in the law in the late 19th century.
Where is cinema with all this reform. How did it choose to depict the asylum systems?
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In this clip we see Boris Karloff portrayal of a composite of individuals who over the span of a century served as the gatekeepers over what was The Bethlehem hospital founded in 1247. From Bethlehem we get Bethem and from that we get Bedlum. I I suspect with no proof that this is where Tim Burton got the term for his loony character BEETLE JUICE. In any respect, the history of Bedlum, like that of Brodmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane, is as vital to the history of London's Lunacy reform as it is to American cinema. Time will not permit us to segue over into how places for paupers evolved into specialized hospitals for the care of the mentally-ill. suffice to say, neither does cinema. Instead Hollywood takes the path of least resistance and chooses to focus on the more sensational aspects of the mentally ill. Later will will touch on how cinema is guilty of focusing all too often on the mentally ill as violent members of society. Perhaps this is as it it should be because cinema remains a by product of our collective consciousness. As much in us as we are into it, Cinema stems from us.
The narratives/screenplays written by writers in the west maybe acting out their assumptions in the same manner as audiences who witness them. As I intend to touch upon, some of the techniques used to entertain us are not necessarily delivered forthrightly in how we should read the scene. They are often on a one-sided heavy handed ploy to straitjacket our minds . While editing techniques aid by pulling viewer in the story being told, filmmakers in the west tend to withhold some of the more sinister aspect of the States interests and the level of care and diagnosis of the mental health industry.
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MEDICAL
Sigmund Freud has an personal image that we all tend to associate with his self-hood. Indeed images of him as a learned professor cloaked in suit coat and tie while administering his most recognized contribution to cinema: PSYCHOANALYSIS. Again Freud was not above alluding to cinema even though both areas where nascent at this time he was developing his theories. Many argue Freud relied upon attribute of cinema such as 'the screen' memory' as well the castration theory via the visual shock of a up close [zoom lens] of the female genitalia, the reverse is even more true. Thus psychoanalysis and cinema (largely through Freud) relied on each other. However the cinematic rendering of mental illness up until the time of Freud's theories was based on the psychiatric treatments conducted in asylums. Not until the art movement known as the Surrealist where we find Luis Bunuel fascination with the unconscious and the dreams that Freud hypothesized, do we find the engagement between psychoanalysis and cinema that was to become a long lasting marriage it has. This marriage birth many cinematic offspring. Before we delve into the that family tree lets make clear what up to this point what psychiatric care was to psychoanalysis.
What about Psychoanalysis?
Although the current practice of both psychiatry and psychology has been deeply influenced by the theories of psychoanalysis, all three practices have separate roots.
As explained above, psychiatry has its roots in medicine. Psychology has its roots in the academic study of animal and human perception, and in the early part of the 20th century it was first applied clinically as an aid to education.
Psychoanalysis, both a theory of mental functioning and a specific type of treatment philosophy, was developed by Sigmund Freud in the early 1900s. Freud, a physician and a professor of medicine, developed his theories about psychoanalysis while studying cases of hysteria and compulsion neurosis. The basic premise of psychoanalysis is that most psychological symptoms are the result of our unconsciously avoiding many of the unpleasant truths about ourselves. Through a detailed “psycho” analysis (i.e., analysis of our thought process and mental images) we come to learn just how we consistently manage to lie to and deceive ourselves. The idea behind this treatment philosophy is that persons who have come to understand their own deceptions can then manage to avoid being controlled by them
Let us dig for a moment. Dig we must to unearth what some of this means to cinema. As Carl V. Jung would further in uncovering that iceberg of personality development that Freud's introduction the the world to, that iceberg proved to conceal what lay beneath: A tip called conscious as Jung would go on to speculated that there are universal collective archetype found in all the myths and hence narratives of mankind beneath. He would spell out these and the universal archetypal journey's that archetype/or heroes are apt to take. If this were true, and our history in literature seems to bear this out, then cinema (based on screenplays which were another form of storytelling) would rely on the same threads. One finds evidence of these theories in film criticism if not films themselves. Thus audiences educated in these same archetypes, read cinema as shadows no less real that Plato's cave drawing.
If there was one film that exhibits all that I have written and perhaps all that I will write, it would have to be this film. ONE FLEW OVER THE CUOKOO'S NEST. In this film we have the depiction of the decrepit institutional setting . Though more like a hospital than the dungeon like squalor of the early 19th century asylums, all aspects of medicine like psychiatry have there skeletons in their closets In this movie the hospital captured the times when the lobotomy and electrocution technique (although unfavorable depicted.) were still the norm.
Yet as to the character- roles, you have the archetype hero in the form or a criminal. He is not the man in a good white guy in white from the days of John Wayne. Jack Nicholson as Murphy in this film is a renegade. He is a charlatan trying to beat the system or a man suffering from some then unknown personality disorder. You have the mother figure/sexual repressed female lording over the entire ward: Actor Louise Fletcher in a defining career role as nurse Ratched. This is also an appropriate time to also mention that this film more than any other gives credence to the ANTI psychiatric movement that developed during same decade.
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Now lets step backwards again to pick up where cinema was with mental heath before ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST. Remember Freud died of cancer in 1939. He, accompanied by Carl Jung had visited the United States in 1909). It was not until some time after Freud's visit that Psychoanalysis as a practice among clinical practitioners crossed the Atlantic. Largely throughout the 1960s and 70's the Europeans were still hashing out the pros and cons through letter and books. 1961 THE MYTH OF MENTAL, Thomas Szasz attached the practice of labeling people who are disabled by living as mental illness. He was lionized by some and laughed at by others. His was not the only one to join in the choir of social analysis. Michael Foucault's Madness and Civilization 1960 was the first of its kind. His book was vastly different from Szasz inasmuch as Foucault traced the history of the concept of madness back through time; he argues that folly or madness was once deemed inclusive. His findings suggests that the problem with psychiatry was it usurped the development of a language to speak to the mad.
During my research for this post, I consulted Phenomenology, Structuralism and Transcendentalism. I came to realize that these philosophical developments are avoided in cinema, yet all are vital for the lay person to gain insight into Freud, Carl Jung and others whose presence infuse film's bastardization of their theories
Look closely at Jack Nicholson's performance in 'One Flew...' His portrayal had not definition in DSM III but it does now. We the doctors meet to discuss his observed behavior, they can not reach a conclusion. When we watched it, we championed him as a renegade. He challenged the system and lost but he was still championed for it. His antic were folly. His folly reflects the era in which the movie was made. The counter-culture reflected our desires to confront authorities. As Michael Foucault might have suggested, we have lost the language to speak to/of some individuals but we have not lost our capacity to understand them.
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Robert Dinero's Travis Bickle may have come across as a mad man. Yet in the end of this award winning film, he becomes the lauded as a hero. His inability to fit in, to win the affection of the woman he sought may have been manifestation of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Attributes of Travis' condition would be addressed in war movies such as APOCOLYOPS NOW AND DEER HUNTER. While the American military would denied plausibility of these and other conditions as late as the Vietnam War, psychologist had long began to study the affects of war torn soldiers as they returned home from WWII. I know not what part in complicity the American Psychiatry Associate play in this but it seems they waited to come up with a term while families had to find was to cope with suffers of it long beforehand. What did audiences do with Travis? He was not under a doctor's care to act as the voice of authority. Was the structure of the movie, instrumental in the gathering compassion for the character? Is that what we take into the movie session with us? Do movies both serve artistically as our psychoanalysis and our own ability to equate ourselves with the on-screen sufferer?
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Despite the anti psychiatric move and its attack on what was the status of mental health, neither Michael Foucault nor Thomas Szasz favored being lumped into it. Many papers devoted to defining the professions argue against what is often perceived as a simplifying the definitions of mental illness. Some like Lauren Beachum argue that cinema has done a grave disservice. The tendency of film makers to focus on character types whose mental illnesses manifest in acts of violence serve to prejudice and misinform the public. While these points seem valid due to the excessive use of the terms psychopathic killers in place of a plethora of disorders, these defensive papers do not address the complicity of the the psychiatric profession to allow their profession to serve as a means of social control.
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The above clip is offered as a wonderful combined illustration of what has happened with some cinematic depictions. It offers the masses a means to view share and modify the authoritative masking that both governments and the mental health profession holds over us. This voice over is that of a sufferer who has taken GIRL INTERRUPTED and re-presented it with her own narrative. While she relies on clinical terms she nonetheless, usurps the power construction by via her own female voice. Nonetheless, it is a movie that she trusts. Did Winona Ryder and Angelica Jolie's respective performances resonate with this women? Does having a condition aid audiences? What about those of use who have not been diagnosed; how do we know the depiction is accurate?
We have much to thank Alfred Hitchcock for. No other director has made so much use of camera techniques and cinematic tricks to convey emotions. Indeed literature can offer similar introspective experiences into the mind yet film remains how post modern man has decided to recreate subjective experience through the means that is cinema – a multi-sensory stimuli. Through technology and special effects film makers can imitate how emotions influence our perceptions of events. Audience members draw from their own experiences and allow the disbelief to become real. We then can infer the character's feelings oo our mental state of mind. That is, we gather what we consider normal, (see the character as acting abnormal) mix it with what we are told through dialogue and get mental illness .
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Even though Hitchcock, favored techniques went into his favored genre the melodrama, he help create the genre that came to be known as the psychological thriller. The reason I identified him as a forefather of mine in writing this is because like psychoanalysis, he was concerned with perception, character traits and identity. Today special effects have expanded yet techniques like slow motion and point of view, telephotos and blurred vision have become synonymous with film making. They serve to manipulate the audience and to depicted a character's state of mind.
We can now return to answering the question asked above. Why did Cronenberg re-present the question about the movie SPIDER.
We can also return to the the clip from Betty Davis' performance in WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE. What do you think her illness was? How does the over all movie reflect the real lives of the two actors Joan Crawford and Betty Davis? Does this affect their performances? Watch the movie in its entirety and analysis your viewing pleasure. Does it ending affect your feelings about Baby Jane. These are the type of questions I ask because I suspect each helps reiterate what Ralph Fiennes had to say about Cronenberg's making of SPIDER. The ambiguity places the decisions in the audiences lap. Its one thing to have cinema and/or the authoritative voice of a psychoanalyst, aid us in our watching. I another when we are presented with a character instead of a mentally ill person. ts another when
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OUR TIME IS RUNNING OUT
We have touched on a number of aspects of PSYCHOSIS IN CINEMA. There are many others. Time will not permit us to segue into the topic of torture. The same type of torture we see creeping into our cinema matter dealing with the war on Terror. Readers are advise to look at the Stanford prion experiment conducted by Philip Zimbardo. It was funded by the U.S. OFFICE of Navel Research and had influenced such movies as ZERO DARK THIRTY. When the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq came the public's knowledge, along came with it our already formulated beliefs about the so called few bad apples (eg Police Killings of inner city youths) and Muslim fanatics. We are sure to take these assumptions to the theater with us. What the study suggest is that evil is not something reserved for the criminally insane. It may be something we are all capable of. What does this say about use?
