Mind Reeling , livre ebook

Mind Reeling

Mind Reeling
Psychopathology on Film

Edited by
Homer B. Pettey
Cover: Conrad Veidt as Cesare in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920; dir. Robert Weine).
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2020 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Pettey, Homer B., editor.
Title: Mind reeling : psychopathology on film / Homer B. Pettey, editor.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2020] | Series: SUNY series, horizons of cinema | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020018466 | ISBN 9781438481012 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438481029 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Mental illness in motion pictures.
Classification: LCC PN1995.9.M463 M56 2020 | DDC 791.43/6561—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020018466
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Melissa and to Jennifer, as always
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
1 Introduction: A Very Brief History of Psychopathology in Cinema
Homer B. Pettey
2 Adèle H., Camille Claudel, and Margot de Valois: Isabelle Adjani’s Real “Mad” Women? Costume Drama and the Disruptive Female
Susan Hayward
3 Musical Madness on Hangover Square
Murray Pomerance
4 Screening Multiple Personality Disorder in the Age of Kinsey: Lizzie and The Three Faces of Eve
R. Barton Palmer
5 The Cine-Telescopic Psyche: 1950s Serial Killers and Sexual Psychopathology in The Sniper and While the City Sleeps
Robert Miklitsch
6 Pathologies of Pedagogy in Midcentury Melodrama: The Miracle Worker and A Child Is Waiting
Jennifer L. Jenkins
7 Passion and Delirium: Representing Madness in Spider and Asylum
Jim Leach
8 Scorched: Landscape, Trauma, and Embodied Experience in Incendies
Tarja Laine
9 Ghostly and Ghastly Desires and Disorders in Young Adult : KenTacoHuts in Mercury
Julie Grossman
10 Criminal Biographies and Visual Culture
Homer B. Pettey
Contributors
Index
Illustrations 1.1 Jim (Stuart Whitman) trying to resist temptation at a schoolyard in The Mark . 1.2 Walter (Kevin Bacon) tempted by Robin (Hannah Pilkes) in The Woodsman . 2.1 Adèle (Isabelle Adjani) holding her father’s book as her identity becomes known in L’Histoire d’ Adèle H . 2.2 Margot’s nightly escapade to look for sex in La Reine Margot . 3.1 George (Laird Cregar) mounting the Guy Fawkes bonfire with Netta’s (Linda Darnell) disguised body in Hangover Square . 4.1 Lizzie (Eleanor Parker), Elizabeth’s other self, at a piano bar looking for men in Lizzie . 4.2 Eve Black (Joanne Woodward) ready for a night on the town in The Three Faces of Eve. 5.1 Suspect gazing at a “Fill-In-the-Face” newspaper drawing he’s filled in, in While the City Sleeps . 5.2 Sniper Eddie Miller (Arthur Franz) takes aim on the object of his hatred in The Sniper. 5.3 Eddie’s target. 6.1 Breakthrough moment with W-A-T-E-R for Helen Keller (Patty Duke) with her teacher, Annie Sullivan (Anne Bancroft), in The Miracle Worker. 6.2 First-day polite nerves of Jean Hansen (Judy Garland) as she enters a classroom of mentally challenged children in A Child Is Waiting. 7.1 Spider (Ralph Fiennes) at the window envisions a scene from his own family’s past in Spider . 7.2 Stella (Natasha Richardson), after plummeting through the glass of a hothouse, to get away from Dr. Cleave (Ian McKellen) in Asylum. 8.1 Nawal within the ruins in Incendies . 8.2 Landscape as prison. 8.3 Face as landscape. 8.4 Landscape as face. 9.1 Mavis (Charlize Theron) in bed with insignificant lovers in Young Adult. 9.2 Mirroring warped feminine personalities of Aileen Wuornos (Charlize Theron) and Mavis. 9.3 Empty hallways as visual metaphors for Mavis. 9.4 Day and night at the BUY BUY BABY mart. 9.5 A world-weary, beaten down hotel clerk who could have been Mavis. 10.1 Fake copilot, con man Frank Abagnale (Leonardo DiCaprio), follows the objects of his desire in Catch Me If You Can. 10.2 Bonson’s (Tom Hardy) stage profile as himself arguing for his release in Bronson . 10.3 Bronson, reverse profile, as the nurse who denies his request. 10.4 Steven Russell (Jim Carey) walking toward the prison exit as a vice cop in I Love You Phillip Morris.
Acknowledgments
Homer B. Pettey would like to thank Melissa Alice Pettey, to whom this collection is dedicated. His sister has not only been an inspiration for joy and devotion throughout his life, but, even more, she has also given him insights into real-world, not the academic, issues affecting individuals with mental disabilities. Moreover, her life and occasional struggles have provided him with an understanding of the social, economic, and political problems facing those citizens among us who endure the hardships of their psychological conditions, whether biological or environmental in nature. While she has faced ignorant and disdainful comments, while she has lived through decade after decade of public shunning and derision, while she and her fellow friends with disabilities have endured obnoxious, prejudicial, and far too often socially acceptable jokes, especially from so-called comedians, “social justice” academics, films, and supposedly morally high-ground television and internet personalities, she has never, because of her nature, expressed any feelings other than acceptance of others, no matter their race, religion, ethnicity, disability, or sexual orientations. Her love has never wavered, her warmth has never diminished, and her playful humor has never ceased. Homer B. Pettey owes his sister more than he can ever repay.
Additionally, he would like to thank R. Barton Palmer and Susan Hayward, two admirable scholars and good friends who have supported his efforts for years. To his old pals in high crimes and misdemeanors, Allan J. Arffa, Carter B. Burwell, and Chip Johannessen, he continues to owe debts, although some repayment on their parts would be accepted. As always, he would like to thank that great American institution and its publication, the Harvard Lampoon , for its continued work to achieve humor in this often all-too-serious world.
1

Introduction
A Very Brief History of Psychopathology in Cinema
H OMER B. P ETTEY
T HE HISTORY OF CINEMA REVEALS a fascination with psychopathology. No matter the psychological classification, in the main, cinema has willingly portrayed these psychic dimensions, symptoms, and perversions. The stages of the history of psychopathology onscreen accord with general public perceptions and misperceptions of mental illness. Early cinema treated what was called at the time insanity, rather than specific ailments, as a cause for bizarre behavior and criminality. The late 1920s and 1930s, with the introduction of sound, gave voice to horrific crimes of so-considered demonic madmen. In the postwar period, however, public sentiment leaned toward a more clinical, diagnostic view of mental incapacity. The new era of therapy, of psychoanalyzing everyday life, of psychosuggestive advertising, of personality, IQ, and Rorschach tests—all transformed and informed the public about the dimensions, distinctions, and degrees of mental abilities and disabilities. By the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, psychopathology in mass media became categorizable into discrete patterns of recognizable misbehavior with nomenclature now understood by police, jurors, judges, teachers, editors, and anchormen. Universities required psychology majors to learn the differences among types of symptoms of abnormal psychology and the theories about their etiologies. The stigma of seeking therapy gradually ebbed away and a more accepting mass media turned to narratives of social responsibility for persons with mental illness. Of course, a simultaneous dissolution of mandatory institutionalization, either through exposure of corrupt management and horrific conditions or through removing state legislative economic support, produced an influx of mentally impaired people on urban streets. In contemporary cinema, shifts in attitudes toward afflicted people have now created a need for new social problem films, ones dealing with a variety of abuses and disorientations of the self. New awareness of disorder has become common parlance, so much so that news media, talk shows, and successful television comedy and dramatic series focus upon protagonists with anxiety and obsessive-compulsive behavior ( Monk ), manic-depressive bipolarity ( Homeland ), and even homicidal sociopathy ( Dexter ). Cinema continually expands its depictions of mental illness, almost as though with each new disorder, a film waits to be made. In the main, cinema holds up a mirror, no matter how dark or cracked, to reflect the public’s continual fascination with these typifications—still regarded by many as pathologies.
Much of the silent era treatment of mental illness accords with Oliver Sacks’s concept of the asylum:
Finally, coming back to the original meaning of asylum, these hospitals provided control and protection for patients, both from their ow