Minds In Progress (Part III): When the Mind Goes Very, Very Wrong

[Continued from "Part II" here.]

The Mobile Spectrum of Sanity: Man-Made Monsters and Man Made a Monster

If dramas about madness focus on the attempt to heal, to understand, to gain a new awareness of the causes of suffering, then horror films show us what happens when causes are not revealed and assuaged, but twisted into increasingly perverse appearances. When the mind works, sonatas, calculus and spiritual growth result; when it goes wrong, both in movies and life, it can go very, very wrong. Spectacularly wrong, in fact; the consequence being amazing characters like Peter Lorre in M, Norman Bates, and Hannibal Lecter. Horror takes the tragic, sad shades of the word "sick," and exploits them for purely sensationalist punch, infusing the word with all its blasphemous, lurid, humorous, campy, frightening and shocking manifestations.

A mind is a many-beleaguered thing—dense with paradoxes, dilemmas, fragilities, and riddles. We all exist on a fluid and vulnerable spectrum between health and madness, and our common slippery slope is a truly disquieting prospect for any audience. To address this problem, the horror genre intervenes on our behalf, using extremities designed to alleviate any uncomfortable identification attending more realistic images of mental illness. One of the oldest tricks in the book: push characteristics of the damaged psyche to a ridiculous, supernatural limit, producing not a sick human, but a monster come to life; a fusion of real person and legendary figure—The Thing Beneath the Bed, Madman on the Loose, the Boogeyman. Tortured minds become less than and beyond human, ironically disassociating audiences from real world horrors created by psychological dissociation; a fanciful and reassuring gap between us and the scariest failures to meet reality. "Shock" here is not that of recognizing ourselves, but the vicarious thrill of distancing ourselves from any relation to "sickness;" a dissuasion from our own capacity for "evil deeds," a Freudian taboo upon which communal sins are projected, so they may be sacrificed for everyone's benefit.

Dr. Loomis, the psychiatrist hunting Michael Myers in Halloween (1978) describes him this way: "I met him, fifteen years ago... No reason, no conscience, no understanding; even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, good or evil, right or wrong... with this blank, pale, emotionless face and, the blackest eyes... the devil's eyes... purely and simply... evil." It's a darkly satiric version of the doctor/patient relationship: a psychiatric duty not to bring one's charge back from the brink of madness, but to hunt it down and stop a wordless death mission representing the impossibility of sanity. After Michael's rampage, his victimizer sister Laurie Strode asks Loomis in quavering tones: "It was the boogeyman?" He responds, with melodramatic dread: "As a matter of fact, it was." (Cue the infamously spooky piano theme.)

The Exorcist: Where Science and Psychology Fear to Tread

William Friedkin's The Exorcist (1973) locates our worst anxieties about the grey epistemological area between simple mental illness—the province of scientific knowledge, diagnosis, and possible treatment or rehabilitation—and the realm of pure volitional evil or "possession" that we suspect may lie beyond it. Writer William Peter Blatty turns conventional 20th-century logic, by which abnormal behavior is explained through scientific dispelling of religious superstition, on its head. The increasingly disturbing behavior of 12-year-old Regan (Linda Blair) is first dismissed as a treatable psychological condition difficult to diagnosis. Only after Regan undergoes an ultra-realistic series of tests, including spinal tap, do the doctors embarrassedly suggest exorcism. Her incredulous mother (Ellen Burstyn) asks, "You're telling me I should take my daughter to a witch doctor?"

Most people in 1973 or today would have the same reaction. The Exorcist earned the moniker "scariest movie ever made" because it convincingly reverses, with total artistic commitment, the usual modern philosophical movement from theological explanation toward medical diagnoses. A thrilling admixture of Grand Guignol set-pieces, body shocks, and bravura sound mixing, all synthesized to exert a firm, relentless grip over the senses, The Exorcist pinpoints with a zealot's precision a small section of the modern mind: one acknowledging, ruefully, that despite increasing technological advancement, aspects of the human persona subject to disintegration and terrifying behavior will always emanate from a twilight area of knowledge lying in the province of mysticism, religious philosophy, and words like "evil," "Satan" and "mystery."

Our Achilles heel is exposed by systematically dispensing with—via maximum suspension of disbelief—the job of ruling out every rational cause of Regan's demonic transformation. No brain lesion; psychedelics; catatonia, somnambulism. Now what? Now we are in territory we don't pretend to control; Book of Job land; hurricane country. Existentially, we truly are fucked. Scientific helplessness sets the stage for metaphysical maelstroms to erupt unhindered, taking center stage in our imagination. Fear of internal chaos is given a physical form ugly as hell; a body out of control: swelling, puking, masturbating, spitting, flailing, and levitating. Not to mention head-spinning and extreme tongue-lolling.

The limits of psychiatry, where doctors fear to tread and priests, shaman, and holy men enter the arena—the ancient hole in the midst of contemporary reality that never disappears, a realm comparable to queasy feelings we get looking at the infinity of stars, or meditating upon not just death but insignificant death—all combined with a cute little kid swearing like a sailor on a holiday bender, referring to herself as a sow, and upchucking big yellow goobers the size of small turtles is enough to make anyone feel really yucky. By the time a deformed, obscene teenager is jamming a crucifix into her vagina, barking "Let Jesus fuck you," proceeding to shove her mother's face into that same bloody crotch saying, "Lick me," metaphysical displacement equated with organic horror has been expressed irreversibly. Has there ever been a scene as blasphemous, as blatant, as audacious, as terrifically distillative of every fear about our carnal nature unleashed, without hope of being organized by logic or knowledge—as the spectacle of a adolescent girl jabbing herself with the greatest icon of Christian sacrifice and purity right into a forbidden place, the locus maximus of guilt, pleasure, pain, and birth? Forget vagina dentata—my god, this is vagina stigmata; vagina satanicus. Here, the religious question's sheer brute force—both its faith and doubt, the existential push inherent to physical creatures capable of metaphysical operations—is shown with outrageous reverse-ecstasy, as if completely localized in revelations of the flesh: the skin of Regan's stomach creating welts that read "help me;" the spider-walk; the pulpy, bulbous alien sex organs that appear in bloody glory on the statues in the church.

The film names the dilemma between Being and The Body that first appears so acutely in adolescence; a dreadful societal and cultural anxiety about teenagers beyond reach. Speaking to a Generation Gap as wide as the Grand Canyon, at the time of its release there was no more apt embodiment of all parents' fears about drugs, sex, rock, long hair, political insurrection, and notions of freedom from old time religion, than a teenage girl literally possessed by demons unexplainable by adult authority. Shit, by the time 1973 rolled around, to some parents, the hippies who flooded Woodstock and Chicago and anti-war demonstrations were the goddamn Antichrist.

Real and Imagined Threats: Polanski, DePalma, Cronenberg

David Cronenberg is a director famous for melding psychological disease with its manifestation in deformed states of flesh. In The Brood (1979), a devilishly clever play on postpartum depression, Nola (Samantha Egger), under care of Svengali-like "experimental" psychologist Oliver Reed, bears a series of children resulting not from conventional insemination but as a physical manifestation of her suppressed rage (whoa!). Look for the moment Nola pulls another fetus out of her "womb" and licks it like a mother wolf; it will stick in your memory.

Roman Polanski explores a young woman's pathological fear of male sexuality in Repulsion (1966), notable for its haunting representations of delusion. When Carole (Catherine Deneuve) is left alone in her apartment, madness takes over: phantom men wait in bed to pop out and rape as soon as she lies down, and a narrow hallway doubles as a tunnel of groping, hungry hands.

Brian De Palma explores Hitchcockian male/female psychological splits reminiscent of Psycho in Dressed to Kill (1980), featuring a murderous cross-dressing psychiatrist (Michael Caine); and in the insular, garish, dream-like atmosphere of Sisters (1973), about Siamese twins separated at birth, one of whom is a closeted homicidal maniac. Conflation of twins and dual identities is explored in Cronenberg's Dead Ringers (1986) with Jeremy Irons as a pair of gynecologist twin brothers using some very nasty medical instruments, in De Palma's Raising Cain, and in The Other (1972), about two prankish brothers, one embodying conscience and the other sociopathic tendency; a similar dynamic drives Fight Club (1999), Primal Fear (1996), and Mr. Brooks (2007). In these films the difference between a psychological voice and real person is blurred, and cinema's dexterity—flashbacks, dreamscapes, interplay between literal and figurative characters—is proven to be the medium best equipped to deliver the nuances of a split (and/or conflicted) psyche.

A Few Refreshing Moments of Truth: Session 9 and Manhunter

Session 9 (1999) portrays contractors renovating an abandoned, decrepit mental institution, where one of the workers finds old audio tapes of sessions between a psychiatrist and former inmate. During their conversation, a murderous personality named "Simon" emerges from the patient's psyche, creating a truly frightening moment. I promise you will feel that agitating but not entirely unpleasant electric sensation ripple through your body: yes, a bona-fide "spine-tingler." The film is also unique for sensitivity concerning the criminally insane. In its last, instantly classic voiceover line, we hear Simon say: "I live in the weak and the wounded." Insightful, nuanced moments like this are a rarity in horror; most of them prefer, a la Michael Myers, to see things in black and white, reticent to look farther into the nature of "monsters."

Manhunter (1986) highlights the same kind of complex moment: William Peterson plays Will Graham, a detective specializing in analyzing methods and motives of serial killers by "getting into their heads." But Will's associative skill makes him unbalanced, prey to the seductive pull of madness influencing even "good" people. The key line comes when Will says of the villainous Tooth Fairy: "As a child, my heart bleeds for him. Someone took a little boy and turned him into a monster. But as an adult... as an adult, he's irredeemable. He butchers whole families to fulfill some sick fantasy. As an adult, I think someone should blow the sick fuck out of his socks." Here, the film dubiously and bravely expresses the tenuous role of free will in severe illness, raising questions about motive and responsibility that go beyond conventional morality.

The Silence of the Lambs and Our Land of Serial-Killers

Anthony Hopkins made Dr. Hannibal Lecter (a character also featured in Manhunter) a household name with The Silence of the Lambs. Lecter presents a deliciously twisted betrayal of the mental health system: versed in analyzing afflicted minds, he uses specialized knowledge not to heal but to terrorize. This fascinating contradiction in his identity is an ambitious attempt to embody evil; he's aware at a genius level of the mind's mechanisms, but nevertheless embraces mayhem—implying the reasons behind "evil deeds" are perhaps not an object for analysis, but an otherworldly force of malevolence.

With its Molotov cocktail of ambivalence toward the utility of violence, pathological fascination with celebrity, and commoditization of the body as marketable product, naturally America produces the world's most notorious serial killers. Hollywood follows the leader: Spike Lee's interpretation of David Berkowitz in 1999's Summer of Sam (watch for the chilling scene when Sam talks!); Tony Curtis with a classic I-need-a-shower-now-please performance as The Boston Strangler (1971); Zodiac (2007), a detailed look at San Francisco's eponymously referenced murderer; Steve Railsback as Charles Manson in Helter Skelter (1977); and a recent spate of imaginatively titled fare like Ed Gein (2001, again with Railsback), Ted Bundy (2002), Gacy (2003), and Ulli Lommel's Green River Killer and B.T.K. Killer (both 2005).

Devil Children

The American heuristic project of understanding where mental illness stops, and preternatural evil begins, is prominent in "Devil Child" films, in which a cherubic, seemingly innocent child is actually a sociopath of the "nature," as opposed to "nurture," variety. The seminal (pun intended) film in this regard is The Bad Seed (1956), in which a mother begins to suspect her sweet, ponytailed daughter of being a born sociopath. In The Good Son (1993), the culprit is a boy (Macaulay Culkin), a very naughty little guy who likes to throw crash test dummies off of bridges to cause car collisions; similar tales serve as the basis for Orphan (2009) and the indie Home Movie (2008), a Blair Witch Project-style story about a progressive minister begrudgingly acknowledging his children are irredeemable sociopaths (watch for that last painterly scene, a demented "American Gothic" in miniature.)

More Scary Stuff to Check Out

The first-despised-than-hailed-as-a-classic of voyeurism Peeping Tom (1962); Monster (2003) with Charlize Theron as Aileen Wurnos, the second woman ever to be executed on Florida's death row; David Lynch's Inland Empire (2007) replicates the bizarre logic of a mind in the throes of dreaming or illness; Kate Winslet caught up in a creepy fantasy world in Heavenly Creatures (1994); Warren Beatty's paranoid journalist tested to determine if he is a sociopath willing to kill political candidates in The Parallax View (1974); Jack Palance and Martin Landau as insane escapees conducting the siege of a suburban family in Alone in the Dark (1982); young men recruited by cults using group psychology and then "deprogrammed" in Ticket to Heaven (1981) and Split Image (1982); Bettie Davis is a bitter ex-child-star psychologically torturing Joan Crawford in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1965); Jennifer Lopez journeys into the mind of serial-killer Vincent D'Onofrio in The Cell (1998); William Friedkin's Bug (2006), about a couple succumbing to paranoia while barricaded in a motel; Jodie Foster screws with Martin Sheen's head in The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1976); Kevin Bacon is The Woodsman (2004), a pedophile trying to keep straight; Powers Boothe is the titular cult leader in Guyana Tragedy: The Jim Jones Story (1980).

Part IV, "Comedies: Who's Crazy, You or Us?" (and a concluding thought!), continued here.

Posted by ahillis at September 7, 2009 10:30 AM