Minds In Progress (Part IV): Who's Crazy, You or Us?

[The final installment, continued from "Part III" here.]

Harold and Maude: A Funny Take on "Sanity Is Not the Absence of Vibrancy"

If in drama, the primary mode of audience participation is empathy—and in the horror film, it's vicarious escape achieved by moral extrapolation—then in comedy, the guiding principle is uncomfortable implication. The genre turns viewer anxiety about its own potential pathology back upon itself, questioning whether it may be the audience, and society at large, who—in their half-repressed hypocrisy, greed, aggression, and envy in the name of maintaining order and prosperity—may be more deranged in its collective consciousness than poor souls designated as, to borrow a phrase, the "identified patient." Several elements are in play: ragged individualism; tense suspicion of "The State;" and the efficacy of rebellion, against one's own mind or the fascistic minds of others, neatly summed up by a notion that "in an insane world, the only proper place to be is an institution" (a.k.a. "Oh My God, Inmates Are Running the Bleeping Asylum!" Syndrome).

Hal Ashby's Harold and Maude (1971) chronicles the love affair between a death obsessed upper-crust teenager and a life-affirming octogenarian (Ruth Gordon is the definition of "irrepressible"). If Regan is the destructive rage of the counter-culture's teenager personified, then Harold (Bud Cort) is the same creature become a merry prankster. The film depicts an America in turmoil, where everyone we encounter is hilariously neurotic. But only those like Harold, possessing a sense of humor about their own misery (he expresses anhedonia to his mother in a series of faked elaborate deaths, replete with props), are given the chance to see beyond a broken ego and convert broken-hearted lunacy into redemption.

Rescue arrives in the persona of Maude: her last-chance stand against the solemn self-deception of authority (even if it's that of death itself), and delightfully deranged lust for life, ultimately pull Harold away from stifling wealth and alienation long enough to begin his healing process. Her vibrant "super-sanity" is contrasted with Harold's psychotherapist (his office is sterile to the point of surrealism) who shows a technical proficiency, but complete absence of genuine engagement with Harold's humanity.

The Dream Team (1987) is Cuckoo's Nest played for laughs; inmates lose their psychiatrist during a NYC field trip, getting entangled in murder and romance. The not-too-inside-joke is that 1980s Manhattan –where you could dress as a chicken, spout apocalyptic warnings on a street corner, or both, and merely evoke jaded indifference—is more dangerous than your average institution. Crazy People (1990) has Dudley Moore as a lovable loony also set loose in the city; in the best scene he pitches ideas to a group of advertising executives with tag lines for products so stunningly honest (Volvos: "They're boxy, but they're good") they are treated first as lunacy, then as genius. In our American Asylum, land of the used-car salesman shit-eating grin as a way of life and commerce, a basic honesty sometimes uproariously assumes the patina of transcendence.

The Holy Fool

LADY CLAIRE GURNEY: That's very clever, but is it the truth?
PSYCHIATRIST: Huh? Don't come to me for the truth. Only explanations.
- The Ruling Class

"The Fool is innocent, spontaneous and joyful, even Christ-like. As a result he may be ridiculed by conventional society, although he actually has the sight which they have lost."
- Cecil Collins, painter

Crazy People is a minor proponent of the "Holy Fool," a person who can illuminate the foibles and hypocrisies of those typically considered adjusted by virtue of his or her unconventional version of reality—usually a kind of sweet, unaware, but penetrating honesty and/or innocence. The Ruling Class (1972) is anchored by a wild Peter O'Toole, playing a paranoid schizophrenic recruited by his aristocratic relatives to fill his brother's seat as Earl after the Earl hangs himself during ritual auto-erotic asphyxiation (dressed in a pink tutu!). O'Toole's charming lunacy, Christ-like antics, and emphasis on "love" confronts aristocratic attitudes in very funny ways. Clashing ornate tradition with '70s-style Jesus freak anomie, it is a merciless ridicule of aristocratic pomp as formalized pretension signifying nothing. Although highly romanticized, O'Toole's character mines humane truths instead of belittling schizophrenia by generating observations at the boundary between fresh irreverence and mannered madness.

Personal Psychology and the Therapist's Office

Since the "Me Decade," when a reign of interpersonal chaos and personal introspection precipitated an unprecedented concern with individual mental health as a centerpiece of popular culture, films have increasingly lampooned the therapy session. What About Bob? (1991), in which neurotic patient Bob (Bill Murray) infiltrates arrogant psychotherapist Dr. Leo Marvin's private home life, is a virtual Nostradamus in predicting the current invasion into legitimate psychological circles of charlatans and people-haters like Dr. Phil. Bob is a hapless walking dictionary of disorders, but more lovable in his fragility than smug, charmless Leo (Richard Dreyfuss), who doesn't want to deal with Bob, and so gives a copy of his newest book, "Baby Steps," for free.

Dreyfuss packs everything wrong with the current gaggle of New Age celebrity therapists into a single character: condescension, patronizing superiority masquerading as empathy, dollar signs for eyes, a tendency to convert complex ideas into chewable tablet form catchphrases, and a thinly masked dislike of actual flesh-and-blood people. When Bob inserts himself into Leo's family vacation, the psychiatrist must deal with him not in the abstract, as a patient, but as a human being. The doctor/patient power balance is also turned on its head to comic effect in the very funny Analyze This (1997), in which Robert De Niro's mafioso enlists Billy Crystal as his reluctant therapist.

A darker form of stalking drives The King of Comedy (1981), with De Niro as Rupert Pupkin, a socially isolated aspiring comedian lost in delusions of grandeur. Instead of practicing the avenger's refrain "You talkin' to me?" he hangs out in his mother's basement holding talk shows with cardboard cutouts. Rupert embodies our modern media zeitgeist: part pushy nerd-fan nebbish, part scarily off-kilter obsessive, he pursues fame to replace loneliness with an absolving, self-justifying celebrity spotlight. When he kidnaps late night host Jerry Langford (Jerry Lewis, accessing his uber-curmudgeon) in an attempt to get a gig on his show, weirdness turns criminal. To delve further into the goosebumps of borderline personality, watch Play Misty For Me (1971), in which Jessica Walter won't leave Clint Eastwood alone; Glenn Close's rabbit-cooker in Fatal Attraction (1987); and Single White Female (1992) in which Jennifer Jason Leigh mimicking roomie Bridget Fonda.

Other Funny Things

A mysterious stranger and brilliant therapist comes to town in Mumford (1999); Mel Brooks pokes fun at Hitchcock in High Anxiety (1977); Jeff Bridges is a radio DJ trying to overcome a tragedy who befriends a homeless man (Robin Williams) with mystical visions in Terry Gilliam's comic drama The Fisher King (1991); Nicholas Cage is a con-artist with OCD in Matchstick Men (2003); the British King of Hearts (1966), in which British WW I soldier (Alan Bates) finds himself in a town run completely by escaped mental patients; and anything by Woody Allen.

A Concluding Thought: In and Out of the American Asylum

Despite the imposing buildings, huge manicured lawns, and teams of doctors, the barriers separating the institutionalized and those living on the outside are, if not gossamer thin, at least more permeable than most of us choose to ponder. For some, one or two thoughts maintain a precarious station beyond the evaluation room's grasp; for others, a few moments of courage or insight, the right medicine, or a series of compassionate gestures can mean impending freedom. All of us move forward and back across the scales of mental health; we are all partially ill; we are all partly sane. We exist, as individuals and collectively, on a spectrum of sanity characterized by high mobility, relative to how our consciousness expands or contracts in response to traumatic or liberating experiences. Constantly fed by images (from life, art, and mind), our state of mental health depends upon the accuracy and sturdiness of the ones we digest. The insane are too controlled by the image; the bored and vapid are not controlled by it enough.

All of America is a madhouse waiting to make a break for it in one direction or another; we are all image-makers, movie-makers, mental patients, grindhouse perverts, aspiring saints. If the mental hospital is a place where dreams and nightmares are tyrants, overwhelming touch and cry, then often the everyday world "on the outside" does not dream enough—loses sight of the spiritual, transcendent, creative elements of our minds. We go the movies, because in a practical sense, we need to be insane for a couple of hours. Unlike the (officially) committed patients of the asylum, however, afterwards we usually get to go home.

Posted by ahillis at September 10, 2009 10:38 PM