Gary MacLennan wrote:
> 
> Preliminary 1. For what it is worth I thought Heon's was a very fine post.
> I have been following this thread though it has at times got into areas I
> am not that interested in.
> 
> Preliminary 2. But the question whether the cinema has represented madness
> adequately has set me thinking. If I may be permitted to be personal here I
> have first hand experience of depression and I am a carer for someone who
> suffers from schizophrenia.  I say this not to claim for my arguments any
> particular force, but it has been my experience on a number of lists that
> people can easily be hurt and offended when discussion arises about this
> topic. My declaring my hand as it were is an attempt to signal that I wish
> to add to no one's pain.
> 
> 3. Is there a philosophy of madness?
> 
> Very crudely and over simply I would say 'yes' and that the dominant
> philosophical tendency is to assimilate the phenomenon of madness into the
> discourse of Romanticism. Here the mad become either the Feared or the
> Exotic Other.
> 
> If we take the Feared Other the basic move is I think to create a character
> who threatens the very reproduction of the social.  Classically we are
> meant to gain vicarious pleasure from the threat and are then reassured
> when the threat is closed off. Generally through the death of the mad
> character.  The modern variation on this theme is to refuse closure and to
> construct the plot so that the threat remains.
> 
> If I were to nominate, as it were off the cuff, a film that best
> encapsulates the Mad as Feared Other I would plump for Psycho. My proviso
> here would be that we need to recognize that the Feared Other is not in
> fact Norman but his mother.  She is absent/present like the Father in
> Sylvia Plath's best poetry. It is, I would argue, the ambiguity of presence
> and absence that constitutes a good part of the continuing ability of this
> film to disturb us. It also give us a glimpse of something like the
> experience of psychotic hallucinations and delusions. These may have little
> direct referential value but they are never without meaning.(BTW for a
> sophisticated up to date discussion of the question of truth and reference
> see Roy Bhaskar's Plato Etc)
> 
> 4. The mirror image of the Mad as Feared Other is the Mad as Exotic
> Other.  Here the basic impulse is to construct the mad as special, as
> somehow gifted with special insight. Jeynes' thesis on the bi-cameral mind
> is suggestive here. He argues that modern consciousness is based on the
> uni-cameral mind where typically one hemisphere, the Left is
> dominant.  This replaced the old bi-cameral mind where the right side of
> the brain produced auditory and visual hallucinations which were typically
> read as the real, active presence of the Gods in this world. If we follow
> Jeynes then we can understand the Romantic fascination with madness as a
> longing for a lost unity with nature, a longing for a return to
> subject-object identity.
> 
> The recent film that most clearly expresses the strengths and weaknesses of
> the Mad as Exotic Other was for me the Jeremy Leven 1995 movie Don Juan De
> Marco starring Johhny Depp and Marlon Brando.  One of the key points of the
> drama was that the psychiatrist Dr Jack Mickler (Marlon Brando)  does not
> want to destroy Don Juan's (Johnny Depp) delusions with medication. This
> has all sorts of echoes of the Romantic's fear of science's capacity to
> destroy nature.
> 
> Indeed it seems to me that the whole film could be regarded almost as a
> dramatization of Keats' lines from Lamia:
> 
> Do not all charms fly
> At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
> There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
> We know her woof, her texture; she is given
> In the dull catalogue of common things,
> Philosophy will clip and Angel's wings,
> Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
> Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine -
> Unweave a rainbow, as it ere while made
> The tender-person'd Lamia melt into a shade.
> 
> I have a good deal of sympathy with non-scientific ways of looking at the
> world and indeed increasingly  more so as I get older, nevertheless it is
> absolutely essential to point out that Romanticism's fear of medication in
> this case psychotropic medications has and continues to do a great deal of
> harm.  Films Like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest convinced a generation
> that the mentally ill were being over medicated etc to control them.  The
> truth is much harsher and much harder to understand. The mentally ill of
> the world are generally under or non-medicated.
> 
> 5. An alternative to Romanticism?
> 
> The proper alternative is the more than somewhat
> unfashionable  philosophical Enlightenment. I would argue that our great
> hope should be that when science finally does understand how the human
> genome operates then we will be in a position to cure and prevent mental
> illness. In terms of the cinema I can only think of an early episode of
> Star Trek which expresses this enlightenment impulse. In this Captain Kirk
> is dispatched to a remote planet which imprisons the last group of the
> incurable and dangerous mentally ill. He brings with him the  definitive
> cure which after some adventures he does succeed in administering. But lest
> I seem to be putting all my eggs in the science philosophy basket let me
> say that art can still best convey the suffering of the mentally ill.
> 
> The following lines from Robert Frost's A Servant to Servants are almost
> too brutally true to read. The story of the young man who goes mad and is
> locked up in a cage made of hickory bars. The image of the hickory bars
> worn smooth still haunts me:
> 
> She had to lie and hear love things made dreadful
> By his shouts in the night. He'd shout and shout
> Until the strength was shouted out of him,
> And his voice died down slowly from exhaustion.
> He'd pull his bars apart like bow and bowstring,
> And let them go and make them twang until
> His hands had worn them smooth as any oxbow.
> 
> 6.  Depression
> 
> Michael asked about cinematic expression of depression.  As has been
> pointed out this is extremely difficult to convey, especially in the
> Hollywood cinema which is designed primarily to entertain and make
> money.  I can only think of two moments which conveyed to me something of
> the experience of sinking into depression and they both involve Robert De
> Niro. there is the beautiful sequence in The Mission(1986 Dr Roland Joffe)
> when he has to abandon pacifism and face the slavers who are coming to kill
> and enslave his parishioners.  A boy brings him his sword and they both sit
> in silence on the bed.  Not a word is uttered but we get a feeling of
> incredible sadness.
> 
> The other moment is in the lesser film Midnight Run (1988 Dr Martin
> Brest).  It relates how the bounty hunter Jack Walsh (De Niro) is bringing
> back a bail jumper Jonathan Mardukas (Charles Grodin).This is generally a
> fairly light hearted caper movie but in one sequence Jack has just
> prevented Jonathan form flying off.  the dramatic point is that Mardukas
> had convinced Walsh that he could not fly and so had to be brought back
> overland.  after the discovery that he has been lied to Walsh is sitting
> with Mardukas in a train.  De Niro here manages to convey a great deal of
> sadness and indeed the bleakness of Walsh's life. Mardukas eventually
> coaxes  him into a good mood, but the depression and sadness seem so real
> to me.
> 
> Final thoughts
> 
> I have argued that generally the representation of mental illness,
> especially schizophrenia has been mediated through the discourse of
> Romanticism, where the mentally ill are portrayed as either the Feared or
> the Exotic Other.  I have also suggested that we need to move from these
> dialectical counterparts towards philosophical enlightenment if we are to
> find a new way of both conveying the suffering of the mentally and also
> indicating how they can be helped and hopefully one day cured.
> 
> However as always with mental illness what we do not know or understand is
> in some ways a good deal more interesting than what we do.  For instance I
> suspect that the WW1 poet Ivor Gurney's delusions about radio waves was
> based on the capacity to perceive these same waves at some level. Similarly
> I have often wondered how did the Maid of Orleans know that a sword could
> be found for her in the church of St. Catherine de Fierbois?
> 
> For a film which captures the notion of the Mad as Exotic Other I would
> turn to Don Juan De Marco
I am mostly a lurker, since I am a retired philosopher (and my areas
were always ethics, mostly applied, I even used film for ethical
analysis...) but I wanted to say that the romantic analysis of madness
is one of the best things I have read.  For some years I worked as a
counsellor and in working with schizophrenics, I found my greatest
breakthroughs came in discovering the commonality between the pain
following some kind of social rejection that my schizophrenic
interlocutor translated into poetic metaphorical stories and the pain
that I too would feel when I experienced equivalent social rejection. 
Psychiatrist as helper movies like ordinary people seem to function by
opening self to sameness rather than otherness. 
	As for medication, I'm all for it as an aid to talk therapy.  Too often
I've seen it used as a replacement.
Natalie



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