Movies and Mental Illness (eBook)

|xi|Foreword to the Fifth Edition

When Dr. Wedding asked me to write this foreword, I experienced the full range of what I guess are pretty predictable emotions. Rather than naming the rather embarrassing first iteration of my feelings, I’ll ask you instead to picture my 5-foot 6-inch frame walking through the majestic woods of New Hampshire with a puffed-up chest and a spring to my step. I’ve written about movies for much of my career, and Movies and Mental Illness is the altar on which every mental health professional who writes about film has felt compelled to leave an offering. Dr. Wedding’s book is a masterpiece. Nobody else has come even close to the scholarship, creativity, and almost impossible inclusiveness that await you in this fifth edition. As a result of this high, it took me longer than I’d care to admit to actually put pen to paper. Instead, I imagined over and over again that I had already written what would be the most celebrated essay in the history of the world that endeavors to discuss film and psychology. This, I recognized, was the Walter Mitty stage of writing. I was Danny Kaye in 1947 or Ben Stiller in 2013. The same Walter in both films, and both films perfectly capturing my state of mind. That’s the magic of movies.

But next came anxiety and fear. After all, if I have placed this book on the altar, then it is, by definition, beyond description. Imagine trying to write an introduction to something for which your admiration has come close to worship. It is akin to describing something awesome, something that is in its essence uncapturable. The magic of movies struck again. This time nearly suffocating me in one of those groovy space suits in 2001: A Space Odyssey. I was dumbstruck as I watched the planet Jupiter grow large and ominous, and my writing was delayed despite the pesky fact that the clock refused to stop ticking.

Like a delirious pinball, I ricocheted from one film to the next, looking to rescue myself from the paralysis of my task. I settled on the warnings of Captain Picard in Star Trek: Generations. Chatting with Commander Riker, Picard contemplates the passage of time. “Someone once told me that time was a predator that stalked us all our lives,” he muses. And to be honest, I was awfully close to being captured and devoured by time’s most pernicious weapon – that monster we call procrastination. But then I remembered that Picard, ever the optimist, turned the metaphor of predatory time on its head. “I rather believe that time is a companion,” he tells us. “What we leave behind is not as important as how we lived.” If we are talking about how we live, then it is here that I must confess that I have lived my life with and through the movies. My father took me to see 2001: A Space Odyssey when it came back to the theaters in the mid-1970s. I have been enamored of Star Trek from the moment I had the capacity to turn on the television set by myself. Onscreen stories are inextricably tied to who and to what I am.

As I thought more about this foreword, I borrowed from the sense of responsibility and challenge that virtually every story about the intoxication of exploration has at some point unfailingly depicted. This assignment would not become the game over moment from Aliens that has come to exemplify giving up. This assignment would be my invitation to discover and to be amazed. My paralytic fear became Caliban’s resolve in The Tempest. “Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments will hum about mine ears,” he says. Rather than eschewing the island that made him, he embraces and celebrates the magic of his predicament. To me, Caliban’s thousand instruments are the countless movies that have enriched my life. As if to prove my point, I noted that The Tempest has enjoyed more than five different movies adaptations, and I adore every one of them. If the deformed Caliban can look upon his island with wonder, then I can certainly write this foreword with the same spirit of discovery and awe.

|xii|By now you’ll sense that the biggest impediment to my celebrating Movies and Mental Illness wasn’t time, or grandiosity, or even my lingering fear of abject failure. The impediment was the subject itself. To borrow again from Shakespeare, the “past is prologue.” I have never not loved movies. As such, I lose all sense of time when I thumb through this book. Wedding so seamlessly mixes the nuanced world of psychiatry with the nuanced world of movies that every time I sat down to write this essay, I would read a chapter or two, and then I was off to the cinema yet again. The wonder of our modern world is the immense and immediate accessibility of film. All you need is a laptop or a theater and a willingness to pay a few bucks. Because of this book, I discovered gems like The Boy Who Could Fly, revisited long forgotten favorites like Birdy, and soared through the clouds with the giddy and increasingly dangerous teens in Chronicle. In other words, every time I opened this book, I risked getting lost in at least three movies, each well over an hour long. I therefore feel this foreword ought to contain at least some form of warning. Movies and Mental Illness is that gift that at the same time becomes the best kind of trap. Hours will collapse as you read. You will turn to YouTube to search for the most obscure but illuminating movie clips. You will scan your local library for the DVD of that film that is no longer streaming. If you live in a rural setting as I do, you’ll drive hours to see that one film that just happens to be playing at that funky arthouse cinema nestled like a shrine on Main Street in some small New England town.

The real impediment to this foreword is knowing when to stop reading and to start writing. For a psychiatrist, this book is like the table of luscious food in Pan’s Labyrinth, but without the terror of the Pale Man to stop you from eating. Without the Pale Man’s menace, you have infinitely more freedom than the girl in Guillermo Del Toro’s haunting film. You can take more than just a grape. But with a feast like this at your fingertips, how in the world does one begin?

I suppose it is best to start with what is perhaps already obvious. Since humans have been humans, we’ve told stories. We had movies way before we had movie projectors. Homer describes each scene of The Odyssey as if he were intimately familiar with the local cinema in ancient Athens.

My goodness, this could have been written by Quentin Tarantino! The magic of stories rests in their iterative dialectic. We hear or we watch the same tales again and again, and yet when these stories are done well, they feel as fresh as the break of day. Thank goodness for the endless creativity of humanity.

But there is another constant with which this introduction must reckon. The variety of stories that we tell is matched only by the variety of madness that we suffer. Depression, mania, psychosis … these illnesses have been described for thousands of years. Say what you want about the flawed Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th edition (DSM-5). I will maintain that some form of the DSM was written long before the American Psychiatric Association (APA) claimed this catalogue as its own. Pathological states of mind have always been integral to our stories. In fact, I would go so far as to say that pathological states of mind are the essence of our stories. If you’ll accept this supposition, then it stands to reason that movies themselves are perhaps our best and most accessible |xiii|modalities toward understanding representations of mental illness. They are also among the most jarring means through which we can...