Hollywood's Mad Rush to Portray
Schizophrenics and Borderline Psychotics

Gwyneth Paltrow plays poet Sylvia Plath, who wrestled with a succession of breakdowns before committing suicide at the age of 30.

(January 15, 2004) -- Crazy characters can be a director's shortcut to high drama.

Mental illness has become almost as ubiquitous in modern cinema as the car chase or gunfight. Forget the traditional action-hero or femme fatale, these days directors prefer jittery schizophrenics and borderline psychotics who forget to take their medication. Hollywood, it seems, has gone mad for madness.

From One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest to Donnie Darko, cinema has developed a dark fascination with the mentally unhinged. The latest actor to try the straitjacket on for size is Gwyneth Paltrow in Sylvia, a film based on the life of the troubled poet Sylvia Plath, who wrestled with a succession of breakdowns before committing suicide at the age of 30.

The film may not be a bundle of laughs, but Paltrow will have leapt at the opportunity to play Plath. After all, starring in a movie involving mental dysfunction dramatically boosts an actor's Oscar chances. Just ask Nicole Kidman (The Hours), Jennifer Connelly (A Beautiful Mind, in which she plays the wife of a mentally disturbed mathematician), Angelina Jolie (Girl Interrupted), Geoffrey Rush (Shine), Dustin Hoffman (RainMan), Cliff Robertson (Charly) or Joanne Woodward (The Three Faces of Eve).

But the way most films deal with mental illness is enough to drive anyone crazy. Sylvia is yet another movie resorting to the old truism of how genius and insanity are invariably bosom buddies. It's a familiar idea, deriving from Dryden's maxim that "great wits are sure to madness near allied", and Hollywood can't get enough of it.

In the movies, mental disability often entitles the sufferer to some sort of intellectual or spiritual superiority. Call it compensation if you like. In Rain Man, Dustin Hoffman is a numerical whizkid with a photographic memory despite the severe autism that reduces his life to a series of obsessive routines. Similarly, Russell Crowe combines paranoid schizophrenia with a Nobel prize-winning intellect in A Beautiful Mind, a film that suggests severe mental illness can be overcome with some all-American determination and the love of a good woman.

The unhinged genius figure gets another outing in Shine, with Geoffrey Rush starring as the brilliant pianist whose mental breakdown reduces him to a babbling wreck.

Such characters tend to convey the idea that the mentally fragile have access to more powerful feelings than the average man on the street. "Crazy is just you or me amplified," Winona Ryder observes in Girl Interrupted, after being institutionalised with a borderline personality disorder after chasing a vial of aspirin with a bottle of vodka. In the same film Angelina Jolie insists that her illness is a "a gift that can help her to see the truth". Never mind that it has also kept her in a psychiatric hospital for eight years.

Nevertheless, the notion that the visionary insights of the mentally ill can help sane people to greater self-awareness is a recurring Hollywood theme that gained currency in the '60s and stems from psychiatrist R.D. Laing's theory that "Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be breakthrough".

This peculiar veneration for the mentally disadvantaged is played out in another form in such films as I Am Sam and Forrest Gump, where the intellectually challenged are heralded as models of spiritual integrity in a morally bankrupt world.

But it's not just easy characterization that attracts directors to films about mental illness. Madness can also come in handy as a convenient short-cut to high drama. A schizophrenic's delusions provide a film with the classic unreliable-narrator figure, generating instant tension in the uneasy relationship between illusion and reality. Spider employs this tactic to excellent effect, as David Cronenberg delivers a complex and compelling tale of psycho-sexual dysfunction filtered through the slippery medium of an unstable mind.

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Movies involving mental dysfunction can also give a filmmaker greater artistic licence. Delusions allow directors to wave goodbye to conventional plot lines and weave in spectacularly surreal tangents at the drop of a hat. This is demonstrated in the heroically ambitious Donnie Darko, where the title character's "daylight hallucinations" mean that, visually, anything goes. "I see a lot of really messed-up stuff," Donnie admits, and his troubled mind provides director Richard Kelly with the perfect excuse to indulge in a host of special effects and wonky camera angles to convey his altered perception.

Ultimately cinema's obsession with split personalities, manic depressives and psychological disorders is likely to run and run. Exploiting mental illness for popular entertainment may not be especially palatable, but it's certainly nothing new. In 17th century London people would visit the Bedlam madhouse to stand and stare at the eccentric behaviour of the mentally confused. Today it would seem little has changed; we just go along to the movies instead.

Source: The Age

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