Journalist and film critic Neal Gabler once argued that movies have “conquered reality.” It's a bold thesis, but one of increasing relevance in today’s surreal climate of pseudo-events and fake news.
While movie-reality is only part of the entertainment complex, films can influence our perceptions about the way the world operates. For example, villains with facial scarring and female characters playing supporting rather than leading roles reinforce negative stereotypes and make the world harder for many people. Studies have also shown that negative mental hospital portrayals dissuade people from seeking treatment.
As part of my research on the cultural history of mental hospitals, I have watched over 250 films. I uncovered so many repeated tropes, that, as Yogi Berra once said, I felt “déjà vu all over again.” I realize I am late for awards season, but I cannot resist offering up my top picks for Worst Asylum Tortures in Film History, by category:
Hydrotherapy: In real life, American mental hospitals have been using hydrotherapy since the nineteenth century. I'd like to recognize here the first film representation of asylum water torture, the 1922 Harry Houdini vehicle The Man From Beyond. The great escape artist plays a man frozen in a block of ice for a century who gets thawed out in present times. When he goes manic after finding a reincarnation of the girl he loves, he lands in a padded cell, is wrapped in sheets, and then doused with water from a shower above. An intertitle describes, “a little treatment they had back in the dark ages” that the medical establishment “wouldn’t stand” for today. Houdini escapes.
Shock Treatment: This is a very competitive category. Films have been playing horrific ECT (Electro-Convulsive Treatment) as nightmare punishment since The Snake Pit in 1948. That film at least posits that a caring doctor is resorting to desperate measures since the hospital is overcrowded. Here I highlight Shock Treatment. In this 1964 film, Dr. Edwina Beighley (Lauren Bacall) punishes a man posing as a patient for the crime of trying to expose her plot to steal a million dollars from a rich patient. The sadistic Dr. Beighley uses psychedelic drugs and then a massive ECT machine to demolish the mind of the unfortunate man. The camera zooms in and out to punctuate the electrified agony.
Lobotomy: In movies, this treatment is used to turn disruptive persons into helpless robots. I nominate Planet of the Apes (1968). Here, astronaut Charlton Heston searches for and locates a missing fellow crewman on what they think is a distant planet inhabited by humanoid apes. He wonders why his friend does not recognize him. We soon see why—a long scar on his head signifies lobotomy. “You took his identity!” rants Heston. Dr. Zaius, the leading ape scientist, agrees, calling brain surgery “a kind of living death.”
Anachronism: Hollywood hasn’t always bothered to check and see if treatments have happened yet. In From Hell, we get an icepick lobotomy (pioneered by Walter Freeman in the 1940s) in Victorian England. In Changeling, we have ECT in 1920s Los Angeles (it hadn’t been invented yet). The most egregious case is the 1985 Disney sequel to The Wizard of Oz. In Return to Oz, Aunt Em and Uncle Henry have sent Dorothy to Dr. Worley’s gothic sanitarium to cure her of her post-Oz depression. She is to be hooked up to a terrifying Victorian ECT machine that appears to have a face. Dorothy is saved at the last minute by an electrical storm that knocks out the power.
Creativity: This award should go to The Jacket (2005). Adrien Brody plays a Gulf War vet who suffers amnesia and brain damage. After he lands in Alpine Grove Psychiatric Hospital, wrongly convicted of murder, he is gagged, injected with a mysterious green substance, and taken down into the morgue. Here he’s strapped into a ghastly-looking canvas straitjacket and slammed into a mortuary drawer. The purpose, explains Dr. Becker (Kris Kristofferson), is to “adjust, maybe even reset his violent proclivities, peel away some layers of hate.” The rationale: “you can’t break something that’s already broken.” Later, someone notes that this procedure was “banned in the seventies.” What the treatment actually does is transport Jack into the future, where he learns how he will die. He must try to solve his own murder.
THE BASICSWe all know that movies are not real. But perhaps it is best to think critically about what we are taking in—so that we are not taken in.