CHAPTER THREE
Jocelyn Dupont
This chapter deals with the representation of hallucinations and delusional universes in a selection of four contemporary American films. They are, in chronological order: A Beautiful Mind (dir. Ron Howard, 2001), Spider (dir. David Cronenberg, 2002), Black Swan (dir. Darren Aronofsky, 2010), and Take Shelter (dir. Jeff Nichols, 2011). In the following pages, I intend to discuss strategies of narrative deception and manipulation in the context of the feature film, thus attempting to investigate the so far little-studied notion of delusional or “mad” narration in film. What triggered the composition of this article are two general observations that can be made about the seventh art and that seem to have held true for nearly as long as it has existed.
The first is an almost inbred tendency of the movies, at least since Georges Méliès, to lean towards the spectacular and the disruptive. It is a well-known fact that many character-based fiction films—not to say almost all—especially those from Hollywood, privilege extreme psychological states rather than serene ones. Explosions of violence, profound personal crises, and fits of all kinds have long been the stuff film drama is made of. The same goes for insanity versus sanity. As Jason Horsley observes:
Since they tend towards sensationalism, and to invoking strong emotional responses, movies lean naturally more towards madness than sanity (just as they are predisposed towards depiction of chaos and violence rather than with peace and order).1
The second observation is that cinema has for an extremely long time harbored a fascination for inner states of minds and mindscapes. This certainly is a matter for surprise, verging on the paradox. If one thinks about it, in its essential technological nature, cinema is most of all fitted to record external “reality”—let us not omit the Nabokovian quotation marks—to capture images of the physical, sensitive world that surrounds us. And yet the attraction for invisible worlds has always exerted its magnetic pull on filmmakers, as Marcel Oms once observed:
As soon as cinema became aware of its own technical capabilities through special effects and other tricks, it started to appear, in the collective imagination, as a mechanical means not only to reproduce but also to reveal the invisible sides of our lives, while at the same time other figurative arts seemed to have exhausted such expressive capacities and turned towards abstraction.2
Cinema has always been driven by a strange pull for this paradox, verging on aporia, which may even be said to challenge its very nature. Besides, the issue of the representation of madness certainly is a privileged locus for the study of such attraction. As Patrick Fuery notes:
The representational processes of the cinema construct a certain type of sign in order that narratives can develop and the spectator can make sense of the structures …. The issue here is when that which is being represented in cinema—images of madness—challenges the processes of cinematic representation, and consequently cinema itself.3
The complexity of the undertaking is thus twofold. Besides the issue of the representation of tormented subjectivities, how to represent what is categorized by our discursive environments as wholly other, or even, as a mere lack or absence of to use Foucault’s terminology?
Such questions can hardly be answered within the scope of a few pages. That is the reason why this contribution will restrict itself to a short discussion on hallucinations in contemporary American films that have madness as their thematic core, and have opted for narrative strategies that promote the representation of delusional visions and hallucinations. In the first part, I will make some brief theoretical remarks concerning the status of hallucinations in the fiction film. This will be followed by a rapid analysis of four sequences. In conclusion, I will raise the question of viewer response to such films.
Filming Hallucinations
Broadly speaking, a hallucination is the perception of an object that has no reality or sensations which have no corresponding external causes. Hallucinations can be visual, aural, or related to taste, smell, and touch. In psychiatric terms, and per the often-quoted 1973 study by French psychiatrist Henry Ey (1900–1977),4 hallucinations are the very essence of psychopathology insofar as they constitute a radical rupture with the reality principle.
They also are a crux; even though hallucinations are always real for the patient, they never are for the mental health practitioner. Their imperceptibility in “reality” makes it even more difficult to provide a fully satisfactory definition, as it rests on an impossible observation, an asymmetrical relationship between presence and absence.
This is the reason why one has to be very cautious when talking about “hallucinations” in films as though one were talking of the same phenomenon as in a psychiatric context. I would like to dismiss as unethical and unscientific claims made by some critics verging on the antipsychiatric and even sometimes downright New Age ideologies that the psychotic’s hallucinations could be—or even should be—compared with the spectator’s own position. Most schizophrenic patients who commit suicide do so because of the unbearable pressure imposed on them by hallucinations, from which they desperately try to escape—a far cry from most spectators’ comfortable viewing experiences.
This is not to say, however, that hallucinations and the film experience have nothing in common. Some critics and film theorists have argued in favor of such proximity, starting with André Bazin and Christian Metz, who introduced the idea of cinema as a paradoxical hallucination. In his 2011 book La subjectivité au cinéma, Dominique Chateau argues that cinema is a space where consciousness fluctuates and reality is put to the test. He writes:
While cinema may struggle to flesh out hallucinations, it nonetheless has something to do, as a projection of fantasies and images over reality, with the transformation or distortion of percepts—be they true or false—into a position of in-between-ness where consciousness wavers.5
Another interesting lead may be offered by Raymond Bellour, who proposes in his essential study Le Corps du Cinéma (2010) a theoretical model of the film experience as primarily hypnagogic. This is even more convincing since Henry Ey, in his treatise on hallucinations, had distinguished between three major types of hallucinations:
•Hallucinations experienced during sleep such as dreams and nightmares
•Hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations, close to those one may experience on the threshold between sleep and wakefulness (either when waking up or falling asleep) or in a state of hypnosis
•Delirious and alienating hallucinations
In the latter category, which mainly corresponds to the films to be considered, the subject alienates what is most intimate and personal and ends up perceiving it as words and acts that belong to the other, an other so radically other that it threatens to destroy him or her.
The terminological coincidence linking Bellour’s film theories to Ey’s psychiatric classification is rather telling. Cinema, as a fantastic—even “phantasmagorical”6—journey in a world of moving visual and aural perceptions that have no tangible reality yet still exist in front of our eyes—and the rest of the audience—has a hallucinatory quality, though one that is more akin to the hypnagogic experience than the alienating one experienced by psychotic individuals.
Filmmakers, on the other hand, seem to be more attracted by delirious hallucinations, the most radical, spectacular, and thrilling. This is where the art of narrative steps in. If cinema is essentially an adequate vehicle to place us in a state of hypnagogic reverie, then the crafting of mad narratives may result in achieving an analogon of psychotic hallucinations, or at least in the telling and showing of demented hallucinatory tales.
Generally speaking, conventional film narrativity is neutral and impersonal.7 In movies dealing with psychopathology and hallucination, the issue is thus to deneutralize the narrative through strategies of enunciation so that the normal landscape can be turned into a “mental” mindscape, preferably a paranoid schizoid one, where madness can enter the representational field, and delirious hallucinations burst onto the big screen.
A Beautiful Mind (2001) and Black Swan (2010)
Ron Howard’s Academy Award winner A Beautiful Mind is the film version of the already-romanticized version of John Nash’s turbulent biography. The Princeton mathematician and 1994 Nobel Prize winner interpreted by Russell Crowe was a notorious paranoid schizophrenic, suffering from hallucinations. Howard’s often melodramatic film endeavors to portray the genius, the family man, and the lunatic in one sweeping cinematographic movement. Despite a tremendous popular success and some critical recognition, the movie drew a lot of criticism from mathematicians and psychiatrists alike. In the latter’s case, it is the representation of Nash’s hallucinations that seems to have been the main cause of discontent.
Howard’s decision was to transform all of Nash’s hallucinations into elements pertaining to the visual narrative. The director went so far as to incarnate Nash’s psychotic visions and turn them into characters of the film. Three actors thus fill in the parts of the hallucinations: Paul Bettany as Charles, the prodigal roommate, who accompanies Nash through his studies and later turns up in the company of his young niece Marcee (Vivien Cardone). The third hallucination is Ed Harris, who acts as secret agent Parcher. What mostly characterizes these delusional apparitions is their diegetic status. They seem to belong to the diegetic universe in which Nash and all the other characters evolve. During the first half of the film, this inclusion is the main directorial choice regarding the way hallucinations operate. They are invisible as hallucinations because of their excessive visibility. Besides, the filmic narrative is intent on deceiving the viewer as most of the shots are not subjectivized. On the contrary, the camera is positioned to deny access to Nash’s subjectivity as long as possible, shunning subjective camera and semisubjective shots. The shot-reverse shot sequences, on the other hand, appear perfectly normal. Consequently, the hallucinations cannot be ascribed to the central character’s consciousness and are not perceived as hallucinations by the viewer. This, of course, is not a new film trick. It had already been successfully used in David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999), with the presence of Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) to be retroactively decoded as a figment of the main character’s imagination.
However, what makes A Beautiful Mind quite specific is the use of a highly conventional cinematography in entire sequences8 that are supposedly moments of acute psychotic delirium. Because of this very conventionality, Ron Howard’s film can be said to be an extremely manipulative narrative. By choosing not to distinguish between “landscape” and “mindscape,” the film certainly cheats viewers above all. Because hallucinations can be normally perceived, they become the ultimate fakery. Hence the film’s difficulties, once the delusional nature of the apparitions has been made clear—thanks to the sequence in the psychiatrist’s office exactly halfway through the film—to remain intriguing during its second half. Eventually, the hallucinations become rather tedious ghostlike figures as the movie gallops to its happy ending. As the film’s way of dealing with hallucinations boils down to a narrative trick, the central question—namely, what is going on inside this supposedly beautiful mind?—is left entirely out of the picture.
It may be worth mentioning that Darren Aronofsky’s first film, Pi, released in 1998, also dealt with portrayal of a paranoid mathematician, though in a far less conventional way. Pi, however, was not a huge commercial success, unlike Aronofsky’s fifth feature film, Black Swan (2010), a movie that offers an intense journey into psychotic territories.
Black Swan is a powerful film blending ballet, the quest for one’s limits, and delusional psychosis. As we follow Nina (Natalie Portman) through her ascension to the very top of her art while she interprets the swan queen for a ballet company, we also follow her sinking into the throes of paranoid schizophrenia, which mostly takes the form of a cleaving of personality, in a clear parallel with the black and the white swans she must interpret. Drawing from influences such as Michael Powell’s The Red Shoes and Robert Siodmak’s The Dark Mirror, the film provides a spectacular variation on the motif of the doppelganger, moving in a carefully orchestrated crescendo from the first fleeting uncanny encounter of her own image to a climactic moment of self-destruction that recalls the end of Poe’s 1839 short story “William Wilson.”
As far as delusions and hallucinations are concerned, Black Swan greatly differs from A Beautiful Mind. The construction of a mindscape seems to be an absolute priority for the director. The film relentlessly follows Nina, and there is not one single sequence in which she is not present, possibly not even one shot if one accepts that every time we do not see her in the frame, we are sharing her point of view. In Black Swan, we seem to be nearing the apex of what an alienated narrative in the conventional feature film can be. Close-ups, medium close-ups and tracking-in shots recalling Polanski’s Repulsion (1965) insistently follow the protagonist in her descent into madness, or perhaps her ascent, given the overall soaring composition of the film.
Besides, Black Swan relies heavily on “occularization,” the spectator’s adoption of a narrative vantage point through a direct or indirect levelling with a character’s visual perception inside the film’s narrative. In Black Swan, the gaze of the character and that of the camera coincide to such an extent that everything becomes possible. Psychotic delirium, particularly in the last breathless minutes of the film, is thus shown through an intense distortion of reality via maximal subjectification and internalization of the narrative instance. Aronofsky even takes the viewer so close to Natalie Portman’s character that things ultimately become physical. The most striking hallucinatory sequences in the film are arguably those in which Nina sees herself metamorphosing into a black swan. These shots, such as the feathers suddenly growing in her back or her foot becoming a palm, captured in very close shots, are among the most penetrating of the film. They provide a striking experience for the viewer, illustrating or even fleshing out Michael Fuery’s comments on the issue of looking directly at madness:
We do not penetrate madness to see its impossibilities; we experience them as the rub against it. It is this initial site of resistance that shows us we are witnessing madness. It is a site that has become so invested with fear that the systems for representing it often carry a sense of the medusa—to gaze directly at madness will bring about a transformation of the self.9
Spider (2002)
David Cronenberg’s Spider came out in 2002. The film is an adaptation of Patrick McGrath’s eponymous novel, published in 1991. Resting its textual artifice on the literary tradition of the “madman’s diary” as well as more paradigmatic unreliable narratives in the tradition of Edgar Allan Poe, McGrath’s novel is a journey into the depths of schizophrenia in which Spider, the erratic narrator of his own life story, gradually traces his way back to his own past and the murder of his mother which he perpetrated in a totally delusional state, convinced that she had been replaced by another woman, a prostitute named Hilda with whom Spider’s father was having an affair. While the novel, relying heavily on inner ghosts and hallucinations, might have provided Cronenberg with several spectacular sequences of visual delirium, the director chose not to include such scenes, opting instead for a starker mode of representation, making Spider “as bleak and reality-based as a movie about mental illness can be,”10 in the same vein as Lodge Kerrigan’s Clean, Shaven (1994). This is not to say, however, that hallucinations do not feature at all in Spider. On the contrary, they insidiously enter the film’s narrative and give the spectator access to the truth behind Spider’s delusional universe. The status of hallucinations in the film is rather complex. With one exception, they occur during moments of remembrance, either through reverie—long moments of analepsis that cannot be described as flashbacks but rather as recollections—or, more often, through moments of inner introspection via the writing of his own journal. On several occasions, we see Spider (Ralph Fiennes), alone in his garret room, scribbling incomprehensible hieroglyphs on a torn diary, before we understand we have been propelled back into his past. In these sequences, simply introduced by cuts instead of dissolves which have become the convention for such retrospective returns, we see Spider as an adult back physically to the territories of his childhood. Spider features on screen twice, as an adult and as a child (Bradley Hall), both as the witness and protagonist of his past. Such dual incarnation to signify a return to the past is not so unconventional, having already been used quite successfully by Ingmar Bergman and Woody Allen, among others. Besides, these scenes are not exactly instances of hallucinations but moments of retrospection. However, in Spider, the character’s past is a delusional one, and his narrative quite unreliable. This is where hallucinations find their peculiar function. Instead of providing, as in Black Swan, moments of intense visual spectacle or, as in A Beautiful Mind, overly evident apparitions, hallucinations in Spider work their way discreetly through the character’s visual memories shared by the spectator who, for a long while, will not be able to identify them as such. This is of course particularly true for the (non) metamorphosis of Spider’s mother into Hilda, the prostitute who, Spider believes, has usurped her in the family home.
While Spider’s delusion is total and will ultimately lead him to commit matricide, the spectator is trapped in a visual jigsaw puzzle, confused and unable to identify precisely who Hilda is, as both she and Spider’s mother are interpreted by the same actress (Miranda Richardson) yet so differently that one can never be certain of their identity. While we, spectators, know we are following a madman’s memories, we remain in a state of ambiguity, unable to know much more than the madman, until, that is, he also projects Hilda’s face onto Mrs. Wilkinson’s (Lynn Redgrave), the warden of the home he has found refuge in after having been left out of the asylum.
Hallucinations in Spider are thus used against traditional conventions in the context of a film staging a schizophrenic character struggling with his psychotic condition. Their eminently ambiguous status allows for the creation of an unreliable film text that avoids the pitfalls of excessive spectacularization.
Take Shelter (2011)
While still dealing with psychotic hallucinations, Jeff Nichols’ Take Shelter, released in 2011, also provides an interesting variation on the theme of delusional visions. First, it shifts away from huge Oscar-winning productions to a more low-key, almost independent cinema. Second, it links hallucinations to other forms of fear, such as that of global destruction, stirring some deep-rooted American collective nightmares and bridging the gap between the personal and the apocalyptic.
Unlike what happens in the three films previously studied and in most films dealing with hallucinations, Curtis, the protagonist (Michael Shannon) does not entirely fall prey to his hallucinations. As the film unfolds, Curtis struggles against the onset of his psychotic disorder, trying to resist his gradual collapse, taking medication and consulting therapists. Repeatedly in the first part of the movie, he is plagued by nightmares from which he awakens in a state of terror. We mentioned earlier that images seen in dreams or nightmares are a form of hallucinations, distinct from psychotic delirious ones, and in most cases, closer to the viewers’ experience than the latter. Hence this strange, even uncanny feeling of connecting back to reality when the nightmare comes to its abrupt end shared by both character and spectator.
Take Shelter does not propel the viewer into a deluded world of nightmarish hallucinations. Unlike A Beautiful Mind, its narrative is not based on withdrawal of crucial information—which allows for unexpected twists and spectacular revelations. It is the narrative of a crumbling psyche, on the threshold of catastrophe. As in Black Swan, the camera remains focused on the protagonist, yet apart from the nightmare sequences we do not share Curtis’s visions. On the contrary, Michael Shannon’s stony and tormented face remains the locus of a profound enigma.
Those who have seen the film do know, however, that an unexpected final twist—or twister, rather—will occur in the final sequence. Beyond its fantastic quality, reconnecting madness somewhat boldly with the genre of the supernatural, this final, apocalyptic moment combines a sense of doom with the triumph of what Derrida called “the truth of delirium.”11 In this instant of absolute revelation where the Book of Job meets that of John, the viewer experiences the catastrophic Word;12 the madman’s “hyper-acuteness of the senses,” to echo Poe in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” has indeed become a Revelation.
Conclusion
One could ultimately raise the issue of the ethics of such films. Beyond their mere spectacular effects and the thrill of experiencing delusion and psychotic alterity in a primarily entertaining way, is there a place in such movies for a viewer’s ethical response to a disease that is often agonizing for those who suffer from it?
When confronted with patients suffering from hallucinations, mental health practitioners are generally advised to bring the patient to a state of “double-consciousness,” infusing doubt into his or her certainty.13 By twisting this statement ever so slightly, one may raise the following question: does the double consciousness of the film-spectator inform him about the single psychotic reality of the hallucination?
This may be doubted. To trigger viewers’ empathy in the face of psychotic disorders, films should not remain within the boundaries of the classic Hollywood paradigm. The comfortable stability of the product is too big an obstacle to allow a truly meaningful insight into the thralls of such disturbed psyches. One must turn to more “borderline” movies to do so. Films like Polanski’s Repulsion, Kerrigan’s Clean, Shaven or Keane, or even, more recently, Bronstein’s Frownland, do not necessarily shatter the cinematic conventions of the feature films, yet they disrupt them to such an extent that the viewing experience becomes an experience of alterity. Only through such heterological processes can filmmakers produce something ethically meaningful in front of the catastrophe of psychosis.
Notes
1. Jason Horsley, The Secret Life of Movies: Schizophrenic and Shamanic Journeys in American Cinema (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2003), 33–34.
2. Marcel Oms, “La vie quotidienne au cinéma: image de la folie, folie des images,” CinémAction n° 50 (1989): 88. [My translation]
3. Patrick Fuery, Madness and Cinema: Psychoanalysis, Spectatorship and Culture (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004), 15.
4. Henry Ey, Traité des hallucinations, 2 vols. (Paris: Masson, 1973).
5. “Si le cinéma représente tant bien que mal l’hallucination, il a quelque chose de fondamental à voir lui-même, en tant que projection, avec cette manière de projeter des fantasmes sur la réalité, de les métamorphoser en vrais-faux percepts, dans cet entre-deux où la conscience claudique. “ [My translation]; Dominique Chateau, La subjectivité au cinema (Rennes, France: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2011), 82.
6. It should be remembered here that the Greek etymology of the word fantasma means “the sudden apparition of images,” which somehow could stand as the most embryonic definition of the cinematographic experience.
7. “In classical Hollywood narration the conventions of continuity editing, unobstrusive cinematography, and realist sound design frequently elide the narrator’s perspective and present it as an objective and ideologically neutral viewpoint on a story that unfolds naturally in space and time.” James Stadler, Pulling Focus. Intersubjective Experience, Narrative Films and Ethics (New York: Continuum Press, 2008), 68.
8. Hallucinatory sequences can also be very long (over 10 minutes) and include several diegetic developments.
9. Fuery, Madness and Cinema, 16.
10. Sharon Packer, Movies and the Modern Psyche (Westport, CT: Praeger Books, 2007), 167.
11. Jacques Derrida, Mal d’archives (Paris: Galilée, 1995), 136.
12. Julia Kristeva, Folle Vérité: Vérité et vraisemblance du texte psychotique (Paris: Seuil, 1979), 9.
13. I would here like to thank Pr. Vignoles of Le Vinatier Psychiatric Hospital (Bron, France) for his expertise and the richness of conversations we have had on the matter.