I understand why John doesn’t want to take those pills, why Frances refuses to be “dull, average, normal,” why McMurphy can’t keep from igniting the oil fire of his personality before Ratched’s frigid gaze. Because what if it’s that tiny, tiny fragment of your beautiful mind that does hold your equilibrium or the true core of your identity? What if it’s the exact nerve cells of your uniquely mad genius that wind up with their circuitry scrambled to hell? What if Crazy Lisa is right? What if it’s the “disturbed” imaginations wherein lie the sonnets or sonatas, the equations, the chiaroscuros, the distinguishing spark? What are “ideas” without any “emotional energy” as juice? Memento ergo sum, and what if it’s precisely that off-kilter level of serotonin that allows you access to those memories that make you, you?
I watched the movie again the other day, and I realize I no longer identify at all with John, the crazy one; I identify with Alicia, with her dilemma. Her decision not to commit him is loving, humane, not passive denial — she’s the anti-Ratched, for she wants to empower, not control. And I realize I have no idea how my grandfather actually felt about my Aunt Edith, and those decisions that he had to make, time after time after time, to have her locked away. I know he resented the responsibility, yes, but — did he also do it out of genuine concern? Love? A hope that she would be cured? My Aunt Edith probably wasn’t going to kill anyone, but she might have wound up in a ditch, beaten or stabbed to death, or self-deadened with suicidal despair. Is it unloving, inhumane, to take away someone’s power to self-destruct? Isn’t that what we really should trust our loved ones to do? And hope they make the right choice? I have to wonder about this now from the other side: Faced with a crashing-and-burning loved one on my hands, would I be able to sign those forms?
At the end of The Snake Pit, after a tidy Freudian unraveling of her neuroses, Olivia asks her doctor how she can be sure she won’t wind up in the pit again; he snaps off the light, lets her stand a moment in the dark, then points out she now knows where the light switch is. Click. So although she might find herself in the darkness once again, at least now she’ll always have the power to find her way to the light. But what happens, say, to someone like my Aunt Edith — someone for whom even the light switch has no power, no meaning? What about someone who can’t just click her heels?
It doesn’t matter, in a way, that ECT is now, by all accounts “largely voluntary, a last-resort option” and a lifesaver for many people (see: Carrie Fisher); it doesn’t matter which way the debate or the proof on it swings; it doesn’t matter that I am not clinically bipolar or borderline or that I most likely will not become a paranoid schizophrenic or (I hope) the muttering bag lady on the corner, off her rocker, off her meds, the one I turn my eyes from, or a space traveler flung two thousand years forward into an evolutionary quagmire. It doesn’t matter whether any of us really does have control over our own mental and emotional well-being — the psychobiologists and the psychosociologists can battle that one out — or agree on a definition of the word “crazy,” that we often simply fall back on the slippery and subjective cousin-definition of porn: “We know it when we see it.”
And it doesn’t matter, in a way, that my own family members, my friends, the people I trust with the spare key to my life, would never, I think, I think, sign any papers (I wonder), would never allow the straps or machines or (I hope) the stripping away of me.
Because there is still that thin, shaky line between being crazy and being inconvenient, and who hasn’t worried about losing their grip? About losing that weak clutch on sanity, reality, self, or about those things being pried away? “There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness,” says Melville. The threat of that will always loom for me, and perhaps it’s the cautionary and inspiring images in my mind of McMurphy and Frances and Janet and John, along with women cast into gloomy pits, or women snapping back on their own lights, and version A and version B of a crazy aunt, that help me keep it all in check, the wisdom and the madness, teeter and threat, the images that show me how to go just crazy enough to empower myself and not the devil in my soul, how not to wind up unself’d and groping in the dark.
1One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (United Artists, 1975): screenplay by Lawrence Hauben and Bo Goldman, based on the novel by Ken Kesey and the play by Dale Wasserman; directed by Milos Forman; with Jack Nicholson and Louise Fletcher
2Suddenly, Last Summer (Columbia Pictures, 1959): screenplay by Gore Vidal, adapted from the play by Tennessee Williams; directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, with Elizabeth Taylor, Katharine Hepburn, and Montgomery Clift
3The Snake Pit (20th Century Fox, 1948): screenplay by Frank Partos and Millen Brand; directed by Anatole Litvak; with Olivia de Havilland
4Frances (Universal, 1982): screenplay by Eric Bergren, Christopher De Vore, and Nicholas Kazan; directed by Graeme Clifford; with Jessica Lange, Kim Stanley, and Sam Shepard
5An Angel at My Table (ABC/Television New Zealand/Sharmill Films, 1991): screenplay by Laura Jones, based on the autobiographies of Janet Frame; directed by Jane Campion; with Kerry Fox
6Planet of the Apes (20th Century Fox, 1968): screenplay by Michael Wilson and Rod Serling, based on the novel by Pierre Boulle; directed by Franklin J. Schaffner; with Charlton Heston, Kim Hunter, and Maurice Evans
7Girl, Interrupted (Columbia Pictures, 1999): screenplay by James Mangold, Lisa Loomer, and Anna Hamilton Phelan, based on the autobiography by Susanna Kaysen; directed by James Mangold; with Winona Ryder, Angelina Jolie, Whoopi Goldberg, and Vanessa Redgrave
8The Wizard of Oz (MGM, 1939): screenplay by Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson, and Edgar Allan Woolf, based on the novel by L. Frank Baum; directed by Victor Fleming; with Judy Garland and Billie Burke
9A Beautiful Mind (Imagine Entertainment, 2001): screenplay by Akiva Goldsman, based on the book by Sylvia Nasar; directed by Ron Howard; with Russell Crowe, Jennifer Connelly, and Christopher Plummer
HOW TO BE LOLITA
THE SCHOOLGIRL, THE NYMPHET, THE MUSE, AND THE INEXORABLE TICKING CLOCK
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Taxi Driver
Bugsy Malone
Pretty Baby
Lolita
Manhattan
MISS JEAN BRODIE
Little girls!
she announces imperiously at the front of the classroom, here at the Marcia Blaine School for Girls, calling us to order, demanding our immediate attention.10 And I pay attention, of course, for I am a little girl, she is speaking to me — although, at six years old, I am younger than Miss Brodie’s thirteen-year-old pupils. Perhaps I am even too young to be attending this PG-rated movie, but I am accompanied by my parents, after all, and it’s about a schoolteacher and her devoted students in 1930s Scotland, they probably reasoned — if they ever reasoned about such things — so how inappropriate could it be? And how could this impassioned, in-her-prime Miss Jean Brodie (Oscar-winning Maggie Smith at her fine-boned loveliest) offer anything to a little girl but the wisest counsel, the sagest of lessons on life? Especially in that enchanting Scottish burr?