The grandmother of my friend with the country estate and pleasure-dome home movie theatre recently suggested she rent Fly Away Home, a very charming family movie about a girl and a gaggle of motherless geese, that the kids might enjoy that one. But my friend won’t do it — it isn’t any concern about violence or sex in film, she explains to me; it’s because image shapes experience, actually creates it. Her children can take a walk in the woods or along the river and see actual geese; she wants their later memories to be of their authentic experience, she wants them to remember the realities of their lives, not the manufactured versions offered to us by a mainstream corporate culture. Later, she says, with a foundation of real experience in place, the kids can watch all the movies they like.
I admire her philosophy, the integrity of her vision. And she’s right; I’ve often questioned just how impressionable I was — and still am. I’ve wondered about the influence of film on my own authenticity. But don’t we all, to some degree, project ourselves onto the screen, cast ourselves as the main character in the imagined “remake” of every movie we see? And I didn’t grow up in the country, with wild geese around, so if the closest to wild geese I might come is watching Fly Away Home, at least I’ll always have that — those abandoned baby geese, for an hour and a half, aren’t a secondhand experience; they become real babies for me to mother, too, and that’s a lesson I’ll happily learn.
So, for better or worse, whether it’s due to subliminal absorption or conscious emulation, my identity has been as shaped by the movies I’ve seen as by anything else in real life. The very thing that concerns my friend is unalterably, inextricably part of my reality: Movies have created entire aspects of my self. They’ve given me definition. They’ve taught me how to light Sabbath candles, how to seduce someone with strawberries. Bulldoze my way past writer’s block. Go a little crazy. Characters are my role models, my teachers; the movie theatre has been a classroom. The blur has happened, and I often catch myself thinking: Did I actually do that? Say that?
Or did I just see it in a movie?
HOW TO GO CRAZY
ELECTROSHOCK, BEAUTIFUL MINDS, AND THAT NASTY PIT OF SNAKES
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Frances
Suddenly, Last Summer
The Snake Pit
An Angel at My Table
Planet of the Apes
Girl, Interrupted
A Beautiful Mind
I had my first experience with electroshock therapy when I was eleven.
It was 1975, the year I started seventh grade, and boys my age were strutting their Crazy Jack Nicholson imitations from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest all over school.1 I know I saw the R-rated Cuckoo’s Nest when it opened in a theatre, and I know some adult must have accompanied me — my parents, or an indifferent babysitter, although why would anyone take an eleven-year-old girl to see such a movie? — because I was too timid and well-behaved to sneak into verboten theatres on my own. I didn’t break rules; I was scared Something Bad would happen, that vague threat if you somehow sullied your permanent record by misbehaving, by acting out.
In Cuckoo’s Nest, Randle P. McMurphy, a.k.a. Crazy Jack, is a charismatic petty criminal who tries to evade prison by feigning craziness, which he thinks will earn him some easy time in a mental ward. Doesn’t work out to his benefit, in the end. The film was shot in the real Oregon State Hospital in Salem, and looks it — some of the zombielike extras with deformed craniums seem too creepily real. Lots of metal doors clanging, chains clanking, images of leather restraints installed on cots, and stooped men with shaking hands. Orderlies are incongruously dressed in white button-up shirts and black bowties and look just like diner soda jerks from the 1950s. It all haunts. At eleven, I feel haunted and creeped out even as I watch from the safe distance of my theatre seat, even as I tell myself it’s only a movie; when the dazed and confused patients line up to get their little Dixie cups of pills and water, I can almost smell that thin wet-paper smell as they swallow.
Bad-behaving McMurphy comes up against Nurse Ratched, the white-stocking’d, sexually repressed, modulated-voice, emasculating image of the Bitch in Charge; when McMurphy boasts to an orderly that he’ll be getting the hell out soon, and the orderly grinningly tells him, “You’re going to stay with us until we let you go,” McMurphy, for the first time, realizes he’s trapped — that Nurse Ratched is truly in control of his destiny, his body, his mind.
But what haunts me the most, then and now, is the scene where McMurphy, after inciting a near riot during one of Nurse Ratched’s therapy sessions, is given electroshock therapy. He isn’t wheeled into the small white procedure room, strapped to a gurney — no, he strolls in, with that cocky Nicholson bounce and grin teenage boys love to emulate, oblivious to what’s in store. When he’s asked to lie down on a table, he cheerfully complies. My heart starts racing around here — I know what is coming, I believe, but I don’t know how I know, I just know in my belly it is the punishment coming, the Something Bad. I am too old to look away, to seek the comforting glance or hand of an indifferent adult. McMurphy’s shoes are removed, conductive gel is smeared on his temples, and I feel the pasty chill of that on my own face. He obligingly takes into his mouth a rubber guard that looks exactly like the dental plate my orthodontist uses to take impressions of my teeth for braces. Attendants place padded white tongs on either side of his head and grip him under his chin, a flip is switched, and there’s a brief, brief buzz that isn’t the worst of it — it’s the seizing up and sudden clench of McMurphy’s body, the whine from the back of his throat, the convulsive shaking and straining he does for long moments after the shock itself has ceased, the way everyone has to struggle to hold him down. I watch that with my pulse racing, my fingers gripping the armrests hard, my own body in some kind of mimetic, rigid seize. McMurphy is eventually lobotomized at the end of the movie, but it’s off-screen and not nearly as memorable.