Mondays through Fridays, everyday at 3:00, my local ABC station used to run “The Afternoon Movie.” I’d come home from junior high and heat up a Stouffer’s Tuna Noodle Cassarole, open my algebra or history book, and watch classic old movies with Bette Davis or Audrey Hepburn. I see Suddenly, Last Summer this way, with Elizabeth Taylor; her character, Catherine, has been committed to Lion’s View State Asylum by her rich evil spider of an Aunt Violet, who pressures caring psychiatrist Dr. Cukrowicz (Montgomery Clift) to perform surgery on her rambling, babbling, violent, and promiscuous niece.2 Dr. Cukrowicz is a lobotomy specialist, who calls the procedure “the sharp knife in the mind that kills the devil in the soul.” Aunt Violet says she wants the surgery to help her niece, but in truth she wants snipped out and away an unpleasant and scandalous memory of Catherine’s dead cousin, Violet’s son. The aunt wields absolute control over the family, using her power and money to convince Catherine’s feckless mother to sign the authorization for it, and this Ratched-like supremacy is unnerving to me; it’s clear that Catherine isn’t crazy: She’s inconvenient. Beautiful Catherine convinces Dr. Cukrowicz to get her out of the ward of crazy, shrieking women; she gets her hair done and gets out of the surgery at the end, too, and I expect to feel relieved, but I still feel a sense of personal, familial threat hovering in my own living room. That evening I take pains to do an extra good and industrious job on my homework. I tidy up my room. I offer to do chores.
I also watch The Snake Pit, with Olivia de Havilland as another going-crazy woman, this time committed by her caring husband to Juniper Hill State Mental Hospital after she’s exhibited uncomfortably odd behavior: blankness, confusion, inexplicable hostility.3 There is a nasty montage of hospital-gowned Olivia undergoing shock treatments — menacing shiny black machine, padded tongs, conductive gel scooped from what looks like a pot of marmalade — but the zapping itself is off-screen, save for the moans. I give the quickest glances to the jerking feet, the naked legs that try to thrash. But I’m drawn back in later when Olivia, a wannabe writer, is given a typewriter and permission to write one hour a day; she feels stronger, more assertive, is looking to reclaim some control over her self, and makes the mistake of asking the sadistic, vengeful Nurse for the privilege of some privacy.
NURSE
Look, you, being a writer is nothing to be so excited about. It doesn’t set you above the other ladies, you know. . all you have is an exalted view of your own importance!
And as punishment, Olivia is immediately thrust into a ward with the craziest of the crazies. She stands in the throng of ranting and raving women, the camera swoops up, fast, and the ward visually transforms into a huge craggy pit, Olivia lost in the swarm. We next see her, now calm, polite, and well on her way to recovery, telling her caring doctor what she remembers reading once about “the snake pit”—how, in the past, they threw insane people into a pit of snakes in the hope of shocking them back to normality. Because, the theory goes, what might drive a normal person insane might well drive an insane person normal. It seems to work for Olivia — but the movie ends the day she wins release from the asylum, and who knows what happens to her after she gets to go home with her caring husband. Who put her there in the first place. Because her “odd” behavior made him. . uncomfortable.
I still have Crazy Jack in my mind, but Olivia and Catherine become my images of Crazy Women, and they unnerve me because of their helplessness. There is an aunt or a husband in full charge of them; one is vindictive and one is loving, but both have the power to hand a family member over to someone with the even greater power to strap them down, use a sharp knife to kill the devil in their souls — or just an awkward bit of memory — or toss them into a pit of snakes.
Forget it, I tell myself, they’re just a couple of old, outdated movies. I empty the dishwasher, I Windex the glass coffee table in the living room, I bury my nose in whatever I’m supposed to be studying, my x-plus-y calculations or review of the Marshall Plan; no resentful attitude against work, no laziness, no bad behavior here.
Camarillo State Mental Hospital, in Camarillo, California, was once the largest mental institution in the western United States. Now a college campus, the grounds are still considered a “Historic Asylum.” Charlie Parker wrote “Relaxin’ at Camarillo” in 1947 after a six-month stay there for a nervous breakdown. Rumor has it the Eagles wrote “Hotel California” in its honor. After its closing, an editorial in the Ventura County Star bemoaned the loss of their local hospital, “which for six decades provided a humane and tranquil refuge for the mentally ill. . For some, the well-tended grounds and Mission-style buildings were the only real home they’d ever known, and the caring staff had become as close as family.”
As a kid, I never realized I had a famous mental institution practically in my neighborhood, the we’re-getting-closer point en route from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara along a highway lined with gentle eucalyptus trees. My Aunt Edith’s multiple commitments there happened long before my time and my experience of her; vague references to Aunt Edith’s “craziness” usually went over my head, and I didn’t connect her with lockups in a Camarillo asylum, or with Olivia de Havilland and Elizabeth Taylor, with their shapeless smocks and Medusa hair, staggering around the bottom of a snake pit and screaming to get out, until I was older and my mother told me more of the story, and I realized that my memory’s version of the pleasant lady with the crisp-folded $5 bills didn’t, perhaps, really exist.
Watching Frances in 1982, when I am eighteen, I spend much of the first half of the movie amazed the lead actress is the same insipid girl from the Jeff Bridges King Kong.4 This time Jessica Lange is 1930s movie star Frances Farmer, who goes to Hollywood, refuses to conform, leaves after she can’t get along with anybody, gets used and abused in a love affair with Clifford Odets, returns to Hollywood, and continues to piss people off — from that point it’s pretty much a sad downhill, as the ruling figure in her life, her mother, Lillian, keeps terming her ornery willfulness as mental illness and commits her to a series of progressively worse insane asylums.
The movie initially tries, I think, to make the point that strong, passionate women get punished, but what, exactly, Frances is so strong or passionate about isn’t especially clear. Her politics are imprecise to me, and early in the movie it seems she gets into trouble or antagonizes people for foolish, bring-it-on-yourself reasons: Bad behavior such as driving drunk and then assaulting the cop who pulled her over, or showing up three hours late for shooting, which has nothing to do with integrity or the courage of one’s convictions and is all about being egotistical and rude. Even the journalist who adores her from start to finish tells her she ought to pick her battles better and fight the ones that count. She does a lot of shrieking, and it seems unprovoked. The hysteria just hangs there. But once she’s in the hands of people with power, once she’s placed in that very first “convalescent home,” the shrieking becomes rooted, substantial. It finally makes sense. As the movie goes on, shrieking becomes all she can do, all she has left — until the end, when even the power of outburst and outrage is taken from her.
I see the movie with my mother. Early on, Lillian Farmer applauds her teenage daughter for winning an essay contest, clearly a vicarious thrill for her, and my mother and I both feel warm and happy and identifying at that; I am a high-achieving, well-adjusted teen — a role at which I excel — and she is my biggest, most voluble fan. But when the movie shifts, when Frances starts acting out and her mother’s devoted and concerned maternal signature on papers becomes a warrant, a weapon, a threat, my old discomfort returns, increases.