Lillian sends Frances to Meadowbrook Hospital for some rest — but we hear the real reason from the Man in Charge: That in her “present excited state,” her “mother is unable to control her.” At Frances’s intake interview, the Director of Meadowbrook reassures her that “for creative people under stress, erratic behavior is not uncommon,” but Frances already hears alarm bells:
FRANCES
I don’t want to be what you want to make me. . dull, average, normal!
Cut to a syringe plunged into her thigh like a meat thermometer into a roast, and a rubber guard thrust in her mouth, for her own protection during an induced bout of insulin shock. Frances tries to make nice and polite after that, soon telling the Director how much the treatment at Meadowbrook has helped her, how excited she is to return to her exciting movie star life. Good, he tells her—“Your mother has such big plans for you!” But he also tells her she still has obvious feelings of “anxiety, hostility, and guilt”—and that she isn’t going anywhere.
FRANCES
You’re trying to rearrange what’s going on in my head. You’re trying to drive me crazy!
She escapes and rushes to Mother, telling her she’s finally figured out the why of her messy life: The actress biz doesn’t work for her, she plans to buy a country house and have a vegetable garden instead: “I’ve realized the only responsibility I have is to myself.” She isn’t going to be a movie star again, but that flips Mother out—“You selfish, selfish child!”—and Frances is next dragged shrieking, shrieking, shrieking, down a hallway in a straightjacket.
We’re back to electroshock. It’s the now-familiar scene: Several people hold the patient down, the conductive gel is smeared on, a rolled towel is shoved in her mouth, the dial turned, that brief and innocuous buzz, and then the convulsions, the jerking, the straining against restraint. She’s thrown in a snake pit of a ward with other wacko women — unlike McMurphy’s relatively placid wardmates, these gals are underworld Gothic in their excessive, whooping, drooling craziness, they’re Olivia de Havilland’s freakish snakes, and Frances practices her next Good Girl speech on them, rehearsing her next pleas to be released. She dooms herself when she commits the ultimate sin; Frances tells her Mother — she shrieks it, in fact — that she doesn’t love her. That’s it.
Cut to a procedure room, where a White-Coated Doctor describes the beauty of what happens when a slender instrument is slid up under a person’s eyelid to sever the nerves of the temporal lobe, the nerves that “deliver emotional energy to ideas.” Electroshock first, to sedate the patient, helps, of course. That way, you can do ten an hour. Frances, bruised and covered with sores, is wheeled in, strapped to a gurney, while the White-Coated Doctor caresses something like an ice pick.
WHITE-COATED DOCTOR
With the cure comes a loss of affect, a kind of emotional flattening, with diminished creativity and imagination. After all, it is their imaginations and emotions that are disturbed.
The White-Coated Doctor then holds up a hammer the shape of a small mallet, and, just out of frame, thank God, thank God, positions the pick, takes aim, and there’s a gentle but definitive tap. End shrieking. Cut to black, then the final shell of Frances, years later, autopiloting her way through a 1958 episode of This Is Your Life, then zombie-ing off alone down a dark Hollywood street.
Feelings of anxiety, hostility, guilt, a daughter blurting out I don’t love you and a mother’s accusatory You selfish, selfish child! — is that really all it takes?
I’m excessively sweet to my mother for the rest of the day.
My first therapist, when I was around fifteen, was a lovely man in sweaters named Steve, with an unthreatening office in velours and earth tones and macramé’d hanging plants. I saw him once a week and I remember he insisted I pay $15 toward each session — my mother was paying the rest — in order for me to feel more responsible and involved in my own treatment.
Treatment for what? Many of my friends went to therapists, and most of our parents certainly had. It was the late 1970s, it was Marriage Encounter and EST, it was the San Fernando Valley. It was an expected coming-of-age ritual, like nose jobs, a status symbol, even, a casual qualification for club membership. Annie Hall, an Unmarried Woman, and Ordinary People all went to shrinks. My parents had divorced a few years earlier, but that was expected, too, and, in comparison with other parents’ divorces — in comparison with other parents’ marriages, even — it seemed relatively bumpless, untraumatic, everything done by the book. I was by the book as well, a good kid, trouble-free and achieving, good grades, good friends, never cause for worry, a sweet-natured, self-reliant daughter who had learned to make zero demands on the self-absorbed, physically and emotionally absent father, on whom the divorce-traumatized, needy mess of a mother could lean, depend, the one who didn’t need any taking care of herself, no problem at all, a good good girl, a fucking Good Girl.
My mother behaved as if my visits to a shrink were perfectly ordinary, like going for a haircut — and yet, paradoxically, she seemed bewildered by it, taken aback that her perfect daughter was showing any kind of crack. I had asked, tentatively, vaguely, not wanting to alarm or disturb, if I could “talk to someone”; there was something hot and coiling inside of me, a simmer that terrified me with its threat of mess, like tomato sauce in a pot on the stove, little bubbles exploding to spatter the range with orange grease. There was no room in the house for my mess. I remember, at the first visit, numbly asking Therapist Steve if he wanted to hear my dreams. He said sure, because the process of discussing them could open stuff up. I don’t remember what they opened up, but I know I started to cry, loudly, and then I tried to stop crying, because crying leads to wailing and wailing leads to shrieking, and if I began to shriek and explode that way, I thought I might not be able to stop. It isn’t good to be a shrieking Afternoon Movie Woman; people who say they care will do anything to get you to stop. And who knows what else might blurt out of you, along with the shrieks?
But everything was fine, really, perfect, I kept insisting in between choked sobs, so what was there to sit on a brown velour couch and complain of, what was there to cry or shriek about? I was ashamed of my distress, aware of my privileged life — what was I making such a spattery fuss for? Why be anxious, hostile, guilty? Therapist Steve seemed so nice, caring, but you never know; I apologized and smiled a lot, trying to assert myself as unanxious and already meek. But for fifty minutes, once a week: An explosion of choking, convulsive sobs without reason or source, of gasping for air.
I stopped seeing Therapist Steve not long after I started driving. My indulgent grandfather bought me a car for my sixteenth birthday and I was abruptly empowered; you can drive yourself places, escape to and away from, you’re an adult, autonomous, and it worked on me, somehow, that new ability to navigate the Ventura Freeway meant the magical ability to control myself and my destiny, even just a few miles of it. In the confined safe space of a Honda Civic, I could breathe. I was incredibly relieved; no more encroaching threat of orderlies in white shirts or shiny black machines, no more inexplicable crying, not for me.