[A general note: I tend not to provide links, as if to “end-noted references,” to statements in my movie discussions, because I think a lot of the facts can be searched for online readily enough by people are about as avid about movies as I am. And I am just playing around with a sort of “hobby” area of interest with my movie discussions; no matters of national security are involved here. But where a certain point may seem to require backing up, I’ll try to present a reference when I can, either as a hyperlink or as an “old-time” end-note type reference, where a reader's seeking out the print source may be needed. For instance (see the Duel blog entry), do you puzzle over my assertion that Stanley
[Hitchcock section edited 2/17/12.]
Introduction
As Tolstoy famously said in Anna Karenina, and I paraphrase, all happy families are the same, but each unhappy family is different.
Meanwhile, movies can be looked at as art, entertainment, and a sort of cultural advertisement—of us to outsiders. A given movie can embody all three purposes at varying levels of success.
With movies as a sort of cultural emissary of the United States to the world, and their growth in treating complex topics over recent decades, perhaps no area is so interesting as their dealing with issues of mental illness, personality disorders, and the like, particularly among women, where the forms of the illness in the individual, and the ways others in her life relate to such a woman, can be complex, subtle, and demanding for significant others. And if foreign populations, especially those who do not accord women the social status they have in the U.S.
For a two-hour movie to treat such a thing is hard enough; and then the issue arises of how much a wide swath of the paying audience can relate to such depictions. Obviously, not everyone can. It’s tough enough for these women to get understanding in their own lives; how can we expect a range of people as turn up to watch a movie will all be in accord on what this woman’s life is about, and what it means to them?
This is obviously a complex subject with many nuances. In this two-part blog entry, I hope to stimulate some thought along these lines without being definitive or exhaustive. Plus, I am at a point in my life where my sympathy for women, which I long thought was pretty good, has been tried as perhaps at no other time. So for me to be a generous fellow in this two-part entry is something of a minor miracle.
Also, though I want to be fair to each movie I deal with here, I am aiming to “bring this blog entry home” in a discussion of what probably seems most warm in moviegoers’ memories—and hence “most relevant”—the 2010 movie Black Swan, which I consider problematic.
First, what some might see as a bearishly complex look at an old Hitchcock movie.
Part 1: Hitchcock’s Marnie (1964); Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968); and Milos Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)
1. Hitchcock’s last great film, though a quirky one
It’s of course debatable what position in the movie pantheon should be occupied by Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980), i.e., where he stands among the greatest film directors in the English language; and many people have written books on him, discussed him, etc. I have referred to his movies in my Internet comments mainly to have a frame of reference, regarding certain ways of doing art or addressing certain complex issues, that people can understand because so much of his work is so familiar, if not equally deeply understood by those who know this work.
And I certainly don’t expect to set any standards in understanding of Hitchcock in my Internet comments; if anything, I hope to conform with what could be called the received wisdom on his work, and if I say things about him sometimes that seem at variance with this, well, when any of us talk about movies that we feel worth discussing deeply, idiosyncratic interpretations, readings, etc., will come up, and if we are sane, we let these go by.
It’s been noted that Marnie (1964) is counted among what critics have assessed as the top ten Hitchcock movie in terms of quality, cultural significance, whatever. I would tend to agree with this, but it’s the sort of film that, if you assessed Hitch just on the basis of one film, and you used this film, you’d say, Why is he so honored as he is? But if you look at his best films—arguably, topping at Notorious, Vertigo, Psycho, and North by Northwest—and then threw in Marnie, you’d say yes, it belongs up there, as a sort of also-ran by a master.
(Some say Frenzy was Hitch’s last good film, but to me, Frenzy in various respects is derivative of his own past work, and while it is technically well done, it has no really likable characters and has a cold theme. Marnie is the last good film by Hitch that only he could have chosen to try to do, and get it to work when it does; Frenzy is like something a Hitchcock imitator could have done.)
Fossil of a movie still interesting
Marnie, of course, could seem old-fashioned by today’s standards—and even did, apparently, to some audiences of its time. The focus on the rich, to me, is quaint, as it holds to some age-old standard of a romanticizing eye (hero Mark Rutland runs a publishing company that apparently his father was too much of an oaf to save from imminent collapse, so Mark turned it around; yet Dad turns up like an elderly British squire, dapper with leather vest in big mansion, gushing his small talk about food and perpetual enthusiasm for horses). I personally have always found a focus on the rich in literature to be a bit much to swallow. For instance, it made reading Henry James a little trying, but James was always much better, and more edifying, in his focus on psychological, perceptual, and tried-conscience issues—something that could apply to anyone with a brain.
Perhaps today’s feminists would say the Mark Rutland character—played well by Sean Connery, who was early in his tenure as James Bond, and reading lines here as if he quite understood the script—was a “man after my own heart”: not only a publishing professional, but taking it upon himself to help a troubled young woman who combines thievery and sexual frigidity, and showing an apparent virtuosity as a psychological scholar later in the movie. Actually, I think this character, as just drawn, is one of the more preposterous ones in the movie script (Joseph Stefano, writer of the Psycho script speaking in a Marnie DVD commentary, was originally tapped to write the script of Marnie, and felt the psychiatrist, a separate character in the novel by Winston Graham, should have been kept separate from Mark; but in the final script by Jay Presson Allen, he was combined with Mark).
The movie seems rather oddly constructed in other ways (though its development started before that of the movie The Birds [1963], as if it would immediately follow Psycho). Bernard Herrmann’s score seems to shift between themes and tones abruptly as if echoing the stark shifts in the story (and his score in this movie is a bit heavy-handed or forced when it doesn’t quite work, but tasteful when it does). Some scenes are blocked and filmed rather awkwardly, such as the early scene between Marnie and her mother and a late scene where Marnie and Mark discuss the practical possibilities connected to businessman Strutt’s possibly turning her in. The movie seems to get in its own way—is not nearly as smoothly dreamlike as Vertigo—in respecting the needs of a story that admittedly is complex.
Meanwhile, Connery’s Mark Rutland, however Dutch-uncle he seems today, seems adequately decent within the premises of this movie. And Tippi Hedren acts in this movie (or gives her best shot to a difficult part); in The Birds, she is mainly window-dressing, I think.
Psychological angle keeps it alive
Some might say another old-fashioned aspect of the movie is its psychological interpretation, as it articulates the consequences of her suffering in early life; she suffered trauma as a girl in accidentally killing a sailor who’d served as a john for her mother, who was working as a prostitute to support herself and her daughter.
To me, the psychological side is the most interesting part of the movie, and most amenable to modern interpretation. We can note within his corpus other (on the surface) outmoded Hitchcockian psychological depictions—the Freudian terms of “acute melancholia with a guilt complex” for Jimmy Stewart’s Scottie in Vertigo, or the split-personality trope for Norman Bates in Psycho (which I’ve long thought is much more useful as a sort of playful mythologizing, for gothic horror-movie purposes, than as anything educational within the field of psychology).
But the old-fashionedness of these are beside the point as—showing his staying power—Hitchcock generally sets up more general, phenomenologically spelled-out issues of psychology: dramatic and language patterns that allow people to wonder about, and discuss, what X pattern means today, how it relates to their lives according to the current “orthodoxy” defined by the more modern terminology and specific means of relating psychological theories to our lives. For instance, Vertigo is a good template for seeing and discussing a tangled intersection of love and fear of death, specifically in how a suicidal woman to whom we become deeply emotionally attached can leave us emotionally shattered if she soon dies, then we are apt to see the next best candidate for such an attachment as a replication of the first woman.
To me also, difficult mother-daughter relations are always interesting to observe and parse through in a movie, no matter how old-fashioned some facets of the depiction are now. This is partly because such relationships are complex and vary between families, and fitting a meaningful drama about one into a two-hour movie is hard, as one would imagine for any screenwriter and director. In this regard, we can still find interest in, and be touched by, the story of Marnie and her desiccated old mother (emotionally desiccated, that is, while Hitchcock makes allusions to others of his movies in Marnie such as Psycho, hinting at another, more literally desiccated mother, Mrs. Bates). Bernice Edgar, Marnie’s mother, generally well played by Louise Latham, looks in her dowdy way like someone who could have fit in with the Ed, Eunice, and Mama skits on the Carol Burnett Show, and sounds in her first appearance somewhat as if she is a stroke victim—with Southern accent (too heavy for Baltimore) and folksie idioms (e.g., something like “Well I just swore [?]…you take me to the limit…I can’t take all the jump-running you do”).
A “borderline personality” relationship is key
But in the early scenes with Marnie's mother, the family dynamic and mannerisms are set out clearly, and we see she and her relationship with Marnie comprise an example of what seems strikingly modern, which contributes to perhaps the most touching scenes in the movie: the emotionally repressed yet still needy old woman who can spout embittered generalizations about men and in her congealed woundedness and narcissism has built a castle (to live in) of excuses, well-worn self-justification, and control-of-others that has part of its foundations on her daughter’s heart, intruding on her daughter’s rights and emotional and even sexual life. At one point, typically, the mother reacts with explosive anger to the daughter’s acute perceptions of some aspect of their life; here, a crude parental mode of admitting reality bullyingly tries to deny the child’s more honest interpretation of this.
This set of phenomena is one way to describe a sort of “borderline personality” relationship (“BPD” = borderline personality disorder), with Marnie understood as the borderline person, and the mother as troglodytic parent: Marnie is a social deviant and sexually crippled partly because her mother is deriving her own sense of identity and security from colonizing her offspring’s life. The mother’s way of defining reality in certain stark terms, and almost hysterically reacting to the child’s ingenuous questioning of this, is part of a more general form of self-defense called “splitting.”
“Splitting” as a sort of quintessentially borderline symptom is looked at in a notable study that focused on the giftedness of borderline patients as figuring in these patients’ treatment by family members. In this following quote, splitting is not connected specifically with sexual abuse or intrusions: “The very nature of [a parent’s] pathological narcissism...includes primitive defenses [in the parent] that would be very disturbing[,] such as splitting with alternating mental states...” (Lee C. Park, John B. Imboden, Thomas J. Park, Stewart H. Hulse, and H. Thomas Unger, “Giftedness and psychological abuse in borderline personality disorder: Their relevance to genesis and treatment,” Journal of Personality Disorders 6, no. 3 [1992]: 236.)
In Marnie’s case, as we see at the end of the movie, the central value along which a kind of “splitting,” or more exactly in this case a standard by which to fight against some aspect of life, is that of being “decent,” which the mother says she wanted Marnie to grow up to be, and Marnie admits ruefully that that is the case (with “decent” being understood along the lines of “chaste”): Marnie is a thief and a liar, she says, but she is “decent.”
Granted, the movie’s depiction of Marnie and her relationships is not a classic example of a BPD sufferer; but it comes close enough that, despite its heavy-handed or old-fashioned way of conforming with it, it gives us a good example of a kind of person and especially her family nexus that we can use in assessing later examples within movies that come closer to the more typical, and clinically understood, instances of this complex and sad phenomenon. (I believe no other movie by a major director handled this kind of topic up through 1964.)
Further, how Mark Rutland is attracted to Marnie (similarly to Scottie being attracted by Madeline in Vertigo) echoes one quintessential feature of how borderline people can attract the deep sympathy/empathy of others: “[T]he most striking personality feature [of borderline patients] is...particularly their ability both to access and then to strongly influence our private emotions, [which in turn] engender[s]...classical ‘countertransference problems/“special” treatment relationships’...” (Park et al., 233). With this last quote, you can hop over the technical term of “countertransference” and probably have an intuitive understanding of “ ‘special’ treatment relationships.’”
(These patterns of interpreting such personalities will become relevant in looks at other movies in this two-part blog entry.)
In any event, the mother as someone to behold with a sort of awe, as someone both to look at askance and to want to further understand later, is established early on: after the mother has talked to Marnie who has just woken from a bad dream, and Hitchcock lingers with black humor on how the dry old woman stumps with her bad leg down a shadowed stairway, we rather laugh with him, as if you can’t help but ponder the drollness of this person. She becomes more human only at the end of the movie, when she admits to her sordid past.
A movie’s technical sides help deliver the message
Marnie also shows how a director is immeasurably aided by his production team: not just Herrmann, whose score here is more successful in its “spooky-experience” phases (how he combines instruments with exquisite taste for certain particular emotional effects, such as a wily melody for strings, woodwinds, trumpets [?], and flute for “nightmare music,” is always remarkable). But also involved are director of photography (“DP”) Robert Burks and editor George Tomasini, both of whom would be dead within a few years—and who had been central to Hitchcock’s production team through most of his most accomplished movies, starting in the 1950s. Marnie was the last movie made by this team under Hitchcock, and it gets its technically well-built quality from this.
Overall, a movie with much more to recommend it than what flaws in has in technical contrivances, story oddities, and a strange shape to the narrative in terms of its tonal shifts.
Marnie takeaway: dinosaur of a movie shows troubled mother-daughter emotional nexus; story mood is echoed by dramatic music and other movie techniques; the big challenge of crafting such a movie is illustrated.
2. The education of Rosemary Woodhouse
It’s hard to believe that the releases of Marnie and Rosemary’s Baby were only about four years apart. They seem from quite different eras. Moreover, Hitchcock seemed to embody the principle of requiring actors to conform to the prerogatives of where his camera was going (as Janet Leigh said he basically told her to do in Psycho) while Polanski preferred to have his camera follow the actors if they were moving dynamically, even if this required use of a hand-held camera—and of course Polanski is one of the directors (Orson Welles is another) who exemplify the beginning of more modern film-making with this by-now ubiquitous technique. Yet Polanski in his crafting a modern-day horror film, in this his first American work, was compared by critics to Hitchcock.
Rosemary’s Baby may seem quaint to include in my rather arbitrary thematic collection of films for a couple reasons; one is that the way she is a young woman dealing with a problem embodies this in a rather gothic/pulp sense—she has been impregnated by the Devil. I should point out that, strange as it may seem, I have never really believed in the Devil; I’ve always felt it was a superfluous concept. I believe in evil in a fundamental (if not quite theological) sense; bad motives, damagingly sick people and political systems, yes. But not a goat-eyed fellow who, as in this movie, looks like a Halloween mask….
This was a movie to cater to audiences including many blue-collar types, the World War II vets and their children; not only Roman Catholics, but one would presume others of a more religious stripe were addressed in this admittedly genre movie, but also in connection with a general sense of fear at what was becoming of society and the world: by early 1968, you had the Vietnam War deepening; the Cold War ongoing; recent riots in Watts and other areas; young demonstrating in the streets…and people really felt it was a genuine question, not just a pretension of Time magazine to ask on its famous cover, “Is God Dead?,” which the movie glimpses in a waiting room toward its end.
However its catering to a sense of a shaken, traditionalist-minded electorate seems passé now, this movie is still relatable—just as its theological, story-serving premise can be “embraced in willing suspension of disbelief”—as a story of a young, rather naïve, idealistic woman coming to grips with insidious and profound lack of credibility in her very husband and in the small, new community she is within—including two eccentric neighbors, the elderly Castevet couple, Roman and Minnie (the latter played flavoredly by Ruth Gordon).
This movie is also exquisitely well crafted, situating its supernatural shenanigans within a credible and well-portrayed domestic environment and lifestyle. Polanski himself tried to fashion the movie so that people could read it as suggesting Rosemary Woodhouse was merely becoming mentally ill (as a function of pregnancy, not unlike such more recently established medical conditions as postpartum depression and the like), rather than having really been impregnated by the Devil, though her increasing paranoia is for the Castevets’ and their witches’ coven taking her baby for a ritual use, before she finds the baby itself in its black-draped crib.
In this regard the movie is quite like Kubrick’s The Shining, making a supernatural “wormhole” of horrors spill its “treasure” amid the most placid of domestic settings; I think Rosemary’s Baby is better for its quiet, competent craft, while The Shining, as much as I like re-viewing it, is, as one critic has recently said, “engineered.” Rosemary’s Baby movie could also be considered the first real movie of the seventies, before Five Easy Pieces and its ilk; it deals with how we can’t trust any of the infrastructure of middle-class (or local-society) life that we’ve long relied on without complaint. It could be considered an East Coast companion of Polanski’s other great paranoia movie, the West Coast Chinatown (1974), perhaps one of the very greatest movies on the subject of (putative) almost-bottomless American sleaze, which is all the worse for the moral perversion of the character of Noah Cross.
Not to be superfluous in discussion of a movie that is probably familiar to most movie lovers, I should point out that Mia Farrow is really what makes this movie, both as an engrossing story and as a testament to cinematic craft, interesting still after all these years. Only about 22 at time of shooting, which was during the fall of 1967 and early winter of 1967-68 (amid which her husband more than twice her age, Frank Sinatra, served her with divorce papers, and before she went briefly to Rishikesh, more or less in league with The Beatles and others in February 1968), she seems almost otherworldly as a redheaded waif of sorts, at least half Irish (her father, I understand, was from Australia, perhaps explaining her odd accent here).
Her performance is pitch-perfect at almost every turn. We all manage to relate to such an elf, because her story is really one of what to me is the real payoff: not the point of seeing her child in her crib, making her widen her eyes in horror; but being brought to progress inexorably to a sort of adult stand from a lingeringly pious young woman who in a hypnagogic dream (half awake and half dreaming), shaken by the recent suicide of a new neighbor, recalls a time of being apologetic to a nun or such regarding a Catholic-school mishap. Where she progresses to is steely resolve to get to the bottom of finding what was done with her baby, and ending up spitting in the face of her husband (the sometimes disingenuous-lizard Guy, played earthily by John Cassavettes) when he preposterously reminds her, “We’re getting so much in return, Ro.” In short, the unexpected goal of her education, as she is seemingly childlike in a nightie, is to stand up to the appalling perfidy of her husband.
(Which of course is only one component of the predicament she ends up in; the other might end up being, what kind of school to send a child who is half devil?)
I personally enjoy the movie because it seems to give me a window of memory into a past; such things as the New Year’s party remind me of something vaguely similar I was at as a child in about late 1967. And testifying to Polanski’s important focus on details, my seeing Guy taking his phone call about fellow actor Donald Baumgart’s going blind, while he is holding a can of what looks like turpentine, reminds me that, at one time, artists and white-collar types once (without embarrassment) used hand tools and do home fix-up and remodeling, as my father certainly did. (Well, some still do, but you hardly, if ever, see it in movies today, styled as if it were admirable.)
Also to be noted is that this movie escapes being a piece of schlock in an interesting way: longtime director and producer William Castle, who was noted for making second-rate horror movies like House on Haunted Hill, complete with cheesy promotional gimmicks like “Emergo” and so on, produced Rosemary’s Baby. He is glimpsed in a cameo as the old man with a cigar outside the phone booth toward the movie’s end. He may have wanted to direct the movie, but legendary Paramount producer Robert Evans had Roman Polanski direct—a key move, for history (not just of this movie)—with Castle producing.
In light of this, the only hokey scene is when the movie’s underlying premise of the Devil fathering the child comes to the fore, with the christening party or whatever it is at the end. Appropriately punctured by moments of humor, this scene still seems preposterous enough (except, again, for Farrow’s keen performance) that you’re left feeling that Vincent Price, an old hand in Castle’s previous movies, might come sauntering in, with an epicene bisexual mince, in a lime-green sport jacket that would allow him to vie with Sidney Blackmer (Roman Castevet) for king of the tacky bon vivant suit. Fortunately for us all, this doesn’t happen.
The movie might strike today’s young as a quaint snapshot of old times with boxy cars and glimpses of hippie-ish values at a party, but Mia Farrow’s Rosemary is still an artist’s model of young-female moral growth.
Rosemary’s Baby takeaway: a waif of a woman can be the true hero within a domestic context, as she descends into paranoia while pregnant, and ends up justified by the movie’s facts. Craft depicts a solid domestic scene that makes a hidden abomination all the more startling.
3. A seminal modern psych film, with a misogynist element: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)
This movie can be called the granddad of the modern psychiatric-treatment film, and of related films that can be grouped under the rubric “critical personal-problem films.” These two groups can be said to encompass some of the films in Part 2 of this set of reviews. Since Cuckoo’s Nest is so famous, and many people seem to have an opinion on it, any “explication for the uninitiated” is superfluous, so I thought I’d offer a few select opinions on it, some of which address what I think are misunderstandings about the film, and this largely to orient my comments on later films in Part 2.
It’s good that people are led to understand the issues and concepts of psychology and psychiatry as life leads them there, either because of developing their own problems or because they have a family member who has problems. But along with the helpful enlightenment of spread knowledge, there also is an increased likelihood of misconceptions, some of which square with the observation (mine) that says, “Give people a little science, and they go to hell with it.”
For instance, some people today, well-meaning in want to hew to the “straight and narrow” in treating their loved one who has a psychological problem to the point of long-term disability, will harshly criticize this film because of how it depicts ECT, or electroconvulsive therapy, or as it’s commonly called, “shock therapy.” To me, this is one of the least of the problems with the film; actually, Randle Patrick McMurphy, played by Jack Nicholson, is subjected to a lobotomy by the end of the film, and it’s amazing that I hear no one among the film’s detractors comments about that.
Of course, in the film, the ECT is applied bilaterally (which I think is not typically done today), and the portrayal of its effect on Randle, played well within the dramatic objectives of the film, makes it seem as if he was subjected to some Nazi or Soviet torture. For one thing, modern ECT is applied with general anesthesia, so there is no convulsing or the sense of extreme pain conveyed by Nicholson. And, as the movie takes place in about 1961 (note the radio-news item about, I believe, the Berlin Crisis in one scene), was ECT applied so barbarically then? I don’t know, but in any event the movie was taking an artistic liberty in making it seem, first, that ECT was not much better than today’s water-boarding, and second, that it could be used as if it was punishment (which typically, of course, it isn’t).
I figure, you can remove the ECT scene from the movie, and you can still have a powerful movie that has an impact, and conveys something still useful today, yet has a tendentious quality to it.
The movie (1975) was based on a novel, published in 1963, that I would suggest today is more notable for its misogyny than anything else. The mental hospital in which we, and McMurphy, find ourselves is where men in drab hospital patient-costumes and in drab surroundings are treated to therapy that seems to drill in on men’s sex lives, in close to if not exactly a demeaning way. The group therapy, such as it is, is led by a Nurse Mildred Ratched (note the phonetic similarity to “rat shit”), who is most distinguished for her coldness and bureaucratic firmness.
The story combines this with having a sort of fun-loving sociopath, McMurphy, trying to show these poor souls how to live more, even if (as he later finds) he has been involuntarily committed (for his own good, of course) while most of the others are not (they are voluntarily admitted). Thus you have an allegory of what society has become: men in an admittedly sick condition, humiliated by women in a squalid facility, where only the free-spirit sociopath (with the dirty-picture playing cards) can show them some way out. I am not making fun of this, really; I am summing it with the pitched satirical quality it has. Further, McMurphy doesn’t just teach the others how to be more epicurean, but how to have a little more courage in standing for themselves against the system, so to speak.
All this conforms with the 1960s-70s idea of the “allegedly insane person being more sane than society (which has become inherently sick),” which is a theme of the celebrated novel Catch-22 (one of my favorite novels) and an idea promulgated, but in a different setting and with a different professional intent, by Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing.
Cuckoo’s Nest is very much an allegory of its time. It’s still interesting as a cultural artifact showing what, in a movie, could be done (or what some tried to do) to convey an idea of deriving meaning in life while plagued by a hideously declined society, by means of a sad story with men treated unfairly in a psychiatric hospital. Those who are familiar with today’s professional psychiatric standards can probably play a dangerous party game of taking a gulp of beer every time they see in this movie a lapse in professional standards. Expect to get sick-drunk.
(By the way, the man who plays the dark-suited doctor who interviews McMurphy was a real psychiatrist at Oregon State Mental Hospital [whatever its title was], who was still alive, in his eighties, in 2005 when I last researched this movie online. He didn’t have a problem with much of what was done in the movie, though he did object to one portrayal of something. Also, William Redfield, who plays the stuffy Harding, was supposedly diagnosed with cancer during filming of the movie, and died shortly after; the movie is dedicated to his memory, I believe.)
If there’s a primary lesson I would want to convey with this, it’s that, as I feel with all of my own writing as well as in educational lectures I’ve arranged locally, cultural works about mental illness should be about more than just that. And I think all the best such art is. Hamlet isn’t just about melancholy (depression). Lolita isn’t just about (as people would find especially horrifying today) a middle-aged man’s rhapsodizing sexual interest in a minor. And so on.
Cuckoo’s Nest, at its best, and put in the most banal terms, is about finding healthy meaning wherever you can; and that even an apparent wildman like McMurphy can help his putatively healthier (or more average), but benighted, fellows in this regard.
Cuckoo’s Nest takeaway: story of antihero with gusto amid men in psych hospital, in fable-like nightmare situation of humiliation by women functionaries, may reflect its angry-1970s times, but can still harbor a theme of edifying optimism.
[Hopefully to come:]
Part 2: Stories of immersion in personal instability or growth
[this list will probably change]
Thirteen (2003), Girl, Interrupted (1999), White Oleander (2002), Rachel Getting Married (2008), Black Swan (2010)
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