When a shooter’s flaming-red hair doesn’t indict movies, nor should be a cause to be crude about psychiatry
Short before the main feature, #1
One of the standard points that may be brought up concerning the Aurora tragedy is, “What to do about mental illness—because look at the kind of violence we have here!” Clearly the mass-shooter recently suffered some massive decline in mental health. What the specific illness is we can only speculate on, though obviously it is serious. But one thing we should be as quick to note is that this case is an aberration, in a number of ways: (1) not every fan of the Nolan-directed Batman franchise is a potential mass-shooter, clearly; (2) and not every mental patient, whether in remission, or in an acute state, or with any other status, is likely to engage in violence.
For backup on this last point, let us look at components of an article in the March 4, 2003, New York Times, in the “Science Times” section [p. __?], “Revising the Script on Mental Illness and Violence.” The article notes, in a set of considerations that ranges through a number of perspectives and sources of authority:
“The fact is that the contribution of psychiatric illness to all violence is quite small. For example, a Justice Department study found that people with histories of mental illness were responsible for 4.3 percent of all homicides in the United States in a year.”
Derived from data accumulated in the Epidemiologic Catchment Area study sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, “Among [those with such] serious disorders [as] schizophrenia, major depression and bipolar disorder[, p]eople who use alcohol or other drugs were found to be 12 to 16 times as likely to be violent as non-users.” [italics added]
“A study published in The Archives of General Psychiatry by Dr. Henry Steadman of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine … reported that substance abuse was a strong risk factor for violence.” [italics added]
From this same study, which followed its subjects for a year after they left the hospital, it was found that “the highest rates of violence occurred before hospitalization. […] But in the year of treatment after being discharged, when psychiatric symptoms are likely to be lower, the risk for violence among patients was no different from that of people who did not have psychiatric disorders. […] This suggests that the violence is related to the level of psychiatric symptoms, not the psychiatric diagnosis itself.” [italics added]
Are people with long-term psychiatric disorders apt to be violent to strangers? Not usually. “One surprising finding in this [Steadman] study was that when psychiatric patients were violent, they tended to be violent with family members or friends. Only 14 percent of all reported violence was directed at strangers.”
Back to the issue of substance abuse, and apparently not directly based on the Steadman study, “The fact is that an intoxicated alcoholic is far more dangerous than a schizophrenic person who is wandering the streets [and not intoxicated].”
Short before the main feature, #2
There was talk in the media this past weekend related to, Can people sue the movie studio behind The Dark Knight Rises (for wrongful death or such)? The technical answer reported, based on various sources, was no. But more fundamentally, this movie did not cause a person to go crazy and shoot up a theater—certainly not cause as to be legally responsible. Are there more movies aimed to young viewers with a lot of outlandish violence? Yes, it certainly seems that way; movies with wide release in theaters (as opposed to quieter “indies” and straight-to-DVD fare) tend in recent years to be aimed to youth, and often feature comic-book-based or other types of superheroes, fantasy figures, and so on.
But the idea that a movie is somehow peculiarly aligned, in a causal fashion, to a crazy’s aberrant behavior is put into perspective by one maker of another movie, from 1976, which was taken as a “basis for a certain violent act” by a clearly mentally ill young man.
In the ~1998 long documentary on Taxi Driver included in the ~2006 DVD of the movie, screenwriter Paul Schrader says, “You are not going to get rid of the John Hinckleys of this world by censoring art.” He later adds, and this paraphrases somewhat, “If you get rid of the study [e.g., Taxi Driver], you will still have the character [in real people]. If you have the study, the people with the character can [possibly] recognize themselves [toward the end of getting help]. Many of them are too far gone anyway.”
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Ordinary People: Still remarkable after all these years
I didn’t choose this film specifically to make a point in relation to the Aurora tragedy; I felt it was a quiet enough film on which I could provide a review that was cozier for readers, like my reviews of films requiring less thought. (
Zoolander [2001] is a good one for that…it may come up before long.) But quickly enough, it became evident that
Ordinary People was apropos for a topically related serious point.
This was the first film directed by
Robert Redford, the actor who starred with Paul Newman in
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and
The Sting (1973), with Dustin Hoffman in
All the President’s Men (1976), and in a few others, before becoming apparently of more value to Hollywood as a director (he also directed
The Milagro Beanfield War [1988]) and initiator of the Sundance Film Festival. Also, looking increasingly his age, with wrinkles—which you might not expect with an actor who initially seemed primarily valued for his looks (imagine George Clooney looking like a prune)—Redford seems to carry an aura of being “real” and decent in recent decades. This film, perhaps, was an important first step in establishing (inadvertently) that stance and reputation, but also represented his intention to actually be more real—sincere—in his work, not just appear that way.
Ordinary People was also noted for containing a first serious (and successful) film role by Mary Tyler Moore, who had made her name as a TV actress, first as Laura Petrie in The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961-66) and then, more famously, as Mary Richards in The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-77), which seems to have been one of the most esteemed, and also one of the most popular, shows in the 1970s, which some might consider the golden age of well-crafted and –written comedies, and certainly had the array of Norman Lear shows that set important benchmarks for TV and popular culture more broadly. Notably, Moore’s show was not helmed by Lear, but was coproduced by Moore and her husband Grant Tinker, and its comedy certainly was not as politically pitched or so willing to tackle taboos as Lear’s shows were. But Moore’s show—in a way that today might seem quaint—was both intelligently written and winning in its depicting a single career woman who, as the famous theme song said, was “going to make it after all,” as her titles-sequence character throws her hat into the air.
Moreover, Moore’s show was generous enough to provide notable roles for Gavin MacLeod, who later was the captain on TV’s The Love Boat; Edward Asner, who later had a show of his own (as Lew Grant, his character on Moore’s show); and even Ted Knight, who might seem like a limited-range actor—he had a non-speaking bit part in Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) as a policeman and was quite colorful as the pompous judge in the film Caddyshack (1980)—but was memorable and almost iconic on MTM for his performance as the boob-ish, pretentiously sonorous, self-absorbed news anchorman Ted Baxter, who parodied the perceived self-importance of real news anchors. Other costars who went on to notable things were Valerie Harper, who starred in the spinoff Rhoda; and the resourceful Cloris Leachman, who had her own spinoff show, Phyllis, for a short time, and who has also starred in movies directed by Mel Brooks such as Young Frankenstein (1974) and High Anxiety (1977), and even still turns up in sardonic fare like Bad Santa (~2004).
As I write all this, I’m reminded of what a set of “esteemed” figures we had on the media stage in the 1980s—whether we felt they were on our side, like Moore, or a source of parodying fun, like Ted Baxter, or a sort of straw-man way to criticize arch-conservative views, like Archie Bunker—even though, as has been noted, bitter conservatives in the 1970s felt Archie was a hero for his pithy expressions of prejudice and the like. It was in reaching beyond this pantheon of characters that we thought would never change, and whom we seemed to own, that Moore took on a role in Ordinary People that seemed quite at odds with Mary Richards, whose boss Lew Grant criticized her in a sort of semi-cynical/sneering, semi-endeared way for her “spunk”: the mother in the 1980 film seemed an icy, self-absorbed upper-middle-class sort who, back in the day, might have been classified as a “refrigerator mom” who helped condition the breakdown of her privileged son, but today seems like anyone of her character and in her position would be seen: a woman who may seem (including to herself) inadequate to her role at one point, but becomes evident (to all who would open their eyes) as a complex person, as everyone is in the family drama in which she is embroiled. And what does this film tell us about the fate of having a child succumb to mental illness?
Film wins several awards; technically modest style helps it; social background says a lot
Ordinary People is at once a child of its time, a reflection of old standards and attitudes toward psychology, and an unwittingly prescient example of what would later be called a typical indie film. It certainly got a lot of awards in its day: Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director (
Redford on his first attempt!), and Best Supporting Actor for Timothy Hutton. Mary Tyler Moore was nominated but did not win for Best Actress. Today some may sniff that something else that was in the running for Best Picture for 1980 should have gotten some of
Ordinary People’s Oscars, but a few things help us understand why this film was esteemed as it was, if we put its dated qualities aside.
Its script, by Alvin Sargent—who won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay—and based on a 1976 novel by Judith Guest, condenses a lot of incident and emotional drama into two hours, with the result that for even a connoisseur of “psychodrama” like myself, the story and emotional connotations seem to come on pretty fast and thick. The directing is, you would say, unobtrusive in the sense that Redford wasn’t trying to call attention to camerawork and some aspect of production with a lot of flashy style; but the shots, and the ways different shots/angles on people are edited together, suggest a carefully storyboarded approach to the film, with Redford wanting to get as many of the book’s nuances into efficient shots as possible. As a director, he apparently saw his role to translate the book’s vision—embraced by his own sympathy—to film as directly as possible. All this plus the film’s small budget—even its musical score seems like more than the same theme used a few times—makes it look like what today would be called a solid indie—and one that some might say calls for Oscars, though in 1980, this was a Paramount film that, Oscar buzz aside, was probably greeted as a major release, not the way a limited-distribution and serious-themed indie would be today.
I will have a lot to say about the psychological aspects of the story, but first let me comment on the lifestyle/SES/values side of the story. The minimal marketing take on this story is that these people comprise an upper-middle-class family, and leaving aside changes in what this means over the past 30 years, I would grant that this is true. Further, having graduated from high school in 1980, and having dealt with psych issues at the same time (though without hospitalization or ECT as Hutton’s Conrad character has received), I would say there is a fair amount of overlap between its take on a certain phase of private middle-class life and my own little experience—except that I was by no means from an upper-middle-class family. Moreover, there is something obviously WASPy about this family, a point I’ll return to, while my own experience—tsunami-like, as it turned out—of upper-middle-class sorts in the early 1980s was largely not of WASPs (and the common derisive talk of the time about “WASPs” and “preps” was something I could not relate to by direct experience).
On the other hand, the flavor I get from this film, with its choir scene early on, demonstrating the famous musical theme of “Pachelbel’s Canon” that pops up in the film almost hymnally, is that of some Catholic subpopulation, even though Conrad (and his later girlfriend Jeannine Pratt, played by Elizabeth McGovern) seems to attend a fairly generic prep school. For me, beholding the lives and morés of Catholics is very much a mixed experience, and this for a number of reasons. First, my family in the 1970s very much grew up isolated as Protestants amid a lot of Catholics in our corner of New Jersey; Highland Lakes has long had its own established Catholic church, while the Protestant church in the community in the 1970s was such a poor cousin by comparison that for years it was just run in the summer, supported by congregants who were only up in the lake community for the season. When I attended this church in 1978, and its pastor was a minister, from another (distant) location, who came out of retirement to run it, it was just beginning to operate like a year-round church.
Moreover, my sense of Catholics as (I know this may sound unfair) a group containing far more hypocrites than any other Christian denomination—because it’s a form of Christianity that seems to allow as much “taking for granted” among its parishioners as possible—has left me with a dim view of Catholics in general. In the 1970s, when I was a fatherless boy growing up in sometimes “cold” environs—meaning, with limited emotional support at home, occasionally rather tough-hided friends or peers in the area, and even considering myself an atheist for a time—the fact of punky classmates who could be punks during the week and trot off to church (for forgiveness?) on Sunday did not conduce, for me, to respect for this religious group. Plus, my mother’s longtime anti-Catholic views (I jokingly think of her and her family as philosophically still fighting the Thirty Years’ War; her father playfully referred to a fatty chicken tail as “the Pope’s nose”)—all this will wait for a far more explicit, and warm-humored, treatment—basically have helped make an environment where I could not help but look askance at Catholics.
Seeing how things have gone in my home county since, with so many changes in my life—schooling-wise, economic, friends-wise, etc.—and as much as you work and happen to become more understanding about people and “other kinds”—I am still left with a longstanding skepticism about Catholics. Witnessing the hypocrisy of “corporate nothings” in workplaces who have this religious background—along with their more objectively objectionable tendency not to be adult-as-needed in work issues—doesn’t help.
So if Conrad’s prep school and family are Catholic—which I don’t think they’re meant to be—this adds a preciousness to this family portrait that both complements the story and makes it in some way old-fashioned. Now, among astute Catholic viewers, who naturally would not take such a vinegary view of Catholics as I do, this movie may still seem precious and old-fashioned, and perhaps they would propose—and I would agree—that the basis for this quality is the way, in the real world, the American middle class strove and fashioned itself in the wake of World War II and leading through the turbulent 1960s and socially and economically stressed 1970s, with the result that the upper-middle class could be materialistic and “emotionally repressed” and “phony” and so on, but not yet altered, liberated, spited, and everything else by social and economic changes starting during the Reagan Administration in which a new conservatism started to mold American thinking; religious values, private schools, homeschooling, and other forms of “heading back to more parochial styles and private-interest standards” became ascendant; gaping economic divisions within the middle class grew; family structures became more varied, with homosexual (same-sex) parents, ethnically mixed marriages, and so on becoming increasingly common; and options for “emotional succor” in terms of health care and leisure pursuits only became more varied and numerous.
This is an arguably overambitious attempt to summarize changes that help explain in what way Ordinary People presents a dated view of middle-class trials, leaving aside the issue of psychology, which is of most point here.
Elizabeth McGovern—whatever became of her?—is a good illustration of the cultural metes and bounds of this movie. She is the obvious love interest for Conrad, who in a somewhat trite sense helps bring him out of his shell—rather as Jennifer Lawrence’s character Nora does with Anton Yelchin’s character Porter in
The Beaver (see my July 6 entry; and it’s funny how both actresses seem as if, in these films, they’re stronger in the eye-candy department than in the character-development area). McGovern seems in
Ordinary People as impeccable as a doll, looking fastidious in plaid skirt and neatly cut hair and with sincere, big blue eyes. Paul Simon’s lyric in his 1986
Graceland song “That Was Your Mother”—“…pretty as a prayerbook / Sweet as an apple on Christmas Day”—always struck me as a slightly odd metaphor (who savors apples on Christmas?), but somehow it seems to fit McGovern’s character perfectly. You could also compare her to a stained-glass window: a shot of beauty, an intimation of transcendence, and from a different angle precious and parochial. She is a sort of late-1970s dream image without quite being an instance of the grotesquely Fluffernutter banality of
The Brady Bunch.
Background: The ungiving mother
Another premise of this film—or, not so much a premise as a dramatic component that the film takes pains to articulate—is that of the ungiving mother. I won’t reveal the film’s end, which comes as something of a surprise but seems to fit the overall rather compact dramatic structure, but the theme of a mother who is emotionally inadequate to family needs—in a way that involves her use of hardened defense mechanisms or certainly regularly used communication stratagems—is something that doesn’t seem to get addressed much today, not in the way that this film does. In fact, this film’s take on it could be seen to echo, if not exactly represent, the more clinically-oriented theory of the “refrigerator mother” that, for some decades, was considered the bluntly causal root of certain psychological problems, such as even the extreme phenomenon of schizophrenia.
This film’s story, indeed, is so detailed and full of intricate interrelationships between the three family members and between their present conditions and their pasts that I wonder if it is based on a true story. For my own purposes, doing a richly detailed psychological story always should be based as much on a real example as possible, because the truth of psychological issues that involve close emotional relationships and such things as what today would be called posttraumatic reactions is best traced in the real relations you find in an actual case. You can’t make up some of these complex situations (without risking seeming like you don’t know what you’re talking about), and part of their majesty and mystery is actually, as with a biological specimen, discovering what relations and patterns in the concrete example you haven’t been aware of already. In this way, such a story has a Henry Jamesian quality to it; but when you’re dealing with the results of a past tragic death and so on, being true to reality means you stick to the real life of a case—and you also realize the details can start to swamp and exhaust you, as I felt at times this film seemed to with me.
Lastly, I myself have lived much of my life with an emotionally challenged mother, a “nexus” I have written about in the past—most explicitly in my novel A Transient, which I deliberately keep under wraps for now—and which I hope, and expect, to write about in some depth again. As one telling example, my mother—who I have very consciously opted not to write about much on this blog—has had the habit, since the 1970s, to speak critically about my father as if she can never get over certain “character flaws” she’s felt impelled to address, and ways she’s felt he’d left us—her, largely—in the lurch. This despite the fact that my father was by far the most energetic and resourceful in our nuclear family in the 1960s, and it was a tragedy how he died of a heart attack tied to his type 1 diabetes. My mother was married to him for nine years. She has periodically spoken critically of him for more than four times that period of time, and this drive obviously has a way of being unapt to be satisfied. Further, she does it sometimes by way of criticizing in a rather unforgiving manner something in me. (This has been documented in old health records.) Clearly she does this as a way of blaming others for shortcomings when really she should address similar in herself—which she by and large has opted not to do, on specifics or broadly. I have tried to address her criticizing my father—it seemed to take many years, and I finally did, and there was something morally necessary and long-fought-for about it—and still, well after this attempt at trying to reduce a bad habit, she periodically goes on with this behavior.
So when I see Mary Tyler Moore’s well-tooled performance where she reacts to passing matters of doubt or to needing to “be a supportive person” to her younger son Conrad in the increasing wake of the death of her older son Buck, whom she seems to have loved more—when she reacts with little controlling gambits or practiced evasions that seem to efficiently step on Conrad’s face—I understand this very well, from an inevitably not-entirely-sympathetic viewpoint. (And her own husband, generalizing near the end of the film in a way that may seem glib or synthetic, “You’re determined but you’re not strong, and I don’t know if you’re really giving,” speaks with more point and heft than it may seem at first.) I know I’m generalizing a bit vaguely or slightly glibly here, but you get the point, and given the chance to retool my pronouncements here, I think I can make quite solid, nuanced statements on this.
Indeed, this film—I groped to find a way to sum it up in a catch-phrase—is somewhat like a cross between Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, which I haven’t read for many years, and a sort of middlebrow drama of American middle class life—not a soap opera, definitely. From here on, I will try to comment from a lighter-mood perspective, because Ordinary People is also something we can be a little amused by, as well as respect and appreciate it for how it can still speak to us. If it sometimes treads a line between sentimentality and poignancy, and at other times between mawkishness and more tasteful sadness, I think for many of us it can still hit home.
A sketch of the story, and the performances
Conrad Jarrett, in high school, is undergoing anxiety symptoms in the wake of, first, his brother having died in a boating accident and, second, his own having gone to a psychiatric hospital for four months. The story seems to attribute Conrad’s problems largely or entirely to the trauma of his brother’s death—in which he possibly could have done something to save him, but likely could not—though, given the severity of his subsequent depression (including ECT treatments), in this day and age psychiatric commentators would say he must have an underlying biological propensity for depression and “We have a treatment that can help,” etc., etc. Though in 1980 psychopharmacology was certainly around—the first-generation antipsychotics had been around for decades, and tricyclic antidepressants had been around since the 1960s, along with anxiolytic (anti-anxiety) medications—which latter Conrad presumably starts to ask for at one point—the film seems to look at Conrad’s outpatient options as being, first, talking therapy, and then pills only as a possibility to consider later and maybe not at all. (This actually accords with standards I was aware of in the late 1970s.)
And interestingly, his talking therapy, which he arranges uneasily as persuaded to by his father, after episodes of nightmares and anxiety attacks, is with a psychiatrist. Psychiatrists, you must know, are the psychology-related professionals who are licensed to prescribe medication; psychologists almost always just do talking therapy. In the old days—up through, say, the mid-1990s—psychiatrists could do talking therapy; today they seem almost exclusively to just evaluate for, and prescribe, medication. (But what was probably true then as well as today is that psychiatrists cost more, so for Conrad to see a psychiatrist rather than a psychologist is a bit extravagant cost-wise. His dad pays, of course.)
Timothy Hutton’s performance as the troubled Conrad is, I think, excellent. He fully deserved his Oscar. In the earliest scenes, we are dunked right into his snap-up-from-sleep tortures; with handsome-but-haunted face, shadows under eyes, and glaring looks, he gives a solid impression of Depression Face to rival Winona Ryder’s in
Girl, Interrupted (see my April 19 blog entry). Being plunged into this sort of thing early on and with quick, intense shots is a sort of announcement of where we stand like the bluesy guitar fanfare, courtesy of Eric Clapton, at the start of John Lennon’s song “Cold Turkey”: “
Shit, we’re dealing with some heavy
shit, are you
ready?” In a movie era when such “family psychological trouble” stories weren’t widely addressed seriously—on topics we “don’t talk about outside the home”—after the more politically pointed
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975; see my February 10 review), and the “let’s talk about our maritally troubled lives today” of the sensitive
Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)—
Ordinary People was being about as brave as it was tasteful and careful in its presentation. With this, Hutton did a well-wrought job in probably the most important role of the movie.
Donald Sutherland as his father Calvin seems adequate to his role but not quite a standout as Hutton is or Mary Tyler Moore as his wife Beth. (
The film’s Wikipedia article has the opinion that Sutherland’s not being nominated for an Oscar was one of the biggest snubs in Oscar history, but this is a bit overblown, I think; such a position might be based on the opinion that because the movie’s story is so impressive and finely wrought with an ensemble cast, why
didn’t Sutherland get a nomination and a win? Well, maybe an Oscar nomination was in order; but I don’t think an Oscar
win.) He is supportive enough as a father to Conrad in terms of understanding him, or wanting to, while still being rather baffled by him, while Beth is much more apt to draw boundaries between what she will and won’t do to respond to Calvin’s acute troubles. Conrad once or twice confronts his father for his not being strong enough in dealing with Beth, or something along these lines, so Calvin comes off (at times) as a bit weak (at least in terms of the family nexus), while as what is identified as a tax attorney—there is one somewhat useless scene where he is counseled by a well-meaning but somewhat glib associate at work—maybe Calvin can be excused for being burdened by a tough career, and hence not so much positioned to deal with Conrad’s issues as Beth should be expected to be.
MTM as a bitter stalk of a mother
Mary Tyler Moore’s performance as Beth is fine, too, and in a sense she has the hardest role in the film, not for being its anchor as Conrad is, but for being a person we are both to identify with to some degree but also to hold in some judgment, as the mother who draws lines, almost like a cold regularized defense mechanism, as to how much she will accommodate her younger son. With severe-looking plucked brows in this film, Moore, after her years as lovely young Laura Petrie and winning career woman Mary Richards in her 1970s show—with a not-successful turn at movie roles in the late 1960s—impresses with an against-type turn in this, her only film role of note since her acting career really has been undistinguished since about the early 1980s. Moore might have seemed a little too cute as Mary Richards, while
she is noted today as having helmed a feminist role in her work there (though Beatrice Arthur’s role as Maude, in the Norman Lear show, I think was much more conspicuous in this regard).
Moore’s neat, nice quality throughout her major acting roles—along with perhaps a sense of discipline she derived from her condition as a type 1 diabetic for which she has been known for years—provided her a chance to portray a chilly WASPy, upscale housewife in
Ordinary People. Perhaps her experience with alcoholism, also noted in her Wikipedia bio, helped shape her ability to seem stoical or dry, and isolated, in this role.
But her picky, demanding, precision-bound, evasive qualities as mother Beth are well-turned; these cohere with her being generally “uptight,” as used to be the term, or as if her ass was as taut as a banjo string. Her idea of a blowout would be a single gin and tonic before dinner. She can even betray a softer, sadder moment when she is in her son Buck’s room, seeming to melt with a sense of sad reminiscence; but when Conrad innocently turns up, she startles, in an example of how pinpoint accurate this film is in unwinding its drama.
At another point, Beth seems to be all about her cloth napkins in napkin rings while Conrad moves nearby like a lost soul.
Later, at a cocktail party where her husband is uninhibitedly telling a friend about his son’s currently seeing a psychiatrist,
Moore’s Beth reaches to him with a friendly-yet-insidious hand, and aims to guide him away to “better sense.” A bit later, in the car, with a humorless mug, she is franker with a colder, bitter, reproachful tone when she scolds him for revealing what he has to the friend. This both reflects mores of the time (especially among the more image-conscious upscale) and spells out the “Mommie Dearest” potential of Beth as a character.
The film gets to a more famous point where the drama spells out potential beyond the character-bound traits just noted: After Conrad confronts his father in relation to his mother, who has bitterly confronted the both of them about Conrad’s having quit the swim team, Conrad makes the move to point out how Beth was on an overseas trip while Conrad was in the hospital, but, he adds bravely, she would have visited Buck if Buck had been in the hospital. Beth retorts almost as if it is her inevitable right, “Buck wouldn’t have been in the hospital!” at which Conrad retreats to his room, later attended to by his father.
When I see this gob of family politics and remember that, for many years, any issues of psychological trouble within my own family were at least matters of family politics as not, though certain members involved in the politics wouldn’t have admitted it, it saddens me that today, as I’ve seen among other families, so often psychological disorder is regarded as the biochemically-based or genetically-determined business of the person afflicted, and family members’ part in this was only to be the “innocent, collaterally victimized” bystanders who might seek professional help for the emotional stress posed by the “only source of evil in the family.” This, to me, often oversimplifies the picture, when interpersonal and emotionally entangled conditions for one’s psychological issues—once the province of “systems theory” proponents like Murray Bowen—are of point and once were to be focused on as a corrective to older psychological interpretations, like the Freudian fetish for explaining things in its own individual-bound, dogmatic way. We have gone from Freudian “scholasticism” to a wider array (in the 1950s-70s) of interpretation, ranging from Erik Erikson to Harry Stack Sullivan and Carl Rogers and Murray Bowen, to many others—back to a “unipolar” approach, this one basically oriented to psychopharmacological treatments. It’s enough to make you want to be like Charlie Brown in one Peanuts cartoon where he rests his big head on a tree and says, “I weep for our generation!” Except, a lot of the people who hold these biologically based, “I am not the problem” views I don’t consider “of” my generation.
The gripping odyssey of Conrad
Hutton’s fine performance is crucial to the movie, because—as the high school student who, aside from psychological issues, is in a typical teen’s dust storm of schoolwork, extracurricular activity, haphazard social life, and general “state of becoming” anyway—is who gives this film its gripping side.
Interestingly, his swim-team activity, which ordinarily would be a banal aspect of this story, gives a chance for a small but colorful part in the coach, played by M. Emmet Walsh, who, you might remember, played the sniper who later turned into a private investigator in the Steve Martin-starring The Jerk (1979). Walsh, with his rather ambiguous face that looks like he can’t help sneering most of the time, mixes sympathy and a strange version of callousness as he asks Conrad, none too subtly, if he, the coach, had asked him before if “they gave you shock out there” at the hospital. Conrad, with admirable stoicism and taste, says, “Yes, you did, and yes, they did.” The coach’s risky questioning helps allow this movie to indicate the societal level of stigmatism in 1980 toward ECT, which has never been un-stigmatized (as well it should never be, probably). This movie doesn’t take the angled Cuckoo’s Nest approach and suggest ECT is one more nasty tool in the hands of an East Bloc-type mental hospital. But though it may seem to us today to have been extreme for his hospital to give Conrad ECT when, one hypothesizes, he is only suffering a reactive sort of depression to his brother’s death, it still would have been a mixed bag at best for Conrad to talk about this with someone who should have been supportive, like his coach.
Hutton is brilliant showing Conrad’s fidgetiness when he first sees Dr. Burger, played tastefully, in unassuming mensch style, by
Judd Hirsch, who by that point I think was starring in the TV show
Taxi. Wikipedia articles are always hit-or-miss as to how thorough, well-documented, and/or on-target they are judgment-wise, and
the one on this film contains a comment on Hirsch’s doctor that, to me, is a good starting point, while not the final word: “
Judd Hirsch's portrayal of Dr. Berger was likewise a departure from his work on the sitcom Taxi, and has drawn praise from many in the psychiatric community as one of the rare times their profession is shown in a positive light in film, although some consider his portrayal to be too positive, thus lending an air of one-dimensionality” [there are two numbered references noted within this sentence]. “Too positive” and “one-dimensionality” seem too crude an assessment; I think Dr. Berger is a good “plot device” in terms of being a character needed to help Conrad develop and reveal some of the problems haunting him, and I think Hirsch’s doctor gives a complimentary enough rendering of what a counselor might be like in that kind of situation. Are some of his responses to specific remarks of Conrad’s shallow, or a bit annoying? I think so, but I think he functions about how you would want a psychologist or psychiatrist in this position to function, as a sort of facilitator of Conrad coming into consciousness of what he needs to, to grapple with his problems better.
As a side note: in about the same time (1976-80, more exactly), I saw a talking counselor (actually, a series of them) for the only extended time and (compared to a strangely “administrative” consultation in 1986-87) the only time I used such a counselor as you normally, sincerely would. The best of the talking counselors was Ira Kramer, Ph.D., a Jewish psychologist who was schooled in Jungian therapy. To show how times have changed: in the darkest part of my life, when as it happened I was grappling with obsessive religious concerns with all else, Dr. Kramer not only, in a fairly quick touch-and-go fashion, helped me with my more psychological issues but, from a Jungian perspective, helped me have a little more perspective on my crudely developing (at that time) Christian concerns.
Today, with the focus on medication and on such narrowly “practical” interventions as cognitive behavioral therapy (and Carl Jung today dismissed as a historical oddity, it would seem), this may all sound like weird hippie shit percolating in a bungalow in Rishikesh. But it was what, from the doctor’s viewpoint, was his best shot at the time, and it served my needs well enough, especially looked at in retrospect. Dr. Berger is roughly analogous to my Dr. Kramer—Kramer was a little more aloof, and Berger seems more like a typical talking counselor than what the movie identifies him as, a psychiatrist. In short, I’m surprised how much in this movie rings true as to Hutton’s portrayal of a young man of his background consulting the “exotic” entity of a Jewish psychiatrist (whose ethnic background is only vaguely questioned as to his being “apropos” by Conrad’s provincial grandmother to Beth, not by the more enlightened Conrad).
Final notes
There’s a lot tucked into this movie—peer relations at school…and Conrad’s relationship with a young woman named Karen who had been an inpatient at the hospital when he was there, and with whom he bonded. He meets with her in a restaurant for catch-up, as if she is the only person he can truly relate to at that point…I won’t spoil how their dealings develop in the movie, while Jeannine seems his more likely prospect.
A revealing exchange between Conrad and his mother may strike people as especially odd, but which I think is a very insightful representation of their relationship. She approaches him when he is resting outdoors, and they talk in a fairly banal, desultory way…then she begins a harangue of sorts about a man whose handling of his dog in the neighborhood she doesn’t like, and Conrad tries to joust with her on this issue, at first reasonably, but the two are talking past each other fairly crazily. Finally he bursts into a sort of barking, as if he can only talk on behalf of the dog by sounding like a dog. Disconcerted, Beth heads off. One isn’t really sure if Conrad does this as a subversive, frustrated ruse, or if he is somehow potentiated despite himself to do this. In any event, it shows how, as he tells his psychiatrist more than once, he and his mother can’t relate.
A film sometimes touching, sometimes dated, and very well crafted, and reminding us how much we’ve lost with the more desolate, “Soviet” (man-is-matter) style of psychiatric health-care that is current now.
