Guide to PsycHollywood

This post exists for new readers, to explain why I created this blog, why they should read it, and how to read it.

Purpose

I started this blog purely for fun, because I love movies and thought it would be an interesting intellectual exercise to examine accuracy in movies. However, reasons this blog might be useful to various readers.

A) For someone that either has a disorder, or has a friend or family member that has a disorder, it may be difficult to get their head around their situation. Movies provide the opportunity to see how other individuals deal with their disorders, and since there are so many movies out there, it's good to have a source to distinguish the reputable movies from the garbage and the good performances from the bad.

B) For those interested in psychology, as a hobby or a profession, movies provide a way to fully understand the disorders that you read about. Sure, you can read about all the criteria a psychologist would need to diagnose a patient, but seeing a person actually deal with a disorder is a completely different and necessary experience.

How to Read this Blog

Subject: The character (and actor) that have the mental disorder.

Diagnosis: The Mental Disorder

Emphasis: How important is the mental disorder to the movie?

Focal Point = The whole movie is centered around the mental disorder

Main character = One of the main characters has the mental disorder, however the plot does not focus on it.

Minor character = This character is not central to the plot and is a small force in the small, acting in only a few scenes

Explicit/Implied Mental Disorder: Does the film make an attempt to diagnose the individual?

Explicit: The character is either self-aware or a character has mentioned the disorder.

Implicit: There is enough evidence to diagnose the individual, even though no character has mentioned the disorder.

Accuracy

I will only focus on the objective accuracy of a particular actor's performance as an individual who deals with a mental disorder.

Criticism

This is where I share my opinion of both the quality of the movie and how well it depicted the mental disorder.

Closing Comments

I would like to close this post by saying that I am not perfect, and individuals may disagree on objective (hopefully not) or subjective (probably) points I make about mental disorders in film. If you do, please send me an email at ZSmith890@gmail.com, I'd be happy to hear any criticism you have of my commentary. Thanks :)

Restrepo (2010)

Diagnosis: PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder)

Criticism

This is a different type of post, because obviously I can't judge the authenticity of mental illness in this documentary about soldiers in the War in Afghanistan. I'll keep this post short too, just to express my indignation with how death is treated in the battlefield. A commander in the army telling his troops to "mourn and get over it" is not an acceptable way to deal with the deaths that these soldier's experience during their tours.

Yes, I understand that they're soldiers, and tough love may work for some people. But grief cannot be concealed with machismo. These soldier's either need access to trained professionals or commanders need to be trained by trained professionals on how to deal with these scenarios that occur so frequently in war.

It's not terribly surprising that so many soldier's return with PTSD with such poor training on emotional-coping techniques and understanding of the psychological impact of constant warfare.

Cube 2: Hypercube (2003)

Subject: Mrs. Paley (Barbara Gordon)

Diagnosis: Senile Dementia (Though she may be faking it)

Emphasis: Minor Character

Explicit/Implied Mental Disorder: Implied/Vague diagnosis by "psychotherapist"

Accuracy

The first question may not be how accurate Barbara Gordon's performance is, but whether or not Mrs. Paley's character is faking Dementia for a tactical advantage. I'm not quite sure if she's faking it because when the killer tesseract starts attacking, she should have ran away from it instead of chasing after it like a dog chasing a ball. Also when Simon ties Mrs. Paley up, threatens her with a knife and tells her to drop the act, she further hallucinates Simon as a surgeon. So it's unlikely that Mrs. Paley is faking it, at least in this reality as the "other reality" Simon tells the group not to listen her.

I'm going to skip critiquing Barbara Gordon's performance as Mrs. Paley, simply because her character is very poorly developed and Gordon's acting is atrocious. If Mrs. Paley isn't faking it (the movie would have been much better if that question was more open-ended), then it's safe to say that Mrs. Paley's dementia isn't accurate at all.

When asked by Simon if Mrs. Paley is faking it, Kate (the psychotherapist) says that she is most likely having hallucinations brought about by an emotional response to the dead body that they saw, like in PTSD. However, if Mrs. Paley is so out of it that she thinks the gigantic cube she's in is a gym, I doubt she'd be able to register...I'm just going to stop there. If Kate, who is painted as an intelligent psychotherapist, also thinks the elderly Mrs. Paley is suffering from PTSD then I really shouldn't give this movie too much thought.

The Lost Weekend (1945)

Subject: Don Birnam (Played by Ray Milland)

Diagnosis: Alcohol Dependence

Emphasis: Focal Point

Explicit/Implied Mental Disorder: Explicit

Accuracy

Ray Milland's performance of the struggling alcoholic Don Birnam would have been perfectly acceptable in the 1940's. However the nebulous onset of Birnam's alcoholism with today's knowledge of genetic links of alcoholism calls the diagnosis into question. We can infer from Birnam's recounting of his relationship with the bottle that he started drinking out of a fear of failure. If Birnam was an alcoholic he would have the drink to consume alcohol regardless of that fear. However, I'll grant that it's possible that his fear of failure simply piqued his alcoholic tendencies since his history before he started drinking isn't explored.

The most difficult part of acting as an alcoholic is playing a convincing drunk. Milland's ability to imitate inebriation is successful when he's uttering a particularly sad sentiment or flirting with a woman. But the success of his drunken state can be disrupted by an angry tirade or rant in which he embodies Clark Gable or Laurence Olivier in confidence and stature.

Criticism

The movie focuses solely on Birnam's alcoholism and paints the tragic effects of alcoholism with a brutality that was absent from cinema in the 1940's.

The film opens with a shot of a bottle of whiskey dangling out of an apartment window. When his brother discovers the bottle of whiskey, Don covers by saying he must have hid it before he stopped drinking 10 days ago. Birnam makes an attempt to keep his habit a secret to everyone, except the bartender who he spills his sordid history to. He even goes so far as to buy apples to hide the bottles of alcoholic he's carrying from the judging eyes of his neighbors; perhaps even himself.

There is a particularly moving scene where Birnam describes to the bartender how he feels empowered by alcohol.

"It shrinks my liver, doesn't it, Nat? It pickles my kidneys. Yes. But what does it do to my mind? It tosses the sandbags overboard so the balloon can soar. Suddenly, I'm above the ordinary. I'm competent, supremely competent. I'm walking a tightrope over Niagara Falls. I'm one of the great ones. I'm Michelangelo molding the beard of Moses. I'm Van Gogh, painting pure sunlight. I'm Horowitz, playing the Emperor Concerto. I'm John Barrymore before the movies got him by the throat. I'm Jesse James and his two brothers, all three of them. I'm W. Shakespeare. And out there it's not Third Avenue any longer. It's the Nile, Nat. The Nile and down it moves the barge of Cleopatra."

Birnam was lauded as the next Hemingway when he was younger. After moving to New York, he found the critics and public weren't as enthused with his writing. So he reached for the bottle as a coping device. He couldn't possibly write while intoxicated or hung over or (more importantly) judge himself for having not written anything truly "great." In his mind being an alcoholic isn't nearly as terrible as being a failure.

The film's composer (Miklos Rozsa) unfortunately uses the theramin to portray Birnam's tortured emotional and psychological state. Using the theramin was experimental in the 1940's, however after being associated with a number of science fiction films, its use throughout the The Lost Weekend feels comical. The Lost Weekend won the Oscar for Best Picture and Ray Milland won the Oscar for Best Actor, deservingly so. Though the film might be dated, the torment of an alcoholic is certainly not extinct in today's world.

As a completely unrelated sidenote, the movie may be the first time ridiculous was truncated to ridic, though I doubt it caught on in the 1940's. Mention is also shortened to ment(ch) and thankfully that never stuck.