by Marin Sardy
The room is ringing. It begins gently, then rings louder. I look up from my reading, look around. I can’t tell where the sound is coming from. A low, smooth tone like the sustained note of an old bell, with just a hint of a buzz, it fills the space, seeming to have arisen out of nowhere. It hovers in the air in front of me. I glance at my dog to see if she hears it. She doesn’t react, and for a moment I feel a wet, electrical flash along my spine. Fear.
It’s happening, I think. What if it’s happening? My mind darts about, looking for ways to corroborate this sound. My fiancé is out of town. No one is here. I have no way of confirming what I most need to know: if it is real. Or if I’m hearing things. If the onset has begun, if my senses are betraying me, if I’m hallucinating.
I have read accounts by people with schizophrenia who speak of asking their spouses or parents if a sound is real. “No,” one man’s wife answers him, “there is no marching band passing by outside.” I have noticed the moments when my mother has paused, head cocked, listening for a distant voice or call or echo. And I have heard nothing. And she has not asked—has never asked except once—if I hear those sounds. If I ever hear those horses whinnying, those men laughing, those children crying.
For a moment I am inside that life of uncertainty, that inability to trust one’s own senses. The insecurity, so fundamental, that touches every aspect of my mother’s being. I know these moments happen to everyone—when sensory confusion feels like a warp in the fabric of space. But I can’t shake what always follows: This is how it begins, I think. With small things. A ringing room.
How lovely, though—the idea that a room can ring. And it’s not a harsh sound, not difficult. Only strange, otherworldly, vibratory. It seems to be seeping into me so that I begin vibrating too, and the feeling is remarkable.
I think of my mother’s most compelling delusions. The image she offered me once, of an ocean of fire-capped waves. “Can you imagine?” she asked, enthralled. Or the time she wrote in a letter about a light that came into her bedroom at night. A peaceful, gentle light. “I decided to be quiet for it,” she wrote.
I am 37 years old. As I get closer to the age my mother was when she descended fully into psychosis, at 39, I find myself in these moments more often. Feeling a sense of doom. A sense that it’s coming, it’s coming for me.
The thing is, I don’t really believe that will happen. I know that by the time my mother was my age, she had been dipping into a delusional world for over a decade. She had been showing signs of intense, nonsensical paranoia for years. I know there’s no reason to think it will happen to me. So I tell myself. So I remind myself that this is New York. That all kinds of sounds can come from any direction.
But I’m still listening, and the room is still ringing. I turn my head to one side, then the other, trying to triangulate with my ears, to find a source, to pinpoint an origin so I can say, Oh, it’s just …
And as softly as it began, the sound drops away, overcome by blaring sirens. I hear trucks come near, passing along the avenue—fire trucks. The sound, now suddenly, obviously, a building alarm, fades away.
Thursday, March 8, 2012
Sunday, February 5, 2012
Chalk for Schizophrenia
This month's column is another lyric essay exploring the fluidity and persistence of memory in the body.—-Marin Sardy
The poignancy and the human suffering of many of these children and their families can be obscured by our research output. Our literature can shelter the reader from the despair to which these children bear witness.
Before my mother becomes psychotic, her teeth are white and healthy and perfectly straight. Then as schizophrenia entrenches itself into her life, her eating habits deteriorate. Over the course of the first few years, she sometimes doesn’t eat at all. For a while she chain-smokes, and drinks a lot. At times it seems that she lives on screwdrivers, or black coffee, or ice cream bars. At one point all she seems to want to eat is cheddar cheese with green onions. She was an excellent cook before, but now she barely cooks at all.
Her teeth go crooked, splaying outward in the front, and shifting so there are large gaps between them. My father speculates that malnutrition has caused her gums to go soft. Scurvy, most likely. When I am fourteen, she tries to correct the misalignment by placing small rubber bands around her teeth in a kind of self-orthodontics.
I tell her that she should go have a dentist look at her teeth, but she won’t. She just says that it’s her business—“It’s my business”—and I should leave her alone about it. After a while, the rubber bands disappear and she develops the habit of grinding her teeth. She sits on the sofa and scrapes them across each other for hours on end. I tell her to stop. I shout. I yell about it, saying she is destroying her teeth and that she should go to a dentist. But she doesn’t listen.
Her teeth turn brown and remain crooked, never getting fixed. Toothaches finally get so severe that she agrees to go to a dentist to have the rotten ones pulled. Now some of them are missing, leaving a handful of gaps.
I have come to understand that memories are not snapshots; not inviolable records. They’re webs of associations that have been divided up to be stored in the brain, and have been embedded with the emotions that give them meaning. Each time we recall a memory, we reconfigure it from these pieces, infusing it with new feelings as we examine it again. When there are gaps, we smooth them over; when things don’t add up, we correct them automatically. Each time we draw up a memory, its meaning can shift, with shifts in the details following along to uphold the new significance.
The meaning of this memory: the part stands for the whole. The teeth for the woman. The mouth for the life.
The principal reason for the lack of attention to pressing problems seems to lie in the children themselves. All too often they remain silent about their sufferings, and can seldom be motivated to discuss them. Even after they are grown they much prefer to keep to themselves all the horrors of the past.
I was a gymnast girl. I used to sit in the backseat of my mother’s car and imagine myself bounding over the landscape that whizzed past us. I was forty feet tall, running along the side of the highway at the same pace as the car, and when the scene was flat I tumbled in long strings of aerial-roundoff-back-handspring-whip-over-back-handspring-back-tuck-with-a-half-twist-roundoff… I took my first gymnastics class at age twelve and didn’t spend more than two weeks away from a gym until I was eighteen. The need was mental as well as physical. In my mind I would visualize myself performing whenever I was bored or worried or trying to ignore my mother. In my visions my routines were perfect, I was weightless, and the air itself seemed to carry me through the moves.
Some memories happen in your body. Gymnasts know deeply the feel of fine chalk powder on the skin of their palms. The idle habit of rubbing your calluses with your thumb, knowing the hardened skin, its texture, its dimensions. The smell of the leather grips you pulled from their plastic bag; the chalk-dense wristbands drawn over your hands, letting loose a cloud of white dust. Then the grips, each with a strip of suede worn and bent and tugged and wetted and dried to follow the contours of your hand; looping up around the dowel that gave you the extra inch of reach to link your limbs to the bar as you swung, spun, turned, let go, and caught it again.
When you wrapped yourself around the bar, the chalk rubbed off into the crease of your hips, penetrating the stretchy cotton of your leggings. It wasn’t unpleasant, just pervasive. Back on the mat, you could pull at your leotard and let it snap back, releasing puffs of chalk from the fabric. You breathed it in. The smell, the sense of it against the roof of your mouth: a little bit alkaline, a little bit interesting.
It would get in my hair, a coating on my long, wavy strands, so the shininess and the slippery texture vanished. When I was too tired for a late shower, I’d sleep with the feeling of a slight edge everywhere. Nothing slips around or over chalk. Most times I was so tired I didn’t notice. I crashed the crash of teenagers, awoke at a miserable pre-dawn hour to get to school on time. Every day: class, class, lunch, class, class, gymnastics, homework, dinner, homework, sleep. Regularity was my tether, a defense against madness.
This memory’s metaphor: chalk for schizophrenia. Surrounding, covering, pervading our world.
I had to learn how to figure out what was real on my own, and decide for myself what I saw and believed. My mother’s perceptions became meaningless to me. I stopped listening. She lived inside an elaborate delusion that flattened human beings into chess pieces and rendered my own little idiosyncratic self irrelevant or, worse, unreal. She had a way of bluntly disagreeing with everything I told her. Sometimes when I was talking to her I began to feel like a nonentity. She was so utterly unable to see me that sometimes I wondered whether I was actually there.
Psychologists have a name for this phenomenon, which children of delusional parents are subject to. It’s called “gaslighting.” The term comes from the eponymous movie in which a man attempts to drive his wife mad by telling her everything she sees is false. He turns down the gaslights, and when she comments that they’re low he tells her no, they’re the same as always. Then he turns them up and says the same thing.
I developed mental blocks. They set in when I was fifteen and hobbled my aspirations as a gymnast. Twenty years later, I see that I didn’t want to get better. I didn’t want to have to spend so much time near the edge of control, or, worse, beyond it—subject to larger forces, at the mercy of something bigger than myself. A gymnast must trust the ground to hold her up, the beam to remain still, the bar to flex as usual; her own limbs. Gaslighted, I trusted none of these things.
The past creates us and we are powerless to change it. We can only—if we are very persistent and very lucky and usually not even then—change ourselves.
Sometimes an event, usually the interpersonal kind, will trigger the old feelings and I fall into something like a flashback. It is more like re-immersion in a prior self. I am eleven years old again, and I feel as I felt then—that the floor of the world has fallen out from under me. I see myself in a place of utter disorientation, no horizon visible, like a scuba diver in turbid water who loses track of which way is up. It’s pure terror, a kind of fear that usually only children feel, a fear not only for the loss of oneself or of loved ones, but of the structure of one’s reality.
I have been told that undergoing a two-month round of “exposure therapy” is the most effective way to permanently and dramatically reduce trauma-related anxiety. The aim of this therapy is to expose me to memories of my childhood in a carefully regulated setting so that I don’t become overwhelmed or re-traumatized by them. This approach, ideally, enables my brain to process the events and to learn that the danger has passed.
I have chosen four memories—one to focus on each week. I begin with one I title “My Mother’s Teeth.”
Little by little, I react less intensely to the memories. Still, it feels awful.
The effects are familiar enough. I wake up with a headache and a dry cough. I find myself fighting off a cold. Hives invade my inner elbows, knots take over my shoulder blades. My diaphragm freezes up. I take deep breaths into my belly to relax.
I used to feel this way all the time. How did I ever get anything done?
If I had learned to surrender more fully to life— to physics; to the shape of myself, however imperfect— If I had been able to let go in order to take hold—
—but those days are gone. Those full-twisting layouts will never be mine. Nor the giant swings, nor the piked flyaways I mused I could surely pull off. Exposure has exposed me to my own secret truth: I wear mistrust like a fine powder, even in sleep.
Sources
N. Garmezy, “Children at Risk: The Search for the Antecedents of Schizophrenia,” 1974
M. Bleuler, “The Offspring of Schizophrenics,” 1974
D. Hohn, “Falling: Confessions of a Lapsed Forest Christian,” 2008
The poignancy and the human suffering of many of these children and their families can be obscured by our research output. Our literature can shelter the reader from the despair to which these children bear witness.
Before my mother becomes psychotic, her teeth are white and healthy and perfectly straight. Then as schizophrenia entrenches itself into her life, her eating habits deteriorate. Over the course of the first few years, she sometimes doesn’t eat at all. For a while she chain-smokes, and drinks a lot. At times it seems that she lives on screwdrivers, or black coffee, or ice cream bars. At one point all she seems to want to eat is cheddar cheese with green onions. She was an excellent cook before, but now she barely cooks at all.
Her teeth go crooked, splaying outward in the front, and shifting so there are large gaps between them. My father speculates that malnutrition has caused her gums to go soft. Scurvy, most likely. When I am fourteen, she tries to correct the misalignment by placing small rubber bands around her teeth in a kind of self-orthodontics.
I tell her that she should go have a dentist look at her teeth, but she won’t. She just says that it’s her business—“It’s my business”—and I should leave her alone about it. After a while, the rubber bands disappear and she develops the habit of grinding her teeth. She sits on the sofa and scrapes them across each other for hours on end. I tell her to stop. I shout. I yell about it, saying she is destroying her teeth and that she should go to a dentist. But she doesn’t listen.
Her teeth turn brown and remain crooked, never getting fixed. Toothaches finally get so severe that she agrees to go to a dentist to have the rotten ones pulled. Now some of them are missing, leaving a handful of gaps.
I have come to understand that memories are not snapshots; not inviolable records. They’re webs of associations that have been divided up to be stored in the brain, and have been embedded with the emotions that give them meaning. Each time we recall a memory, we reconfigure it from these pieces, infusing it with new feelings as we examine it again. When there are gaps, we smooth them over; when things don’t add up, we correct them automatically. Each time we draw up a memory, its meaning can shift, with shifts in the details following along to uphold the new significance.
The meaning of this memory: the part stands for the whole. The teeth for the woman. The mouth for the life.
The principal reason for the lack of attention to pressing problems seems to lie in the children themselves. All too often they remain silent about their sufferings, and can seldom be motivated to discuss them. Even after they are grown they much prefer to keep to themselves all the horrors of the past.
I was a gymnast girl. I used to sit in the backseat of my mother’s car and imagine myself bounding over the landscape that whizzed past us. I was forty feet tall, running along the side of the highway at the same pace as the car, and when the scene was flat I tumbled in long strings of aerial-roundoff-back-handspring-whip-over-back-handspring-back-tuck-with-a-half-twist-roundoff… I took my first gymnastics class at age twelve and didn’t spend more than two weeks away from a gym until I was eighteen. The need was mental as well as physical. In my mind I would visualize myself performing whenever I was bored or worried or trying to ignore my mother. In my visions my routines were perfect, I was weightless, and the air itself seemed to carry me through the moves.
Some memories happen in your body. Gymnasts know deeply the feel of fine chalk powder on the skin of their palms. The idle habit of rubbing your calluses with your thumb, knowing the hardened skin, its texture, its dimensions. The smell of the leather grips you pulled from their plastic bag; the chalk-dense wristbands drawn over your hands, letting loose a cloud of white dust. Then the grips, each with a strip of suede worn and bent and tugged and wetted and dried to follow the contours of your hand; looping up around the dowel that gave you the extra inch of reach to link your limbs to the bar as you swung, spun, turned, let go, and caught it again.
When you wrapped yourself around the bar, the chalk rubbed off into the crease of your hips, penetrating the stretchy cotton of your leggings. It wasn’t unpleasant, just pervasive. Back on the mat, you could pull at your leotard and let it snap back, releasing puffs of chalk from the fabric. You breathed it in. The smell, the sense of it against the roof of your mouth: a little bit alkaline, a little bit interesting.
It would get in my hair, a coating on my long, wavy strands, so the shininess and the slippery texture vanished. When I was too tired for a late shower, I’d sleep with the feeling of a slight edge everywhere. Nothing slips around or over chalk. Most times I was so tired I didn’t notice. I crashed the crash of teenagers, awoke at a miserable pre-dawn hour to get to school on time. Every day: class, class, lunch, class, class, gymnastics, homework, dinner, homework, sleep. Regularity was my tether, a defense against madness.
This memory’s metaphor: chalk for schizophrenia. Surrounding, covering, pervading our world.
I had to learn how to figure out what was real on my own, and decide for myself what I saw and believed. My mother’s perceptions became meaningless to me. I stopped listening. She lived inside an elaborate delusion that flattened human beings into chess pieces and rendered my own little idiosyncratic self irrelevant or, worse, unreal. She had a way of bluntly disagreeing with everything I told her. Sometimes when I was talking to her I began to feel like a nonentity. She was so utterly unable to see me that sometimes I wondered whether I was actually there.
Psychologists have a name for this phenomenon, which children of delusional parents are subject to. It’s called “gaslighting.” The term comes from the eponymous movie in which a man attempts to drive his wife mad by telling her everything she sees is false. He turns down the gaslights, and when she comments that they’re low he tells her no, they’re the same as always. Then he turns them up and says the same thing.
I developed mental blocks. They set in when I was fifteen and hobbled my aspirations as a gymnast. Twenty years later, I see that I didn’t want to get better. I didn’t want to have to spend so much time near the edge of control, or, worse, beyond it—subject to larger forces, at the mercy of something bigger than myself. A gymnast must trust the ground to hold her up, the beam to remain still, the bar to flex as usual; her own limbs. Gaslighted, I trusted none of these things.
The past creates us and we are powerless to change it. We can only—if we are very persistent and very lucky and usually not even then—change ourselves.
Sometimes an event, usually the interpersonal kind, will trigger the old feelings and I fall into something like a flashback. It is more like re-immersion in a prior self. I am eleven years old again, and I feel as I felt then—that the floor of the world has fallen out from under me. I see myself in a place of utter disorientation, no horizon visible, like a scuba diver in turbid water who loses track of which way is up. It’s pure terror, a kind of fear that usually only children feel, a fear not only for the loss of oneself or of loved ones, but of the structure of one’s reality.
I have been told that undergoing a two-month round of “exposure therapy” is the most effective way to permanently and dramatically reduce trauma-related anxiety. The aim of this therapy is to expose me to memories of my childhood in a carefully regulated setting so that I don’t become overwhelmed or re-traumatized by them. This approach, ideally, enables my brain to process the events and to learn that the danger has passed.
I have chosen four memories—one to focus on each week. I begin with one I title “My Mother’s Teeth.”
Little by little, I react less intensely to the memories. Still, it feels awful.
The effects are familiar enough. I wake up with a headache and a dry cough. I find myself fighting off a cold. Hives invade my inner elbows, knots take over my shoulder blades. My diaphragm freezes up. I take deep breaths into my belly to relax.
I used to feel this way all the time. How did I ever get anything done?
If I had learned to surrender more fully to life— to physics; to the shape of myself, however imperfect— If I had been able to let go in order to take hold—
—but those days are gone. Those full-twisting layouts will never be mine. Nor the giant swings, nor the piked flyaways I mused I could surely pull off. Exposure has exposed me to my own secret truth: I wear mistrust like a fine powder, even in sleep.
Sources
N. Garmezy, “Children at Risk: The Search for the Antecedents of Schizophrenia,” 1974
M. Bleuler, “The Offspring of Schizophrenics,” 1974
D. Hohn, “Falling: Confessions of a Lapsed Forest Christian,” 2008
Saturday, January 21, 2012
Take Shelter From Inaccuracy in Film
by Marin Sardy
Take Shelter, released this past fall, isn’t the first mainstream thriller to surprise audiences with plot devices that upend public prejudices about mental illness. Shutter Island (2010) comes to mind--and, like it, Take Shelter features a likable protagonist who turns out to be out of touch with reality. At its center stands Curtis, a laconic and gentle small-town family man played by Michael Shannon, who is well known for his small but scene-stealing portrayal of a mentally ill soothsayer in 2008’s Revolutionary Road. In Take Shelter, Shannon’s Curtis shows that the actor can do more than make the camera love him; he can get it right. Throughout the film, Curtis pulses with quiet resolve, devotion to his wife and daughter, and the tension between his usual self-control and the confusion and panic that begin to set in.
The movie almost lovingly follows Curtis’s efforts to address his paranoia and hallucinations, all while he is undercut by worsening symptoms and his desire to keep his problems under wraps. We find out that his mother has paranoid schizophrenia, and that he’s concerned he is now falling victim as well. But here’s the rub: Curtis’s paranoia isn’t based on typical symptoms like hearing voices or noticing changes in how things appear. Nor does it come from less common origins. Instead he has symptoms that aren’t actually associated with schizophrenia. He has dreams—-his dog attacks him; a massive tornado-generating storm looms—-that come laced with an intense sense of truthfulness that pervades his waking hours and begins to shape his behavior.
The dreams of people with schizophrenia often are, like their waking experiences, exceptionally fantastical and bizarre. And it’s true that delusions share much in common with dreams on a neurological level. But none of the diagnostic criteria for the illness involve dreams, and in the medical literature I’ve found no references to a Curtis-esque confusion between sleeping and waking states. Does such a version of schizophrenia actually exist? Or was it simply created to help the filmmaker’s larger purposes?
Maybe the director, Jeff Nichols, wanted to help audiences relate to Curtis, to more easily see themselves in him. Unlike hallucinations, everyone has had nightmares and knows what they feel like. But either way, these days it’s easy to relate to Curtis’s unease and sense of dread about what’s on the horizon—-even if we join him in fixating on rebuilding an old storm shelter. In September, New York Times critic A. O. Scott praised Take Shelter as “a quiet, restless exploration of the latent (and not so latent) terrors that bedevil contemporary American life.” Indeed it is. But given how directly our fears already parallel Curtis’s, isn’t it better to let viewers put themselves in his shoes without the extra help of fudged facts? To let audiences see that despite all the differences between themselves and him, a strong underlying connection can remain?
When it comes to bodily illnesses, filmmakers rarely get away with this kind of thing anymore. Viewers want to know exactly what is happening, for obvious reasons, and tend to roll their eyes at older films that are cagey or offer contradictory details. Gone are the days of unspecified terminal illnesses, as in the 1977 heartstring plucker Bobby Deerfield, which features a woman dying of an unnamed malady that occasionally but not always resembles cancer. Now that our culture has gotten comfortable with discussing physical ailments in polite company, audiences snicker at this. In the 1980s, films like Terms of Endearment and Steel Magnolias put a decisive end to the use of such devices. Yet actors playing characters with mental illnesses often still offer only variations on timeworn caricatures.
Directors also get away with drastically altering the facts of mental illnesses. Some make tremendous departures that do less to reveal the realities of mental health than to serve the filmmaker’s purposes. Take John Nash’s experiences in the 2001 film A Beautiful Mind. Not only are Nash’s hallucinations (which in real life were entirely auditory) represented as visual—a better fit for film—-they are presented in a way that appears ordinary, coherent, and consistent. This is good for fooling an audience into believing in Nash’s false reality, but it is nothing like the perceptual strangeness and insidious quality underlying schizophrenic delusions.
In many ways, representations of mental illness on film have made a lot of progress toward accuracy—and humanity. The nuance in Marcia Gay Harden’s performance as the generous mother Mary in 2006’s Canvas, for instance, strengthens the emotional impact of her frantic terror as she becomes wildly delusional. And Jamie Foxx’s spot-on and Oscar-worthy portrayal of the severely ill homeless musician Nathaniel in 2009’s The Soloist is, in my mind, the highlight of the past decade’s offerings. Moreover, scenes in The Soloist that show Nathaniel’s inner experience reflect what we know from first-person accounts of schizophrenia: Alone in his apartment, a young Nathaniel hears layers of whispering voices that grow louder and more insistent. He looks around him, frightened. The room appears altered, sinister. Objects seem to announce themselves to him. Disoriented and confused, he flees.
Take Shelter stays truest to the realities of mental illness once the plot gets rolling, after Curtis’s dreams give way to daytime hallucinations and his paranoia begins to cost him dearly. He loses his best friend, his job, his wife’s trust. At the same time, he ineffectually tries to find help for himself, visiting his mother in an assisted-living facility to ask her about her own symptoms, then seeing the family doctor. But he stops short of taking the long drive to a psychiatrist and instead goes in for free community counseling with someone who has neither the training nor the legal capacity to deal with the medical aspects of his problem. It is here that Take Shelter manages to be both a successful suspense film and a serious family drama. The dangerous shortcomings in available resources, as well as the lack of a safety net for Curtis’s whole family, form much of its tension.
Still, I can’t let go of the feeling that despite its strengths, the film undercuts Curtis’s dignity by altering his mental illness and using it as a device to focus and highlight more general fears. There is something dehumanizing about consistently relying on a small group of people to represent more universal human truths. It begins to deny that group the permission to be anything more than that.
I can’t help but think of Ingmar Bergman’s 1961 classic Through A Glass Darkly, which is a great film but has always left me a little cold. It is in many ways a stunning examination of the human condition, but it so heavily relies on the metaphoric value of the character Karin’s ruthless hallucinations that as she becomes more ill she is reduced to a trope. Her terrifying visions come off as devices to express Bergman’s existential angst more than as the real experiences of a specific person in the grip of psychosis. I know there are many more damaging ways that people with mental illness are dehumanized in our culture, but I guess I still take this one personally. Because my mother is not a symbol. She’s a real person—-no more and no less—-even if she sees things the rest of us can’t.
Take Shelter, released this past fall, isn’t the first mainstream thriller to surprise audiences with plot devices that upend public prejudices about mental illness. Shutter Island (2010) comes to mind--and, like it, Take Shelter features a likable protagonist who turns out to be out of touch with reality. At its center stands Curtis, a laconic and gentle small-town family man played by Michael Shannon, who is well known for his small but scene-stealing portrayal of a mentally ill soothsayer in 2008’s Revolutionary Road. In Take Shelter, Shannon’s Curtis shows that the actor can do more than make the camera love him; he can get it right. Throughout the film, Curtis pulses with quiet resolve, devotion to his wife and daughter, and the tension between his usual self-control and the confusion and panic that begin to set in.
The movie almost lovingly follows Curtis’s efforts to address his paranoia and hallucinations, all while he is undercut by worsening symptoms and his desire to keep his problems under wraps. We find out that his mother has paranoid schizophrenia, and that he’s concerned he is now falling victim as well. But here’s the rub: Curtis’s paranoia isn’t based on typical symptoms like hearing voices or noticing changes in how things appear. Nor does it come from less common origins. Instead he has symptoms that aren’t actually associated with schizophrenia. He has dreams—-his dog attacks him; a massive tornado-generating storm looms—-that come laced with an intense sense of truthfulness that pervades his waking hours and begins to shape his behavior.
The dreams of people with schizophrenia often are, like their waking experiences, exceptionally fantastical and bizarre. And it’s true that delusions share much in common with dreams on a neurological level. But none of the diagnostic criteria for the illness involve dreams, and in the medical literature I’ve found no references to a Curtis-esque confusion between sleeping and waking states. Does such a version of schizophrenia actually exist? Or was it simply created to help the filmmaker’s larger purposes?
Maybe the director, Jeff Nichols, wanted to help audiences relate to Curtis, to more easily see themselves in him. Unlike hallucinations, everyone has had nightmares and knows what they feel like. But either way, these days it’s easy to relate to Curtis’s unease and sense of dread about what’s on the horizon—-even if we join him in fixating on rebuilding an old storm shelter. In September, New York Times critic A. O. Scott praised Take Shelter as “a quiet, restless exploration of the latent (and not so latent) terrors that bedevil contemporary American life.” Indeed it is. But given how directly our fears already parallel Curtis’s, isn’t it better to let viewers put themselves in his shoes without the extra help of fudged facts? To let audiences see that despite all the differences between themselves and him, a strong underlying connection can remain?
When it comes to bodily illnesses, filmmakers rarely get away with this kind of thing anymore. Viewers want to know exactly what is happening, for obvious reasons, and tend to roll their eyes at older films that are cagey or offer contradictory details. Gone are the days of unspecified terminal illnesses, as in the 1977 heartstring plucker Bobby Deerfield, which features a woman dying of an unnamed malady that occasionally but not always resembles cancer. Now that our culture has gotten comfortable with discussing physical ailments in polite company, audiences snicker at this. In the 1980s, films like Terms of Endearment and Steel Magnolias put a decisive end to the use of such devices. Yet actors playing characters with mental illnesses often still offer only variations on timeworn caricatures.
Directors also get away with drastically altering the facts of mental illnesses. Some make tremendous departures that do less to reveal the realities of mental health than to serve the filmmaker’s purposes. Take John Nash’s experiences in the 2001 film A Beautiful Mind. Not only are Nash’s hallucinations (which in real life were entirely auditory) represented as visual—a better fit for film—-they are presented in a way that appears ordinary, coherent, and consistent. This is good for fooling an audience into believing in Nash’s false reality, but it is nothing like the perceptual strangeness and insidious quality underlying schizophrenic delusions.
In many ways, representations of mental illness on film have made a lot of progress toward accuracy—and humanity. The nuance in Marcia Gay Harden’s performance as the generous mother Mary in 2006’s Canvas, for instance, strengthens the emotional impact of her frantic terror as she becomes wildly delusional. And Jamie Foxx’s spot-on and Oscar-worthy portrayal of the severely ill homeless musician Nathaniel in 2009’s The Soloist is, in my mind, the highlight of the past decade’s offerings. Moreover, scenes in The Soloist that show Nathaniel’s inner experience reflect what we know from first-person accounts of schizophrenia: Alone in his apartment, a young Nathaniel hears layers of whispering voices that grow louder and more insistent. He looks around him, frightened. The room appears altered, sinister. Objects seem to announce themselves to him. Disoriented and confused, he flees.
Take Shelter stays truest to the realities of mental illness once the plot gets rolling, after Curtis’s dreams give way to daytime hallucinations and his paranoia begins to cost him dearly. He loses his best friend, his job, his wife’s trust. At the same time, he ineffectually tries to find help for himself, visiting his mother in an assisted-living facility to ask her about her own symptoms, then seeing the family doctor. But he stops short of taking the long drive to a psychiatrist and instead goes in for free community counseling with someone who has neither the training nor the legal capacity to deal with the medical aspects of his problem. It is here that Take Shelter manages to be both a successful suspense film and a serious family drama. The dangerous shortcomings in available resources, as well as the lack of a safety net for Curtis’s whole family, form much of its tension.
Still, I can’t let go of the feeling that despite its strengths, the film undercuts Curtis’s dignity by altering his mental illness and using it as a device to focus and highlight more general fears. There is something dehumanizing about consistently relying on a small group of people to represent more universal human truths. It begins to deny that group the permission to be anything more than that.
I can’t help but think of Ingmar Bergman’s 1961 classic Through A Glass Darkly, which is a great film but has always left me a little cold. It is in many ways a stunning examination of the human condition, but it so heavily relies on the metaphoric value of the character Karin’s ruthless hallucinations that as she becomes more ill she is reduced to a trope. Her terrifying visions come off as devices to express Bergman’s existential angst more than as the real experiences of a specific person in the grip of psychosis. I know there are many more damaging ways that people with mental illness are dehumanized in our culture, but I guess I still take this one personally. Because my mother is not a symbol. She’s a real person—-no more and no less—-even if she sees things the rest of us can’t.
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