Content area
Full Text
James Charney Madness at the Movies: Understanding Mental Illness Through Tilm. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023.
The cinema is at once both beneficial and detrimental to the field of psychology. While many people's first exposure to mental illness is frequently on the screen, this exposure can also lead the viewer to an immediate misunderstanding of important elements of those illnesses. As an obvious example, viewers often see individuals with mental illness as more likely to commit acts of violence, when not only is that inaccurate, but they are often more likely to be victims of violence. Of course, filmmakers will point to the fact that they are not psychologists and that what they are creating is meant to be artistic or entertaining, not medically accurate. James Charney's new book, Madness at the Movies^ attempts to correct this divide by using psychological theory as a practicing psychologist to read a variety of films that he sees as accurate interpretations of a variety of mental illnesses.
Charney introduces a new disorder-or at least a new aspect of a disorder- and a new film in each chapter. He goes on to contextualize the film in its time and space, at which point he describes the film and its characters before diagnosing the character he feels best exhibits the disorder of the chapter. The first two chapters after the introduction are two complementary pieces on schizophrenia, which serve as a strong beginning. The two chapters, the former dealing specifically with hallucinations and delusions and the latter with acute psychosis, present Ingmar Bergman's Through a Glass Darkly (1961) and Roman Polanski's Tepulsion (1965) as case studies, respectively. Charney commends the characterization of Karin in Through a Glass Darkly as a schizophrenic, both through the accurate representation of delusions and through Bergman's refusal to show her hallucinations at the risk of a cheesy effect. However, he also points out the inadequacies, including the character's lack of disturbance of the four A's-affect, association, ambivalence, and autism. He goes on to explain the history...