Mental Illness Tropes in Popular Cinema: Dissecting Stereotypes and Stigma
Michael F. Stevens
Mental illness maintains a long and troubled history in cinema. From the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Psycho, and even to modern portrayals of super-villains with crippling psychological disorders, cinema constructs simplified and damaging tropes of mental illness. Contrary to popular opinion, no depictions of mental illness in film do not recall the transgressive history of its prejudicial antecedents. Cinema’s obsession with the mentally ill is a trans-genre, stigmatizing event. The mentally ill in film comedic mockery, dramatic emasculation, and even desperate violence and victimization. The nature of their portrayals instantiates a simplified, reductive typification of the sufferer, who is simultaneously observed and examined but denied the ‘right to look.’ Mental illness in cinema privileges the clinical gaze, what Michel Foucault saw as an authoritarian and dehumanizing dissection of a patient from his bodily agency. One can witness the clinical gaze as a form of colonial staring; what Nicholas Mirzoeff says resided in an initial domain of slavery and domination.
By explicating existing cinematic tropes of mental illness, a homologous presentation obviates this distortional categorization of the sufferer by demonstrating the falsehood of images. These presentations clarify a set of rules and visual distinctions each depiction must adhere. As Barthes contends, the language of an image is two-fold with both denotational and connotational aspects. The former “requires only a knowledge in some sort implanted as part of the habits of a pervasive culture.” The latter necessitates a specificity that locates its meaning in a cultural context. He also states a photograph “offers us…a coded iconic message and a non-coded iconic message.” (Roland Barthes. “Rhetoric of the Image,” in The Visual Culture Reader, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff. Routledge, 1998, pp. 87–89.) Likewise, Karen Strassler shows us how images have indexical and iconic meanings which identify and authentic their content. Mirzoeff, in his analysis of the control of colonial plantations, foregrounds the necessity for realism in the visual domain meaning, “the ‘struggle for existence’…the claim of the right to existence.” (Nicholas Mirzoeff. “The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality.” Duke University Press, 2011. Page 36.) Collecting images of mental illness in film reveals four dominant stereotypes of the sufferer, each with their specific visuality and consequence, not solely perceptual. By identifying particular regimes of thought, the person living with mental illness can reclaim their visuality, excoriating these images encoded meanings by decoding the bias and connotations hidden within them.
As Mirzoeff states, “Claiming the right to look means moving past such spontaneous oppositional undoing toward an autonomy based on one of its first principles: “the right to existence.” The constitutive assemblages of countervisuality that emerged from the confrontation with visuality sought to match and overcome its complex operations.”
DIRTY, DISEASED, UNHYGIENIC, CONTAGIOUS
Depictions of the mentally ill as dirty implies fears of biological transmission. Mental illness is always associated with the clinic. Contextualizing the ill with institutions facilitates credibility to their stigma. Institutions permit a sanctioning of the discrediting the mentally ill undergo.
CLINIC/ASYLUM
The sociologist Erving Goffman states the institution maintains the fiction of care for those who are viewed as threats to society. The asylum traumatizes individuals by bureaucratizing a clinical gaze, exacerbating the social distances already in place between sufferers and the prevailing order. The patient’s visualities no longer conform to accepted regimes.
CRIMINAL/VIOLENCE
Despite the vast majority of people living with mental illness having never committed violent crimes, this trope creates an unrecoverable link with criminality. The institutionalization of the mentally ill connects sufferers to ‘sub-groups, reinforcing violent stereotypes.
MISOGYNY/RACISM/LACK OF REPRESENTATION
Media tropes persistently re-stigmatize mental illness as well as isolate the sufferer. They also exacerbate existing misogynistic and racist paradigms.
COUNTER VISUALITY
By self-identifying as someone with a mental illness, I engaged others in the topic of stigmatization and representation of mental illness in film. Responses elicited knowledge of existing stereotypes but a wholesale inability to confront them. By externalizing an inherently invisible condition, but one with an existing regime of visualities, I reconstruct my identity as someone with mental illness in the public context. Divisions along race and gender lines as well as perceived prejudices were unveiled and temporarily resolved through discourse.
Those who engaged in this examination of mental illness offered a consistent awareness of the vicissitudes of meaning. Black interviewees expressed a generational unwillingness to seek clinical solutions for mental illness, using either family or church to resolve problems. Invariably, everyone expressed surprise at the continuity of stereotypical ‘looks’ throughout these depictions. Some who previously offered support for specific roles reversed their opinion in an increased awareness of this form of mimesis.
Sourced: Goffman, Strassler, Mirzoeff, Foucault, Barthes, ASC Annenberg USC
Conclusion
Depictions of mental illness in cinema offer an intersection of existing stereotypes, prejudices, and denial of representation. Truthfulness in these depictions remains predicated upon the exclusive talents of the actor’s abilities. The veracity of a portrayal manifestly recalls an architecture of developed stereotypes. The depiction of the person living with mental illness qualifies the actor and not the affinity of representation. The problem with this type of portrayal lies in the notion of mental illness as an inherently unseen condition and its contentiousness as a form of disability. Though Hollywood claims agency over their visualities of the mentally ill, the actual sufferer remains outside of this narrative. An exceedingly small number of roles involve characterizations of the mentally ill, and a large number deal with co-morbidity issues or symptoms such as addiction. Vast inclusion disparities also exist in these depictions, which also reinforce racist and misogynist stigmas or stereotypes. When viewing its history, continued marginalization, and exclusion, one struggles to rectify any description of mental illness in cinema with the daily struggles of those these conditions affect.
