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And the restraint it takes not to stick ourselves into every abstract object on the gallery shelves
I saw last night that Biden has become the first American president to recognize the Armenian genocide. It is a hundred years since the assassination of Talaat Pasha by Soghomon Tehlirian, since Raphael Lemkin began to think that there should be a word for—and laws against—the mass murder of people for their culture and ethnicity. Combined with the resolutions of the House and the Senate in 2019, does this mean that the United States as a country finally, officially recogizes the genocide for what it was? (And if we recognize the same regarding the Rohingya and the Uyghurs, what are we doing about it beyond the name?)
I am still deciding whether I want to try to write about Guy Green's The Mark (1961) when I have a nearly literal queue of other films ahead of it: my knee-jerk reaction is that it's a better film about mental illness than about pedophilia specifically, but Rod Steiger's Dr. McNally is the best movie mental health professional I've seen since Dr. Silla in Danger Signal (1945). I believe all of his scenes, even when I have to screen out the mid-century Freud-o-babble he's occasionally stuck with. (Having been crotch-punched by a toddler myself, I remain unconvinced of it as an intrinsically Oedipal act. It can be hard to reach much higher at that age.) Especially because psychiatrists in message pictures are so often presented as didactic, almost priestly figures, I really appreciate that McNally is rumpled and informal, frank about the capabilities and limits of his profession and obviously—he's a prison and court-appointed therapist—underpaid; he chain-smokes even for the '60's, his office is a clutter of books and swing-arm lamps and coffee cups, and he manages to be at once warmly acute and scrupulous about boundaries even when discovered asleep under his jacket long after usual hours. The protagonist's sessions with him are authentically familiar and defensive, some weeks burrowing to the heart of a problem and some weeks just filling up the time. I love a quick flickering gesture he makes after his girlfriend has called in the middle of one session, simultaneously laughing at himself and dismissing the interruption: "It's your hour, not mine." I love even more a speech he makes in the second act that doesn't sound like a speech, almost forgetting to light his cigarette with the match he's still holding because he's so serious about what he's saying: "It's an amazing thing I've noticed. When someone's been sick and begins to get better, he's generally more balanced and of sounder instinct in many ways than people who've never been ill . . . Sometimes I wish that half the people in this city had been ill and were getting better."
On the complex reasons people may use labels. "I use it 'cause it may not describe my feelings, but it does a good job of explaining how people perceive me" doesn't get a lot of discussion in my experience.
I am still deciding whether I want to try to write about Guy Green's The Mark (1961) when I have a nearly literal queue of other films ahead of it: my knee-jerk reaction is that it's a better film about mental illness than about pedophilia specifically, but Rod Steiger's Dr. McNally is the best movie mental health professional I've seen since Dr. Silla in Danger Signal (1945). I believe all of his scenes, even when I have to screen out the mid-century Freud-o-babble he's occasionally stuck with. (Having been crotch-punched by a toddler myself, I remain unconvinced of it as an intrinsically Oedipal act. It can be hard to reach much higher at that age.) Especially because psychiatrists in message pictures are so often presented as didactic, almost priestly figures, I really appreciate that McNally is rumpled and informal, frank about the capabilities and limits of his profession and obviously—he's a prison and court-appointed therapist—underpaid; he chain-smokes even for the '60's, his office is a clutter of books and swing-arm lamps and coffee cups, and he manages to be at once warmly acute and scrupulous about boundaries even when discovered asleep under his jacket long after usual hours. The protagonist's sessions with him are authentically familiar and defensive, some weeks burrowing to the heart of a problem and some weeks just filling up the time. I love a quick flickering gesture he makes after his girlfriend has called in the middle of one session, simultaneously laughing at himself and dismissing the interruption: "It's your hour, not mine." I love even more a speech he makes in the second act that doesn't sound like a speech, almost forgetting to light his cigarette with the match he's still holding because he's so serious about what he's saying: "It's an amazing thing I've noticed. When someone's been sick and begins to get better, he's generally more balanced and of sounder instinct in many ways than people who've never been ill . . . Sometimes I wish that half the people in this city had been ill and were getting better."
On the complex reasons people may use labels. "I use it 'cause it may not describe my feelings, but it does a good job of explaining how people perceive me" doesn't get a lot of discussion in my experience.
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Or “it’s close enough for most purposes, and I don’t have the time or energy just now to recount the past thirty years of my life.”
I guess that’s kind of the same thing.
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Occasionally I try to guess what fictional psychiatry will sound cringe down the road. Most movie/tv depictions of DID, probably (Crazy Jane on Doom Patrol may actually be the most believable depiction I’ve seen, but is still built on the idea that the phenomenon is always due to sexual abuse, and I personally think it can have other causes sometimes). And fictional autistic characters usually have a pretty narrow range of symptoms (I made a comment the other day in a Facebook thread that I’ve noticed some fictional characters *don’t* get flagged as autistic by reviewers or most audiences, but have multiple actually-autistic fans pointing them out and going “yep, One Of Us.”)
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Your example also bears overlap with "I use this for the sake of ease even though it doesn't fit 100% 'cause I haven't found anything better yet."
Conversely, I have a couple of labels I don't use for myself even though others might apply them.
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The stuff I find most durable from earlier eras is where the observation of people's behavior holds up even if the terminology has shifted. Outrage (1950) passes that test, for example. Possessed (1947) flunks big time.
And fictional autistic characters usually have a pretty narrow range of symptoms
I assume more variation in characters written by autistic authors, or characters who aren't written to be the autistic character, but I understand what you mean about especially film/TV conventions of What Autism Looks Like.
(I made a comment the other day in a Facebook thread that I’ve noticed some fictional characters *don’t* get flagged as autistic by reviewers or most audiences, but have multiple actually-autistic fans pointing them out and going “yep, One Of Us.”)
I believe I encountered this phenomenon most recently with Lilo & Stitch (2002), although it's something I personally think about with Stand-In (1937).
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It's worth seeing just for him. And not, from my experience of his filmography, the sort of part he usually got to play. I hope it's streaming somewhere accessible to you. It went under my radar until I saw it was leaving the Criterion Channel at the end of the month.
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I like that analogy and hadn't encountered it before.
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