Last week I met with a patient of mine. He’s a sweet, kind middle-aged man without a hostile bone in his body. He and his brother both have schizophrenia. Both of them fear psychosis and cooperate fully with psychiatric care to keep it at bay. My patient is the higher functioning of the two, and often takes his brother to the movies. I learn about new movies this way, since my patient usually sees them before I do.
Last week he and his brother watched the first 15 minutes of the new “Joker” movie starring Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga. They walked out when the villain was depicted as mentally ill, and the psychiatric hospital a nightmare dystopia.
We talked about how psychiatrically disabled people are demonized in movies and elsewhere. Insanity seems to be an evergreen choice for movie villains. From Norman Bates in “Psycho” to Hannibal Lecter and Buffalo Bill in “Silence of the Lambs,” from Batman’s adversaries to Michael Myers in the “Halloween” series, the viewing public never seems to tire of scary, mentally ill characters.
Other demonized groups come and go. For example, I recently watched the original “Mad Max” from 1979. The bad guys were apparently bisexual and gender-nonconforming in that one. That wouldn’t fly today. For a long time in many popular movies it was Communists, and then after 9/11, it was Arabs or Muslims.
Even when there’s an element of truth to these prejudices, e.g., the reality of 9/11, or the occasional violent person with psychosis, a lot of innocent folks get trapped in these stereotypes. Most Muslims aren’t violent. Most people who have schizophrenia or dissociative identity disorder (“split personality”), the usual diagnoses of the cinematically insane, are not dangerous, or homeless, or offensive in any way. They’re mostly suffering and scared — and more often the victims of violence than the perpetrators.
What’s the best solution? Casting all movie villains as straight cisgender WASPs wouldn’t be fair to that group either. Is there a plausible “fair distribution,” to smear everyone equally? Is there a non-silly way to make movie villains not resemble any real people — make them all purple or something? None of these seem realistic. Are we stuck catering to existing negative stereotypes?
I don’t have a solution. All I can say is, it’s plainly wrong to pick on a disabled population. I felt bad for my patient. He never hurt anyone in his life, yet couldn’t take his brother to a movie in wide release without feeling personally vilified on the big screen.
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