The opening scene: a vaudeville show, the titular Titicut Follies, performed by the inmates and guards of a hospital for the criminally insane. These shows are presumably put on to give the inmates something to do, something to accomplish and perhaps take pride in, and as a way of integrating them into a normalizing social context. But this scene offers no justification: it shows only the performers, partly in shadows and singing away. In refusing to contextualize the performances as (feeble) attempts at socialization, we see them within a whole history of underlying carnivalry in society’s modern attitude toward madness. They are condescending showcases. “Oh, listen to those madmen sing. Aren’t they having fun, those poor madmen. What a show!”
One of the best scenes: a shot is held seemingly interminably as an enraged inmate stamps, naked, back and forth in his dark, barren cell, stopping once to hammer his fists against his barred window. It is riveting, the overpowering reality of a completely broken human being, fragile and enraged and despairing. The camera cuts to a closeup, presumably a few minutes later (though it could be any time), and the now-calm man informs an off-camera questioner that he was once a teacher; his sudden calmness and the facticity of his life history makes the weight of his despair and stifled rage all the more palpable and catastrophic.
This scene, and the film’s hyper-realist style in general, insists on the textural reality, the painful human intimacy of what we’re viewing. It is an attack on society’s representation of madness, the representation exemplified by the vaudeville show. The film insists on the fleshy humanity of the inmates and the dehumanization they undergo in the institute.
Of course, even the “reality” that the film insists on is another very particular representation of madness. But the film’s representation is self-reflexive: it makes an issue of representations. Indeed, the whole movie is a layering of representations. And at its center is the structure of the mental institution itself: the institution both passively representing society’s conception of mental illness and actively participating in the construction of that conception, defining “mental illness” and forcing its inmates into the confines of that meaning.
Tags: documentary, favorites, Foucault, mental illness, movies, representation
