Mental Illness Narratives in Media

As someone who is both mentally ill and a vociferous consumer of popular media, it's rare for me to see a movie or TV show that accurately reflects the struggles an individual deals with when dealing with mental illness. There have been some novels written by authors who also suffer from mental illness, but by and large I have found that most media representation of the mentally ill is inaccurate, unsympathetic, and sometimes downright harmful.

Classic literature has a long history of authors writing frankly about their mental illness, even if it was in antiquated terms: Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath. But since film and television are far less personal mediums than literature, they tend to use mental illness as a plot device or an interesting character trait rather than offering a first-person account of mental illness. This is dangerous for several reasons. The first being that film and television are two of the most accessible forms of popular media, and are available to people who may not be blessed with the education level or resources needed to access classic literature and/or academic writing. This means that for many people, their entire understanding of mental illness is based on what they've seen in films and on television. Those who suffer from mental illness but haven't been diagnosed may know that there is something wrong with them, but struggle to identify with the often outrageous and outlandish depictions of mentally ill people that they've seen, and so remain undiagnosed and unable to seek help. Those who do not suffer from mental illness may have seen Jeremy Sisto as Billy Chenowith on Six Feet Under or Glenn Close as Alex Forrest in Fatal Attraction and assume that these are accurate depictions of bipolar disorder, and become fearful of schizophrenic or borderline people. Or it may not be as bad as that: maybe they've seen Silver Linings Playbook and think they understand bipolar disorder, think that their bipolar friend's problems can be solved if they just set them up with some young hottie who likes to dance. Oh, if only it were that easy! The entire psychiatric community would be out of work.

As someone who suffers from depression and is a recovering bulimic, I find it difficult to relate with the characters in film and television who are explicitly stated to be mentally ill and are supposed to represent people like me. To begin with, protagonists who are canonically defined as "depressed" are almost always white men, and usually white straight men. I think that's probably because a mentally ill character is already an "other", so the writer may try to make them as "normal" as possible in every other aspect of their characterization. Unless, of course, they're a villain, in which case they're also often coded as queer, because dangerous craziness and queerness are so often intertwined in popular media! Never mind that queer people are more likely to be depressed due to the oppression and discrimination they face every day- most Crazy Queer Villains are depicted as madmen and madwomen, driven to homicidal insanity by their sexual perversions. This is a trope that was once extremely prevalent and seen everywhere from psychodramas and thrillers to animated children's movies (think: Professor Ratigan from The Great Mouse Detective, coded "sissy" and violently insane). It is slowly falling out of favour, but it can still be found in popular procedural crime shows like CSI and Criminal Minds.

Even when characters aren't portrayed as villains, they are often written and acted very stereotypically and one-dimensionally, as both the writers and the actors choose to base their interpretation of a mentally ill character on a set of symptoms, rather than portraying their character as a fully-realized person with interests and quirks that exist outside of and irrelative of their mental illness. Personally, I've done a lot of research into the way eating disorders are portrayed in media aimed at teenagers, and I've found that the characters are almost always stereotypical Type-A "Best Little Girl In the World" overachievers. I'm thinking here of endless Young Adult novels, a recent storyline on Glee, and that time on Lizzie McGuire that Miranda stopped eating for one episode but was cured after a pep-talk with her friends. In most teen media in fact, eating disorders are portrayed as a confidence issue that can be cured easily (I could wrte another entire post on how this erases the very real struggles of eating disordered people, who are overwhelmingly girls and women). To my mind, the most well-rounded and developed character with an eating disorder storyline to date has been Cassie Ainsworth from the British teen drama Skins. She has anorexia, and it is a continual struggle for her, but she has character traits that are not related to or attributed to anorexia, a love interest, and is generally quite sympathetic and likeable. When I was at my worst suffering from my own eating disorder, my best friend watched Cassie's episode of Skins and said it helped her to understand me better.

And that's the thing about proper representation: it doesn't have to get in the way of a good story. Cassie's storyline is engaging and interesting even to people who don't have anorexia or bulimia. It's entertaining, but not damaging. The same can be said for the many mentally ill characters on Mad Men (though I'm still waiting to see how Ginsberg's schizophrenia storyline plays out).

All I want is to see people like me onscreen. People who aren't dangerous, or hopeless, or inhuman... just... whole. Because mentally ill people like me aren't broken or incomplete or irreparable, we just want to be understood.

"Young Americans" is the most cynical song of the '70s

David Bowie has long been described by the media as a chameleon of sorts, someone who picks up on social and cultural trends, takes them to their logical extreme, and casts them aside soon after, on to the next thing. While I agree that Bowie is certainly always in tune with  the cultural zeitgeist, I disagree with the idea that his many personas represent a wish to emulate the zeitgeist- rather, I'd argue, his many different public identities come from an intent to parody and comment on whatever trend du jour he happened to find worthy of discussion.

Now Bowie is well known for his gender bending which was obviously intended as  his commentary on the constructed social structures placed around male and female identities. But what I think is rarely discussed is his brilliant commentary on race, colonialism and cultural theft.  this was something explored throughout the "plastic soul" era of his career and most explicitly on Young Americans, both the song and album.

As a Brit who was heavily influenced by American culture, Bowie wrote "Young Americans" as an expression of his distaste with the racial climate in the USA at the time. Stylistically, the song is an up-tempo number in black American soul/R&B style but unlike his contemporaries, Bowie didn't just borrow the musical style for aesthetic purposes. It's intended as a reflection on the cultural theft that he talks about in the song. Quite clever really as at first listen it sounds like another blue-eyed soul number, but the lyrics belie a criticism of "blue-eyed soul" and the willingness of white people to steal from and exploit black culture while still harbouring racist attitudes.

Have you been the un-American?

Just you and your idol sing falsetto

'bout Leather, leather everywhere, and

Not a myth left from the ghetto

Well, well, well, would you carry a razor

In case, just in case of depression?

Sit on your hands on a bus of survivors

Blushing at all the afro-Sheeners

These lyrics express Bowie's feelings about the cultural climate of the 1970s in regards to race relations, and basically what he's saying here is that white (especially male) Americans consider themselves the "default" American, and, as it has been said before "everyone else gets a hypen". Now Bowie is a white male and I am a white female so I don't want to imply that either he or I are the foremost experts on race relations. What I mean to say is that the song is intended as a message to Bowie's white contemporaries. Black music was (and still is!) being imitated by white singers and white bands who were happy to take the fun parts of black culture but refused to engage in any political discourse about race relations or acknowledge the disparity between the recognition they got and the recognition black artists got. "Not a myth left from the ghetto" may be referencing the fact that black culture and black stories were mined by white people for artistic inspiration until we (white people) saw the well as being run dry. Not a myth left because we stole everything.

Performing on the Dick Cavett Show, December 1974

Black music and black fashion are things that we white people are happy to steal but still see as threatening in their original form, so they have to be watered down. Bowie is asking his audience why they are happy to take from black culture without ever really knowing the black experience.  He asks his audience, "You may enjoy the music, but do you understand where it comes from culturally and emotionally?"  At this point I have to state: no. I do not understand the experience because I have never lived it. I'm just a white lady from rural Canada and I'm in no way attempting to speak for black people with my commentary on this song. I think it's telling though that most of the musicians featured on this song are black, including of course Luther Vandross, who played a big part in arranging the song. Bowie, a white man, is singing it, and I think it's very sneaky how he gets his message across, because he knows that many of his listeners will only listen to funk/soul/R&B music if it's played by a white man like him, so he emulates the style perfectly but makes his lyrics very cynical and accusatory, so that  the listeners are initially hooked by the melody and style, get into the song, and then somewhere around the middle, realize that the very song they are in enjoying is decrying people like them (people like us, rather).

I think there's also some interesting commentary here on gender, too: the lyric "ain't there a woman I can sock on the jaw" references domestic violence obviously, but it's not an autobiographical lyric, it's a narrative "voice" Bowie uses to illustrate the hypocrisy of the ~enlightened~ '70s man. He loves the fact that the sexual revolution has freed women to engage in no-strings-attached sex, but he is angry at the fact that the women's lib movement has offered them other sorts of autonomy. He longs for an old-fashioned woman he could own and abuse rather than the Modern Woman who asks that a man be accountable for his actions.  

Basically, this song is about the hypocrisy of the 1970s youth: pretending to be so much more open-minded than their predecessors, but still harbouring racist and sexist ideals, just expressing them in a different way, perhaps a more insidious way.

That being said, although Bowie's a brilliant songwriter, the song shouldn't be taken as the last word on race relations: he is after all, still a white man from Britain. I do think though that we white people can learn something from it since we still persist in copying and stealing from black culture. The fact that this song is performed in a funk/soul style is the cleverest thing about it as it allows the narrator (Bowie) to address the issue from within the cultural arena in which it exists. Bowie's always played with personas, image and identity, and although I think he feels free to adopt personas that are based on some aspect of his personality, "Young Americans" is his protest against those who base their image or identity or sound or look on something that is not a part of their life and never will be, something that they will never know or understand. 

Mad Men, or, "Daddy Issues: The TV Show"

So the theme of paternal abandonment continues, both in my life and on Sunday's episode of Mad Men! But, as per the theme of this blog, I'm going to stick to covering Mad Men, with this entry paying particular focus on the interaction between Roger Sterling and his daughter Margaret.

Margaret is an interesting character in that the events of her life are rarely shown through her perspective on the show. Instead they are mostly relayed to us by Roger through conversations he has with other characters. In an early episode, Roger bitches to Joan about the fact that Margaret seems to have no motivations in life, only having dated two boys (one who committed suicide). You'd think that even someone like Roger would be able to extend sympathy to Margaret for dealing with a tragedy like that, but the event is reduced to pillow talk between him and Joan (Joan, lovely Joan, defends Margaret, saying that Roger is too hard on him). In another episode, Margaret's possible eating disorder is hinted at as Roger jokes that Mona stopped cooking after Margaret stopped eating.

And of course, there is Margaret's wedding, the events of which are particularly contentious for father and daughter as Roger is hell-bent on taking his new, much younger wife Jane to the wedding, while Margaret is against this. It's not a huge leap to assume that Margaret is viciously (and rightfully) jealous of Jane for her relationship with Roger. After all, Jane is not much older than Margaret herself.

So as we can see Roger and Margaret have quite the strained relationship, largely due to Roger's failure to provide for Margaret emotionally and to acknowledge her humanity as a daughter. I think this has much to do with Roger's issues with women: he tends to categorize his relationships with women as either sexual and passionate or cordial and distant. For instance, he doesn't appear to have much regard for Peggy as a friend or colleague despite seemingly respecting her work.

Roger doesn't know quite what do do with Margaret, a daughter, because he never wanted a daughter. A son, he could commiserate with and raise in his own image, but with Margaret he's faced with a dilemma: does raise her to be used by men the way he uses women, or does he warn her against such men, which would require some reflection on his part and admittance to misdeeds? The answer that he comes to, of course, is neither. He chooses to give up on parenting Margaret entirely.

Which brings us then to the events of The Monolith, where we learn that Margaret has engaged in her own form of parental abandonment: leaving her toddler behind as she chooses to follow a group of hippies to live on a commune. Both Roger and Mona are shocked and make it their mission to set Margaret straight, travelling to the commune to shake some sense into her, as it were. It doesn't work, obviously, because who would want to leave a life of free love and drugs to go back to New York City with their parents, to raise a child just the same way as their parents did (and have the child grow up to be as miserable and dissatisfied as them?).

It is then we see Roger trying to take on the Cool Dad role: Oh sure I'll have a look around! Yeah, I wanna here all about your cool new life! Far too late to make a difference, of course. And as the day wears on, the similarities between Margaret and the hippie girl that Roger has been sleeping with over the course of the season become too apparent for Roger, and he's faced with the harsh reality of what he's done to the women in his relationships (the "she's somebody's daughter!" dilemma) and what a shitty human being he is towards women. His breaking point comes when Margaret sneaks off from the barn where she is supposed to be sharing a tender moment with her father, to have sex with another one of the hippies, which hits way too close to home for serial womanizer Roger.

Roger doesn't want Margaret to continue the cycle of parental abandonment that he has been perpetuating, and so he flips his shit, attempts to drag her out of there, and lays a guilt trip on her about her responsibilities as a mother. Then, Margaret, in what I can only say is one of the best fictional daughter-to-father fights I've ever heard, truly rips into Roger, handing his ass to him about his own parental abandonment and all-around shitty behaviour as a father.

Roger mocks Margaret (Marigold) about her life in the commune, telling her she's got to step up and face reality, be a mother and stop living for a life of hedonistic pleasure.... but isn't that exactly what Roger did for Margaret's entire childhood? Boozing it up, banging secretaries, spending loads of money and basically doing whatever he wanted? Margaret is clearly still extremely bitter over what she feels was a shitty childhood and she unloads it all on her father, so viciously and so painfully: "How did you feel when you went away to work, Daddy? Your conscience must have been eating you alive. Calling your secretary from a hotel at lunch to pick out a birthday present for me.... it's not that hard, Daddy, I'll be fine."

Roger walks away in his muddied suit, defeated.

The events of Roger's trip to the commune echo Don's own relationship with Sally and perhaps serve as a warning of sorts as to what will happen if Don doesn't get his shit together and be a proper parent. What pains me so much though is that this episode is set in 1969 and there are still girls and women out there with the same complaints about their fathers: they never cared, they were never there, they never had any emotional connection. People like to say that about Mad Men: "oh, weren't things terrible back then?",  they say, but things are still pretty terrible, just not as explicitly. When will they get better? When men like Roger and Don everywhere start getting their damn shit together.