Mental Disorders in Popular Film

How Hollywood Uses, Shames, and Obscures Mental Diversity

Erin Heath

• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781978795655
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Social Sciences

Contemporary Hollywood films commonly use mental disorders as a magnifier by which social, political, or economic problems become enlarged in order to critique societal conditions. Cinema has a long history of amplifying human emotion or experience for dramatic effect. The heightened representations of people with mental disorder often elide one category of literal truths for the benefit of different moral or emotional reasons. With films like Fight Club, The Silence of the Lambs, The Dark Knight, and Black Swan, this book address characters identified by film or media as people who are crazy, mentally ill, developmentally delayed, insane, have autism spectrum disorder, associative personality disorder, or who have other mental disorders. Despite the vast array of differences in people's experiences, film often marginalizes people with mental disorders in ways that make it important to be inclusive of these varied experiences. These characters also commonly become subject to the structures of hierarchy and control that actual people with mental disorders encounter. Cinematic patterns of control and oppression heavily influence the narratives of those considered crazy by the outside world.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Gender and Reality inFight Club and Black Swan
• Chapter Two: Villainizing and Psychopathsin The Dark Knight andThe Silence of the Lambs
• Chapter Three: Cognitive Theory and Autism inRain Man and Mary and Max
• Chapter Four: Disability Theory and Race inRadio and The Soloist
• Chapter Five: Institutionalization and Gaslighting in Girl, Interrupted and 12 Monkeys
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author