Tara Ison - Reeling Through Life - How I Learned to Live, Love and Die at the Movies

At the end of The Snake Pit , after a tidy Freudian unraveling of her neuroses, Olivia asks her doctor how she can be sure she won’t wind up in the pit again; he snaps off the light, lets her stand a moment in the dark, then points out she now knows where the light switch is. Click . So although she might find herself in the darkness once again, at least now she’ll always have the power to find her way to the light. But what happens, say, to someone like my Aunt Edith — someone for whom even the light switch has no power, no meaning? What about someone who can’t just click her heels?

It doesn’t matter, in a way, that ECT is now, by all accounts “largely voluntary, a last-resort option” and a lifesaver for many people (see: Carrie Fisher); it doesn’t matter which way the debate or the proof on it swings; it doesn’t matter that I am not clinically bipolar or borderline or that I most likely will not become a paranoid schizophrenic or (I hope) the muttering bag lady on the corner, off her rocker, off her meds, the one I turn my eyes from, or a space traveler flung two thousand years forward into an evolutionary quagmire. It doesn’t matter whether any of us really does have control over our own mental and emotional well-being — the psychobiologists and the psychosociologists can battle that one out — or agree on a definition of the word “ crazy ,” that we often simply fall back on the slippery and subjective cousin-definition of porn : “We know it when we see it.”

And it doesn’t matter, in a way, that my own family members, my friends, the people I trust with the spare key to my life, would never, I think, I think, sign any papers (I wonder), would never allow the straps or machines or (I hope) the stripping away of me.

Because there is still that thin, shaky line between being crazy and being inconvenient, and who hasn’t worried about losing their grip? About losing that weak clutch on sanity, reality, self, or about those things being pried away? “There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness,” says Melville. The threat of that will always loom for me, and perhaps it’s the cautionary and inspiring images in my mind of McMurphy and Frances and Janet and John, along with women cast into gloomy pits, or women snapping back on their own lights, and version A and version B of a crazy aunt, that help me keep it all in check, the wisdom and the madness, teeter and threat, the images that show me how to go just crazy enough to empower myself and not the devil in my soul, how not to wind up unself’d and groping in the dark.

1 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (United Artists, 1975): screenplay by Lawrence Hauben and Bo Goldman, based on the novel by Ken Kesey and the play by Dale Wasserman; directed by Milos Forman; with Jack Nicholson and Louise Fletcher

2 Suddenly, Last Summer (Columbia Pictures, 1959): screenplay by Gore Vidal, adapted from the play by Tennessee Williams; directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, with Elizabeth Taylor, Katharine Hepburn, and Montgomery Clift

3 The Snake Pit (20th Century Fox, 1948): screenplay by Frank Partos and Millen Brand; directed by Anatole Litvak; with Olivia de Havilland

4 Frances (Universal, 1982): screenplay by Eric Bergren, Christopher De Vore, and Nicholas Kazan; directed by Graeme Clifford; with Jessica Lange, Kim Stanley, and Sam Shepard

5 An Angel at My Table (ABC/Television New Zealand/Sharmill Films, 1991): screenplay by Laura Jones, based on the autobiographies of Janet Frame; directed by Jane Campion; with Kerry Fox

6 Planet of the Apes (20th Century Fox, 1968): screenplay by Michael Wilson and Rod Serling, based on the novel by Pierre Boulle; directed by Franklin J. Schaffner; with Charlton Heston, Kim Hunter, and Maurice Evans

7 Girl, Interrupted (Columbia Pictures, 1999): screenplay by James Mangold, Lisa Loomer, and Anna Hamilton Phelan, based on the autobiography by Susanna Kaysen; directed by James Mangold; with Winona Ryder, Angelina Jolie, Whoopi Goldberg, and Vanessa Redgrave

8 The Wizard of Oz (MGM, 1939): screenplay by Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson, and Edgar Allan Woolf, based on the novel by L. Frank Baum; directed by Victor Fleming; with Judy Garland and Billie Burke

9 A Beautiful Mind (Imagine Entertainment, 2001): screenplay by Akiva Goldsman, based on the book by Sylvia Nasar; directed by Ron Howard; with Russell Crowe, Jennifer Connelly, and Christopher Plummer

THE SCHOOLGIRL, THE NYMPHET, THE MUSE, AND THE INEXORABLE TICKING CLOCK

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

Taxi Driver

Bugsy Malone

Pretty Baby

Lolita

Manhattan

Little girls!

she announces imperiously at the front of the classroom, here at the Marcia Blaine School for Girls, calling us to order, demanding our immediate attention. 10And I pay attention, of course, for I am a little girl, she is speaking to me — although, at six years old, I am younger than Miss Brodie’s thirteen-year-old pupils. Perhaps I am even too young to be attending this PG-rated movie, but I am accompanied by my parents, after all, and it’s about a schoolteacher and her devoted students in 1930s Scotland, they probably reasoned — if they ever reasoned about such things — so how inappropriate could it be? And how could this impassioned, in-her-prime Miss Jean Brodie (Oscar-winning Maggie Smith at her fine-boned loveliest) offer anything to a little girl but the wisest counsel, the sagest of lessons on life? Especially in that enchanting Scottish burr?

MISS JEAN BRODIE

Little girls! I am in the business of putting old heads on young shoulders. And all my girls are the crème de la crème! Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life!

And those unformed little girls, pudgy or scrawny, spotty or velvet-cheeked, with their unfortunate juvenile haircuts and baggy school uniforms, gaze at her adoringly, fully under her spell. I adore her, too — whatever the crème de la crème is, it is obviously the best thing to be. Miss Brodie offers a secret knowledge beyond spelling and geography and math; she seeks to illuminate “all the possibilities of life,” of art and poetry and love, to her girls, “to provide you with interests !” she promises, to nurture their natural proclivities for romantic passion, above all else, and I am eager to be privy to these teachings — even if I don’t understand everything that is happening in this movie, Miss Brodie’s destructive emotional manipulations, or the intricacies of academic politics. I am almost jealous of the special attention Miss Brodie pays to her four favorites — Jenny, Sandy, Monica, and Mary — especially Jenny, whom Miss Brodie deems prettiest, the one who “could be magnificently elevated above the ordinary realm of lovers,” the girl most destined to be famous, one day, she says dreamily, “for sex.” I do not understand what being famous for sex could possibly mean, only that it is, like being the best crème , clearly the thing to aspire to, and so I am determined to pay extra good attention that I might learn.

Miss Brodie has recently ended a love affair with Teddy Lloyd, the art teacher with a wife and a flock of children; their once-glorious time together has turned prosaic, lost its idealized sheen, and while he is in despair at losing her, he doesn’t hesitate to call her out: “The truth is, Jean, you bounced into bed with an artist, but you were horrified when you woke up with a man!” Miss Brodie is not done with him, however; she sees an opportunity, in pretty-but-bland young Jenny, to create a romantic scenario, a Dante-and-Beatrice-esque love affair between the fortyish Teddy and the budding teen, a relationship that will rejuvenate and reinspire an older man to greatness and awaken the young girl to the glory of sexual maturity. And so, over the next few years, she grooms the clueless Jenny to replace her in Teddy’s bed.