Review: Touched with Fire

Medication. Once you have been on it for a little while, you begin wondering if you need it. Some — like me — fiddled with the dosages. Others stop taking it at all. Those with an artistic temperament, especially poets, don’t like seeing their most valuable kind of intelligence stripped away from them so that exercising their craft becomes harder. Because Art is more important to them than their relations with their families and friends, they step boldly beyond sanity and give themselves over entirely to their illness — until life becomes unmanageable.

It is understandable why people seek to go back to mania, particularly those of us with an artistic bent. Personally, I found writing poetry came easily to me. I not only had the focus, but I also had the sense of association that one needed to choose words to convey specific, charged meanings. If I had had a lover afflicted with the same, my output of love poems would have been enormous.

We all think we are brilliant in mania, but a great many manic artists are at best banal. A few like the poet Robert Lowell needed mania to keep an edge in their poetry. Others like Shelley sought out doctors to get help quelling their mood swings. These famous names — along with that of Vincent Van Gogh and many others — tempt some to

Touched with Fire steals its title from Kay Jamison’s classic book of the same name. (Jamison isn’t mad. She appears as herself in the movie at one point, desperately trying to set one of the characters straight on the issue of whether to take his meds or not.) It tells the story of two young people who meet while locked up in a psych ward. Like many such relationships, there is a wind storm of shared stimulation that transcends sex and common love.

They are bad for each other. They sneak down into the basement of the ward in the middle of the night to talk, write, and make art together. This nightly rendezvous makes them wildly orbit each other, like two Kuiper Belt objects stuck in mutual admiration. When they are separated, they grow wilder at first, then crash into depression, their bodies digging out craters of morbid, energy-less, angst. When they get out, they stop their meds again and head out on an extended road tour which nearly costs them their lives when he drives their car into a river.

Both Katie Holmes and Luke Kirby deserve praise for their portrayals. She is the intellectual, the one who retains the ability to reason while he is the wildman who chants rap. It is Holme’s character who eventually sees the light; Kirby’s cannot resist bipolar disorder’s attraction. Griffin Dunne puts in a great performance as Kirby’s much maligned father whose bipolar wife abandoned the family. He and Holmes’ parents show part of the damage that unrestrained mania can have on families. Kay Jamison is a surprise appearance, as the goddess to who Kirby and Holmes turn when they must confront their mania. It is clear who understood Jamison’s message better in this confrontation. Jamison is often portrayed as an apologist for medications by anti-psychiatrists, but here she makes the case that too much medication is a bad thing and cites her own experience.

Touched with Fire gets it right. Nowhere have I seen the excitement of mania so brilliantly exhibited. We’ve needed films like this just as we have needed the recent Infinitely Polar Bear and Homeland because they tell the truth about us and show that we are human. We are not Jasons — we are children of the light.

If you miss it in the theaters, rent the dvd.

Review: An Angel at My Table

Janet Frame endured eight years as a mental patient before she went on to become the poet laureate of New Zealand. She was misdiagnosed. While she was incarcerated she underwent electro-convulsive therapy without anesthesia and was lined up for a lobotomy until her doctor learned that she had won a prestigious literary prize and took her off the list. This movie is the story of three periods in her life. Her time in a mental hospital is the second.

I would guess that social anxiety and, perhaps, depression were the demons that afflicted Frame. She would hide in corners. She failed at her work as a teacher. When two of her sisters died, she crashed into a frozen despair.

If Angel at My Table is accurate, Frame was most certainly not schizophrenic. An early scene in the second part of the film shows her riding to the hospital in a car with two women who are severely impaired by their illnesses. She stands out as unafflicted by whatever is troubling her fellow passengers. Things were done to her while she was in the hospital just because they were the latest treatment. Her mother desperately signed the papers for the lobotomy: if Frame had been trapped in a mindless system, we would have lost a great author. Fortunately, a doctor noticed in time and helped her win her release.

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Review: Infinitely Polar Bear

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I identified with the wife and mother. Partly because she was, like me, the wife of a man with bipolar disorder. But also because she was the kind of person I think of myself as being, a bright, competent woman who pulls things together to be the provider for her family. Any time I doubt my other wifely abilities, I can tell myself that, after all, I’ve done pretty well for us as the family breadwinner.

For the mother (played by Zoe Saldana) in Infinitely Polar Bear, though, providing for her family means trusting her chaotic, bipolar husband (“totally polar bear,” as his younger daughter describes him) can pull it together to care for their two daughters while she relocates from Boston to NYC to get the education she’ll need to provide a better life for her family.

As that bipolar husband, Mark Ruffalo shines, displaying an entirely believable mix of chaos, love, and hard work as a father pulled toward sanity by the need to keep it together (take the Lithium, put away the booze) for his two daughters. His enthusiasms and his battle with household clutter did remind me of my husband.

But this is a movie that focuses, not on the journey of the patient, but that of the whole family. You can see the wife, on her last reserve of patience as she gets her husband’s ecstatic 3am phone call announcing that he has completed a costume for his daughter, and realizes that he is manic again. And you can see her in warmer moments when she remembers why she loved him in the first place. And you can see his daughters’ loving but often embarrassed relationship with their father, as the film honors the way he pulls himself together to be the best father he possibly can without sugarcoating the experience of being the child who wonders, if I move away from dad, will he still take his Lithium?

On the whole, it’s an upbeat story, one in which love does triumph and dad does come through when he’s needed. And one I’d definitely recommend.

 

Review: Love and Mercy

I’m always a little on edge when I sit down to watch a movie about someone living with mental illness, particularly if it is a true story. Did the actors, writers, and director get what it is like to live with mental illness or did they make a caricature of it? Did they romanticize it? Did they put a hockey mask over the face of the sufferer and an ax in his hand? Is it another ECT scene out of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest? Or do we get the truth?

Bill Pohlad’s Love and Mercy had me worried about romanticization before I saw it. I dreaded that he would render the illness of Beach Boy Brian Wilson as cute and fuzzy, something that would make us wonder whether we were too cruel when it came to the mentally ill. It did do that, but there is a right way to go about it and a wrong way. The wrong way declares that there is no such thing as mental illness; it diminishes the impact that the illness has on those closest to the sufferer and suggests that the illness that afflicted the likes of Brian Wilson was little more than a personality quirk. Pohlad and his cast did it the right way: it acknowledges the severity of Wilson’s illness, but also turns a harsh eye towards his guardian/therapist, one Eugene Landy and his sadistic oversight of the musical great. Paul Giamatti’s performance was so to the T that when Wilson watched the movie, he experienced a severe dissociative state where he believed for several minutes that Giamatti was Landers come back to haunt him.

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Arguing with the God Within

Near the end of Ingmar Bergman’s classic Winter Light, the troubled minister who is the film’s main character, can’t decide whether to hold the 3 o’clock service or not. His day has been especially depressing because he gave counseling to a parishioner who subsequently committed suicide that very afternoon, he fought with his mistress, and he has the flu. The church sexton, a disabled survivor of a railroad accident, talks to him about the part of the Gospels which he has been reading, the Passion.

Jesus, the sexton reasons, didn’t suffer all that much on the cross. Why, the janitor goes on, he personally suffered more pain in his life than the four hours that afflicted Jesus and his pain was probably much worse. No, the crucifixion is not the most important segment of the Passion. Think of the Garden of Gethsemane, he says. The Last Supper is done. The disciples who have accompanied him have no clue about what is about to happen, so they go to sleep. Jesus is all alone, so he kneels down to pray. And what does God the Father say to him? Nothing. God is silent. And that, the sexton reasons, is the most terrible ordeal that Jesus endures.

Agnostic that I am, I still value the Gospels as a guide for understanding the suffering that is happening in my life. But what I would give for a silent God at times! In the void, my depressions fill the emptiness with the voice that is the worst of the Old Testament combined with Catholic guilt. I call this my inner god — a false god to be certain — because its primary purpose is to torment me. My illness exists, according to this voice, for the purpose of punishing me. But therapist after therapist has asked me What have I done that is so terrible that I deserve this constant hammering at my self-esteem? I can throw out a number of things, but they are all trivial compared to the actions of some of my peers who feel no shame for what they wreak against others. Surely there should come a place where my penance is over? But no matter what amends I make, the god inside me continues to berate me and declare me worthless.

One reason why I value my manias is that they shut down this voice entirely. Only my own ideations occupy me — obsessively. My thoughts race from project to project, propounding desperate philosophies that enthrall me more than methamphetamine. The evil god, the blasphemer against my happiness is put to death and does not rise again until I crash. Then for more than forty days at a stretch, the god assaults me with shame.

For the depressed and the anxious, the silence of God is a scream.

The Hidden Side of Gia Carangi

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A cult has grown around the memory of dead supermodel Gia Carangi, mostly due to the movie of her life with Angelina Jolie in the title role. The film explores many facets of her troubled personality including her drug use, her obsession with her lover, her bisexual promiscuity, and her death from AIDS. Her problems, we are led to believe, stemmed from her drug use which made her irritable, anxious, depressed, hyper, and in the end terminally ill with HIV.

Many have speculated that Gia was bipolar. This could be a strong post-mortem diagnosis given her interludes of manic behavior and severe depression. A Gia Carangi fan site says

Gia frequented New York’s jet-set night spots, such as Studio 54, and developed a heroin problem during the latter part of her life. Because of Bipolar Disorder, Gia experienced extreme mood swings and would walk out of a fashion shoot if she didn’t feel like doing it. She constantly medicated herself with heroin. Carangi made several attempts at fighting her heroin addiction, attending rehabilitation centers multiple times. In 1983, she was profiled on ABC’s 20/20 magazine, in a piece focusing on the dark side of modeling. In June of 1986, she was diagnosed with HIV, becoming one of the first famous persons to be diagnosed with the disease, and also the first famous female diagnosed.

The makers of Gia completely overlook the possibility that Carangi’s eccentric behavior was driven by an organic brain dysfunction. None of the semi-fictional “interviewees” alludes to bipolar disorder though likely symptoms are depicted.

Why is this angle on Gia’s life ignored? In the post-Nancy Reagan “Just Say No” era, a certain anti-romanticism has developed around the drug culture. Many find it far easier to blame irresolution as a friend leads one down the wrong path than to admit a deeper dysfunction. It is more glamorous to be a drug addict than a sufferer of a mental illness. Many of Gia’s fans could buy into the myth that people with mental illness cannot contribute meaningfully to society as Gia did.

A few months ago I read another one of those articles which disputed Kay Jamison’s contention that Vincent Van Gogh was bipolar. The author argued that based on recent evidence that showed that Van Gogh had not committed suicide, Jamison’s diagnosis was wrong. The writer ignored all the letters and accounts of his bizarre behavior including his cutting his ear off as a message to a lover, reducing his end of life depression to grief over the death of his brother Theo. I finished the piece with the impression that she just didn’t want to acknowledge that bipolar was anything but a completely debilitating illness whose sufferers could not give the rest of the world anything of value. That the article appeared in a magazine that prided itself on its skepticism — truth-seeking — saddened me. Because this was the latest instance of its subtly disparaging those with mental illness, I have since ended my subscription.

We think better of drug addicts than we do of the mentally ill. This may be the main reason why Gia’s heroin abuse is seen as the root of all her problems when, in fact, it may have been a symptom and an attempt to curb the wild manias and low depressions that afflicted her. We cannot know for sure because Gia died before seeking treatment. Rehab programs don’t have good records of identifying those who live with conditions like bipolar and schizophrenia, rooting everything in the relationship the addict has with her or his drug and those around them. Gia’s biographers have mostly retold her story as a fable about her undefined weak character. If we are honest, however, we will not allow Gia’s memory to serve such a shallow purpose as merely warning people away from drugs. A far more potent message can be sent about the importance of recognizing mental illness in ourselves and in our loved ones. What if Gia had been put on a combination such as lithium and lamotrigine? If our intent in retelling her story is to save lives, let’s make sure that we put our focus on the right cause.