Major Assignment 1

Research Essay

For this assignment, we had to make a research essay about a topic related to the topic we picked for Small Assignment 2. I had psychological disorders for the mini tutorial, but I decided to go with something loosely connected to that and researched how mental institutions are portrayed in cinema.

Reflection

I learned from the mini tutorial that actually crafting a research question for a project is really difficult. It takes multiple revisions to the question to actually get what you want to write about. You also need to make sure the thesis you cook up for the paper itself can be argued, as you can trap yourself later in the project because you don’t have an argument for the paper. Conducting more in-depth research is much more difficult than it was in the mini tutorial. When it comes to scholarly sources, you have to make sure it actually pertains to the project you’re working on. The most difficult part of the research paper was trying to find scholarly sources. Not many people research the portrayals of mental disorders on cinema, let alone portrayals of mental institutions. What I learned from writing the paper itself is you must think realistically about what you want your paper to be. I had many sections that I thought up that I had to scrap because they didn’t exactly help my argument. You also need to get some feedback from your peers in order to iron it out. You often get blinded by what you’re making, so another perspective can really help. The transferring of the essay to a web-style article made me realize that sometimes you have to make adjustments to the final draft in order to make the real final product. I had to find more pictures than what I had in the Word document so that it looked like a true web article. I was the most confident on finding the general information I needed from the internet. I also thought the general outline I had was very good before I started the paper, and it never changed. I will take what I learned about finding true scholarly sources with me throughout my education, and most likely my life. I am even utilizing it now, as I make my final paper for my Intro to Asia course.

 

A Clockwork Asylum

Christian O’Reilly

4/25/2022

Did you know that Danvers State Hospital, an insane asylum that opened in 1878, was the inspiration of Arkham Sanitorium in H.P Lovecraft’s The Thing on the Doorstep, which in turn inspired Arkham Asylum in the Batman comic universe? Asylums may be a thing of the past, but they are often used in film as a stage to excite the viewer. One’s reality is shaped by the viewers perspective, though, and can affect how someone sees a modern mental institution, most of the time being negative portrayals giving birth to negative perceptions of these places. The purpose of this essay is to explore mental institutions in media. How are they represented and portrayed? First, I will give some notable examples of negative portrayals of mental institutions and staff in movies, such as A Clockwork Orange. Then, I will give some more examples of negative portrayals in video games. Finally, with the assistance of a scholarly journal by Cornelia Pechmann and Chuan-Fong Shih as well as the documentary A Forbidden Orange, I will explain why these negative portrayals are a problem in the first place and how cinema can influence us.

One of the most well-known movies that demonizes mental institutions is A Clockwork Orange (1971). Directed by Stanley Kubrick and adapted from the novel of the same name, A Clockwork Orange tells the tale of Alex, an antisocial and extremely violent delinquent. Throughout the first part of the film, he and his gang go on a massive crime spree, committing theft, murder, and rape. Eventually, Alex is captured, leading to the scene that is a key part of this essay. Alex is subjected to a very experimental technique that is referred to as the “Ludovico Technique”. He is strapped to a chair and forced to watch films of sex and violence. Throughout this, he is injected with many drugs and his eyes are physically forced open with clamps. As a result of the “treatment”, Alex became violently ill at the thought of sex and violence, with him even being unable to defend himself later in the film. There was some backlash when the results were demonstrated to some government officials, with the chaplain of the prison complaining that the technique stripped Alex of his free will. (Plot Summary) This kind of portrayal is sickening, and it gives people a bad view on psychiatry.

Trigger Warning

According to Audry Mattle, despite how unrealistic the scenes are, Psychotherapy is utilized to show the mind of a patient in the film, showing a speedy recovery and a lack of ethical concern. (Mattle). If this is how people believe the treatment of mental illness goes, who’s going to willingly go to get treatment?

The House on Haunted Hill (1999) is another film that gives mental institutions a bad name. Even though most of the movie doesn’t actually involve an active asylum, it is full of negative portrayals of patients, staff, and treatments just in the opening of the film.

Trigger Warning

When the movie begins, you see a doctor or orderly walking into an office, with screaming in the background. He puts on a record, sharpens a pencil, and begins to fill out what seems to be medical notes. It cuts to a doctor in a medical room, with a nurse standing beside him while another nurse films him cutting open a strapped down patient without any anesthesia or painkillers. The doctor stops when he hears something, and looks up to see many patients, yelling and banging on the opaque glass ceiling. It cuts back to the man taking notes, with a girl in the area in front of him. All of the sudden, a bunch of patients break the glass door of the office and enter, grabbing the man. One patient grabs the other sharpened pencils and proceeds to stab him in the neck, piercing through the other side. One of the patients hits an electric box, and it cuts to more patients running through a hall and into the surgery room. The staff are grabbed but the doctor pulls a lever that traps everyone in the asylum and is beaten by the inmates. One nurse is drowned, while another is most likely raped. An inmate picks up the camera the nurse was filming with, and we cut to the camera’s perspective, where we are told what was happening by a newscaster. It’s brutal, and that’s just in the first two minutes. The low number of guards and staff is entirely inaccurate, which makes it seem like people don’t care about the patients, plus the surgery on the conscious man shows a horrible picture of medical practice. The patients themselves in the film are also shown negatively and unrealistically. Not all people with mental disorders are murderous psychopaths, yet all of the patients in the opening are shown to have violent tendencies. Granted, it is possible that the torture and mistreatment these people most likely had caused them to lose themselves, but the patients also rape one of the nurses. The scene lacks any female patients, which also seems unlikely. Throughout the film, the characters are often subjected to and killed with the “treatments” that were once employed in the abandoned asylum, like electroshock therapy or the fictional “Saturation Chamber”, a treatment for schizophrenics that was basically a giant version of those moving image wheels (Plot Summary).

It isn’t just movies that are at fault here. Video Games also tend to give negative portrayals of mental institutions. Outlast is a game where you play a journalist who is investigating Mount Massive Asylum, a mental institution run by the Murkoff Corporation. According to Lainey Huffman of EGD, the game gives a negative image to people with mental illness, with the patients in the game being rabid and disfigured (Outlast). Not only that, but it is also later revealed in the game that the Murkoff Corporation was intentionally mistreating their patients, wanting to create a place full of death and madness in order to control an entity known as the Walrider. Mount Massive Asylum is probably the worst portrayal of mental institutions in all of media, with countless instances of murder, a part where a patient is raping a dead body, a psychotic doctor who cuts off the player’s fingers, and even a male patient who performs gender reassignment on other men.

Alan Wake is another game that, while not having an actual institution, gives a negative portrayal of psychiatrists. In the game, you play as a writer named Alan Wake, whose ability to write has unleashed a malevolent force, referred to as the Dark Presence by Alan, on the tourist spot known as Cauldron Lake. Halfway through the game, Alan is essentially kidnapped by a psychiatrist named Dr. Emil Hartman, who wishes to use Alan to control the Dark Presence. Portraying mental health professionals like this is bad for people who should get help.

These kinds of portrayals need to stop since it can affect the mental health of others and distort people’s views on mental disorders. According to a scholarly article written by Cornelia Pechmann and Chuan-Fong Shi, the results on a study on how smoking in movies affected youths showed that “exposure to attractive movie stars smoking tended to create the impression that smoking was socially condoned” (6).

If you think that people aren’t concerned about how movies influence others, think again. In the documentary A Forbidden Orange, Vicente Molina Foix, a Spanish movie critic, talks about the public’s response to A Clockwork Orange, stating “A Clockwork Orange was preceded by the scent of scandal. Many said it was immoral and cruel, that it favored crime, etc.”(A Forbidden Orange, 4:19-4:34), and a picture of a newspaper article is also shown stating that, taking an example from the Detroit News, around 30 American newspapers restricted ads and reviews for X-rated films at a minimum du e to the film (A Forbidden Orange, 5:52-5:57).

Audry Mattle also talks about this in her own project, talking about the experience of a doctor named Butler. She says that a patient of Butler “learned from Nightmare on Elm Street that the doctor wanted to turn him into a zombie. (Mattle). This kind of stance is harmful for the mental health of others, not only for the fact that it demonizes those with mental illness, but also since it gives the treatment of said illnesses a bad image. Thankfully, a few movies used negative portrayals of mental institutions to help inspire change in the real world. The movie The Snake Pit was inspired by a novel, written by Mary Jane Ward to tell her experiences at mental institutions, and was one of the first to take mental illness seriously. According to Chrissy Stockton, “the film had such a tremendous effect that 13 states soon changed their laws regarding mental-health institutions” (Stockton), reforming patient treatment, so negative portrayals aren’t always a bad thing, it’s how its portrayed that matters.

In the real world, asylums were truly disturbing places. That’s probably why so many negative portrayals exist out there. Cinema is a way of showing someone a perspective of a life that could’ve been. It can be a very powerful force, that’s why it has been used for the purpose of propaganda in the past, such as in China, with films like Sparkling Red Star and The East is Red being used to strengthen the support for the People’s Republic of China. The study of the mind is how crime has decreased and order is restored, so don’t believe everything you see on the screen.

 

Works Cited

A Clockwork Orange. Directed by Stanley Kubrick, Polaris Productions, 1971.

A Forbidden Orange. Directed by Pedro González Bermúdez, HBO Max, 2021.

daleeasson. (2011, July 13). The house on Haunted Hill – opening. YouTube. Retrieved March 31, 2022,

from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2l_b2DvTGzM&t=12s

Mattle, A. (n.d.). Portrayals of Mental Illness in Film and the Impact on Viewers, Individuals with Mental

Illness, and Mental Health Treatment. Portrayals of Mental Illness. Retrieved March 31, 2022, from https://amattleresearch.digitalscholar.rochester.edu/portrayals-of-mental-illness-in-film-and-the-impact-on-viewers-individuals-with-mental-illness-and-mental-health-treatment/

Pechmann, Cornelia, and Chuan-Fong Shih. “Smoking Scenes in Movies and Antismoking Advertisements

Before Movies: Effects on Youth.” Journal of Marketing, vol. 63, no. 3, 1999, pp. 1-13. ProQuest, https://libdatabase.newpaltz.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/smoking-scenes-movies-antismoking-advertisements/docview/227751193/se-2?accountid=12761.

Stockton, C. (2022, March 28). 44+ Insane Asylum Movies: Thrillers, Dark dramas and more. Creepy

Catalog. Retrieved March 31, 2022, from https://creepycatalog.com/insane-asylum-movies/

Wikimedia Foundation. (2022, April 3). A Clockwork Orange (film). Wikipedia. Retrieved April 3, 2022,

from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Clockwork_Orange_(film)

Wikimedia Foundation. (2022, March 28). House on Haunted Hill (1999 film). Wikipedia. Retrieved April

2, 2022, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_on_Haunted_Hill_(1999_film)