Mental Disorders in Popular Film
How Hollywood Uses, Shames, and Obscures Mental Diversity
By (author) Erin Heath
Not available to order
Publication date:
28 February 2019Length of book:
106 pagesPublisher
Lexington BooksISBN-13: 9781498521727
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.
Mental Disorders in Popular Film is a delightful manuscript with many intriguing critiques of popular media depictions of disability—a rare find indeed. The author includes disability theory, scholarly literature, political critique, intersectionality, misconceptions (and corrections), and eye-opening revelations of how mass media manipulates its viewers’ outlooks on mental illness and developmental disabilities. These five chapters or cases each contain two movie examples to enlighten readers in ways which cannot be unseen or unknown, all wrapped up in a highly accessible read suitable for both students—and everyone else. Moviemakers beware!