Mind Reeling investigates how cinema displays and mirrors psychological disorders, such as bipolar disorder, amnesia, psychotic delusions, obsessive compulsive behavior, trauma, paranoia, and borderline personalities. It explores a range of genres, including biopics, comedies, film noirs, contemporary dramedies, thrillers, Gothic mysteries, and docufictions. The contributors open up critical approaches to audience fascination with film depictions of serious disturbances within the human psyche. Many films examined here have had little scholarly attention and commentary. These essays focus on how cinematic techniques contribute to popular culture’s conception of mental dysfunction, trauma, and illness. This book reveals the complex artistic and generic patterns that produce contemporary images of psychopathology in cinema.
Table of Content
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction: A Very Brief History of Psychopathology in Cinema
Homer B. Pettey
2. Adèle H., Camille Claudel, and Margot de Valois: Isabelle Adjani’s Real ‘Mad’ Women? Costume Drama and the Disruptive Female
Susan Hayward
3. Musical Madness on Hangover Square
Murray Pomerance
4. Screening Multiple Personality Disorder in the Age of Kinsey:
Lizzie and
The Three Faces of Eve
R. Barton Palmer
5. The Cine-Telescopic Psyche: 1950s Serial Killers and Sexual Psychopathology in
The Sniper and
While the City Sleeps
Robert Miklitsch
6. Pathologies of Pedagogy in Midcentury Melodrama:
The Miracle Worker and
A Child Is Waiting
Jennifer L. Jenkins
7. Passion and Delirium: Representing Madness in
Spider and
Asylum
Jim Leach
8. Scorched: Landscape, Trauma, and Embodied Experience in
Incendies
Tarja Laine
9. Ghostly and Ghastly Desires and Disorders in
Young Adult: Ken Taco Huts in Mercury
Julie Grossman
10. Criminal Biographies and Visual Culture
Homer B. Pettey
Contributors
Index
About the author
Homer B. Pettey is Professor of Film and Comparative Literature at the University of Arizona. He is the editor of several books, including
Hitchcock’s Moral Gaze (with R. Barton Palmer and Steven M. Sanders) and
Rule Brittannia! The Biopic and British National Identity (with R. Barton Palmer), both also published by SUNY Press.
More ebooks from the same author(s) / Editor
21,632 Ebooks in this category
