https://videos.files.wordpress.com/c9iomOIt/reccreads.mp4
Looking back on a childhood spent in vicinity of the television set, I’m bothered. A list of characters in my head—
(beloved, or if not that, remembered with such furious potency that it’s left deep, decades-lasting psychic imprint)
—I’ve realized something: they’re all mentally ill. Take the Tin Man, boot up Spotify and give his 30’s crooning another listen. He’s singing about Bipolar Disorder, or, at least, some facet of a mood disorder: destabilized, off his meds so bad that his body’s ceased to function, needs special oil (read: alcohol) to get him out of “the woods” (read: he’s out of work, for the large part homeless, seasonally adrift and held captive by yet another spell of his illness.) He calls it a curse because he’s a nursery rhyme set to meter and the children are watching and after all, life-threatening’s saved for the cyclones and witches. He’s the first to go down when the group braves the Poppy Field, first to weep silver at the mention of a moral salt-of-the-Kansas-county truth. He claims his lack is one of heart when in fact the poor fellow has two portions too big of the organ. Reasoning away mental health when in relation to the children’s story is a foolish past-time. I’d argue that the majority of the characters who led us through those early years of new life were some of the most disabled. Magic’s in the margins. Magic’s in the toss of a woman’s head set to film. Fake star shine and mood music in the studio’s rafters. The director vapes and fingers the Lexapro he forgot to take at lunch.
Allow me to be a girl for a moment and reference my favorite leading lady, Vivien Leigh. Known manic-depressive, she spent her 40’s and 50’s being institutionalized for brief periods between performing on stage and in film and curating a world-renowned home life at Notley Abbey. Historians speculate that her miscarriage during the filming of Cleopatra was the impetus for her first documented breakdown. It’s implicit in medical literature that the Bipolar Beast often lies dormant until a severe trauma affects its host. Following a manic episode, Vivien was famous for writing her friends heartfelt apologies for her outlandish behavior. From what I’ve read, they mostly forgave her. What’s tragic? Everything, really, but the dear woman could have benefited from a mood stabilizer.
Vivien’s experiences with brain pain consisted of brutal ECT treatments, resulting in a bruised face and invasive public attention. During a stay in Hollywood, she was forcibly thrown to the ground and rendered a tranquilizer shot. Despite Larry’s best efforts, Vivien was mishandled. She was a movie star, and while her enormous privilege affects our levels of empathy for her, I offer her as figurehead, nonetheless. It’s telling. In modern vernacular, we celebrate her for two distinguished roles, both of which she spent portraying mentally ill, southern women.
Streetcar’s Blanche performs the languid, though robustly fortifying co-morbidity of BP Depression and psychic disturbance with dreary, blonde pathos that curdles on-screen, second-guessing itself as theatrical precursor to Second-wave feminism.
losing our grip on purpose 