Brain Pain, the kind that keeps you up at night, the calibre of demon-at-bay which Canon is pocked with. The greats diagnosed its dailiness through metaphor, while today we greet it with palmfuls of swallowed pills, the ritual of therapy, and advocate’s backbone.
Libre is a Southern literature and arts magazine bent on brain pain & reexamining what it means to scavenge for agency in liminal states of illness.
Issue Three: Cinema
There’s a scene in Dallas Buyers Club when McConaughey grips his pistol. There’s birdsong in the distance and every rivet on his ruined face is exposed by light and the way his mouth parts—pained and opened by a sprawl of grief so great it animalizes—his vocals are taught and immobilized by a fault he cannot, in this moment, cope with beyond considering suicide.
A translation of pain to film. Pain made visible, even touchable, to the audience at home. We realize we’re asking a lot with this theme. I personally want a dramatic monologue in the vein of Nash or 1976’s Sybil, or a brief personal essay about the first time you watched Silver Linings Playbook.
How do they hold up? What do those characters do and say and weaponize when put back onto the page? Modernize or pay tribute or critique the devil out of it. This theme places us in a precarious position, one in which we’re walking the tightrope between trivialization of mental health’s painful inheritance and portrayal and the celebration of film and new media. It’s something we’d like to fight against proactively and rationally.
Mental health on film. Sifting through narratives for the unanswerable static of the mind. Villains & iconography, settings & archetypes: so transcribed they’ve lost half their blood through rewrites, reconfigurations based on the expected in place of the truth. Film as pensive for the troubling and troubled. A marriage of opposites: conjoining of text and image and their silent partner, psyche.
Issue Three wants to criticize, deconstruct, pay homage to, and place film at the center of the conversation around mental health and media. You’re welcome to pull from character archetypes, but we want to see transformation bloom from the borrowed comparison. History, theory, and gossip are suitable when placed in the correct context. We crave the well-wrought, foot-noted critical essay if you have the time and resources. Odes are fine; rewrites are always a chancy business, but give it a try if you’re feeling up to dueling with the liminality of transposed scene and altered dialogue.