Post by marshamae on Sept 16, 2021 18:27:33 GMT
Hitchcock’s Spellbound is about a dysfunctional mental health facility. It features several patients and 4 psychiatrists, plus some wonderful depictions of mental delusions.
Now Voyager is about a woman in neurotic free fall , thanks to her abusive mother, and her treatment by a caring doctor. Claude Rains the doctor spends most of his lines classifying his treatment as not psychiatry ,but help for those who have wandered off the path, and his facility , Cascades as a place where people go to rest. Today the first step in treatment is to recognize that you have an actual problem with a name. This relieves anxiety and guilt and allows treatment to go forward. In Now Voyagers, patients seem to find comfort in the idea that there is nothing much wrong.
Tender is the Night , though badly cast in my view, is an interesting representation of a playboy psychiatrist and his mentally ill wife. It’s the first film I can recall where the father’s sexual imposition on a daughter is discussed on screen as the cause of the mental illness. It came out at the same time as BUTTERFIELD 8 and Marnie, both of which featured early sex abuse, though not by the father. For fans of Fitzgerald it is interesting that Fitzgerald cast himself as his wife’s psychiatrist, when it is all too likely that his control and suppression, and their hectic life added to her illness. It’s interesting too that Tender is the Night ends with Dick a pretty hopeless alcoholic and Nicole more or less recovered and with another man.
Now Voyager is about a woman in neurotic free fall , thanks to her abusive mother, and her treatment by a caring doctor. Claude Rains the doctor spends most of his lines classifying his treatment as not psychiatry ,but help for those who have wandered off the path, and his facility , Cascades as a place where people go to rest. Today the first step in treatment is to recognize that you have an actual problem with a name. This relieves anxiety and guilt and allows treatment to go forward. In Now Voyagers, patients seem to find comfort in the idea that there is nothing much wrong.
Tender is the Night , though badly cast in my view, is an interesting representation of a playboy psychiatrist and his mentally ill wife. It’s the first film I can recall where the father’s sexual imposition on a daughter is discussed on screen as the cause of the mental illness. It came out at the same time as BUTTERFIELD 8 and Marnie, both of which featured early sex abuse, though not by the father. For fans of Fitzgerald it is interesting that Fitzgerald cast himself as his wife’s psychiatrist, when it is all too likely that his control and suppression, and their hectic life added to her illness. It’s interesting too that Tender is the Night ends with Dick a pretty hopeless alcoholic and Nicole more or less recovered and with another man.