Austin Film Festival: Mental Illness in the Movies

The unreliable narrator is a powerful tool in the hands of the right author, and when it comes to movies, nothing is more unreliable than a character with a mental illness.

The Austin Film Festival hosted a panel Friday that explored the cinematic depiction of varying levels of sanity . John August (Big Fish), Richard Kelly (Donnie Darko), and Jim Uhls (Fight Club) are all writers who have dipped their toe in the crazy soup.

 

Kelly breaks the sanity spectrum down into two poles. Psychopathy involves a character who is a victimizer, taking advantage of others and showing an extreme lack of empathy. Schizophrenia, on the other hand, turns the character into the victim. It is the latter syndrome that makes for more sympathetic characters, while the former is great fodder for tales involving serial killers.

  

When discussing sanity, the underlying questions all deal with the nature of reality. What is real in this story? And if mental illness is involved, can we ever really know for sure?

 

With Big Fish, August had to address the issue of truth. While truth is theoretically singular, in the movie, each of the main characters had a different kind of truth they were dealing with. The father told tall tales that captured emotional truth, while the son wanted the literal truth, thinking that would get to the heart of the matter. The truth is a not a collection of facts, and the “lies” his father told contained the important elements of his history.

 

That doesn’t mean it was easy. If a father lies about his past, can he be trusted when he says, “I love you son”? In the end, August believes that maybe untruth is better than nothing. After all, myths might not be real per se, but they provide an explanation that soothes our collective anxiety when faced with the unknown.

   Fight Club deals with both ends of the sanity spectrum, as the schizophrenic main character invents a psychopath to break himself out of a sleepless, consumerist haze. Because this split personality isn’t revealed until the end, there are no veracity issues for the audience to deal with, only a retrospective realization of all that has come before.

  

Kelly is hesitant to place Donnie Darko in the category of movies dealing with mental illness. His depiction of a break with reality could be explained by things other than insanity, like time travel or a religious experience. As much as anything, it’s a coming of age story – to which Fight Club’s Uhls proclaimed, "Adolescence is a form of insanity.” It can certainly feel that way.

 

Beyond the unreality of Donnie Darko, Kelly wanted to peek behind the curtain of this type of character. "I want to get into the logical operating system behind the crazy,” he said. "The architecture of the insanity.” To Kelly, “life is a form of insanity.”

 

What’s required of an audience to participate in this type of storytelling? "You have to have faith that this story is going to take you on a journey that’s worthwhile,” Kelly said. He then asked the audience at  St. David’s, where the panel was being held, “Are we in a church right now?”

Crazy, man.