MHA's Blog: Chiming In

One of the great things about this blog is finding unknown or hidden places where mental health conditions are being addressed and looking at what is being said about them. One of the great, positive frontiers is children’s television.  Newer shows seem much more willing to take a look at these controversial issues head on. One recent example is Adventure Time’s season four episode “I Remember You.”

Adventure Time is a Cartoon Network show about a boy named Finn and his shape-shifting, talking dog named Jake. They live in an absurdist world, fighting villains who aren’t really evil and saving princesses who don’t need saving. Among the villains is a man named the Ice King, who controls ice and snow, and wants to date a princess (and is friends with penguins). One of the princesses is a 1000 year old vampire named Marceline, who wants to play her bass guitar, not be evil (she drinks the color red, not blood). Some of the other characters include the Bubblegum Princess, who is made of bubblegum and is a scientist, and BMO, a living videogame console. (Television shows for kids seem to be getting more complicated, don’t they?)

In the episode “I Remember You,” the Ice King wants to get himself a girlfriend and hears that women love men with tragic pasts (in a brilliant takedown of pick-up artists). Believing that he has a tragic past that he can’t remember, he takes pages of his scrapbook (which he comments “still smells like tears”) to Marceline, and asks her to help him write a song. While he sings about the Bubblegum Princess, the song eventually breaks down to him wailing about wanting someone to love him. Marceline reads the pages of the diary, and the audience learns that he helped raise little Marceline. Eventually, we learn that the Ice crown he wears is destroying his brain but keeping him alive. In the end, she realizes that he’ll never remember her.

This is one of the most direct views of mental health conditions (and memory loss conditions) I’ve seen. The Ice King has no control over his reactions, and the loss of his relationship with Marceline is tragic (even for someone who doesn’t watch the show). He’s oblivious to her pain, but not because he’s mean-spirited but because he has no way to handle it. At one point, she yells at him to “stop being crazy,” and his response is to climb on top of her fridge. It’s weird and funny and sad all at the same time. He pleads at another point, “Why won’t anyone tell me what’s wrong with me?”

Marceline, meanwhile, is stuck remembering their relationship before the crown destroyed his brain. She loved him, and still does, but can’t handle him for long stretches of time. Adding to her stress is the knowledge (written on a picture of her as child), that he wore the crown to live forever because he didn’t want her to be alone. She’s guilty for it, and for not helping take care of him, and that knowledge doesn’t help.

For a 15 minute short, this was incredibly moving. The relationship between the Ice King and Marceline is fractured but loving, and her exasperation and her sorrow is pitch perfect. From what I know of the show, they have dealt with this relationship in other episodes and plan to do so in the future. This is a great way to help children understand what it’s like to have a mental health condition and how empathy can help someone. It’s also pretty funny, as long as you just go with the all of the weirdness. I’m really glad to see this topic being dealt with so completely, and so well, for such a young audience. I have to think that episodes like this will help the next generation remove the stigma around mental health conditions.

Next week, we’ll take a look at the 1994 movie Nell, which featured an Oscar nominated Jody Foster as a young woman living alone in a cabin, and the doctors who study her. Have you seen this episode of Adventure Time? What do you think of its handling of mental health conditions?

Sybil is the mother of all multiple personality disorder movies. It was the first one to really catch the public’s imagination (except Jekyll and Hyde).  It helped solidify what dissociative identity disorder looked like to the general public, and how they should feel about people with the illness. My question in watching it is whether it’s any good. As it turns out, it’s very good. 

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We’ve talked about how grief translates to film well, and how it dominates the discussion of mental health in American pop culture. The cinematic qualities of loss were easy to define and understand, so the emotion took hold as an appropriate topic for important movies. Many of those movies don’t have anything new to say about it. However, every so often, one does, and Ordinary People is one of those movies. By focusing on one family member’s grief and showing how it ripples through the other family members, the movie says something really powerful.

Ordinary People is about the Jarrett family, specifically Conrad Jarrett, the family’s teenage son. His older brother Buck drowned in a boating accident that Conrad survived. The guilt and grief pushed Conrad to a breakdown that led to a suicide attempt. His father, tax attorney Calvin, found the boy and saved him, leading Conrad to spend 6 months in a mental hospital. The movie is set two months after he returns home and begins to put his life back together. He sees a psychiatrist, begins dating a fellow student and deals with his father’s grief and his mother’s anger. Strong performances by Donald Sutherland as Calvin, Mary Tyler Moore as Beth and especially Timothy Hutton as Conrad, anchor the film.

The movie is small but influential, focusing on the family and its grief. Hutton, who would be the youngest Best Supporting Actor Oscar winner at 20, grounds Conrad in reality. He’s a scared, troubled boy holding on to grief, anger and fear, and Hutton makes all of that believable. He wants to do what’s right and be perfect, but he can’t. The swell of emotions is palpable and well-drawn, and as an audience member, you feel terrible for Conrad. He can’t seem to do anything right, and the guilt weighs on him almost psychically. His performance is the center of the movie, and you feel for the young man. The portrayal of grief is not groundbreaking in what it contains, but how masterfully he performs it. Judd Hersh, who plays Dr. Berger, is a wonderful, strong presence who actually helps Conrad in meaningful ways. His therapy is full of actual wisdom, instead of platitudes, and he makes the character feel as important to the movie as he does to Conrad.

Where the movie gets in to the groundbreaking stuff is with his parents. The older Jarretts seem to have the perfect life. They are upper class, have supportive friends and go to great parties. They even go on vacation. Calvin tells Dr. Berger, Conrad’s psychiatrist, that he thought that his life was perfect. He loves his son very much and does everything he can to help him. He encourages Conrad to go to therapy, takes an active interest in the boy’s health and is a generally good presence. He is grieving as well, but is able to articulate his grief and uses it to help his son heal. Both men understand that something is wrong and are willing to address it.

Beth, Conrad’s mother, is a different story entirely. She is cold, angry and depressed, but won’t admit to any of it. At first, she seems like she shut down with Bucks’s death, refusing to acknowledge anything is wrong. She yells at Calvin for telling family friends about Conrad’s therapy, goads him into taking a vacation without him and repeatedly tells Calvin that Conrad is just trying to manipulate him into doing whatever he wants. At no time in the movie does that seem to be true at all, even when Conrad might have been able to. Calvin tells her that Conrad just wants to know she doesn’t hate him, and she can’t even do that. When she and Conrad finally have an argument, Conrad yells that she never came to visit him in the hospital and says that she’d visit Buck. She yells that “Buck would never have been in the hospital.” It’s a bold choice to have the mother as the withdrawn, angry parent since those traits are usually assigned to fathers in movies about grief. By the end of the movie, Calvin admits that he’s not sure she can love anyone, and she doesn’t argue with him, but rather runs away from the problems. It’s a great, brave performance for Mary Tyler Moore, who's able to push all of her America’s Sweetheart energy completely away.

By looking at how Conrad’s grief and guilt affect his parents and their grief, Ordinary People said something interesting about the process of healing. It's another great example of therapy being used in a positive way in a movie, perhaps better than I’ve seen since I’ve started this blog. It suffers from the same “only rich white people get therapy” issue that a lot of movies suffer from, but that is a larger Hollywood problem.

I highly recommend this one, especially if you want a good cry. Next week, we’ll look at Prozac Nation, an early 2000s film about mental health in college. Have you seen Ordinary People? What did you think?

Dr. Frasier Crane has been overlooked in the last few years, but for many people, Kelsey Grammer’s psychiatrist was the mental health professional they knew best. For some, he might have been the only one. Through Cheers and its spin-off Frasier, he brought the good natured doctor (and some genuine mental health knowledge) to TV for 22 years.

The show Frasier is set after Cheers finished, moving Dr. Crane to Seattle. There, he lives with father Martin, a blue collar former cop injured on the job, and the older man’s nurse Daphne, a flighty English nurse, and spends time arguing with his psychiatrist brother Niles, who might be more pompous and ridiculous than he is. He hosts a call-in radio show where he gives mental health advice to callers, who usually have preposterous problems that he solves with silly solutions. His co-workers at the office, including his producer Roz, give a different perspective to his high-brow, pompous view of the world. He still fights with his ex-wife Lilith about raising their son Frederick. 

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Perception, the TNT television show, has an interesting hook. The main character, Dr. Daniel Pierce, is a neuroscientist who assists the FBI with cases. He also has paranoid schizophrenia. Instead of making him an empty shell of nervous tics, the show makes Dr. Pierce a fully formed person.

Entering its second season, Perception focuses on Dr. Pierce, played wonderfully by Eric McCormack, and Agent Kate Moretti, played by Rachel Leigh Cook. She’s a former student of his who brings him in to help with cases. Together, they solve crime and try to understand the brain. Dr. Oliver Sacks, the world renowned author and neuroscientist, is an advisor on the show, which helps with the accuracy of science and with the portrayal of brain disorders of all kinds.

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