From Beyond

From Beyond (Unrated Director’s Cut) is based on a story by H.P. Lovecraft in which a “mad scientist” type, Dr. Pretorius, develops a machine, “the Resonator”, a device which looks a whole lot like a giant Van De Graf generator, which allows human beings to see and otherwise have contact with strange and horrible creatures from an alternate dimension by giving off sound waves or vibrations stimulating the pineal gland in the human brain.  Most of these alternate-dimensional creatures as depicted in the movie (special effects in 1986 were not what they are today) seem to be jellyfish and trilobite-type things that swim in the air as their earthly counterparts swim in the water.  The problem is that in this invisible world there are some things larger and more dangerous than ethereal jellyfish, and that one of those “things” killed Dr. Pretorius by literally biting his head off. 

However, when Dr. Pretorius’s assistant, Dr. Tillinghast, tells that story to the legal system, he initially gets charged with the homicide of Dr. Pretorius, but then, as the investigating detective points out, it becomes known that the ax with which Tillinghast supposedly decapitated Pretorius is distinctly lacking in blood evidence.  What to make of Tillinghast’s story about the pineal-gland stimulating technology, the strange creatures, and the interdimensional being that attacked his colleague?  Tillinghast gets sent to the mental health system, where he  gets diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, and waits for the arrival of a second doctor to concur on the issue of whether he is to be considered fit to stand trial (technical sanity for the purposes of the legal system and good mental health in an absolute sense being two different things). The psychiatrist who runs the facility in which Tillinghast is being held considers the new doctor, who is known for doing experiments on patients and embracing unusual theories about schizophrenics, ethically dubious as well as ineffective.  Dr. Bloch, hospital administrator, takes a dim view of experimentation upon patients, and holds to the traditional way of handling schizophrenics, institutionalizing them for life. According to Wikipedia, “As with his earlier film Re-Animator, Gordon made use of medical advisors to be sure that the actions taken by the doctors and nurses of the film followed proper medical procedures”. This story was clearly set in a time before widespread deinstitutionalization (perhaps the Reagan revolution and the idea that releasing people with mental health conditions on antipsychotic medication and leaving them to their own devices hadn’t yet arrived).

Tillinghast’s evaluation sparks a larger investigation after the second psychiatrist, Dr. Katherine McMichaels, orders a CAT scan (technology unknown in Lovecroft’s time, and reletively new in 1986, when this movie was made). As the doctors smoke while looking at the images, the CAT scan reveals that Tillinghast’s pineal gland has enlarged and is influencing other parts of the brain in an unprecedented way, leading to the hypotheses that (1) Tillinghast is not schizophrenic, and the Resonator did work; and (2) if powerful pineal gland = schizophrenia symptoms, schizophrenics are not really “crazy” so much as “differently abled”, being able to percieve supernatural phenomena unseen by others, a view held in Lovecraft’s time by people who actually worked with schizophrenics, most notably C. G. Jung.

Though Tillinghast rightly considers re-activating the resonator and re-running the late Dr. Pretorius’s experiment extremely dangerous, it is the only alternative to a life of institutionalization and worse, so accompanied by Dr. Michaels and a police sergeant, he reluctantly agrees to “return to the scene of the crime”, the creepy Victorian mansion in which the late Dr. Pretorius died. Tillinghast gets the Resonator working again, and they all see the strange creatures. Dr. Michaels gets “hooked” and runs the Resonator herself, putting them all in jeopardy. They re-encounter Dr. Pretorius, who lives again, effectively having been incorporated into the creature that ate him, and seeking to eat others. She also discovers an S&M dungeon in the basement of the creepy old mansion, and dons a leather outfit, which is suprisingly in good condition and just the right size. Then things really go off the rails. I had trouble following the plot at this point, but it seems I’m not the only one.

The repeated stimulation of his pineal gland causes Tillinghast to grow a stalklike appendage in the middle of his forehead, assume a zombie-like demeanor, and develop a taste for human brains. (A “frequent flyer” to the psych ward who sees him at the hospital is initially suspected of suffering the DTs, until an EMT sees him, too.) Tillinghast proceeds to wreak havoc when re-admitted to the mental hospital. When Dr. McMichaels returns to the hospital with the story about what happened and her new bondage look, the psychiatrist in charge, having been given a perfect opportunity to avenge her professional rivalry, orders that Dr. Michaels be given electroshock therapy. Last minute exigencies caused by the rampage of the brain-eating creature that used to be Tillinghast lead to the administration of the ECT being delayed. This gives Dr. Michaels the opportunity to escape, acquire new clothes, and misappropriate an ambulance. She returns to the old house and sets a bomb to blow up the Resonator. Tillinghast and Pretorius end up meeting mano-a-mano, but Michaels is the only survivor.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest is a classic of American cinema, and Jack Nicholson’s most well-remembered cinematic role. The movie was based on an earlier theatrical production, and upon the the Ken Kesey novel of the same name, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which had been loosely based upon his experiences working as a janitor or orderly in a VA mental hospital in California, where he also volunteered for LSD experiments.
A lesser-known fact is that having been released in 1975, as a cinematic retelling of a story set some 10-20 years earlier, it is an extremely realistic portrayal of what State mental institutions were like until fairly recently, insofar as how the facilities were set up and what the available treatments were.
Nurse Ratched is easily vilified and has become synonymous with representatives of institutionalized cruelty in our age, and McMurphy observes that she likes to “play with a rigged deck”. However, though some of her policies are merely protective of institutional inertia (what can putting the World Series game on the ward’s television hurt?), certain of her actions are an attempt to impose order upon chaos and good habits upon pathology; in many cases, she engaged in such restrictive measures as withholding other patients’ cigarettes in an effort to stem the negative influence upon the other patients on the part of McMurphy, who had started gambling with the other patients and had won much of their existing supply of money and cigarettes. Though the patients possess wishful thinking of winning these items back, if enabled to gamble some more, Ratched holds out no such hopes and is immune to McMurphy’s charisma. She thinks the regimen of the institution, if strictly adhered to, can at least partially “fix” McMurphy and the other patients, but McMurphy’s fellow inmates welcome the excitement and fun McMurphy’s stunts bring into their drab world. In an interview with Dr. Spivey, the chief psychiatrist, Randall Patrick McMurphy admits that the reason he got sent to prison, and subsequently to the mental institution was, “as near as I can figure out, it’s ’cause I, uh, fight and fuck too much”. This movie is as much about the way society deals with such a nonconformist as much as it is about the personal conduct of such an individual himself; as the behind-the-scenes deliberations of the doctors and Nurse Ratched are shown and the workings of the various bureaucracies dealing with McMurphy are put before the audience. The treatment team make the fateful decision to “keep him (McMurphy) on the ward”, rather than exercising the other options available to them of sending McMurphy to another ward with more “disturbed” patients, or, as the head of the hospital wanted, sending him back to the prison work farm, on the grounds that McMurphy wasn’t technically mentally ill, and that therefore he could well be returned to the penal system, rather than remain in the mental health system.

Though the medical and psychiatric knowledge of the time had decided that McMurphy was “not crazy, but he is dangerous”, modern-day audiences view this picture with a different perspective than people did when it was released in the 1970s. These days, folks are likely to ask, upon seeing McMurphy’s provoking manner, if perhaps, he “has ADD”, which, back then, was not considered possible in an adult. Some speculate that he might have been a sociopath. Modern audiences also express shock at what was then a common procedure, and, during the time period referenced by the original book upon which the movie is based, the only game in town, electroshock therapy without anesthesia, which is now banned in the US, being widely considered barbaric and cruel.
At one point when a melee erupts in the ward, and McMurphy and the Chief are among those taken away immediately to get electroshock treatment, ostensibly to calm their agitated, violent states, but actually because it is the prevailing punishment this particular bureaucracy can dispense. While McMurphy and the Chief are sitting on a bench outside the electroshock room, waiting their turn, McMurphy does the chief the small kindness of offering him a stick of gum. Chief thanks McMurphy for the gum, and with surprise, McMurphy notes that the Chief “can talk” and is thus not “deaf and dumb” as he had previously been described by others in the ward. (Chief actually came off more as a catatonic to me). The Chief warns McMurphy about people “working on him” by telling him the tragic story of his own bedevilled and alcoholic father. Nevertheless, McMurphy continues his antics and continues to get himself and others into escalating amounts of trouble.
Though the predominant disability portrayed in this movie is mental illness in various forms and degrees, both by actors and by authentic patients who had roles as “extras”, there is the occasional wheelchair user shown at various times and places in the hospital, and it is not uncommon to see stray manual wheelchairs left unattended, and easily commandeered by the able-bodied. Though the hospital was built well before the ADA became law, and is probably not designed with wheelchair accessibility in mind, the patients’ swimming pool has a concrete ramp on which an older male patient in a wheelchair is gently rolled into the pool, wheelchair and all.
There were no shortage of “acquired disabilties” in the mental institutions of the time: in the past, when electroshock was the predominant form of treatment, and was given in much the same way in real life as it was to Jack Nicholson, it was tacitly acknowledged that some brain damage was part of the deal.
Lobotomies were a common form of treatment in mental institutions in the past, and while dramatic loss of intelligence and personality was not always the direct result of lobotomization, in this movie, an individual who has had a lobotomy is portrayed as a drooling, incontinent zombie, and McMurphy is shown as passive and silent, and no longer “him”, following his lobotomy.