The Great Escape: Madness and Isolation in Film

I have given them thy word; and the world hath hated them, because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world. — John Ch. 17, Verse 14

In an essay on Henry Miller entitled Inside the Whale, George Orwell writes: “The historical Jonah, if he can so be called, was glad enough to escape, but in imagination, in daydream, countless people have envied him.” He goes on to say that the reason for this is because the whale (technically a large fish) in the biblical legend is, in essence, a man-sized womb, a warm, dark, blubbery cushion that guards the inhabitant from the constant horror that is reality. Carl Jung would agree that there are plenty of folk who on some level feel this way, and he called them introverts, though it’s not all that cut-and-dry. Orwell’s essay paints a picture of Miller as a “willing Jonah,” though he admits that Miller is not especially introverted, he is just someone who practices “a species of quietism,” a “je m’en fous” attitude of passivity that comes from “either complete unbelief or else a degree of belief amounting to mysticism.” This sort of attitude may be perfectly appropriate for a drifting bohemian writer like Miller, but it would seem that for a filmmaker, who must constantly be at war with different personalities and forces of nature, there is little room for reclusiveness or reverie, and this is probably the chief reason that these same themes are so often used in film.

What got me thinking about this was watching the deeply fascinating documentary, Crumb. There’s a scene where Robert Crumb is talking with his older brother Charles, a mentally disturbed man in his 50’s who never moved out of his mother’s house. He has done nothing since adolescence but read old books and down antidepressants and tranquilizers. Barely leaving the confines of his sad, stale room, he is without any articulated hopes or desires, and his libido is completely withdrawn, forever lost in some deep, impenetrable recess. “I don’t even get erections anymore,” he tells us, ambivalently. Charles’ story is like a more tragic version of the the life portrayed in the also-excellent documentary The Devil and Daniel Johnston, and he is like a Daniel Johnston prototype who never left the nest. Charles’ younger brother Robert, the one who went on to become the “rich and famous” cartoonist, tells him “I always kind of envied your life, in a way,” which is perhaps the most revealing and poignant point in the movie. The film reveals R. Crumb as an artist from a troubled family who may have ended up as hopelessly reclusive as his two brothers became, had he not been as successful or prolific in the outlet of his art — though ultimately he seems ambivalent towards the direction his life went. Crumb’s feelings toward his success in the outside world is soaked with jaundice and misanthropy, and though he left his two brothers back in the mad womb behind him, there is still a part of him that has never truly left it. Like Henry Miller, he is someone who participates in the world but feels no meaningful connection or empathy towards it. As Orwell would have it, he is still inside the whale, but “the whale happens to be transparent.”

In a sense, this is the goal of the artist in recreating an abstraction of the world in a subjective way — an escape or detachment from reality. Objects found in real life are approximated in a way that can be controlled to fit the will of the creator, and film is the greatest expression of this secret, morbid desire — the desire to escape, to be unattached. Terry Gilliam’s Brazil is a great example of this. In the film the protagonist Sam has a dream where he is hanging from a rope leading to a caged woman that he is in love with, but his legs are held by a pair of brick arms that have emerged from the ground. That scene is similar to the opening sequence in Fellini’s 8½, in which the main character begins to float in the air to escape an urban gridlock, but he is held in limbo on a string by some men below who are treating him like a kite. Both of these films deal with a world weariness and frustration with the protocols and responsibilities that are thrust on the individual, and in both films, the main character ends up retreating, rather than confronting the problems or expectations placed upon him. In a recent interview, Terry Gilliam exclaimed that the ending of Brazil was a “happy ending,” though most people would not see it that way. Sam rides off with the girl of his dreams toward some postcard-like horizon, until we find out this is only happening in his mind, society has conquered him completely and he has gone mad, losing and all connection to reality — “but who gives a fuck?” says Gilliam. “He’s created a world that’s satisfying to him. The outside world can’t get at him and that, to me, is happiness.”

All of Gilliam’s films have this same theme, and the worlds he creates are fantastical, invasive, gritty, grotesque and absurd, like a Hieronymus Bosch painting of a Dickens novel. Often there is a struggle between reality and someone’s inner world, and the underlying desire is freedom from the hassles of the objective world, a return to a primitive or infantile state of subjective interaction that is experienced in childhood. A young child tends to interact with people the same way they do with “non-living” objects; action figures, dolls or even stones can have their own personalities, and often are more interesting than the “real” people around them, whom they have much less power over. The Surrealist movement in general is dedicated to re-creating that magical, subjective state of mind. Czech filmmaker Jan Svankmajer is a great example of an artist who recreates that world where mundane objects take on a surreal new life, where people and “things” are completely interchangeable, and often it is the “things” which ultimately triumph. The Brother’s Quay have followed in his footsteps. Their film adaption of the novel Institute Benjamenta is beautiful and intriguing, but difficult to penetrate — though I suppose that is the point. A more well-known, but equally-abstract artist, David Lynch has asserted that the films he makes are not intended to be analyzed in an intellectual way; they are meant to be felt viscerally. In most of his films, linear storytelling is abandoned completely in favor of creating moods and emotions. Bill Pullman’s character in the film Lost Highway states, “I like to remember things my own way. How I remember them; not necessarily the way they happened,” and in the unstable, shifting reality of the film we get the sense of a consciousness trying to escape the memory of something terrible, perhaps a tragedy or guilty knowledge of an unspeakable crime, though it is never clear what exactly is happening, what is real or what is imagined, or if the whole thing is some twisted dream.

A director like Lynch’s purpose in filmmaking isn’t that much different from that of folk in so-called mainstream or commercial cinema, as different as the results may be. Sergio Leone had said that after a screening of Once Upon A Time In America, a man asked him why the first and last shot in the film was of Deniro in the opium den, and Leone suggested that, who knows, maybe the whole film was just a drug hallucination. The answer flustered the man, who walked off indignantly, but Leone was raising an interesting point about film in general, a point that Jodorowsky also made in the self-referencing ending to The Holy Mountain: it’s just a movie. Whether a film is considered a work of “realism” or “surrealism,” whether it’s purported to be a depiction of fact or fiction, ultimately the theater is a place where people go to have vicarious, impermanent experiences. We are entering a world that is a nice place to visit, but we wouldn’t want to live there. Death, torture, madness, heartache, hallucinations, explosions and absurdity are experienced from within a passive bubble — a transparent whale — and for a while we as viewers become like the angels: other-worldly, infantile, and indestructible. We laugh, we cry, we cringe and we marvel, but when it’s over, we wander back to the mundane world of cars, families, jobs, phone calls, funerals, televisions, and medical bills, with nothing really lost or gained, except for perhaps a light conversation piece to share in the fluorescent haze of our daily lives.