Transorbital Lobotomy, is it right for you? (Part I)
Last year when I was flying into Newark from Paris in the early part of the summer, our flight, just as its landing wheels were about to touch ground, had to abort and again ascend back into a dark orange sky.
After we landed, turning back on my cellphone, I learned that fires were burning out of control around Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada and this was making landings more hazardous in New York and New Jersey. Over twenty years ago, Halifax is where we filmed my first feature fiction film A Hole in One (2004). Hearing about the fires in Nova Scotia that day made me think about the people from Canada with whom we had made this film about a woman who wants a lobotomy, starring Michelle Williams and Meat Loaf. I thought about the lighting crew and camera crew, the people who worked making sure our production office was set up and running smoothly, and the many others I had met in Canada… our incredibly talented production designer Bill Fleming and the Trailer Park Boys–John Paul Tremblay, Robb Wells and Mike Smith.
At the time we filmed in Nova Scotia, the local film industry had a hot hand. They were working constantly. This was in part because of the exchange rate between currencies, partly because Canada was ahead of the United States in regards to attracting productions through offering tax credits and because they had garnered a reputation internationally for the professionalism of the crews they could put together. When we were filming I remember the awe I felt at the synchronous interaction of the members of the camera crew. We were shooting with celluloid film. Afterwards, in Toronto, we transferred the footage to a digital format in order to complete the color-timing. Like our film, the world of filmmaking was in the midst of a shift to a digital format. Working with celluloid was about to become an exception rather than the rule.
The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan coined the term extimacy, comparing it to a Moebius Strip. Place your index finger anywhere on the outer edge of a Moebius strip and it becomes the inner edge and this is true vice-versa. Although Lacan's use of the term goes much further than my own, I will use it to explain what has been for me an important aspect of my work. Making my films I have found what is outside in the world to be where I find what is most intimate to me and inversely by looking at what is most intimate in me I find myself writing and filming what is out in the world.
Anna (Michelle Williams) finding the grave of her brother marked only with a number in the cemetery of a psychiatric hospital in my first feature fiction film A Hole in One (2004).
At the Epigraphic Museum in Athens one can see many extraordinary examples of writing done in the manner known as “boustrophedon,” that is to say, writing that goes in alternate lines from left to right then right to left, like an ox plowing a field—which is what the Greek means, literally “ox turning.” This is writing that in its continuous line resembles how a thin flexible celluloid strip of film moves through a projector and a camera, turning in one direction then the other, beginning with the Cinematograph of the Frères Lumière. Boustrophedon, as a figure of speech, evokes how, in order to be a filmmaker, I have had to just “plow ahead,” not getting bogged down by my lack of mastery and taking as my principle—in a phrase from Samuel Beckett—“Try again. Fail again, Fail better.”
I am partially colorblind. This handicap has been of a tremendous assistance to me. It has emphasized for me and for the people with whom I have collaborated the inextricable relation of a collective effort and individual authorship. As I finish work on my video installation Athens Sanctuary, I will add that my colorblindness has always insuated the role of blindness in my work, and hence the intimacy of the social process to my capacity to create my own work.
Homer begins both the Iliad and the Odyssey with a desire addressed to the gods that the poet be given an opportunity to listen and to hear. The filmmaker looking to create a film that is uniquely their own may wish to listen and look outside to the world and out there find what is most intimate and the reverse, find how what at first seems locked inside is in fact out in the world.
It was from reflecting on how I was named that I first began to envision A Hole In One.
When Ingrid Sischy left her position as editor of Artforum in 1988, one of the new editors called me saying he had heard I was an expert on performance art. I confirmed this, accepted the job to review performance art, got off the phone, and the next day went to the library and looked it up. It turned out that Rosetta Brooks, founder and editor of the irregularly published art magazine ZG, had recommended me. She had published an interview I had conducted in Paris with Paul Virillio, author of War and CInema. The interview was about the space shuttle Challenger explosion. Rosetta had also seen a play of mine, Shade (1986?), that I had staged in the squat where I was living in Paris. Based on seeing this play she had recommended me to Artforum.
Reading about performance art In one of the huge majestic high-ceilinged reading rooms of the Main Branch of the New York Public Library on 5th Avenue, I quickly realized that I was familiar with performance art, even if I hadn’t known it by that name. I was familiar with the work of artists like Joseph Beuys and Niki de Saint Phalle–and, Brooks was right, my theatrical work did have many points in common with performance art. After I had watched and reviewed a few works of performance art, I started to plan my own performances.
Among these was a piece of performance art based on the records of my mother’s brother Richard. He was named Richard after his father, my maternal grandfather. When I was born, my mother had three living Richards in her family: myself, who was her first child, her brother and her father. Within three years I was the only one left. Her brother, who had spent eight years in a veterans psychiatric hospital, either wandered off or escaped and was hit by a train. Within a year of his son’s death their father died from a heart attack--which I presume was a manifestation of his grief.
In the late 1980s, during the same period when I was living in New York City and writing for Artforum, I was engaged–with my mother’s assistance–in a protracted effort at obtaining my uncle’s records from the veteran’s psychiatric hospital. When I received them, they revealed a previously hidden part of my mother’s family and to me appeared to explain why she had always been so adamant that I had been named after her father—not her brother, whom she persistently called by his middle name—a habit, I deduced, in her family in order to differentiate him from his father. These records became the basis for my piece of performance art Taste (1991). Near the end of a long and painful-to-read series of reports on his eight years at the hospital they showed that during the final weeks of his life, preceding when he was struck by a train, the chief psychiatrist of the hospital had denied a staff recommendation that Richard be among the next group of patients to receive a lobotomy. The title Taste I based on a typographical error in his records where, instead of writing the patient had been “tested,” it said he had been “tasted.” I was struck that the records that were intended to be a story about the patient were also a story about the storytellers. I was by then enrolled in a graduate program in comparative literature at NYU. I began to wonder if might not submit these records to a close reading as part of my studies
Richard had served in the 3rd Army when it was fighting in Germany and later occupying areas of the country. While he was serving in the 3rd Army it had been involved with the liberation of the Dora Mittelbau concentration camp. American soldiers supervised the burial of corpses of prisoners found in the camp.
After the war, my mother’s brother had initially returned to Princeton University to complete his senior year. It was there he had his first recorded psychotic break. I have only seen one photograph of him from the time when he was at Princeton after returning from WW2. Richard in that one photo looks different than the other young men at Princeton University. In contrast to them, Richard looks like he thinks he has been bent out of shape and is trying to compensate. After the psychotic break, he was soon hospitalized in the Veterans’ Administration psychiatric hospital in Maryland where he would live most of the time over the next eight years until his death. At the time of his first admission to the psychiatric hospital, he had been seeing a civilian psychiatrist. His notes are included in his hospital records. He is not only the sole civilian clinician but also the only clinician to mention my uncle’s service as a soldier in the war as a possible contributing factor for the psychotic break. At times the records describe him getting on the same day multiple treatments of insulin coma therapy and electro coma therapy. The train that struck him had been headed to Baltimore where his family lived. My mother once told me she imagined her brother had been trying to get home.
Colin DeLand, the renowned gallery owner and curator of the 1980s and 90s, allowed me to perform Taste in his gallery on Wooster Street, American Fine Arts Co. I had done construction work for Colin when he was setting up the gallery and as teenagers we had been friends at a prep school we both attended. His romantic and business partner Pat Hearn, who owned a gallery across the street, attended one of the performances of Taste. The next day she took me aside and told me that I was onto something I needed to pursue. Of course, people make these kinds of comments out of courtesy all the time, but coming from Pat Hearn and the way she said it made me take what she had to say very seriously and the course of my work ever since has proven her right.
Doing research on the period when my uncle had been hospitalized as a psychiatric patient, I quickly discovered that the initial rise of mental healthcare in the US after WWII and the new paradigm for mental health were framed in popular culture around what reportedly clinicians had learned during the war from treating soldiers and which they were now providing for veterans and also starting to offer to the civilian population. I decided to make this transformation of mental healthcare in the postwar period and its representation in literature and popular culture the topic of my doctoral thesis. The research for this thesis eventually became the research for A Hole In One.
By looking at my name I had found the story of my mother’s brother and this in turn had revealed a key moment in the history of mental healthcare in the U.S. This is an example of what I mean by extimacy and how it has been intrinsic to my filmmaking.
The first US Mental Health Act was passed by President Truman in 1946 establishing the National Institute of Mental Health. What is popularly known today as the “G.I. Bill” was officially entitled the “Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944.” The term “Readjustment” would also soon be found throughout the first Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (usually known by the acronym DSM) published in 1952. It was a small book of a limited number of possible forms of mental illness. It was nothing like the expansive tomes of today’s revisions that basically manage to provide everyone with a diagnosis treatable by psychopharmacology. This first edition of the DSM was based on a nosology of mental illnesses written during WWII for the treatment of soldiers by William C Menninger, who had left the family clinic in Topeka Kansas to become director of the Psychiatry Consultants Division in the office of the Surgeon General of the U.S. Army. “Readjustment” went back to the concepts of the psychiatrist Adolf Meyer, a Swiss-immigrant to the US who had become the head of the American Psychiatric Association and whose nosology for psychiatric illnesses had been the generally accepted one in the field in the U.S. before WWII. The use of the term “readjustment” in the original title of the G.I. Bill foreshadowed the new importance that was foreseen for mental health care after the war as meeting a societal need. My dissertation focused on the diagnosis of schizophrenia and how the topics of mental health care, mental hygiene, mental illness and madness began to circulate and be transformed in both literature–especially the writings of the Beats and JD Salinger–and in popular culture–such as in films like Forbidden Planet (1956) and The Snake Pit (1948)–to a degree and in ways that reflected the new prominence given to mental illness in popular culture of the post war culture.
With the encouragement of an anthropologist who was on my committee, I began to meet people who worked in the field of mental illness. I got to know psychologists, psychoanalysts and psychiatrists who had been in practice immediately after WWII, as well as associations formed to support these clinical paradigms. I started to attend meetings of the Payne Whitney History of Psychiatry Section. In the U.S. it is the oldest and most prestigious group of clinicians focused on the history of psychiatry. It was an eclectic group representing a broad range of approaches to mental illness. Their meetings took place on Wednesday afternoons in the basement of the clinic. At that time, in the early 1990s, the clinic still had its own building separate from the rest of the hospital system. When it had begun to house patients in 1929, the building itself had been on the cutting edge of psychiatry. Among its advertised special features had been windows intended to prevent suicide and doors that wouldn’t slam loudly when they were closed. I filmed the interior as it was being torn down and hope to make this footage available as a short film in the near future.
Through a contact at the Payne Whitney Clinic, I was able to find work volunteering at an outpatient center for the severely mentally ill. The center--whose name I will keep confidential--was located near Times Square. Its programs were designed for patients who only had a single diagnosis of mental illness, without any additional diagnosis of addiction—although they were all taking prescribed psychiatric drugs. At the center I assisted-directed the theater program. I also designed and ran groups for which patients–or “clients” as they were called–could sign up. In one of these groups, which I had designed, we read aloud the short stories of Poe, Melville and Hawthorne. Leading this group made a lasting impression on me. Another group created and performed a play. I served as the assistant director. I especially remember a play entitled “Room 13A.” It had been written through improvisation. It was about a drug that cured all mental illness but had one side-effect: it brought back the dead.