Bigger than Life (1957) is a film I return to again and again after a very close friend gave to me the DVD as a birthday present in my mid twenties – I perhaps watch it every two or three years and I once subjected a film and philosophy film group to a thoroughly researched yet rather wayward talk on it – I had not quite figured out my academic interests at the time, and the work was somewhere between social history, film studies and cultural history (there wasn’t much in the way of philosophy…).
The film tells the story of Ed Avery, a diligent yet overworked teacher who moonlights as a cab company telephone operator to support his ostensibly idyllic suburban lifestyle. Under the strain, his body breaks down and he is prescribed an experimental drug that cures the physical problem but causes his kind and noble demeanour to warp into that of a raving fascist: perhaps the most powerful moment of the film takes place during a parent teacher meeting, and drunk on his audience he preaches to an astonished audience that ‘Childhood is a congenital disease and the purpose of education is to cure it’. James Mason’s performance as a man that is frightening and vulnerable, suffering and wicked, still shines now – students I have shown it to have remarked that it doesn’t feel like a film produced over half a century ago.
I have recently come back to Bigger than Life because of a little side project I want to develop which I first presented in a conference that took place in 2018. I never have really had the chance to take it further because things heated up with the PhD just afterwards, and job applications have taken over since. In a nutshell, I wanted to link the increased political attention towards mental disorder immediately after WWII to an apparent and very sudden increase in films coming from Hollywood that depicted mental disorder and psychiatric treatment between 1944 and 1959. More on this pair of claims in another blog post, but Daniel Pick’s recent The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind: Hitler, Hess, and the Analysts does a great job of outlining the employment of psychological investigations by Western intelligence to understand the ‘Nazi mind’ during and immediately after the conflict. Claims based on this research found their way into post-war reconstruction, and investigations like those undertaken by the CIA into the so-called authoritarian personality were conducted in the hope of avoiding a repeat of fascism. Certain factions of Anglo-American psychiatry regarded popular support for fascist and communist parties as a form of mass neurosis, and it was hoped that psychological research could provide insights to prevent its spread. These developments chime with grand humanistic pronouncements made by the recently established WHO about the ‘global psyche’ and the need to assemble a worldwide project of psychiatric epidemiology to reveal the universal nature of mental disorder.
My tentative explanation behind the sudden increase is that Hollywood writers and producers were to some degree in cahoots with these lofty aspirations, and set in motion a series of links between illness, politics and psychiatry that were to define the Cold War era. Andrew Scull recently makes connections between Hollywood and the National Institution for Mental Health writing that principle figures in medicine sought to utilise the potential that films held to extoll the virtues of psychiatric treatment. Spellbound (1945) might be one of the more well known examples of films coming from this period: featuring a title card that describes psychoanalysis as ‘the method by which modern science treats the emotional problems of the sane’, Gregory Peck donning a cheap Freud costume, and Dali’s set design deployed in stunning dream sequences, it at times feels like a public service announcement for mental health. There were many others films during this period that depicted psychiatric treatment and illness, including depression in Monkey On my Back (1957), stress in Lady in the Dark (1944), multiple personality disorder in the now infamous the Three Faces of Eve (1957), drug addition in the Man with the Golden Arm (1955) and my personal favourite – the Tennessee Williams penned Suddenly Last Summer (1959), which established a set of oppositions in its depiction of mental disorder: a diagnosis of dementia praecox versus repressed trauma; ‘biological’ asylum psychiatry versus psychoanalysis: the cold and brutal physical treatments of lobotomy versus a humane Freudian psychoanalysis (more depth on this brilliant film in, yes you guessed it, a post appearing soon near you).
Bigger than Life of course fits into this investigation because it was released in 1957 and it depicts mental breakdown and trauma. The film is however subversive in its representations of mental disorder and clinical treatment: perhaps in keeping with director Nicholas Ray’s earlier depiction of emotionally confused suburban teenagers in Rebel Without a Cause (1955). Bernard Eisenschitz emphasises in his biography of Ray that his contact with the poverty stricken on New Deal social art projects led to him joining the communist party – although escaping blacklisting principally through the intervention of Howard Hughes, Ray sought to avoid censorship by subtly and obliquely expressing criticisms of a rising consumer culture, and his suspicion that paranoia over the Red Scare could ultimately allow fascists to prevail in the USA (it is perhaps unsurprising that Ray’s work attracted the attention of the revolutionary and mostly left-wing film-makers of the Cahiers crowd in Paris, as well as Gilles Delueze, who in his Cinema described his work as one of the exemplars of ambiguity and poetics in film making).
The causes of the changes to Avery’s personality and behaviour are certainly ambiguous: it remains open whether they are caused by the social demands placed upon a poorly paid teacher to uphold a certain lifestyle, a product of 50s cultural anxiety, or the psychological and physiological changes sparked by the pharmaceutical treatment he was administered. Bigger than Life’s script was based on a New Yorker article that warned of the risk posed by cortisone, then marketed as a new wonder drug, in causing psychotic breakdowns. Ray’s adaptation however is more ambivalent about the causes of the changes to Avery’s personality, and poses the question: has the cortisone completely transformed Avery, or has it unleashed some part of his personality, a drive perhaps, which has lain dormant, or suppressed by the social glare? It remains unclear clear whether the treatment has completely changed him, or whether it has amplified certain aspects of his personality tamed by everyday drudger. Prior to the breakdown, Avery comes across as a likeable guy, but he remains a touch aloof and keeps a respectful distance from his middle class colleagues in his quest to be the perfect family man and perfect professional. At the same time, he expresses in private to his wife dissatisfaction with suburban life, and throughout the film there are subtle clues to a vibrant but unfulfilled inner-life: for one the walls of the house are adorned with travel posters for Paris, Madrid, Rome and Monaco and other cultural centres of Europe. The distance from his wife and colleagues might be the only way that Avery can maintain the illusion, and the drug breaks down this distance between who he is and who he feels he needs to be.
As Deleuze claims, Ray deliberately worked with ambiguity to express a view that does not allow any one singular explanation to quite fit, and Bigger than Life Remains a film that expresses the shifting boundaries between culture, society and the body when it comes to writing about the history of psychiatry. To round this up, if I ever do get to writing on this intriguing period in the history of cinema and how it links to the cultural history of psychiatry, Bigger than Life will deserve an extended treatment because of its eccentricities in its portrayal of mental disorder, the authoritarian personality, iatrogenic illnesses, and their relation to American culture in the fifteen or so years immediately after the war.
Kevin Matthew Jones 