Four Talks from A Single Man sciSCREEN

Each week we will post a collection of essays from the six sciSCREEN events we have run to date. Please find here the four essays and talks by the speakers - Dr. Paul Keedwell, Dr. Iain Morland, Dr. Jonathan Scourfield and Susan Bisson who presented at the 'A Single Man' sciSCREEN last March. These essays are there to stimulate discussion and debate so please do add a comment if they are of interest. Also please let us know what you thought of the 'A Single Man sciSCREEN by adding a comment below. Next week, we will add the essays from 'The Hurt Locker' sciSCREENing from May.

To find out a little more on the origins of Cardiff sciSCREEN please visit the MRC CNGG public engagement website: genomicminds.

Grief and A Single Man by Paul Keedwell

Below is an essay by Dr. Paul Keedwell from the MRC CNGG at Cardiff University and relates to our sciSCREENing of A Single Man in March.

This film is a study of a gay man in grief who contemplates suicide but over the course of one day finds solace in small pleasures. From a psychiatric point of view it deals with the overlap between grief and depression and the effect of prejudice on the mental health of society's stigmatized minorities. Concepts of 'normality' change in society over time and influence the practice of psychiatry. Homosexuality only became legal in the UK in 1967. In 1974 the American Psychiatric Association (APA) finally removed homosexuality from it's classification of psychiatric diseases, but this decision was ahead of the prevailing public opinion, which still regarded homosexuality as a deviant abomination. Many psychiatrists had never been happy with the medicalization of this common and enduring sexual preference. Freud himself excluded homosexuality from his own framework of neuroses, regarding it as a condition of self that was determined early in development and which did not lead to pathology provided the individual accepted his orientation. At the same time it was accepted by many psychiatrists that the condition was a result of "glandular secretions" and was a biological fact, not a chosen preference. In fact most members of the APA were hypocritical - concerning themselves with treating the conflict between the reality of an individual's sexuality and his internalized norms/religious beliefs, rather than the sexual orientation itself. The effect of prejudice on the health of the main protagonist in "A Single Man" is stark: we see him projecting of a false self, while secreting his loss. We understand that over time this has led to a worsening of the depressive phase of his grief, which almost ends in suicide. Fortunately the prospect of a new, less 'symbolic' relationship with someone who identifies with his sexuality brings him back from the brink. There is a positive life-affirming message in this story - that depression can lead to courage and spiritual and emotional growth. This topic is touched on in my book, How Sadness Survived*. *Keedwell P A. How Sadness Survived. Radcliffe, Oxford, 2008.

Sexuality, Gender and Colours in a Single Man By Iain Morland

Below is an essay by Dr. Iain Morland from the Cardiff School of English, Communication and Philosophy (ENCAP) at Cardiff University and relates to our sciSCREENing of A Single Man in March.

My research interests are sexuality and gender studies – in particular the relations between sexuality, gender and time – so my response to A Single Man centres on the question: for whom is it a ‘gay film’? Does a viewer have to be gay in order to experience A Single Man as gay cinema, via an identification with the central character, George? I would argue that they don’t, by focusing on the film’s form rather than its content – in other words, by analysing the formal qualities of the film, instead of the content of its characters. Specifically, I think the use of colour in A Single Man makes it possible to view the film as gay, irrespective of whether a viewer identifies as such. Before saying more about colour in the film, I want to explain a little about the relations between gender, sexuality and time. In medical sexology during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, homosexuality was generally characterised as ‘inversion’ – a displacement of gender whereby a gay man was understood to have a female soul in a male body, and a gay woman was correspondingly understood to have a male soul in a female body. One curiosity of this theory of sexuality was that it didn’t actually allow for anything other than heterosexuality: sexual attraction was always cross-gender, albeit at the level of the soul rather than of the body. So in this theory, if you were gay, it was because your gender-inverted soul was attracted to individuals of the opposite sex to your own soul, not because your body was attracted to individuals with the same bodily sex. Beginning with the work of Sigmund Freud at the turn of the twentieth century, the inversion model of homosexuality was gradually eclipsed by a developmental model. In the latter, sexuality is not innate to one’s soul, but a quality that develops over time. For Freud, such development conventionally required a relinquishment of one’s mother, an identification with the parent of the same sex as oneself, and the cultivation of a desire for individuals similar to the parent of the other sex. This developmental account certainly stigmatised homosexuality: it regarded same-sex attraction as immature, a failure to disentangle identification from desire in one’s relations with one’s parents. Homosexuality in this view was a kind of arrested development, a deviation from the path to adult sexual relations that were presumed by Freud to entail cross-gender desire. However, the developmental model has also been powerfully reclaimed. Gay scholars and activists have suggested that a key, life-affirming strength of homosexual communities has been the facilitation of ways of living that do not follow a narrowly-defined path to presumed maturity – birth, work, marriage, children, retirement, death. To live outside of that mainstream timeline can mean enjoying an extended adolescence with profuse disposable income; it can also involve a sobering awareness that advances made by gay liberation coexist with conservative social norms and policies. Both of these are ways of feeling outside a single, dominant timeline stretching from past to future. Whether one lingers in an apparently immature but fun lifestyle, or remains interested in seemingly unsexy political activism, one is somehow out-of-date. The cultural critic Elizabeth Freeman has called this ‘temporal drag’. She’s punning on the practice of drag queening and kinging, but referring to not only unusual performances of gender and sexuality. Temporal drag describes too how the past pulls on the present, and how that feeling of being out-of-date can itself characterise a sexual identity. I was reminded of this when watching A Single Man, particularly when Kenny tells George that ‘the present is a drag’. But I was also reminded of Freeman’s formulation by the film’s use of colour. Much of the film is presented in a washed-out, slightly sepia tone. It looks old, and suggests how grief can make one feel out-of-date, continually reflecting in the present on what was lost in the past. This is not its only function. The use of washed-out colour, as a way of depicting grief on a formal level, emphasises that George is stuck in the past specifically because of his homosexuality in a homophobic society: were George able to speak openly about the loss of his male partner, his past would drag less on his present. Interestingly, there are moments in the film when George does seem to move from being out-of-date to being fully in the present. At those moments, the colour returns to the film. Strikingly though, the washed-out look is replaced never by normal colours, but instead by excessive saturation – everything looks too Technicolor, too gaudy. This fascinated me, because far from bringing the film formally into the present, it still looks old. Imagine browsing an album of photographs from the 1960s and 70s – some look out-of-date because they’re washed out; others look out-of-date because they’re over-saturated. It’s for this formal reason, then, that I’d call A Single Man gay cinema. Shifting from washed-out to excessive colour, without stopping in a recognisably coloured present moment, the film gives the viewer an experience of permanent displacement from a straightforward timeline between past and future. And vitally, it gives this experience of temporal drag to any viewer, not only those who identify with George as gay. Further Reading Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005). Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).

A Sociological Approach to Suicide By Jonathan Scourfield

Below is an essay by Dr Jonathan Scourfield from the School of Social Sciences (SOCSI) at Cardiff University and relates to our sciSCREENing of A Single Man in March.

A sociological approach to distress and suicidal behaviour inevitably emphasises the social and cultural context of distress. Sociological research from the classic work of Durkheim onwards has drawn attention to the significance of social bonds to suicidality. Durkheim’s work was based on macro-level analysis of comparative suicide rates. At the micro-level, sociology has struggled to make sense of individual cases of people in distress. Some sociologists have seen this as the exclusive domain of psychology. Not all have taken this line though, as within sociology we also have the Weberian tradition which focuses on the subjective meaning of events. Within this tradition, sociologists would highlight the role of relationship loss in the film we’ve just seen. The American sociologist of suicide Steven Stack has done quantitative research on suicide films. He claims to have the world’s biggest library of suicide films. (This is more or less just piles of DVDs in his basement). And he and his wife who are currently working together on a suicide film book have watched them all. This is pretty gruelling, as although the list includes such excellent films as Control, they’ve had to sit through the interminable Last Days by Gus Van Sant - based loosely on Kurt Cobain - which is without doubt the dullest 97 minutes I’ve ever spent in the cinema. The Stacks’ research shows that relationship loss – and relationship breakdown in particular – is the most common trigger for suicide in the movies. This is interesting as it is contrary to the conclusions of psychological autopsy studies. These are post-mortem studies of suicide cases based on interviews with those close to the deceased. They tend to be carried out by psychologists and psychiatrists. And they tend to prioritise mental illness – often undiagnosed – as the most principal cause of suicide. So who’s right? Movie makers or psychiatrists? On the face of it of course we should side with science. But it’s a bit more complicated than that. People writing and commissioning movies are tapping into common sense assumptions about what might be a good enough reason for someone to feel suicidal and this stock of common sense is the cultural context of suicidal thinking – what someone might think is a good enough reason for them to kill themselves. Acknowledging the cultural context does not take away from the reality that according to psychiatric definitions, many suicidal people are no doubt experiencing depression. But it does emphasise that, for example, some life events and social circumstances are more likely to be associated with suicidal reactions than others. This brings us to another sociological argument which is relevant to the film. The idea that normal unhappiness is currently being inappropriately medicalised as an illness called depression. In their book The Loss of Sadness, Allan Horwitz and Jerome Wakefield accept that depressive disorder does exists and does need medical attention but they chart the way that normal human sadness has become reclassified as largely an abnormal experience, especially since the publication of DSM-III in 1980 (the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders). They see this diagnostic system as fundamentally flawed because it considers only symptoms and not the context in they occur, such as, for example, the loss of job or an intimate relationship. The issue of suicidality in lesbian, gay and bisexual people is a controversial one. There is survey evidence that levels of suicidal thinking and suicide attempts in LGB people are higher than in the general population. Some activists have highlighted this as evidence of the ongoing experience of homophobia. Other activists are very concerned that highlighting suicide risk might pathologise LGB people as emotionally unstable. Yet others are keen to point out that the cultural climate surrounding sexual diversity has undergone a sea change and the experience of coming out can be a very positive one in 2010. Well I would want to argue that there is a real issue here. I was part of a team conducting research on this issue a couple of years ago and we indeed find young people who spoke of being driven to self-harm by a homophobic environment. We also came across the idea of someone having suicidal thoughts because they could not accept the idea that they were gay. This is not something you would expect to find in a climate of total acceptance of same sex desires and relationships. Now sexual identity is just one of several issues to do with normative gendered behaviour that need to be considered in relation to suicide. There is gender paradox whereby women are much more likely to attempt suicide and men much more likely to actually kill themselves. Gender and suicide is a big topic in its own right that sociology should plenty to say about but I can’t do justice to it here. We could perhaps pick it up in more general questions / discussion at the end if anyone was interested.

Psychiatry and A Single Man By Susan Bisson

Below is an essay by Susan Bisson from the Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies (JOMEC) at Cardiff University and relates to our sciSCREENing of A Single Man in March.

Psychiatry and the movies have grown up together. Both were in their infancy at the turn of the century and then went on to make massive advances within the following decades. Maybe this is why they have always shared a relationship which can be described as both complementary but also hostile. Both disciplines share a voyeuristic interest in appraising the body and are particularly interested when that body does not function as it should prompting a Foucauldian approach to the analysis of psychiatric discourses in film. The appraisal of human ‘exhibits’ effectively made its transition seamlessly from the pit and the gallows to the cinema screen. It is notable that the Edison Manufacturing company in 1903 made a film of the electrocution of Topsy the elephant at Coney Island’s Luna park. Topsy had charged and killed three spectators. The choice of material deemed suitable for an audience by Edison highlights the grotesque choice of subjects at the inception of cinema. Additionally August Lumiere was a scientist whose dominant medical interests were tuberculosis and cancer. Science and the screen have always been welded together via their interest in life and a preoccupation with the visual and the desire to ‘see’. The word ‘monster’ derives from the French ‘monstrere’ to show or demonstrate and has been used in medical history to denote a body that exhibits some sort of defect, whether physical or mental. It is no surprise that generically horror movies have traditionally featured psychiatric representations which have tended towards the fantastic. Horror is by no means the only genre to feature psychiatric representations, however. The variety of genres is extremely wide – from Science Fiction (Twelve Monkeys), through to romance (Mad Love) and comedy (The Dream Team). The biopic has featured over the years, including films such as Bird (The Charley Parker story) and Shine which features the life of the Australian pianist David Helfgott. Prominent films have chosen to use psychiatry specifically as their subject matter. These tend to be seminal films such as The Snake Pit and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest which have had the power to influence further film representations. Notably the type of psychiatric disorder to feature is also extremely wide ranging. Substance abuse and psychosis feature in numerous films and are popular choices for screen representation. Depression does not feature as frequently although it has played a part in screen classics such as It’s a Wonderful Life. Psychiatry features in mainstream blockbuster movies such as A Beautiful Mind and also in arthouse fare such as Harmony Korine’s Julien Donkey Boy. A major preoccupation amongst mental health professionals and media practitioners such as Greg Philo is the veracity of the representation and the possibility that screen representation may reflect biases and misconceptions that contribute to a continued misunderstanding of mental illness. There is a particular sensitivity towards the linking of mental illness and violence and the bias towards a portrayal of negative symptoms. It is too convenient to assume that art house representations offer greater sensitivity than the blockbuster as this is not necessarily the case. At issue is the question of whether film representation should be suborned to the notion of social responsibility. There are many more factors than accuracy that affect screen representation. These include the constant pressure for audience ratings and the demands of both economics and genre. Values of entertainment and acceptability to audience are also crucial. Narrative pace is important and is a reason why depression does not feature as much as psychosis. Essential ingredients for film include dramatic moments and resolutions which can often be at odds with the realities of mental ill health. What matters, at the end of the day, is the quest for a good story and there is an undoubted pressure to make things more shocking than they truly are. It can be hard, at times, to get audiences to engage with difficult subject matter and because film is a primarily visual medium this causes problems for certain aspects of mental health which are difficult to picture visually. Above all psychiatric material must be interesting – this discounts the everyday lives of those who suffer chronic illness in favour of the unusual or bizarre. The figure of the psychiatrist is of great use to the film maker as s/he can act as a ficelle to move the plot forward or explain it. The psychiatrist provides the perfect vehicle for exposition and character development. Traditionally psychiatrists have been used to legitimise sexual themes (particularly in the light of the Production Code) and they act as a rationalist corrective to the supernatural. They are the voice of common sense and can be repressive influences on the free spirited. Film has also mirrored changes in psychiatry itself. During the heyday of psychoanalysis there was a plethora of films which featured Freudian content (such as Hitchcock’s Spellbound). The Snakepit features insulin therapy and Suddenly Last Summer begins with a routine lobotomy. It is the under funding of this procedure and not its drastic nature which forms the early dramatic tension of this film. Not all aspects of psychiatry are featured equally in film, however. As Good As it Gets is cited as one of the few examples of a filmic representation to show psychopharmacological agents as being therapeutic, for example. The omissions from film are as interesting, in many ways, as the inclusions.

Four talks posted from the 'Inception' sciSCREEN

Each week we will post a collection of essays from the six sciSCREEN events we have run to date. To start, please find below the four essays and talks by the speakers - Professor Mark Blagrove, Professor Alessandra Tanesini, Professor Ken Peattie and Dr Robin Smith - who presented at the 'Inception' sciSCREEN last August. These essays are there to stimulate discussion and debate so please do add a comment if they are of interest. Also please let us know what you thought of the Inception sciSCREEN by adding a comment below. Next week, we will add the essays from 'A Single Man' sciSCREENing from March.

To find out a little more on the origins of Cardiff sciSCREEN please visit the MRC CNGG public engagement website: genomicminds.

Some Questions of Lucid Dreaming and Inception By Mark Blagrove

Below are some questions and answers about the concept of 'Lucid Dreaming' written by Professor Mark Blagrove from the School of Human Sciences at Swansea University and relates to our sciSCREENing of Inception in August. What is a lucid dream? It is a dream in which you realise that you are dreaming. How often do they occur? In about 1 in every 200 dreams. How do we know people are really asleep when they have a lucid dream, they could be just half awake and drowsy? You can signal with your eyes from a lucid dream, and monitoring of sleep shows that sleep at this point is in the stage called Rapid Eye Movement sleep. However, there is recent debate about this. Does time pass differently in a dream compared to when doing the same things when awake? No. Can you have dreams within dreams, in that you dream that you have woken up from a dream while still being in a dream? Yes, this is called a false awakening. Do frequent video gamers have more lucid dreamers? Yes, recent research says they do, but the explanation for this is currently disputed. Is there any scientific reason to study lucid dreams? Yes, seeing what happens to the brain as you become self-aware during a dream may tell us what is the neural basis of consciousness. Are there particular personality types who have lucid dreams? Yes, but as it appears that the incidence of lucid dreaming has increased over the last few decades the most important factor in determining whether one has such dreams is to know that they can happen. Does spotting some incongruity or bizarreness in a dream cause you to become lucid? It can do so, but usually we don’t question such incongruities during a dream, and most lucid dreams occur spontaneously, without any obvious cause within the dream. Mark Blagrove is a Professor of Psychology at Swansea University, where he runs a sleep lab and investigates sleep, dreaming, lucid dreaming and nightmares. He is on the editorial board of the academic journal 'Dreaming', and the 'International Journal of Dream Research', and is a past-president and current board member of the International Association for the Study of Dreams (asdreams.org), which is the main organisation worldwide for people with an academic, professional, artistic or personal interest in dreaming.