Homer B. Pettey 
Mind Reeling 
Psychopathology on Film

Mind Reeling investigates how cinema displays and mirrors psychological disorders, such as bipolar disorder, amnesia, psychotic delusions, obsessive compulsive behavior, trauma, paranoia, and borderline personalities. It explores a range of genres, including biopics, comedies, film noirs, contemporary dramedies, thrillers, Gothic mysteries, and docufictions. The contributors open up critical approaches to audience fascination with film depictions of serious disturbances within the human psyche. Many films examined here have had little scholarly attention and commentary. These essays focus on how cinematic techniques contribute to popular culture’s conception of mental dysfunction, trauma, and illness. This book reveals the complex artistic and generic patterns that produce contemporary images of psychopathology in cinema.

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List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments



1. Introduction: A Very Brief History of Psychopathology in Cinema


Homer B. Pettey



2. Adèle H., Camille Claudel, and Margot de Valois: Isabelle Adjani’s Real ‘Mad’ Women? Costume Drama and the Disruptive Female


Susan Hayward



3. Musical Madness on Hangover Square


Murray Pomerance



4. Screening Multiple Personality Disorder in the Age of Kinsey:
Lizzie and
The Three Faces of Eve


R. Barton Palmer



5. The Cine-Telescopic Psyche: 1950s Serial Killers and Sexual Psychopathology in
The Sniper and
While the City Sleeps


Robert Miklitsch



6. Pathologies of Pedagogy in Midcentury Melodrama:
The Miracle Worker and
A Child Is Waiting


Jennifer L. Jenkins



7. Passion and Delirium: Representing Madness in
Spider and
Asylum


Jim Leach



8. Scorched: Landscape, Trauma, and Embodied Experience in
Incendies


Tarja Laine



9. Ghostly and Ghastly Desires and Disorders in
Young Adult: Ken Taco Huts in Mercury


Julie Grossman



10. Criminal Biographies and Visual Culture


Homer B. Pettey



Contributors

Index

Mengenai Pengarang

Homer B. Pettey is Professor of Film and Comparative Literature at the University of Arizona. He is the editor of several books, including
Hitchcock’s Moral Gaze (with R. Barton Palmer and Steven M. Sanders) and
Rule Brittannia! The Biopic and British National Identity (with R. Barton Palmer), both also published by SUNY Press.