'Character Arc to a Cure'

Lindsay Ellis' recent video Loki, the MCU and Narcisssim is a terrific analysis of one particular mental disorder - but there's one thing Lindsay said which I wish had been a little more fully embellished, because I think it's a rich vein waiting to be tapped by people with expertise in mental illness (which is not myself). Near the end of the video, while discussing how narcissism has been used in Loki and elsewhere, Lindsay said of fictional characters who are identified as narcissists: "Either they character arc their way into a cure or we kill them."

I think what Lindsay was saying specifically about narcissism could be applied more generally to how mental illness is depicted in fiction. Again, I don't have a background studying mental illness but... I have watched a lot of movies.

It seems to me that Lindsay had her finger right on the pulse of why depictions of mental illnesses in fiction are so often found lacking. The need for characters to, as she says, "character arc" their way out of their illness. The conventional wisdom in Hollywood does seem to be that if a character has a mental illness then they have to confront it and by confronting it they basically accept and overcome it (if not, they die).

I think part of why Hollywood has a small bag of options in how they depict mental health is simply that the science used is so young. Heck, psychoanalysis is younger than movies themselves and it didn't gain widespread acceptance overnight. Shock therapy both rose and fell during the 20th century! In what I've observed of popular culture, the movies didn't really come to accept therapy as a positive thing until the 1940s. Even up until then, there was a widespread belief that people were simply 'born crazy' and you couldn't 'fix' them. The climax of the play/film Arsenic and Old Lace exhibits the protagonist's relief at discovering he's not a blood relative to the story's four insane characters; there are so many stories from popular culture of the time where in the climax the hero learns they were adopted and therefore not really related to the story's insane character (I've heard it a few times on Suspense) that I'm now all but convinced Arsenic and Old Lace was specifically satirizing what is now a forgotten trope.

But in the post-World War II environment a few films came along to promote the good work being done in therapy. Alfred Hitchcock was specically told by his producer, David O. Selznick, to create a film which would champion psychoanaylsis (the resulting film, Spellbound, was not what Selznick had in mind). Notably, John Huston's 1946 documentary film Let There Be Light which he made for the US Army took great pains to humanize mental patients. The film wound up being suppressed by the US government for about 30 years because they were still uncomfortable with frank talk about mental health. The film has been criticized for emphasizing what seem to be quick and dramatic 'cures.' In that sense, the film is of the same pedigree as Loki in that the solution to mental health is, generally, confrontation and acceptance. Of course, Let There Be Light was so laser-focused on positive outcomes for the mental patients featured because the film wanted to destigmatize mental illness and reassure families welcoming relatives from army mental hospitals that their loved ones were not dangerous. The film The Best Years of Our Lives also did a fine job of depicting what we'd now call PTSD (again, the protagonist confronts and overcomes their trauma).

From there, the 1948 film The Snake Pit did a reasonably good job of portraying a woman's recovery from mental illness. Although the movie follows a pretty standard Hollywood formula (and again, the protagonist confronts and accepts her problems), I give it a lot of credit. Despite being a very Freudian film, being even-handed enough that in the climax, although the protagonist identifies an original source of trauma in her past, she's quick to add that it wasn't this lone event but several in her life which led to her mental illness.

But as mental science has continued to progress Hollywood has never really progressed past this point. They still tend to really like Freud, childhood trauma, couch-based therapy sessions and, overall, some form of confrontation which allows the protagonist to overcome their mental problems. What's more likely to happen in real life is that a patient who confronts and accepts their condition will still have to attend some kind of therapy and possibly take drugs for the foreseeable future (or even the rest of their lives), lest they relapse.

That seems contrary to the American myth of the self-made man, so I understand why Hollywood tends to have mental illness overcome by simply confronting it. If a protagonist is in therapy at the start of a story, the creators definitely intend for them to get out of therapy by the end of the story (re: Falcon and the Winter Soldier). Therapy or drugs are treated as though they were themselves part of the challenge facing the character, rather than tools to help address the actual illness.

I suppose what unsettles me the most about all of this is not that characters 'character arc' their way out of mental illness but that therapy and drugs are not usual part of that character arc. Just as 1940s movies such as The Snake Pit were trying to destigmatize common beliefs about the mentally ill in its time, I think a lot of good could be done today by telling more stories where a character has a long-term need for therapy and drugs which is still presented as a positive outcome.