RD Laing and Psychiatry on Screen
With RD Laing biopic Mad to be Normal closing the Glasgow Film Festival, we take a look at other films which shed light on the controversial psychiatrist's approach to his practice
Psychiatrists could be forgiven for giving the big screen a wide-berth. After all, an early cinematic depiction came in the expressionist The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920) and involved manipulation, hypnosis and murder ahead of patient care. Then there is the most famous screen psychiatrist of all, Dr Hannibal Lecter, who advocates eating the 'free range rude'. What's more, the subgenre of psychiatry in film is perhaps defined by One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1976), which takes aim at the entire discipline for apparently institutionalising and controlling free spirited but healthy people.
The latter is the definition of an 'anti-psychiatry' film and, in crude terms, this is a movement closely associated with the work of Govanhill-born RD Laing. His questioning of every aspect of the psychiatric textbook towards a philosophical understanding of mental illness and treatment catapulted him to fame in the 1960s following his seminal masterpiece The Divided Self (1962), published when Laing was just 28. Laing's personal and professional reputation – with some justification – has declined significantly in the last three decades but Robert Mullan's biopic Mad to be Normal, starring David Tennant, is likely to offer a fresh perspective and bring a colourful life to screen.
Mullan's film is not the first to take inspiration from Laing's ideas. In 2011, Luke Fowler was shortlisted for the Turner Prize for All Divided Selves (2011), which used lost footage of Laing's therapeutic communities to highlight the vulnerability of the mind to disintegration. Ken Loach's Family Life (1971) is also a fictional documentary based on Laing's work and follows a rebellious teenager as her 'problems' become medicalised by her arguably well-intentioned but ultimately overbearing parents. Here, mental illness is something that can only be understood by looking at the whole family, where mental illness might be a rational response.
A less well-known link to Laing can be found in Spider (2002), an underrated and underfunded film by David Cronenberg starring Ralph Fiennes as a schizophrenic man trying to piece together real and imagined memories. Novelist Patrick McGrath based Spider on The Divided Self, which he called "perhaps the best account of Schizophrenia ever written." And, McGrath has some personal experience. He grew up in the psychiatric hospital Broadmoor where his father was Administrator and Head Psychiatrist. Wrongly or rightly, Broadmoor was the kind of Victorian hangover of an institution Laing felt the discipline needed to move away from. Another film based on a McGrath novel, Asylum (2005), is a brooding psychological thriller and also captures a changing era of psychiatric care.
A film not overtly inspired by Laing but which may have interested him is A Beautiful Mind (2002) – which famously charted the life of mathematician John Nash and the chronic schizophrenia from which he suffered. Nash's relationship to his medication and allowing certain symptoms to persist would doubtless have spoken to Laing who, with some insight and some recklessness, took many patients off their meds.
Lars von Trier's Melancholia (2011) also has a Langian flavour in the existentialism of Kirsten Dunst's portrayal of major depression. It cannot help her navigate her disastrous family and wedding day but her mindset does offer a strength and calm as a planet hurtles through our solar system on a collision course with Earth.
A less apocalyptic tale can be found in Intimate Strangers (2004) by French auteur Patrice Leconte. On her first appointment, a patient takes a wrong turn and inadvertently describes her case history to an accountant, who happens to share the same corridor as her psychiatrist. From this comedic premise comes a warm film which accepts – as Laing did – that a doctor-patient relationship can take different forms.
However, a final nod must go to the bizarre contribution RD Laing made to the third James Bond outing, Goldfinger (1964). Fans of the Bond franchise can be reassured there is no hidden meditation on the nature of psychiatry on screen but Laing treated Sean Connery for stress during filming. If he offered Connery any relief is another matter given the somewhat unorthodox nerve tonic Laing used – the potent psychedelic LSD. Irish novelist Edna O'Brien later wrote that Connery later put her off using the drug due to the 'night of terrors' he experienced while under Laing's care.
The world premiere of Mad to be Normal screens at Glasgow Film Festival: 26 Feb, GFT, 7.30pm
Read more about Glasgow Film Festival in The CineSkinny – in print at Glasgow Film Festival venues and online at theskinny.co.uk/film/cineskinny