Films About Losing Your Mind

As I drove between appointments yesterday I happened to listen to a bit of the regular film criticism program on our local public radio station. In this particular program the hosts listed their top five pictures in which the main character loses his mind excepting instances in which drugs or alcohol are involved. Without that proviso the winner bar none would be Ray Milland’s chilling portrayal in The Lost Weekend.

There are any number of pictures in which a supporting character starts off nuts and gets nuttier. The world’s heavyweight champion in that department must certainly be Sunset Blvd. Who is the main character in that picture? If it’s Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), it almost fits although she’s pretty far around the bend when we first meet her. Does it fit if the main character is Joe Gillis (William Holden)? Does he lose his mind during the course of the picture? It’s an interesting question. He certainly loses his life but does he lose his mind?

Another picture that leaps to mind in this category is Hitchcock’s Vertigo. What iis Scottie’ Ferguson’s mental state at the end of the picture? I think he’s lost his mind.

A little-seen picture, mentioned by the hosts, is Sam Fuller’s 60s picture, Shock Corridor. I haven’t seen that picture in decades. In the film a newspaper reporter (Peter Breck) has himself checked into a mental institution as part of an investigation and proceeds to go mad. It’s pretty lurid as many of Sam Fuller’s pictures are.

Many of the other films they mentioned are pretty obscure but several aren’t, e.g. The Shining and Rosemary’s Baby. The former certainly qualifies and the latter qualifies if you don’t believe the Devil exists. But that brings up another interesting question.

Losing one’s mind is actually a pretty common topic in genre pictures, particularly in fantasy, science fiction, and horror but also in westerns. Consider The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

First, who is the main character in the movie? If it’s Jimmy Stewart’s Ranse Stoddard it wouldn’t qualify and the picture would be classified as a comedy (I’m using something along the lines of the Aristotelian definition here). I would content that Ranse Stoddard isn’t the main character but the narrator. The main character is John Wayne’s Tom Doniphon, during the course of the picture, as a consequence of personal disappointments and, essentially, the end of his way of life, he has a psychotic break (the burning of the cabin) and succumbs to major depression from which he never recovers. It’s a tragedy and meets the criteria the Filmspotting hosts set.

Richard Matheson’s novella, I Am Legend has been made into three movies: The Last Man on Earth (1964), The Omega Man (1971), and I Am Legend (2007). I don’t know about the last picture (not having seen it) but the novella itself and, to some extent, the first picture can be interpreted as a man degenerating from agoraphobia into paranoid delusions.

The great strength and value of the entire fantasy genre either in literature or film is that it makes it possible via allegory to tell stories about extremely hard and difficult topics that might well be impossible to tell in a compelling manner in conventional fiction. When viewed in that way the challenge opens up considerably.

In The Wolf Man Lon Chaney, Jr. gives a poignant performance of a man going mad, first in obsession, then delusion, then mania. The physical transformation is actually extraneous but it made the movie much more palatable to 1940s audiences.

Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, has been adapted for film, television, and even cartoons at least 30 times. I recall discussing the novel at some length with my mom. She saw it as a story of drug addiction. I saw it as one of multiple personality disorder (I still do). Hyde was not a physical monster but a moral one. Jekyll wasn’t addicted to the drug; he was addicted to being Hyde. In the film adaptations I’ve seen that’s clear in the 1940s version with Spencer Tracey (IMO and his one of Tracey’s worst) but clearest in the 1931 adaptation with Fredric March in the title roles. A close reading of Stevenson’s works reveals a recurring theme that evil is more attractive than good, irresistible in fact.

Before I draw this post to a close, I wanted to mention a genre picture in which the reverse happens—the main character is insane at the beginning of the movie and gradually becomes sane: The Sixth Sense. At the beginning (not the very beginning but after that) the main character, Dr. Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis) is in extreme denial, a state of delusion. In the course of the picture by helping Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment) overcome his problems, he overcomes his own psychological problems and returns to his own best self. It’s a remarkable paean to the possibility of a practitioner healing himself by helping his patients to heal, caring as salvific.

What are the best movies, among genre films or straight drama, in which the main character starts sane and loses his or her mind during the course of the film?