The Weekend of Psychotic Women, Part 1

I think Marx put it best when he wrote that history repeats itself “the first time as tragedy, the second as a psychotic woman.” I might be misremembering that, but I’m going to run with it. At the beginning of this month, September 1st through the 4th, the Sie FilmCenter in Denver held what they dubbed a Weekend of Psychotic Women, built around a series of film screenings culled from Kier-La Janisse’s classic book House of Psychotic Women. With the book marking its tenth anniversary, there’s a new expanded edition being released, and author Janisse appeared at the sie in person to celebrate the book and the grouping of films she manifested.

Through House of Psychotic Women, which bears the impressive subtitle An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films, Janisse explores her own life as well as a class of films defined by the intersection of femaleness and madness. There is undoubtedly a gendered quality to our perceptions of mental health and illness, something Janisse does not shy away from. Early in the book, she writes: “I needed to focus on what I know: namely, that the films I watch align with my personal experience in that every women I have ever met in my entire life is completely crazy, in one way or another. Whether or not that’s a disparagement is part of what I aim to explore in this book.”

I don’t see it as a disparagement in the slightest. As a trans woman who has been described as “psychotic” (and chosen to call myself that on at least one occasion), I find the concept cathartic. As Norman Bates says, “we all go a little mad sometimes”. This is part of what drew me, years ago, to Janisse’s book, and what drove me again to the Weekend of Psychotic Women.

The weekend began (well, on Thursday), fittingly, with George Cukor’s Gaslight, a work more iconic for the term taken from its title and the play on which it was based — gaslighting (as Janisse points out in the book, “it has gone from a rarely used term to a completely overused term”) — than for the film itself. The term for a particular type of mental abuse does derive from the way that Gregory Anton manipulates his wife Paula, played with ghostly, pallid absence by Ingrid Bergman. Gregory convinces Paula that she is going mad, that she is losing her sanity day by day, a fear seemingly confirmed by noises in the boarded-off attic and the explicable phantom behavior of gaslights.

What Gaslight does for the weekend is to suggest a tone, a theme, even a politics of what it to come. Gaslight is an acknowledgement of not only the gendered nature of neurosis but the role of men in producing specifically female madness. In fitting the traditionally gendered pattern of abuse — a man abusing his female spouse — Gaslight opens the retrospective with both an awareness of sexism and the blurry lines of madness: you might be crazy, but then again, you might not be. You shouldn’t necessarily listen when men tell you you’re losing it: mentally, emotionally, politically.

As for sexism and the role of men in producing female psychosis, nowhere is this more prevalent than in a film shown on Saturday, Abel Ferrara’s Ms. 45. In Ms. 45 the protagonist’s murderous compulsion is driven by multiple men sexually assaulting her, leaving her able to find peace only in violence. Thana, the mute female protagonist, finds her voice in the roar of the titular firearm. As a rape-revenge film, Ms. 45 is undoubtedly the most controversial showing of the weekend, a bold counterpoint to the safer feminist choice that is Gaslight.

Friday saw the screening of slasher gem Alice, Sweet Alice, a religious horror film that deviates from the supernatural angles of The Exorcist or The Omen, instead focusing on religion and behavior; in other words, it is not demonic but ritualistic. I’ve often maintained that even The Exorcist is less a film about any literal actual devil but about a young girl, perhaps already mentally ill, driven mad by incessant testing and the gaze of the psychiatric and religious disciplines. Alice, Sweet Alice takes place on this level explicitly: there is no demon or devil in the film, only a strange young girl (again, under the gaze of psychiatry and religion) and a murderous religious fanatic who’s driven by dogma to kill.

Ritual drives Alice, Sweet Alice (alternate title: Communion) in much the same way that ritual drives Saturday screening Burnt Offerings, a film starring Karen Black as Marian Rolf, a woman who, in taking care of a house with her family for the summer, becomes possessed by the house by way of the conventionally feminine rituals of homemaking, gardening, and elder care. As her husband becomes increasingly frightened and unhinged, Marian is much more calmly absorbed into the house itself.  As with many of the weekend’s films — including another Saturday film, Let’s Scare Jessica to Death — there’s a fine line between madness and the supernatural, and that line is located at the site of repetition.

As someone who deals with obsessive compulsive disorder and copes with mental illness through repetition and ritual, I see such ritual processes as a kind of madness in themselves. I’ve found that at best such processes are a double-edged sword. The coping can only last so long until, as in Burnt Offerings, the ritual takes on a life of its own and becomes a new reality. This is the essence of the anti-religion critique of Alice, Sweet Alice: that morality and humanity has been replaced by mechanistic, rote repetitions that contain violence. This is also true of the violence inherent in Ms. 45, a film that sees its protagonist compulsively commit murders and systematically dispose of body parts; Thana meanwhile becomes unable to perform her job as a seamstress owing to the trauma she’s experienced. You can even see the theme of ritual in the clockwork behavior of insects on dead bodies showcased in Dario Argento’s Phenomena.

Murder and violence become a different kind of repetition: the historical. The essence of the psychotic woman film, if there is a single one, may be the way history seems to repeat itself: “first time as tragedy, the second as a psychotic woman”, as Marx didn’t really say but probably should have. Gaslight is exemplary in this regard: the abusive Gregory Anton is hiding the fact that it was him, in fact, who murdered Paula’s aunt years ago, setting the story in motion. When Paula finally returns to the home she and her aunt shared, a Scotland Yard investigator who once met the aunt initially believes Paula to be the dead woman. Gregory threatens to eliminate Paula, this time by having her committed, a twist on his murder of Paula’s aunt.

In Alice, Sweet Alice, we learn that the killer’s child had died shortly before she could take first communion; this leads her to murder a young girl shortly before she can take first communion herself. In Burnt Offerings, we see the theme of historical repetition in the photos of the house that never seems to change, always simply repeats, as Marian takes on the role of matriarch of the house, essentially returning her to life. Again we see the timeline reiterate in I Like Bats, when a female vampire seems to pass on her vampirism to her daughter, and in Identikit, subtly, in the film’s dueling structure and reappearance of items like the knife Lise presents to her would-be “suitor”.

Even the Weekend of Psychotic Women itself explores a kind of cinematic repetition, repetition of the archetype of the psychotic woman, of the nebulous yet striking intersection of madness and femaleness. Cinema is a ritual in itself: silence your cell phones, dim the lights, trailers, and then finally the feature presentation; finally the credits roll and we return to the land of the living. And over the course of a weekend, of nine films of psychotic women, we all go a little mad, and are the better for it.