Krin Gabbard

Jane Campion and the Therapeutic Discourse

The Hollywood cinema has almost always been highly suspicious of psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, and other mental health professionals. In over five hundred films since 1903, these practitioners have been consistently portrayed as lecherous, vindictive, power-hungry, and/or incompetent. In my own work, I have suggested that these films reflect the widespread rejection of various claims for therapeutic objectivity. For better or worse, very few filmgoers are likely to believe that a woman can sit with a male therapist for weeks and weeks, sharing her most personal secrets, and that the two will never become sexually intimate. Hence films such as Marshall Brickman's Lovesick (1983), which ends with psychoanalyst and analysand strolling off into the moonlight together. At their most malevolent, suspicions about the mental health profession lead to the belief that a therapist will punish a patient who refuses to conform. Hence films such as Milos Forman's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), in which electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is used solely for punishment.

In two of her most intriguing films, Jane Campion has joined the large group of filmmakers who have been highly critical of therapists and therapeutic establishments. In Angel at My Table (1990), Janet Frame is bizarrely diagnosed as schizophrenic and subjected to repeated sessions of ECT. Although P.J. Waters (Harvey Keitel) is not, strictly speaking, a therapist in Holy Smoke (1999), he nevertheless functions generically as an expert intent upon changing the behaviour of an unconventional individual. Both films powerfully reveal the failure of therapeutic interventions.

It would be inaccurate, however, to associate Campion's work with the many American films that attack psychotherapy. Unlike the tragic victims of ECT in Hollywood films, Campion's Janet Frame is not fundamentally transformed by the experience and uses her spare time in a mental institution to flourish as a writer. And although P.J. does seem to seduce Ruth (Kate Winslet) in Holy Smoke, Ruth eventually takes almost complete control over P.J.'s character. And although both Ruth and P.J. have been changed by their adventure in therapy, the changes are thoroughly inconsistent with the outcomes prescribed either by professional organizations or by Hollywood convention.

Clearly, Campion has other uses for the therapeutic discourses that have been so important to Hollywood. As in many of her films, the inner life of a woman is highly mercurial and cannot be contained for long by any man or by any institution. Even under pressure from charismatic individuals and extraordinary psychiatric practices, Campion's heroines remain very much their own women.

Biography

Krin Gabbard is Professor of Comparative Literature and English at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He is the author of Jammin' at the Margins: Jazz and the American Cinema (1996), Psychiatry and the Cinema (2nd edition, 1999), and Black Magic: White Hollywood and African American Culture (2004). He has edited two collections for Duke University Press, Jazz Among the Discourses and Representing Jazz (both 1995). He is currently writing a cultural history of the trumpet, to be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2007.