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The Folklore of Deinstitutionalization: Popular Film and the Death of the Asylum, 1973–1979

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2019

TROY RONDINONE Open the ORCID record for TROY RONDINONE [Opens in a new window]
TROY RONDINONE*
Affiliation:
History Department, Southern Connecticut State University. Email: [email protected].
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Abstract

The demise of America's state mental hospital system, or “deinstitutionalization,” has received much attention from sociologists and historians of medicine. Less understood is the manner in which the public experienced and came to terms with it. Using elements of folklore and horror studies, I will examine how popular films accommodated audiences to institutional decline and confirmed popular antistatist pessimism. The Exorcist (1973), One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), Halloween (1978), and When a Stranger Calls (1979) helped weave a tapestry of distrust. By endorsing popular conceptions of institutional failure and presenting mythical narratives of individualist triumph, these films helped pave a path towards the conservative Reagan era to come.

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Articles
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 54 , Issue 5 , December 2020 , pp. 900 - 925
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2019

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References

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22 The Exorcist, dir. Friedkin. In the book, we get a near identical flashback: “I'm not about to put her in a goddam asylum!” Blatty, 191.

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26 Maisel, 102. One might also note that the 1968 Rosemary's Baby also prepared the 1970s for the penetration of demonic forces into a modern setting medically unequipped to handle it.

27 Darnton, “Peasants Tell Tales,” 34.

28 Canby, “Why the Devil Do they Dig ‘The Exorcist?’.”

29 As Life magazine explained it, Kesey “makes the tired old subject of life in a mental hospital into an absorbing Orwellian microcosm of all humanity.” Quoted in Cottrell, Robert C., Sex, Drugs, and Rock ’n’ Roll: The Rise of America's 1960s Counterculture (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015), 93Google Scholar.

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32 Eliot, 81.

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35 Forman, Commentary; Forman and Novak, 125. In an even more postmodern twist, Forman would learn that many of the patients had read Kesey's novel themselves and liked it. See Fiona Lewis, “‘The Cuckoo's Nest’ from Forman's Perch,” Los Angeles Times, 1 Feb. 1976.

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43 The Snake Pit, dir. Anatole Litvak (1948); Fear Strikes Out, dir. Robert Mulligan (1957); Shock Corridor, dir. Sam Fuller (1962); Shock Treatment, dir. Denis Sanders (1964). See McDonald, Andrew and Walter, Gerry, “The Portrayal of ECT in American Movies,” Journal of ECT, 17, 4 (Dec. 2001), 264–74CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

44 Forman, Commentary.

45 Don't Look in the Basement (orig. The Forgotten), dir. S. F. Brownrigg (1973). This movie allegorizes deinstitutionalization and stigmatization too. The alternative title, The Forgotten, echoes the way society neglects the mentally ill. Says Dr. Masters at one point, “Our patients are all people who are unloved, unwanted, forgotten.” Incidentally, there is no basement in the movie.

46 One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, dir. Forman (1975).

47 Vincent Canby, “‘Cuckoo's Nest’: A Sane Comedy about Psychotics,” New York Times, 23 Nov. 1975, 42–43, original emphasis; Rex Reed, “Movies: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,” Vogue, 1 Feb. 1976; McCormick, Ruth, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,” Cineaste, 7, 3 (Fall 1976), 42Google Scholar.

48 Safer, “‘It's the Truth Even if It Didn't Happen,” 137.

49 Murf, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,” Variety, 19 Nov. 1975. Film critic Gene Siskel even complained that the film was not realistic enough: “What ‘Cuckoo’ is missing most of all, however, is the quiet time, the deadly time you find in most mental institutions. There are too many great scenes of turmoil in this ‘Cuckoo's Nest’ for it to be realistic.” Gene Siskel, “‘Cuckoo's Nest’: Feathered with Some Solid Entertainment,” Chicago Tribune, 25 Nov. 1975. Vincent Canby, “Cuckoo's Nest,” made a similar comment.

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