Monday, May 7, 2018

Titicut Follies


Frederick Wiseman began his film career fully formed, his distinctive approach to documentary already firmly established, with Titicut Follies, a probing study of a state hospital for the criminally insane. The Massachusetts government blocked the general public from viewing the film for decades, eventually prompting Wiseman to add what is surely one of the most passive-aggressive legal disclaimers in film history. Given the matter-of-fact brutality depicted throughout the film, the state’s response is hardly surprising; this would not be the first time an institution would regret exposing its inner workings to the director. Stark moments like the tube-feeding of one emaciated patient add a sour undertone to even the most benign sequences, like a birthday party where well-fed guards and inmates eat cake and play games. In a sequence that calls to mind Samuel Fuller’s America-as-madhouse classic Shock Corridor, two men debating America’s involvement in Vietnam are slowly drowned out by another patient’s tuneless rendition of “The Ballad of the Green Berets.” The titular follies—put on by the hospital staff for the benefit of the patients (and based on how Wiseman films the performance, us as well)—seem downright horrifying in this context, a momentary upending of the power balance that only reinforces the helplessness of the patients. One moment the guards are telling corny jokes and singing; the next, they’re forcing the inmates to strip and march down the hall.

Anyone watching all of this institutionally sanctioned abuse might reasonably ask what sanity is supposed to look like in such a place. Would Jim, the teacher reduced to screaming outbursts by the childish taunts of the guards, seem terribly ill in an environment that accorded him greater dignity? The possibility that it is the hospital that makes the madness and not the reverse is one of the film’s more disturbing questions, posed most forcefully by Vladimir, a paranoid schizophrenic arguing with his doctors that his time in the facility has only worsened his condition (a brief stay for observation has stretched into a year and a half). The doctors greet his arguments with bemused condescension, and one immediately suggests upping the man’s drug dosage to tone down his agitation. The possibility that Vladimir might be right—that sitting naked in a bare cell listening to a delusional inmate rave about obscure papal politics might not be conducive to addressing deep-rooted psychological trauma—is never entertained. In the eyes of the institution, he’s less a human being and more a problem to be solved. Sanity is interchangeable with pliability in this equation, and he will presumably be deemed “better” when he ceases to complain. Tellingly, the only patient in the film to be released leaves in a pine box.