Crooked Beauty, a poetic documentary film shot, directed, and edited by Ken Paul Rosenthal, asks the viewer to reconsider the “nature” of madness. The film takes on powerful popular and professional conceptions of mental illness troubling the dichotomy between sanity and insanity. Crooked Beauty features a first-person voice over that is at various times meditative, persuasive, and argumentative. This essayistic voice over is juxtaposed with beautifully abstracted images shot with a frozen frame; the frame’s refusal to shift, move, or change calls attention to the subtle movements and shifting patterns of the images within that frame. Throughout the film text – at first prosaic and then poetic – overlays these graphic patterns. In the final section of the film the text presents two poems. As the viewer reads these poems, their rhythm and cadence interact with the rhythms produced by the shifting patterns of light as well as the film’s provocative sonic mix. The voice over is accompanied by a soundtrack that includes a dissonant string composition, which resolves at the film’s end, as well as sounds from the natural world such as crickets, birds, and waves.
As a cinematic essay, Crooked Beauty’s thesis argues for a reconceptualization of the dichotomy between mental health and illness that is popularized by both contemporary, western medicine and media. The film argues that this conceptualization amounts to a form of social control. The framing of one swath of the spectrum of mental sensitivity and experience as “broken,” “imbalanced,” or “disordered” is both pejorative and restrictive. The first-person narrator of the film asserts that most humans experience some trauma in their lives and that we all live along a continuum of sensitivities. The dichotomizing of mental states of being into health and illness unnecessarily Others a large portion of the human population. Industrialized and post-industrialized western culture’s overwhelming response is to pharmacologically suppress the expression of those sensitivities. The first-person narrator characterizes this response as a turn toward the de-authentification of the individual in service of the needs of capitalism. The film critiques capitalism for assaulting mental health, asking the viewer to consider mental illness as a reflection of a social condition rather than as a biological or psychological condition. In these ways Crooked Beauty’s exposition follows loosely from Dr. Thomas Szasz’s critique of the “myth of mental illness” and his argument that pharmacracy is a form of imperialism imposed by doctors and the state on citizens. The “myth of mental illness” and the coercive drugging of that illness results in a loss of autonomy, a squelching of basic human rights.
The organization of the film manifests this argument. Crooked Beauty is divided into six segments (authored on the DVD into chapters): “Back Pages,” “The Disease Model,” “Dangerous Gifts,” “Wounded Healers,” “The Icarus Project,” and “New Maps.” Interestingly, “Back Pages,” the longest segment of the film, tells the most familiar story. The first-person narrator reveals that she grew up in a dysfunctional, alcoholic home and that she retreated from the world at a young age. In college, she experienced mania and depression while using drugs and alcohol to the extent that she ceased to function academically, economically, or socially. As a result, she was institutionalized, an experience she describes as being lonely and alienating. In this segment, the narrator emphasizes her alienation while undergoing traditional treatment: she was locked alone in a room, not allowed to commune with others or nature (except to exhibit her traumas like a side-show freak), and observed in the unnatural fluorescent light of the institution. At this point in the film, the issue of alienation comes to the fore where it will remain throughout the length of the film.
The second segment, “The Disease Model,” raises questions of agency. The diagnosis “mental illness” was both a relief and a challenge for the narrator. She notes that this diagnosis let her off the hook – she was not responsible for her condition/experience – but that it proposed a kind of passivity that chafed: “your brain is broken, so take these pills and you and we won’t notice that your brain is abnormal.” This segment explores this experience in relationship to the rhythms of and experience of time in capitalism. The narrator explicitly argues that the Disease Model is correct when it assumes that someone like her would need to be medicated to be able to adhere to the labor demands of post-industrialized capitalism (e.g. 9-5 labor cycles spent under fluorescent lights caged in cubicles). This section of the film draws a powerful comparison between the psychiatric hospital and the bureaucratized office.
While the first two sections of the film orient the viewer to the narrator’s story and make a critical argument about our conceptualization of mental illness, the remaining sections of the film offer the viewer alternative ways of framing those “special sensitivities.” The narrator suggests that she might follow a middle way – a way between suppressing traumas with pharmacology and continually revisiting the past again and again (by refusing to manage those sensitivities at all). “Dangerous Gifts,” reframes “mental illness” as a gift or talent rather than burden or defect. The narrator argues that rather than suppress such talents, people who have them must “learn to take care of our dangerous gift: not to eliminate or tame it into submission but to use it to our advantage and manage it so it doesn't overwhelm.” “Wounded Healers,” extends the gift paradigm of the third section with references to shamans and other figures whose differences are thought to link them to a spiritual world. The narrator questions the efficacy of a culture that continually avoids and suppresses negative emotions (sadness, pain, anxiety) when such emotions and the challenging experiences that generate them are authentic to human existence. The fifth segment, “The Icarus Project,” extends the argument introduced in “Dangerous Gifts” by locating tools for caring for such dangerous gifts. The Icarus Project, an interactive website and community, is one such tool. The film presents this tool to viewers wanting to live an authentic, adventurous life without continually crashing into the sea (as Icarus did). The narrator asks, “what if people learned to use their wings and didn’t crash and burn.” The Icarus Project emerges as a community where people share experiences and tools for managing such dangerous gifts so that they don’t overwhelm their recipients.
The final segment, “New Maps,” establishes an alternate way of thinking about the experience of dangerous gifts: such gifts represent a change in consciousness rather than a descent into madness. The narrator notes that her experiences are cyclic echoing the earlier critique of linear, post-industrialized time; they are a continual cycling between reclamation and loss. The narrator also discusses what is, for her, a key tool for managing her gift: creativity. She establishes creative production as an outlet that helps to manage the fragile fire in her brain without snuffing it out, as would pharmaceutical interventions.
Crooked Beauty offers a response in addition to this critique. The narrator hopes to reshape perspectives on the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness. She advocates a middle ground. Rather than wholly embracing pharmacology as a response to these non-conformist experiences of different sensitivities or wholly rejecting pharmacology, the narrator suggests a flexible approach to their management. She advocates blending western therapies with other therapies (such as diet, creativity, acupuncture, and community) by talking about her own healing processes which involve working with her body, getting outside, working with animals and the earth. Her approach echoes the current wellness model. She asks, “what can I do to keep well?” and emphasizes skill and tool building in her life in the pursuit of wellness. In this way she identifies as a being capable of being well rather than as someone who is broken. The narrator employs the language of authenticity throughout the film, arguing that pharmacological suppression of the symptoms of mental illness produces inauthentic selves and inauthentic experiences of the world.
The imagery of Crooked Beauty resonates with the film’s title; it is exquisitely beautiful. As mentioned earlier, Rosenthal’s frame is static; that frame, however, contains movement. That movement is often “e/affected”; that is, a time lapse, fast motion effect is applied suggesting the experiential difference of those items contained in the frame. The dynamic tension created by this static frame and the movement it contains also mirrors the tensions presented by the voice over regarding paradigms for understanding and containing mental differences. Presented almost entirely in black and white (the color images stand out as key deviations from the palette of grays), nearly every shot focuses on graphic patterns created by light and shadow. Much of the imagery features organic materials enmeshed with inorganic materials. A number of shots also feature objects in the extreme foreground paired with objects in the middle ground. This spatial juxtaposition creates an interesting effect; the viewer must peer through the foreground objects to focus on those in the middle ground. Water, land, and sky images appear throughout the film. Given the film’s subject matter, the water images call to mind the idea that water is a transformative element and land a grounding element. The sky images contain forms of water: clouds, fog, mist, and prefigure the role of the Icarus myth.
Crooked Beauty is a complex film that invites discussion from a variety of audiences. For students just beginning their study of the human mind, it offers exposure to new ways of conceptualizing its states and processes as well as fresh methods for representing “madness.” The film’s experimental form inspires reflection and identification in ways that are neither polemical nor overly expository, offering filmmakers a cinematic model applicable to other contested subjects. In addition, the film is relevant to all viewers who might struggle with/against being codified by external institutions of power and knowledge; Crooked Beauty illustrates one way viewers may effect change in pursuit of larger social transformations.