GROSS/39 1948 - mid-century madness
The Snake Pit is a careful, humane account of the purpose of psychiatry.
Gross is every year’s top-grossing movie, since 1913, reviewed.
THE SNAKE PIT, Director ANATOLE LITVAK, Cast OLIVIA DE HAVILLAND, LEO GENN, Script FRANK PARTOS and MILLEN BRAND, production company 20th CENTURY FOX, 1948, 108 MINUTES.
I’m not sure what I was expecting from a late-forties blockbuster about mental illness. I guess something cruel or prurient or backward - or all three. But The Snake Pit is a different kind of movie all together…
There was a period during which socialism and pyschoanalysis were part of the same project - the project of liberating ordinary people from misery. A generation of practitioners connected them explicitly, considered psychoanalysis to be a component of the struggle.
In exile in the USA, radical couch-jockeys like Wilhelm Reich and Erich Fromm and their cohort - many working in the elite US institutions who’d eagerly taken them up as representatives of leading-edge European thought - developed theories of liberation that required an end to exploitation (and sexual repression obvs) as well as the working through of childhood trauma - each required the other. For these therapists and theorists, there could be no end to paralysing neurosis without an end to wage-slavery.
For them it was simple economics. There would never be enough therapists - enough couch-time - to heal the unending supply of sick and unhappy workers. The only durable solution was to go up-stream from the suffering and provide a ‘prophylaxis of the neuroses’, to prevent unhappiness and anxiety from arising in the first place - by liberating workers and their families from exploitation, the main source of misery in the industrial societies.
Psychosis in Hollywood
The Snake Pit, 1948’s top-grossing Hollywood movie, takes us to the end-point of the misery business. Most of the action takes place in the women’s wing of an old-fashioned and over-crowded state-run psychiatric hospital: Juniper Hill State Hospital is modelled on the real institutions in author Mary Jane Ward’s semi-autobiographical book of the same name. You’ll recognise this place from the psychiatric-realist asylums of later Hollywood - there are convincingly cruel nurses in starched cotton, barred windows, routine sedation, confusion and chaos. Desperate inmates circulate in prison-like yards and featureless rooms.
The performances here are unarguably good. At least a dozen actors you’ve never heard of bring detailed and humane portrayals of psychic pain - mute, violent, street-wise, delusional, hopeful, defeated, beyond hope… And in amongst them is the sainted Olivia de Havilland - yes, Melanie Hamilton in Gone With The Wind - as Virginia. She’s a white-collar worker who aspires to be a writer. She’s been brought in by her fiancé and we learn that she’s been living and getting by, alone in the big city for years. She’s a modern figure - an office worker with a degree of autonomy, her own income, a 20th-Century American woman.
But in trying to relate to others, to form a loving bond with her partner, she’s de-railed by a childhood trauma - it takes the classical Oedipal form - reduced to a paralysing psychosis. She’s paranoid, self-destructive, amnesiac. It’s a careful, clinically honest portrayal that I suspect was drawn pretty directly from the DSM and from Mary Jane Ward’s own illness (de Havilland was nominated for an Oscar but the Academy thought three in four years would overdoing it so the award went to Jane Wyman).
In the asylum
Juniper Hill is a Victorian warehouse for the sick and unhappy. There’s some attention to cure and rehabilitation but it’s a public institution with limited resources. In a vivid sequence a doctor explains that shock treatment is prescribed for purely economic reasons - there isn’t the time for more humane therapies. It’s one of several striking intrusions of the real world in 1948 to the story.
In the common-room the doctors - tweedy, complacent, pipe-smoking men - lament under-funding and over-crowding. Idealistic younger practitioners, like our hero Doctor “Kik” Kensdelaerik (Leo Genn), try to overlay the new thinking - the talking cure - on the grim, prison-like circumstances. Importantly, his colleagues are not sceptical of this new approach, they’re not dismissive or reactionary. They’re not brutes - they’re curious but they’re exhausted.
The place is organised rationally, a fully Benthamite institution. Patients are assigned to numbered wards. The larger the number the tougher the case and the more desperate the circumstances. Patients can move between wards and if they have the good fortune to reach ward 1 they ought soon to be going home. It’s possible to fall back down the hierarchy, though, as if bouncing through the circles of hell, and our heroine does so once or twice. Virginia’s therapeutic journey is not a straight line. The lower levels are Bedlam but also Sade’s Charenton - the male and female inmates come together at a sweet and awkward evening dance. There’s singing and dressing up. The staff join in.
Insanity is not a revolutionary act
In The Snake Pit, mental illness is described but never idealised in the way Hollywood in its counter-culture period would later. We’re not expected to read madness as a state of innocence or a marker of defiance. Insanity here is not a revolutionary act, not a challenge to bourgeois orthodoxy. There are no noble savages here, no one here is neutered by the psychiatric bad guys. Treatment is bureaucratic, sometimes cruel, but it’s not in itself repressive. Litvak carefully locates the repression outside the institution. We’re closer, in this bleak environment, to the purpose of the humanist psychiatric project - patients are repaired and returned to the world.
Censors regarded the movie as sensational, problematic - there are scenes that would merit trigger warnings now. Shock therapy, strait-jackets and grim confinement - but Litvak also carefully explains. The origins of mental illness in childhood are meticulously described and there’s a compelling scene where our now-cured heroine is asked to explain the origin of her illness to a room full of bureaucrats and doctors. She hesitantly returns to her remembered trauma. She has attained self-knowledge, put her suffering in context, in the ideal psychoanalytic way.
Two Freuds
When Freud’s thought landed in Hollywood, when his books were taken up by the big-name publishers and the ideas by the weekly magazines, it was mostly an aesthetic thing. His principle movie disciple in this period, the man we think of as Hollywood’s Freudian, Alfred Hitchcock, brought us thrilling non-Newtonian dreamscapes, murderous psychosis and hip, psychedelic art direction (slamming doors, corridors that close in, landscapes that spin and invert, that kind of thing). But in movies like the preposterous and cruel Spellbound (1945), the psyche is the location only of criminality and perversion. Hitchcock’s Freud (and the Freud of his disciples and successors) wasn’t the therapeutic Freud - the rebuilder of damaged selves - it was the diagnostician, the grim-faced philosopher bringing the bad news about modernity. None of this Hollywood’s scarred characters is on a healing journey, all are going in the other direction.
Janet Malcolm’s famous critique of the Freud business in America, first published in the New Yorker, is available online.
Jeremy Cohan’s piece in Damage magazine, about Reich and Marxism, is fascinating.
It was Freud who came up with the phrase “prophylaxis of the neuroses”, in ‘The Question of Lay Analysis’ and he wasn’t really talking about resolving the social and economic before tackling the psychic but others, including Ernest Jones, developed the idea in that direction.
You can’t really argue with the economics of The Snake Pit. In the USA and elsewhere, Freud’s techniques are widely available but only to the wealthy. Everyone else must make do with medication and apps.
There’s a scene where our heroine is sent a typewriter by her doctor, the kindly Doctor Kik, who knows she aspires to write. The severe matron who delivers it sets it up on a card table and essentially forces her to start typing - “you’re a writer, aren’t you? Write.” It’s emblematic of the tough-but-humane line this movie takes - you’re here to get better. Get on with it.
The transference is dealt with a business-like way in The Snake Pit. As she packs to leave, Virginia tells Doctor Kik “I’m not in love with you any more.” He nods, tapping his pipe.
‘Snake pit’ is a slang term for an asylum but it wasn’t in use before Ward’s book. It’s her contribution to the language.
I’d like to know more about Leo Genn, our kindly doctor. A working class Jewish kid from Stamford Hill, his journey to Juniper Hill was eventful. He acted before the war, in theatre and in the movies, joined the Royal Artillery in 1940 and was promoted to lieutenant-colonel in 1943. In 1944 he was given official leave to appear in Laurence Olivier's Henry V. He was awarded the Croix de Guerre in 1945, was part of the British unit that investigated war crimes at Belsen concentration camp and later was an assistant prosecutor at the Belsen war crimes trials in Lüneburg, Germany. The fact that he lived through all this and then returned to Hollywood and this role is, er, kind of mind-blowing.
The film isn’t on any of the streaming services but you’ll find a decent download at archive.org
Next, 1949 Technicolor epic Samson and Delilah.
