Showing posts with label Ronnie Laing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ronnie Laing. Show all posts

Friday 14 April 2017

Tennant as Laing : True to the notion of his practice, even if playing fast and loose with history ?

This is a review of Mad to be Normal (2017)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


10 April

This is a review of Mad to be Normal (2017)


NB Even before having started this review, the decades were getting confused - as could be apt for the 1960s... ? - and the days of operation of the therapeutic community, at Kingsley Hall, then kept being placed in the handful of years up to 1960 (rather than in 1965-1970)...


In making an account of someone’s life as a cinematic endeavour (if not as strict documentary, e.g. Jackie (2016), which is nonetheless powerful), it would be normal enough (to choose) to make a film that is set in, say, the period 1965 to 1970, and then wilfully incorporate artefacts and events from outside it - such as having a character read from a book not published in the format shown before 1965¹ (and why - except so that we will recognize it - would the author not have the original edition¹, from 1960, to hand ?) : however, unless one expects one’s audience to know so little that they will not be in a position to doubt when the book had appeared (and check the date of publication later), or one has some other motive, why make that period the time of the film anyway, into which to import other things, which are even more extraneous to it… ?


Searching for images of Kingsley Hall (below), one finds that films about Laing are hardly rare : doubtless, director Robert Mullan has also been influenced, in what to say, by what has already been said ?


As well as Asylum (1972) (pictured above), Laing’s life had certainly already given rise to Mike Maran's one-man stage-play (and its associated CD [please see image below]), a film by Luke Fowler as a nominee for The Turner Prize [All Divided Selves (2011)], and two biographies (one by Adrian Laing, one of his sons), so why not David Tennant as Ronnie Laing ? One reason why Tennant works as Laing is his undeniable charisma, which Laing had in quantity, as witness television and film appearances, and his style as a writer (talking about psychiatry for the wider public¹) ; another, apart from the obvious link of Scottishness, is that Tennant brings a sense of conviction to the role, without pretending to resemble Laing point for point (although there is a good physical likeness). Even so (as shown below), it is a convenient fiction (one of several fictions) to let us infer that the community at Kingsley Hall (which existed between 1965 and 1970) had been established just because of Laing² (and that its day-to-day operation devolved - however improbably - on just Laing himself and a colleague called Paul Zemmell (Adam Paul Harvey)).


As to director Robert Mullan’s ascription to his selected era – the time when Kingley Hall was operational as a psychiatric community² – of such matters as the death of Laing’s daughter (with Laing's insisting that he would not conceal from her that she was terminally ill), or, on the visit to the States³ that we see, signing copies of Knots [a book that was not even published in the UK until 1970 (or 1971 ?)], Mullan must know, from his other projects on Ronnie Laing, all too well otherwise (i.e. Susan did not die until March 1976, at the age of 21, as a review in Scotland’s The Sunday Herald (by Brian Beacom) confirms, but, however, without pointing out this anachronism (or any of the others) [as we are told, The Sunday Herald is the Glasgow Film Festival's media partner]).

With what Mullan is doing, then, we are unable to think that these errors are just mistakes : but perhaps they arise, quite normally, from the influence of producers (or funders), who want certain things of a pitch or a script (as the comments that Beacom elicits from Mullan suggest, as well as the fact that the film has taken nine years to make...) ? However, maybe he also wills that we conflate the mad and the normal, and so we are meant to see what actually happened later in Laing’s life as having its roots in this time. If so, is Mullan then expecting too much of his audience : will they see Laing signing books, but just take at face value that Vintage had actually published them in the States by the mid- to late 1960s (not 1972) ?


Our having been given parts played by such as Michael Gambon (Sydney) and Gabriel Byrne (Jim) for those who lived at Kingsley Hall, one not only fears that the latter, certainly, tends to confirm the public’s lightly-based belief that those with a diagnosis of schizophrenia connote dangerousness, but also suspects that selective recourse may have been had to material in Dominic Harris' The Residents (a work of photo-portraiture and recorded memory / interview, on which The Guardian reported in 2012) [available from dominicharris.co.uk]. On wholly another level, there is also a celebrity element to the activities of Kingsley Hall : we know that, with the distortions of Laing’s childhood and his doubtless related capacity and propensity for drink (very much a part of Maran's one-man play about him), he likes to party, but the connection to the environment in which we several times see him hold court (and where Angela (Elisabeth Moss) performs a song), is opaque. Just as we are not really told how the community there came about, this side of things is not explained - not even by some throwaway lines in the dialogue - so we can only suppose that it is a fund-raiser and / or support-group for the work of the Hall.


Upper : Gabriel Byrne, Michael Gambon and David Tennant in Mad to be Normal
Lower : David Tennant and Elisabeth Moss


Going to the end of the film (towards which, the film sags somewhat), and if we did credit what we are shown about the circumstances in which the closure of Kingsley Hall came about, not only is there a purported abduction (which, if it happened, would have had criminal and professional consequences - however kindly it was meant), but also an external factor that is closely tied to the person abducted. In fact (having researched whether this episode is licence, or has any basis in truth), one finds that John Clay prosaically reports, in his biography of Laing⁴, 'Kingsley Hall closed in 1970 after five years, when the lease ran out and was not renewed'. (A significant reason may also have been that, as we see (and as Clay tells us⁴ (op. cit., pp. 132-133), there was antagonism and aggression towards those who lived there, from the residents of the area (the Hall is located in Powis Road, Bromley by Bow, London Borough of Tower Hamlets).) By contrast with what the film shows, Adrian Laing tells us (op. cit., pp. 126-127) that his father had moved out years before the Hall closed :

By the end of 1966 Ronnie was getting tired of Kingsley Hall. Having lived there full time for nearly twelve months during the latter part of 1965 and late 1966 (and for a good time thereafter on an ad hoc basis), he had had enough. It was time to hand over the baton. There was no shortage of people to take over the running of the place in Ronnie's absence. [Laing goes on to say who]


As Mullan must be aware (which is where, before the action, a title with a sweepingly wide disclaimer comes in⁵), closing Kingsley Hall was far more mundane than Mad to be Normal portrays, and - just as the relationship with someone called Angela is fiction per se⁵ - so is the suggestion that the abduction torpedoes it : in reality (as Adrian Laing, foreshadowing the above, had told us (op. cit., p. 114)), Ronnie moved into Kingsley Hall on a permanent basis in December 1965 and stayed there for a year before moving into a four-roomed flat with Jutta […] where the couple lived for almost ten years.

By all means, we do appreciate that Mullan has made a dramatic film, and is wanting to give us a man who makes a heroic act (out of faith in his therapeutic method - shades of Awakenings (1990) ?), but it really has as little to do with Laing as Benedict Cumberbatch does, in The Imitation Game (2014), with Alan Turing : Mike Maran dramatizes Laing on stage, but does not find the same need to invent material that a remarkable life and career contain anyway (the excesses of Laing's personal and professional life that the film features, such as alcohol, envy / aggression, or the experiments with LSD, are well documented and known from elsewhere)...


The film is intent on providing a take on Laing where he hits Angela (and hits her in public, and likewise with Paul), swears at and challenges fellow psychiatrists (British and American ones), and generally acts the gifted (and so unpredictable) maverick : this may not be untrue of Laing’s life as a whole, but – if one wishes to base that impression in Mad to be Normal – there seems to be relatively little reason to locate it in the days of Kingsley Hall.



End-notes :

¹ The Divided Self by R. D. Laing, Tavistock Institute, London (1960) ; Penguin Books [Pelican, then Penguin Classics], London (1965).


The latter is not stated to be a new, or revised, edition - it is just part of popularizing the thought and thinkers of the day. (One early established, in reading R. D. Laing, that one cannot read a book of his without being informed that it is not 'Lang', but that (as he puts it) his name rhymes with 'angel' : there, at least, Mad to be Normal (2017) is spot on….)


² In a film that features [part of] a real person’s life, one expects an element of conflation. However, if one wanted a biography of R. D. Laing, and expects to be told about how his time, from 1956, at The Tavistock Institute led to the establishment of Kingsley Hall, one will be disappointed. Likewise, rather than making in any way clear that Laing is a member, even if also its founder, of The Philadelphia Association - according to its web-page on Wikipedia® :

The Philadelphia Association is a UK charity concerned with the understanding and relief of mental suffering. It was founded in 1965 by the radical psychiatrist and psychoanalyst R. D. Laing along with fellow psychiatrists David Cooper, Joseph Berke, Aaron Esterson, writer Clancy Sigal as well as John Heaton, Joan Cunnold and Sid Briskin.

The Philadelphia Association (PA) came into being to challenge and to widen the discourse around the teaching and practice of psychotherapy and continues to offer a training, an affordable therapy service and two community houses for those seeking retreat. Kingsley Hall, the first of a number of community houses, was founded in 1965 (a building dating from 1928).



³ As Adrian Laing tells us about the trip [R. D. Laing : A Life (HarperCollins (London), 1997, pp. 128-130)], it was not as Mad to be Normal would have us believe (nor is there any reason whatever to locate then the much-told story [Adrian Laing tells it in this piece in The Guardian (@guardian)] of how Laing took extreme steps to engage with a female patient who had not spoken in months, where it is placed as a 'breakthrough' demonstration, to those who received him rather differently than seems so) :


Although the institute [William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis and Psychology in New York] was fascinated to hear Ronnie's account of LSD therapy in the UK, the clinical use of LSD was nothing new to this audience. [...] Perhaps it was because Ronnie was in front of such seasoned characters that his talks were relatively passive. There was no desire to shock, no intention to rock the boat. [...] Ronnie conducted himself impeccably throughout his stay in New York [9-21 January 1967]



R. D. Laing : A Divided Self by John Clay. Sceptre (Hodder & Stoughton (London)), 1997, p. 137.

⁵ When the film was seen to be preceded by this widely drawn disclaimer, it caused a number of the audience to laugh. (This was an ourscreen event (@ourscreenuk), rather than a regular Picturehouse screening (@CamPicturehouse), i.e. where, provided that sufficient people subscribe in advance at ourscreen.com, it takes place.) Not the least of the fabrications of the film is that of Angela (Angie), an American (played by Elisabeth Moss), who effectively stands in the place of the real Jutta Werner (a German), who did live at Kingsley Hall for a while, and became Laing's second wife.




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Saturday 13 October 2012

What things do I point to in Laing and Szasz's thought?

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


13 October

Following on from Ronnie, gae hame!, I have some thoughts to share about Drs Laing and Szasz and their place in the order of things...

1. Dignity and respect - talked about in recent days, as if just invented with applicability to being an in-patient, but the story tells us that Ronnie was alongside, literally, someone who, naked, just rocked and would not engage, so he did the same. But, for all these schemes such as Star Wards, because it's not in the culture of mental-health nursing, nothing much is different, not least at the level of patients feeling that they're in an underclass because of being 'ill': on a crude scale, a sort of pecking order, anything that the relatives have to say (and so they can support, and speak up for, the patient about troubling side-effects, because, unlike the patient him- / herself, those people count) carries far more weight, and the status of anything said by the patient is less important than the family pet's views of his or her care.

2. Coercion - if I compel you to do or suffer something, even for your own good, how is it likely that you will feel about the thing that you did (or suffered), about me for forcing you, and about myself for having been a person who is legally allowed to be treated in that way? Whatever a breakdown is, if it leads to an admission, being dehumanized by hospitalization and institutionalization makes for far more trauma for the in-patient (whereas his or her aberrant behaviour hacked off friends, neighbours, relatives and /or the police, and so, for their sake, he or she gets detained) than the breakdown itself. I think that Thomas questioned why, if someone has to be coerced, there can be therapy, rather than distrust, resentment, fear, pain, on the part of the patient towards the detaining authorities - my analogy, but a bit like trying to carry out dentistry on someone who is not willingly opening his or her mouth.

3. Compassion - much more than those basic things at 1, above, - partly involved in doing what Ronnie did in rocking with that patient, and which feeling for and honouring the respect and dignity of patients would not, in itself, lead to. Compassion wholeheartedly and without reservation puts your lot in with the other person's*, often thought of as unconditional love, and is almost at an opposite pole to psychiatric practice of Ronnie's time - you wouldn't have found many endorsing the rocking anecdote as concordant with their views of patients.

4. Criminality - if I lock you up, whether you're drunk and have smashed some things, or in psychosis and have done the same, and you don't appreciate the situation (in the latter case, thought of as lack of insight), you will nonetheless - at some level - know that you are being treated as if you have done something wrong. As I look at what Thomas might have meant at 2, above, and think of mental health in England and Wales, the police can (forcibly) take you to a place of safety, they may be involved in any sectioning process or in taking you to hospital (if you do get sectoned), and they are the people who take you back, if you escape (or try to). In our own system, then, the coercion and the criminal taint are linked, even though, under the Minstry of Justice's control, there is quite separate legal provisions for the foricble detention of people on remand for or convicted of criminal offences: the in-patient not only feels imprisoned, mistreated, misunderstood, misrepresented, but has a perception that some criminal wrong is the reason for all this punishment. And, amidst all this, he or she is supposed to recover, respond to treatment, and - which is itself ambiguous as to health and character - get better.


For what it is worth, those are my thoughts on what Thomas and Ronnie still have to say to us, decades on...


End-notes

* In Ronnie's case, I suggest that he probably took compassion too far, rather than the approach of being empathic, which, for anyone with mental-health issues, is a less costly and, literally, less soul-destroying way of relating to patients. Whatever happened to him in later life, with booze - but he was a Glaswegian - and the effect of efame or whatever, I guess that he may have given too much of himself, and in a way that Adrian, one of his sons, likes to report (he has written a biography) that Ronnie did not do at home, by usually describing home life as a crock of shit.


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Friday 12 October 2012

Ronnie, gae hame!

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


13 October

There's a rather strange review / account of The Turner Prize entries in The Telegraph (at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/turner-prize/9578907/Turner-Prize-2012-Tate-Britain-review.html).

Strange in that, when Luke Fowler has a film 'about' R. D. Laing, the writer (Richard Dorment) takes issue with Laing himself, what he represented and advocated, and how he was discredited for his theories, and one 'wrong-headed belief' (about schizophrenia)in particular.

Dorment says not only that Laing could be 'self-aggrandising' and 'pretentious', but also 'compassionate' and 'articulate', once he has finished talking, perhaps with less knowledge than he believes, about medications such as lithium and Prozac, neither of which would have done much, if anything, for Laing's core patients.

Far be it from me to say whether one should watch Fowler's film, but Dorment leaves himself precious little space in which to make comments that might inform such a view. Such description as there is leaves one not knowing whether this is a film with an arty feel (as another Telegraph critic felt), or a work of art, nor even, whichever it is, whether it is any good. Just as well Ronnie left the stage earlier...

On which more here.


Friday 21 September 2012

Jarman and jerking-off

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)



21 September

You might or might not like Jarman's style of working, and I couldn't make it all the way through Jubilee (1978), but he was patently a film-maker.

At Cambridge Film Festival last night, All Divided Selves (2011) and the demeanour of its director, Luke Fowler, gave a very different impression from that made by Jarman, and the film did not seem much like a film, and the artist - as all artists tend to do - tried, although his language kept tripping him up*, to distance himself from the idea that his work said something or had a message.

The message that All Divided Selves had consisted almost entirely of Laing talking, often enough with visuals, about psychiatric conditions and his personal and cultural background, plus some others talking with or about him, his theories and psychiatry in general. As it is not difficult to pull quotations out of Laing's works, let alone footage, that says something pertinent to us and to now, then there may be no great merit in having done so, even if you have embellished the enterprise with bits and pieces that you have shot.


Conclusion : Would I prefer to have the chance to see Tacita Dean's FILM 2011 from Tate Modern's Turbine Hall again and have it substitute for my memory of Fowler's film? Yes!


End-notes

* He seemed not to want to say 'illustrative', but nonetheless kept saying it, so drawing atention to a word that he purported to eschew.


Thursday 20 September 2012

Images arbitrarily made interesting

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


21 September

Many people will have chosen to see the film All Divided Selves (2011) because it concerns Ronnie Laing, not because the director, Luke Fowler, is a candidate for The Turner Prize.

They will not have been disappointed to see some footage from when Laing became famous, and maybe from before, and they will have kept with his voice when it was heard alongside seeing material interposed between it and visuals of him speaking: sometimes we cut away from him to that material, sometimes we only heard his voice (perhaps because the recording was just audio, perhaps not). The interest, though, was not in that material, and it could even have been the test-card for all that it mattered.

Laing we saw at many ages, and with varying style of dress, but we always knew that it was he, and, once we heard him speaking and saw his lips move, we knew when we had his words being spoken. As to anyone else in the film and who they were, nothing told us, and only original captions - apart from what seemed a new inter-title regarding Esterson - told us two or three times what community we were being shown, so we might have had Thomas Szasz on the screen and not have known it.

So, yes, we hear Laing talking and being interviewed, but what the film offered as a polemic, as Fowler called it, might have been better achieved by a reading of select passages from Laing's publications, or by reading Adrian Laing's biography of his father. Plus there's Mike Moran's one-man play about Ronnie...

More on this topic here and a review, from the Berlinale, in The Hollywood Reporter here