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Cinematic asylums are never just mental hospitals. They are almost always something more. They are metaphors, symbolic stand-ins for things that worry us. Movie and TV show asylums are designed to teach us lessons about social problems or to probe the mysteries of life. A new Netflix offering continues this tradition.
To step back a bit, we see that this is a longstanding tradition. The asylum in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest," for instance, symbolizes “totalitarian” threats to individuality arising from mass society, and, to a degree, male fears about the emergent 1970s women’s rights movement. Less-remembered movies like "The Snake Pit," "High Wall," and "Spellbound" offer asylum stand-ins for patriarchal control, PTSD, and the rising power of Freudianism.
In the recent Netflix hit series "1899," a mental hospital lies at the heart of a deep mystery that ultimately addresses the intractable nature of grief and the meaning of reality itself.
"1899" opens with a scene out of many asylum movies—a woman in a hospital gown is running down a long hallway. She’s seized by two burly attendants, and she protests that she’s “not crazy.” A shadowy doctor figure watches her at a distance. She is taken to a strange room. Later, we’ll see her pinned into a chair and injected with needles.
But "1899" is not about mental illness or hospitals. Nor is it about psychiatry. It mainly takes place on an ocean liner, where strange things are happening to the passengers and crew. They do not know it, but they are all in a simulation. Vivid episodes of past trauma seem to catch them unawares, though they confidently believe that they are heading across the Atlantic to New York in the year 1899.
As the series winds its way to shocking and surprising conclusions, the asylum keeps poking its way back into the storyline. We watch recurrent scenes showing a forbidding gray institution, ensconced in a desolate mountains-cape, with turreted towers and high stone walls. We read a sign indicating “Mental Hospital” and we observe a gray-haired, ominous asylum keeper watching over the actions of the passengers on their ship via a control room in the asylum.
"1899" is an effective, mind-bending show. It culls generously from our shared celluloid history. It draws on everything from movies like "The Matrix" and "Titanic" to TV shows such as "Lost" and "The Twilight Zone."
Throughout it all, the asylum serves as its anchor. A mental hospital establishes at the start that all is not what it seems and that control will be an issue. It frames everything to come.
Cinematic asylums have a long history. They have been featured in so many feature films (at least 300, by my count), that their hallways, shock treatments, doctors, and constraint devices have become standardized and familiar.
Though few of us have experienced mental incarceration first-hand, most of us “know” what is in the asylum. Films have taught us much about electroconvulsive therapy, about straight jackets, about mind-controlling doctors and brutal nurses.
Films and TV shows like "1899" do not create their scenes from whole cloth. They tap into genres and conventions. This allows them to connect with audiences. They then play with these genres and conventions to surprise, delight, and terrify us. The first season of Disney's "The Mandalorian," for example, is essentially a Western. But it is also an exciting and original new spin on the genre, and audiences lapped it up.
Thus, film conventions foster our enjoyment of "1899." Indeed this show, like every other show, relies upon a shared cinematic vocabulary. We as the audience know this, and Netflix does, too. If you click on the title card for "1899," for instance, you read: “Genres: German, TV Thrillers, TV Dramas.” Beneath that: “This show is: Mind-Bending, Ominous.”
This brings us back to the opening scene. A woman runs down the hall in her hospital gown, gets seized by attendants, and sees the asylum master. This is a scene that’s been played possibly hundreds of times before, in both movie theaters and on TV. But we are not bored by it. In fact, we want to see what this show will do with it—and what it does is quite creative.
