Resisting Psychiatry in Classic Films of the 1990s

Movie madhouses function in different ways. They are castles of torture, ineffective and temporary quarantines for crazed killers, metaphors for patriarchy, silly places for comedic turns, the list goes on. The possibilities are not endless, but they are extensive. One interesting role movie asylums have played is conformity factory for the dangerous, independent-minded rebel.

Before getting into our examples, it’s worth noting that pop culture asylums only superficially resemble actual mental hospitals. For filmmakers, they are irresistible, bizarre settings for human drama. The audience takes one look at the high walls, the long hallways, the shock machines, and the padded cells, and it is ready for scary action.

One popular film trope is to show the asylum as a stage for spirited resistance to the powers of conformity.

Here are two examples from two film legends Johnny Depp and Robin Williams.

In the 1995 romantic comedy Don Juan DeMarco, Johnny Depp plays a young delusional who thinks he’s the world’s greatest lover. Dressed as a 17th-century Castilian, he gets talked down from a suicidal jump by a psychiatrist played by Marlon Brando.

Depp is subsequently shipped off to Brando’s mental hospital. Depp’s unstoppable charm ultimately convinces Brando to not give him any meds, as well as rekindle his relationship with his alienated wife. Depp finally escapes by briefly pretending to be nondelusional, and Brando goes along with the ruse. The next thing you know, they are off to an exotic island to reunite the young man with his lover.

In this ridiculous movie fable, the asylum is worthless as a medical establishment. It is filled with incompetent doctors and love-struck nurses. Its main purpose is to crush a young man’s benign romantic vision of himself. Psychiatry does not fix Depp. Rather, he fixes his psychiatrist. Brando closes the film with this voiceover: “Sadly, I must report that the last patient I ever treated, the great lover, Don Juan DeMarco, suffered from a completely incurable romanticism. And even worse, highly contagious.”

Here's another great movie anti-conformist: Robin Williams.

In Patch Adams (1998), Williams plays the titular young doctor with the catchy nickname. He has a nervous breakdown and commits himself to the Fairfax Hospital Psychiatric Ward. Here he encounters the classic filmland asylum trope of loveable mental misfits, as well as scary episodes like watching his panicked roommate get held down and injected.

Patch himself receives condescending, dismissive treatment from the staff psychiatrist. In time, though, he manages to shake things up and gets reprimanded. In this manner, he uncovers the truth of the mental hospital. It is not built to heal the mind but to control the independent-minded. Patch learns from a wise old patient that he must see what “everyone else chooses not to see” out of “fear or conformity or laziness.” After helping his roommate, he makes a momentous decision.

Patch walks into the psychiatrist’s office and does what no other film patient had ever done: he declares, “I’m leaving.” The doctor says he won’t “allow” it, but Patch exits anyway because he has committed himself. This bold act of defiance alerts the audience to the movie’s moral—it is possible to resist the powers of psychiatric control.

Don Juan Demarco and Patch Adams are irresistible set pieces for two of cinema's great icons of independence. Depp was (and still is) typically cast as the roguish rebel, his movie oeuvre a veritable smorgasbord of quirky, independent-minded rakes. Williams was another independent spirit whose canonical roles—Armand in the Birdcage, Adrian Cronauer in Good Morning, Vietnam, Theodore Roosevelt in the Night at the Museum series—spoke to his wondrous turns as the big-hearted rascal. Putting these actors in the asylum gave audiences the treat of watching two expert rebels thumb their noses at Hollywood's ultimate instrument of mental control, the asylum.

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What could the scary asylum do to these rebels? The answer: Nothing.

While mental hospitals (in films) doing “nothing” is a step up from the horrors that we usually get, it makes no progress toward a realistic view of mental wellness treatment. But it is entertaining.