Mental illness can deceive and manipulate a persons mind so that they can sometimes forget the good person that they used to be. Their actions although sometimes horrific can not be helped because it has become the reality that they live and believe. Mental illness has been present in past society all the way up to the present day. Insomniac’s wide awake in the early hours of the morning itching to sleep but never getting the satisfaction of a good nights sleep becoming mindless zombies, psychosis holds its victim in an iron grip of warped versions of reality causing them to do things that they never would have done if they had control over their sanity. The theme mental illness is prevalent in the texts Shutter Island, The Tell-tale Heart, The Following and Fight Club. The texts have been analysed because they depict the horrors of mental illness in different ways from one another but can still be understood by an audience and how the characters thought and acted through their insanity.
In the 1800s, mental illness wasn’t seen as an illness that could be helped and rehabilitated but a sign that you were broken and mentally insane with no hope of ever fitting into society. The Tell-Tale Heart, by Edgar Allan Poe is a good example of how one might think in their insanity and why they do the deranged things that they do, the short story is set in the 1800s. The narrator of the story lives with an old man who has a mutated eye, the narrator tells the reader that, “I loved the old man. He had never wronged me.” However he hates the eye with a deep hatred so decides to kill the old man without question and stalks him for a seven nights straight in the dead of night. “Night after night, heartening to the death watches in the wall.” It is assumed that the narrator is imagining these noises and it is a side effect of severe insomnia and psychosis. Death watches are insects that are believed to be a bad omen and for the narrator it represents the old mans heart beat. After brutally killing the old man, the narrator is interrogated by the police at the end of the story and is driven insane by the sound of the old mans heart beat and confesses. In the narrators era that he lives in, mental illness was not widely prevalent in the knowledge of society and had a lack of medicine to treat it. Information online indicates that ‘lodging the mentally ill in workhouses or checking them into general hospitals where they were frequently abandoned.’ (http://www.studentpulse.com/articles/283/2/the-history-of-mental-illness-from-skull-drills-to-happy-pills)
The narrator in the story would have been thrown in a cell for the rest of his life or hanged for the crime the he had committed simply because people in his era did not yet have the clear information and resources to help the criminally insane. A clear connection between The Tell-Tale Heart and Shutter Island can be seen when Andrew Laeddis, the main protagonist for the majority of the film says to Dr. John Cawley, “After she tried to kill herself the first time, Dolores told me she… she had an insect living inside her brain. She could feel it clicking across her skull, just… pulling the wires, just for fun.” This quote can be seen as a direct link to the clicking of the death watches in The Tell-Tale Heart and again is a sign of a bad omen. The reader can assume that Dolores had extremely similar symptoms to the narrator in the Tell-Tale Heart and suffered from severe mental illness/s.
Dolores if she had not been killed would’ve been rehabilitated in a safe hospital and hopefully recovered in the future. The majority of present day treatment towards the insane shows how much society has developed since the 1800s in which The Tell-Tale Heart was written and set in. Although there are still some places in the world where the mentally ill are abandoned or killed but medical study and the evolution of medicine has helped many people who suffer from mental illness and has long since concluded the illusion of mental illness being a sickness that can not be cured.
Shutter Island, directed by Martin Scorsese is a film set in the 1950s that portrays the way that the mentally ill perceive their own reality. There has been cases in previous time where people suffer from schizophrenia and have multiple personalities that they have no control over. This can be seen with the film’s main protagonist, Teddy Daniels who is a U.S. Marshall investigating the sudden disappearance of an inmate from Shutter island, a rehabilitation centre for the criminally insane. Little does Teddy know that he is in fact the missing inmate and is under a clinical experiment in order to become sane again. His character has severe schizophrenia and lives a completely warped reality which is very real to him. Teddy says at one point in the film to his supposed partner Chuck, ‘Which would be worse – to live as a monster, or to die as a good man?’.
The audience realises that he chooses to believe his made up reality than accept the crime of killing his wife. He would rather live out his life as a good man rather than be the monster that he was. A connection between Shutter Island and Fight Club directed by Martin Scorsese, is the main character’s mental state who both live made up realities and fake personalities due to their schizophrenic tendencies. The narrator in Fight Club lives in the 1990s when the film is made and suffers Insomnia who then creates an imaginary friend called Tyler Durden which is the complete opposite personality of himself and creates havoc and crime. He believes that his imaginary friend is real but it is in fact himself doing all of the work and crime. Martin Scorsese wanted the audience to understand how the narrator felt angry with his boring life and why his insomnia created Tyler Durden from his deepest desires. Tyler Durden tells the narrator “Hey, you created me. I didn’t create some loser alter-ego to make myself feel better. Take some responsibility!” This quote connects with Shutter Island and shows that the main characters are both Schizophrenic and can’t accept their own lives and mistakes so instead create fake personalities to hide from their true selves. The way the two characters react to their mental illness’s show the difference in time period that they lived in, the narrator in Fight Club lives in a more modern era and reacts to his mental illness by creating a crime ring/ fight club bringing together all of the people that are bored of their repetitive lives. Teddy Daniels reacts differently to his mental illness and is a lot more isolated, because he is in the 1950s he assumes terrible things are happening on Shutter Island and he imagines a very detailed conspiracy is unfolding around him. The lack of proper rehabilitation techniques creates and even worse atmosphere that he is surrounded by on the island.
Fight Club clearly shows the theme mental illness and shares a narrator whom is much the same as the narrator in The Tell-Tale Heart. The main character who narrates the majority of the film starts to lose his mental state after enduring insomnia for weeks on end and creates Tyler Durden from his imagination. He is unaware of the crimes that he commits and rather thinks that Tyler is doing them. The narrator starts to doubt reality, ‘Is Tyler my bad dream? Or am I Tyler’s?’.
Martin Scorsese wants the audience to be just as confused as the narrator by using this quote and makes them start to doubt the existence of the narrator. A connection is made between Fight Club and The Tell-tale Heart, both of the narrators suffer from Insomnia making them delusional and unable to tell between what is real and what isn’t. The narrator in The Tell-Tale Heart tells the reader ‘I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad?’ Poe wanted to show the reader that the narrator was convinced that instead of his Insomnia dulling his senses he instead had sharper senses. He was in fact hearing these things in his mind just the way that the narrator in Fight Club was imagining conversations with Tyler Durden. The connection shows that insomnia in 1843 when Edgar Allan Poe wrote his short story effected people just as badly as it does in the time period that Fight Club is set in and there still wasn’t an effective way to deal with insomnia thus making those who suffer the mental illness do things that they have no control over including committing hideous crimes such as murder.
The Following, a television series created by Kevin Williamson, revolves around many symbols and motifs that can be linked back to some of Edgar Allan Poe’s own symbols which he used in the his stories including The Tell-Tale Heart. Williamson’s main antagonist in The Following, Joe Carol, is a madman obsessed with killing his victims in an ‘Edgar Allan Poe’ styled fashion and removing their eyes after murdering them. “He cut out his victims eyes as a nod to his favourite works of Poe, ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ and ‘The Black Cat’.” Joe Carroll refers to the eyes as ‘windows to the soul’ and believes he is creating art by killing his victims in such a fashion. This connects to The Tell-tale Heart because the narrator in Poe’s short story believes that killing the old man will relieve him of his hate towards the old mans mutated eye, “I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever.” Poe uses the old mans eye as a symbol in his short story to show how the narrator is manipulated by his mental illness to take drastic actions against such a small issue, however in The Following, Joe Carroll removes his victims eyes to salute his favourite writer/poet Edgar Allan Poe although still a very similar motif none the less. The audience can assume that Joe Carroll suffers from a mental illness due to his lack of compassion to other human beings therefore connecting the two main antagonists between the two texts again. The society in which the two characters live in are certainly both very different to one another but that doesn’t stop the same dreadful crimes to occur. However the difference in time periods show that law enforcement has developed greatly and handling situations with the mentally insane are lot more effective today than it was in 1843 when The Tell-Tale Heart was written.
The connections that are found between The Tell-Tale Heart, Shutter Island, The Following and Fight Club represent how society in the era’s they’re set in have changed for the better when it comes to the knowledge of mental illness. The practice of rehabilitation for the insane has improved drastically since when Edgar Allan Poe lived and wrote The Tell-Tale Heart, now the mentally ill in todays society have a far better chance at recovery especially with the advance in medicine. The symbols and character connections between the texts show similarities in the way authors and directors of todays day and age and those in past societies gain the attention of their readers/viewers by using a lot of the same motifs and character development. Mental Illness, still to this day has a huge impact on the lives of those effected by it but helping it has changed a lot since the 1800s and mid 1900s.
Harry Cooper, Blog 