beauty & horror: "THE TRUTH SOUNDS INSANE SOMETIMES..."

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[Regarding the films mentioned in this article, only starting points of their plots are revealed.]

If something stands out in the first moments in which, after the introduction, we see Paulina Lorca in Death and the Maiden (Roman Polanski, 1994) is her isolation. We find her in a house located in the countryside next to a cliff. Night falls, it rains torrentially, there has been a power cut and she looks out the door. The camera makes the wide extension of field that she observes visible to us. With the exception of a distant lighthouse and the road that leads to her house, there is nothing and nobody in miles around. With the power cut, in addition, her isolatison has become total because she can't even use the phone. If she was in danger, nobody would come to her aid.

Paulina, however, does not seem scared. Some windows are open and we have seen her set the table calmly. Instead, right now she is angry with her husband, whom she is wating to see arriving in his car. Assuming he is going to be late, she takes her plate and a bottle of wine and retires to small room, adding one more barrier to her isolation.

Sigourney Weaver, Stuart Wilson and Ben Kingsley in Death and the Maiden

She doesn't seem scared, I said, but deep down she is. Her distress when the lights have gone out accompanied by a thunder has betrayed her before. Now, her reaction putting candles out and getting a gun after seeing an unknown car approaching her house says it all.

Clearly, Paulina's solitude is a retreat in search for peace, but it is not an idle retreat. Hers is a flight, a flight from a world by which she does not want to be reached. And even hidden, or precisely because she hides, the viewer gets the impression that she is exposed to that world from which, despite her efforts, she cannot escape, and that the open windows of the beginning were not so much a symbol of relaxation as of vulnerability.

As will be discovered later, Paulina was tortured in the context of a dictatorship. The anguish that pushes her to hide is that of somebody who has completely lost what Jean Améry, Auschwitz survivor, called "confidence in the world": that of somebody who feels always vulnerable, somebody who perceives hostility in everything and in all those around her, somebody who experiences herself as isolated from the rest and at the same time exposed to them.

The image we will be offered of Paulina throughout the film is that of a woman stuck in her past, anchored in the memory of what happened. All her acts and thoughts have as a background the experience of extreme vulnerability at the torture chamber: the absolute unreachability of the external world, the consequent impossibility of being saved and the total exposure to her torturers. The location of the action in this film, therefore, not only reproduces features of the location of the torture suffered by Paulina, but shows the permanence in her mind of the effects of such torture.

And yes, the obsession with which we find Paulina seems at times a trait of madness. In several scenes both her husband Gerardo Escobar and the individual whom Paulina accuses of having tortured her, Roberto Miranda, refer to her as a person with mental problems: "It’s ridiculous. She’s making it up. She’s paranoid, she’s delusional. You said so yourself: she’s crazy", says Miranda.

At one point, Gerardo, a lawyer, mentions the difficulty of achieving penal recognition for the damage caused to Paulina due to the unreliability of someone whose behavior is characteristic of an acute emotional disturbance: "The only evidence you have is your own testimony. Do you want the real truth? You are not a reliable witness." "Because I'm crazy," says Paulina. "Trust me, any court would tear you to pieces," replies Gerardo.

Following Jean Améry, Paulina’s chronic resentment can be understood as the never-ending struggle to which she has been forced in order to make visible the truth she’s not having recognized, the never-ending struggle “in order that the crime become a moral reality.” (Jean Améry, At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor of Auschwitz and Its Realities, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1980, p. 70.) Her permanence in resentment is but a way to persist in her denouncement and the demand for recognition of a silenced truth. An attempt to "cure" her would amount to the aspiration of making her desist from her need to have her truth acknowledged.

It is inevitable for me to recall at this point the figures of Claude Eatherly (one of the pilots that took part in the launching of the Hiroshima bomb) and philosopher Günther Anders, who from 1959 to 1961 maintained an abundant correspondence in which, among other things, they dealt with the intimate relationship between certain truths and pathological behaviours:

Every reasonable medical man knows: it is abnormal to act normally during or after an abnormal situation; it is abnormal if, after an appalling shock, someone goes on living as if nothing had happened. And even more so if a man, although the cause of the shock he underwent transcends all proportion and all ‘holding capacity' of that which a human being can visualize, digest, remember or repent, nonetheless continues behaving ‘normal’. (Günther Anders, Burning Conscience, Monthly Review Press, New York, 1962, p. 106. )

But, for Anders, a behaviour like that of Eatherly (or Paulina) is not only fully justified, but morally relevant. His assessment of "abnormal" behaviour is, as far as possible, positive:

If he reacted 'abnormally', he reacted adequately. (Op. cit., p. 106)

Claude Eatherly, received in his country as a hero, fought during the years after Hiroshima to be recognized as a criminal. Of course, he ended up in a psychiatric hospital. Behaviors such as those of Eatherly, who committed on purpose misdemeanors from which he didn't earn anything, are for Anders symptoms of moral health.

In cases like those of Paulina and Eatherly, and, let me add, given the context in which they happen, the cure of their "illness" would imply, according to both Améry and Anders, a denial of their respective truths. This is what Anders refers to in his criticism of the doctors who try to treat Eatherly to eliminate his feeling of guilt.

Even sharing with Anders and Améry the understanding of certain types of psychological distress as forms of resistance and motors for the struggle against the invisibility and denial of certain truths, I must express my disagreement with the normativization of the link between trauma and search for justice these authors may be pointing at. Not all people who have experienced a shock are condemned to behavioral abnormality, and the manifestation of psychological wounds shouldn’t be required to consider someone susceptible of the judicial recognition of their truth (as La Manada rape case has clearly shown in Spain). Nor should it be understood that any action aimed at recognition must necessarily be driven by chronic guilt or resentment. However, it is very understandable that this is so, as it is that in many contexts, such as the social environment of the pilot Eatherly, the general absence of discomfort indicates an unfortunate lack of moral consciousness. These last statements regarding what is reasonably understandable, resulting from a certain relativization of thesis by Anders and Améry, are the ideas I want to work with here.

Let’s continue. Günther Anders’s problem with the health institution does not have so much to do with the qualification of the pilot's behavior as abnormal. It is, in fact, abnormal as long as the qualifier comes between quotation marks. The real problem is the subtraction of the credibility of his statements, based on the "abnormality" of his behavior. That someone can be classified as mentally ill does not have to imply that what they say is nonsense. The truth, in its epistemic as in its moral dimension, may be at odds, in certain situations and for many people, with psychological well-being.

A good illustration of this thesis can be found in Michael Clayton (Tony Gilroy, 2007), a film that makes us witnesses of how the prestigious lawyer Arthur Edens makes his truth public after entering a manic phase.

He is in charge of defending U/North, a large producer of agricultural products accused of commercializing carcinogenic herbicides. In the course of a meeting with U/North members, some of their alleged victims and their lawyers, Edens suddenly begins to shed his clothes while declaring his love to a young farmer. He claims his clothes are his offering and his credentials, in clear allusion to his not only socio-economic, but epistemic status, of which his attire is a marker. In his exaltation, moreover, Edens reveals what he has kept secret for six years: U/North's products are indeed carcinogenic. This incident, which has been recorded, triggers a series of moves by U/North to discredit Edens' revelation drawing on his state of mental alienation. As for Edens' own firm, they try to have him sent to a mental institution because his behavior compromises the prestige of the entire group.

Stripped of his clothes and manners, Edens has ceased to be a valid interlocutor and, therefore, everything he says will be ignored. Nevertheless, the viewer is aware that, despite his pathological state of exaltation, despite the behavioral and chemical abnormalities that psychologists and neurologists could detect in him, he has brought to light a truth that in normal conditions wouldn’t have come out. We are, therefore, confronting a case in which the point is not that a person with mental problems has revealed a reality, but rather that only because mentally ill has he been able to do so.

There are occasions when pathological behaviours tear the veil of fictions established as truth. It may initially seem that these behaviours lack meaning, but this is due to the indoctrination we have been subjected to about what appearances and conducts are legitimate carriers of truth. Sometimes, pathology opens loopholes for the revelation of truths that would have remained invisible in good mental conditions. Sometimes, even, certain moral health can be maintained only at the expense of mental health, as in the case of Claude Eatherly. The "sounding like madness" of some truths is not a simple "sounding", but a real alliance of truth with behaviors and thought forms that in fact exceed the limits of normality (of that normality between quotation marks that is synonymous of the usual, the established and the institutionally accepted). Some truths need madness to make their entrance. Madness and truth, therefore, don’t need to function as opposites. Normality and truth don’t need to (although they should) come hand in hand. Borrowing the words from Linguini in Ratatouille (Brad Bird, 2007), "the truth sounds insane sometimes, but that doesn’t mean it’s not the truth.”