Titicut Follies (Frederick Wiseman Productions, 1967)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s programming on Turner Classic Movies was co-hosted by Jacqueline Stewart and Carla Hayden. Both are African-American women and Hayden is both the first female and the first Black person to head the Library of Cognress. She was there to initroduce various films she’d ordered added to the National Film Registry to denote movies of lasting historical, artistic or cultural importance. While Stewart and Hayden also showed a number of fiction films in last night’s salute to the Registry and its newest arrivals, the two I chose to watch were documentaries: Titicut Follies and Word Is Out: Stores of Some of Our Lives. Titicut Follies was shot in 1966 at the Massachusetts Correctins Institution’s Hospital for the Criminally Insane at Bridgewater, and depicts an unsparing look at the horrible way its inmates were treated. It was an early example of director Frederick Wiseman’s style of filmmaking, which tried to make its editing as seamless as possible (though he still boiled down 600,000 feet if film to an 84;minute running time) and omitted narration and background music to avoid guying the audience’s perceptions with those familiar film.

Titicut Follies has the fascinating distinction of being the only film in history, aside from Todd Haynes’ first film – the short Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, which told the tale of The Carpenters using Barbie dolls and was blocked by a lawsuit from the doll’s maker, Mattel – to be banned from public showing in the U.S. for reasons otner than obscenity, indecency or alleged harm to the national security. Though it was originally released to international acclaim – it won awards for Wiseman at film festivals in Germany and Italy – when Wiseman tried to show it at the New York Film Festival in 1967 the Massachusetts state government sued him and the film on the ground that it violated the privacy rights of the inmates depicted. Wiseman’s defense was that he had releases from the state hospital authorities that ran the institution and, according to Massachusetts state law, stood as legal guardians of the inmates. He also pointed out that whatever privacy rights may have been violated, there was a greater good in that the film exposed the abusive treatments the inmates were receiving under the care of people supposedly there to “help” them.

Wiseman suspected that the real reason Massachusetts state authorities wanted the film banned was that it embarrassed them and made the people running the place look like amoral monsters (which makes me wonder how he won their permission to make the film in the first place – were they so blind they didn’t realize just how terrible they would look on screen?). Though a New York judge denied Massachusetts’ request for an injunction and allowed the film to be shown at the festival, the following year Massachusetts Superior Court Judge Harry Kalus (as in “callous,” making his last name ironically appropriate) ordered not only that the film be pulled from distribution but all extant copies be burned. Wiseman, a former attorney, appealed all the way to the U S. Supreme Court, which denied to hear the case, but he 1959 he did win a compromise from the Massachusetts Supreme Court that allowed the film to continue to exist and to be shown, but only to professionals involved in the care of the mentally ill: doctors, lawyers, judges,social workers, health-care professionals and students being trained in one or more of those fields.

Then in 1987, a lawyer named Steven Schwartz filed a lawsuit against the state of Massachusetts and the mental hospital on behalf of family members of seven people depicted in the film. The suit alleged mistreatment of the inmates and used Wiseman’s film as evidence. According o Schwartz’s 1987 lawsuit, “In the years since Mr. Wiseman made Titicut Follies, most of the nation's big mental institutions have been closed or cut back by court orders” – which is true; public revulsion against the treatment of mentally ill people in the institutions supposedly there to “help” them. In fact, there were two major waves of de-institutionalization, one in the early 1960’s and one in the mid-1970’s – the first after the publication of Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and the second after the release of the multiple Academy Award-winning film based on it. So one of the shocks offered by Titicut Follies to a modern audience will be to hear the inmates ranting on endlessly about their paranoid fantasies of how the world is really run, and by whom. As everyone who lives in a major or semi-major city can attest, today people who think like that aren’t in mental hospitals anymore; they’re wandering around on the streets declaiming their crazy ideas about the world to anyone who will listen, as well as plenty of people who don’t but find themselves forced to anyway.

If there’s a message to Titicut Follies, it’s that the therapists and other professionals running the institution seem to be as crazy as the people they’re supposedly there to “help.” Aside from the fact that all the people who work at Bridgewater are smoking like chimneys – even the man who’s in charge of tube-feeding a patient who has refused to eat normally is smoking while he’s administering the procedure, including lubing the tube before he sticks it down the man’s nose all the way to his stomach – the so-called “therapists” often sound as bonkers as the people they’re supposedly treating. One therapist listens impassively as a patient describes the sexual encounter with an 11-year-old girl that got him arrested and sent to Bridgewater in the first place, and one can admire his detachment while wondering just what having to listen to this stuff is doing to his psyche. Another sequence shows the institution’s chaplain, Father Mulligan, doing an elaborate purification ritual in which he blesses each successive body part withholy water and says he’s taking away the sins associated with each human sense – including the crotch – and then Wiseman cuts to a man in the exercise yard expressing his opinion that none of the people running the Roman Catholic Church, from Father Mulligan on up to the then-current Pope, Paul VI, are illegitimate and the true rulers of the church are Cardinal Francis Spellman and Bishop Fulton J. Sheen (whom Mad magazine once lampooned as “Fulton J. Showbiz”).

Then Wiseman cuts to another inmate in the same exercise yard, this one singing the praises of Father Mulligan while literally standing on his head. Aside from showing that Wseman’s style was not as “non-interventionist” as he claims it to be – one can’t watch the juxtaposition of those scene without thinking that the director deliberately intercut those scenes to make a point about the human condition and how even the best-minded of people bring their own agendas to their work of “helping” others – the film seems to be informed by British psychologist R. D. Laing and his views on the social nature of so-called “mental illness’ Among Laing’s criticism of psychiatry is that ot sought to define “mental illness” with the same specificity with which the medical profession in general diagnoses physical illness: an outside agent – either a microbe, an inherent genetic defect or a toxic exposure – makes the body goes haywire and creates a specific set of symptoms which the doctor can then treat with medication or surgery. infiltrateOne of the most powerful scenes in Titicut Follies is one in which various hospital personnel are discussing a specific patient and trying to decide just what sort of “box” his behaviors put him in and what sort of medications they should administer to “treat” him. We get the impression that not only do they not have a clue what’s really going on inside this person’s head to manifest itself as something they define as “mental illness,” they are debating this man’s condition on the basis of unspecified criteria and another group of therapists might analyze the same behaviors and come up with a quite different conclusion. I remember hearing a story about a medical professional who decided to infiltrate a mental institution to see how its patients were being treated, and among the things he did was take notes during a therapy session. The “therapist” leading the session noted in their records that he exhibited “compulsive writing behavior.” infiltrateLike that story, this film dramatizes the extent that once a person has been classified as “mentally ill,” everything they do, no matter how innocuous or “normal,” will be regarded as just one more manifestation of their “illness.” Since Titicut Follies was made, not only have many mental institutions been closed (with the unintended consequence of turning these people loose on the streets, since the network of follow-up clinics the original advocates of de-institutionalization was never set up) but the technology of drugs to treat mental illness has vastly improved, though still nowhere near the level the people in the profession (both the doctors and others who administer the drugs and the companies that make them) like to pretend and tell us how they can be used. While certain mental illnesses can be treated more or less ont he same model as physical ones, many of them remain pretty intractable and, as Laing said, all too often “mental illness” is in the mind of the beholder.