Reality, On-Screen

The action-thriller-sci-fi movie Lucy was released on a Thursday in July 2014. Luc Besson’s film is based on the premise that Lucy, played by Scarlett Johansson, is unexpectedly bestowed with the ability to use up to 100 percent of her brainpower, not the 15 percent with which most humans operate. This ability gives her super-powers and, ultimately, the wisdom with which to direct human-kind. Before its release, Lucy had already received plenty of praise, though I told my husband, C., that I wanted to see the film even if it was a critical flop—for months I’d been making open-mouthed faces at him when the trailer appeared, punching him in the arm as Lucy dispatched thugs with a flick of the wrist, or as Lucy walked through an airport, her hair morphing from blond to black. We bought tickets for a Friday showing.

Four of us saw Lucy at the Metreon in San Francisco that day: C. and I had invited our friends Ryan and Eddie, who excused themselves from work to come. I’d learned a month earlier that Eddie had been diagnosed with schizophrenia more than a decade ago. I didn’t know him well—he showed up occasionally at my house to play Dungeons & Dragons, and I recognized him as the heavily tattooed, and highly stoned, redhead we’d met at a balcony barbecue the year prior. He was the first person I’d knowingly met whose diagnosis also belonged to the collected schizophrenias. Still, Eddie and I had never spoken one-on-one about our diagnoses, or about our experiences with psychosis, and he wasn’t exactly my friend but an acquaintance on the periphery.

I don’t know at what point in the film Lucy became a problem for me. Ryan told me that during an early scene in which the drug-filled bags in Lucy’s abdomen burst, and she begins to violently experience the transformation from ordinary twentysomething to super human entity, he almost reached over to ask if I was okay. Ryan, whom I consider a brother, tends to have his fingers on the pulse of my mental state more attentively than anyone else does, and has sometimes pointed out mania or depression before I realized they’d come to call. I do know that at some midway point in the ninety-minute film, I pulled out my emergency medication, intended for encroaching psychosis, and gulped it down with C.’s Cherry Coke. I considered leaving, but wanted to see what would happen to Lucy. I’d taken the emergency dose because I felt myself slipping, and sensed myself hurtling into the reality of the film, leaving my own behind. I could feel my brain twitching with the belief that I, too, was gaining access to more of my brain than that of ordinary mortals, and that if I tried, I could destroy objects with its power. When Lucy ended, I stood and blindly shoved past the other three in the darkness.

Eddie and I were the first of our group to emerge into the corridor. I said to him, trying to keep my voice light, “Are you having as much trouble as I am right now?”

He answered, “Well, I do know that I’m using 20 percent of my brain.”

In the film, access to 20 percent of one’s brain enables echo-location.

During a psychotic episode the winter before, C. and I had watched Doctor Who together. By the time the episode ended, I was lost.

“Is it happening somewhere else?” I asked. “Did that just happen in another place?”

He explained the concept of television to me. The show had actors in it who also appeared in other TV shows and films. The actors had lives that had nothing to do with what happened in the TV shows and films. The actors lived in reality, which was different from the unreality of the TV shows and films. The TV shows and films were scripted by human beings, who also lived in reality, and who wrote stories that were then turned into TV shows and films. Those human beings were writers, like me. I remained distressed and confused until we put on MasterChef, a reality cooking show that more closely resembles the world that I was supposed to believe in.

But that incident happened when I was ill, during an episode of active psychosis. We intuitively knew, for example, not to watch The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, which was in theaters at the time—and which I’d been excited about seeing—because the world of The Hunger Games was not ours, and because the theatrical experience would be too immersive for my addled brain to handle. We understood that, faced with an enormous screen, and wrapped in a cocoon of Dolby Surround Sound, I’d likely become agitated. I’d believe in The Hunger Games. I’d worry about whatever District I believed myself to be in; I’d wonder whether I’d have the mental and physical agility to emerge as Victor. We’d decided to watch Lucy believing that I could withstand the force of its alternate reality.

I didn’t always recognize the feeling of becoming psychotic, because I didn’t always understand what it meant to be psychotic—but having found myself in that crumbling landscape again and again, I now know the signposts that precede my psychotic episodes. I cannot speak for people who may take a different route, or fly instead of walk, but the feeling of my mind entering a state of rapid fracture is familiar enough now that I can describe the terrain.

It’s one thing to be able to say, “I saw blood dripping down the walls,” or “The landlord has installed cameras in my apartment,” but it’s another to talk about how it feels under the skin to see and believe things that aren’t real. I can rattle off the symptoms of a panic attack: shortness of breath, numbness in the extremities, a quickening heartbeat, feeling that death is imminent, et cetera, but there is no corresponding checklist for the sensations of psychosis. The list of symptoms for schizophrenia, the “prototypical psychotic disorder,” includes delusions, hallucinations, and disorganized speech in Symptom Group I (“positive symptoms”), and apathy, lack of emotion (“negative symptoms”), and/or severely disorganized or cata-tonic behavior in Symptom Group II. These symptoms are largely observable by an outsider, which is fortunate for a clinician who might otherwise be faced with someone who is uncommunicative or nonsensical, and therefore hard to treat. A person experiencing psychosis can seldom describe the ongoing turmoil with any kind of eloquence, but they might be able to tell you what it was like in hindsight, when the damage is in the rear window.

Before the psychosis properly begins, as I experienced during Lucy, I experience an agitated sense of something being wrong. The wrongness isn’t limited to the grotesqueries mutating inside, but is also true of the world at large: how did it get this way, and what am I supposed to do with it? I mean this not only of dailiness, which is full of restless hours that must somehow be spent, but also the sky, the walls, the trees, my dog, the windows, the curtains, the floor—all of which are but a small portion of everything that needs my attention, including everything abstract and concrete, even as my ability to deal with them is at first dwindling and then absent. The more I consider the world, the more I realize that it’s supposed to have a cohesion that no longer exists, or that it is swiftly losing—either because it is pulling itself apart, because it has never been cohesive, because my mind is no longer able to hold the pieces together, or, most likely, some jumbled combination of the above. I can understand only one piece or the other, even though the sky is supposed to belong to the same world as the curtains, and the dog that enters the room draws my attention as an entirely new object to contend with. People write about the so-called comfort of being insane in the same way they cavalierly refer to the happy ease of being developmentally disabled, but in this liminal space I am aware enough to know that something’s wrong.

Something’s wrong; then it is completely wrong. After the prodromal phase, I settle into a way of being that is almost intolerable. The moment of shifting from one phase to the other is usually sharp and clear; I turn my head and in a single moment realize that my coworkers have been replaced by robots, or glance at my sewing table as the thought settles over me, fine and gray as soot, that I am dead. In this way I have become, and have remained, delusional for months at a time, which feels like breaking through a thin barrier to another world that sways and bucks and won’t throw me back through again, no matter how many pills I swallow or how much I struggle to return. What’s true is whatever I believe, although I know enough to parrot back what I know is supposed to be true: these are real people and not robots; I am alive, not dead. The idea of “believing” something turns porous as I repeat the tenets of reality like a good girl. When hallucinating, the idea of “seeing” or “hearing” something is similarly untrustworthy. I’ll see a thing well enough to duck or jump to avoid it. Still, I know what is supposed to be true, and that includes a reality without shadowy demons or sudden trapdoors.

Movies, to differing degrees, are made to enforce the stories they tell, and we applaud when such power is wielded efficiently. An Oscar-winning drama makes us cry, and earns our admiration, because we believe to some degree in the story on-screen; we make a pact with the film to suspend disbelief. If the story is absorbing and the director skilled, we allow ourselves to agree that the actor truly is abandoning his soulmate in a cave, and, accordingly, we ache if that actor is deft enough in his craft to make us believe his pain. His grief becomes, in a way, our grief—our pain at arm’s length, but still close enough to make us wince. Even tearjerkers can be considered efficient, if only because their melodrama cuts straight to our softest places, and gives us the pleasure of plugging in to our own capacity for empathy, no matter how corny.

Film’s technological progression, then, compounds whatever realism does exist. Sitting and watching a projected film with reels rattling in the background, or with an accompanying live organist pounding at the keys, is a different cinematic experience from that of watching a film on an enormous IMAX screen (IMAX’s tag-line, accordingly, is “IMAX Is Believing”). During an opening scene in Lucy that features the famous, prehistoric Lucy, I marveled at how agile computer-generated imagery (CGI) had become since The Matrix—a reality-buster that I saw at its release, and that I don’t dare to watch now—not to mention the groundbreaking Terminator 2 or Jurassic Park. The Microsoft Home CD-ROM Dinosaurs, released in 1993, thrilled me as a child; watching its movie clips was my first experience of 3-D computer animation. But I wondered over the next twenty years, as CGI became increasingly prevalent, whether we’d look back at movies such as The Mummy or War of the Worlds and laugh at how easily audiences had been suckered by a technology still finding its legs. It’s possible to find an online list of the “10 Most Unconvincing CGI Characters in Movie History” as easily as the “25 Greatest CGI Movie Moments of All Time.” Prehistoric Lucy mutters, makes faces, and blends into an environment comprising elements that may or may not be constructed: a real or false river, a true or invented sky. I can’t tell the difference.

The next morning, over breakfast, I asked C. if we could talk about Lucy. If we could figure out what caused my reality to falter, I said, I’d know which films to stay away from.

“Well,” C. said, “Lucy would sound crazy under ordinary circumstances, because of the things she claims she can do. The trouble for you might be that she can actually do them.” Lucy insists that my reality—and the reality of those around me, which I’m supposed to trust when psychotic—isn’t true reality. The film goes forth to embellish, with vivid cinematic tricks, its definition of what true reality is.

The 2001 film A Beautiful Mind traces the life of mathematician John Nash, played by Russell Crowe, with an emphasis on the role of schizophrenia in Nash’s relationships and work. In attempting to place the viewer inside Nash’s “beautiful mind,” Ron Howard resorts to Shyamalan-esque machinations, featuring a perplexing twist in which Nash’s grim supervisor at the Department of Defense, as well as a longtime friend from Princeton and his charming niece, are—ta-da!—revealed to be figments. Psychosis is, in A Beautiful Mind, nothing more than an intensified version of childhood’s imaginary friendships, and goes on to haunt Nash even after his recovery; in the film’s final scene, as Nash is awarded a Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, he glimpses the three figments. Schizophrenia, the movie implies, is forever.

It’s easy to criticize A Beautiful Mind for its hokey depiction of schizophrenia. In fact, I first saw the film shortly after its release, at a recommended showing held by my Abnormal Psychology class at Yale. The point was to show us how Hollywood gets psychosis wrong, but Howard’s use of cinematic figments is less crude when seen as a metaphor for delusion. Supervisor William Parcher is technically a recurring hallucination—a trick of the senses that can walk and talk, courtesy of actor Ed Harris—but he’s also the character who kicks off Nash’s paranoid belief that he must crack an elaborate Soviet code in order to spare America from communists. Without Parcher’s sinister presence, the viewer could never become complicit in the belief that Nash is tangled up in matters of national security.

Years later, I would experience my first hallucinations, which were nothing like the recurring figments Russell Crowe experiences in A Beautiful Mind. Not long after that came the delusions, though I am still waiting for my Nobel Prize.

I did see Catching Fire in a theater. I was no longer psychotic, and I’d secretly booked tickets for C. and me for a 7 p.m. showing. We sat in the plush seats of the Kabuki theater in San Francisco’s Japantown and watched Katniss Everdeen fight for her life. One scene that particularly grabbed me involved a jabberjay attack; on her side of the force field, Katniss is swarmed by genetically modified birds, known as jabberjays, that weaponize through mimicry the sound of her sister being tortured. Katniss screams, agitated and panicking, as her companion Peeta tries to tell her that it’s not real, but the invisible barrier keeps them apart. Despite his best efforts, she can’t hear him explain. The scene felt like a metaphor for so many things.

Later, as we walked toward the parking garage, C. said, “Remember the jabberjay scene?”

I said that I did.

“It was hard to watch,” he said.

In the theater, we had let the film wash over us, and yet my boundaries had been solid. I could engage with the film fully without being lost inside of it. When the lights came up, and the audience began to stir, I reached for C.’s hand as though we were any other couple ready to go home.