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56 2 From Madness to the Prozac Americans is dr. miles bennell crazy? In the opening scene of Don Siegel’s 1955 movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers, he insists that he is not.1 Trapped in an emergency room and attended by two police officers, a doctor, and a psychiatrist from the state mental hospital, Dr. Bennell insists on his sanity four times in the first minute of the film: “will you tell these fools I’m not crazy? . . . I’m not insane! . . . Listen. Doctor. Now you must listen to me. You must understand me. I am a doctor too. I am not insane. I am not insane!” (“Continuity” 32). One can hardly blame either his interrogators or the movie audience for disbelieving him. Disheveled, wild-eyed, and struggling, Miles Bennell does not look like a doctor, and the story he tells would be hard to believe under any circumstances. But one of the central purposes of the movie is to prove that the apparently crazy Dr. Bennell is, in fact, entirely sane. Encouraged by the psychiatrist to “tell [him] what happened,” he explains, “It started, for me it started . . .” (32) as a slow dissolve brings us to the Santa Mira train station on the previous Thursday. The audience watches a cleaner and much more cheerful Dr. Bennell collect his luggage while he recounts in voice-over his early return from a medical conference at the request of his nurse. At this point, the flashback takes over the burden of narrative disclosure, which it largely maintains until the final two minutes of the film. From its beginning, Invasion of the Body Snatchers addresses the problem of mental illness and its diagnosis. Even as the emergency-room doctors —and by extension, the film’s audience—must decide whether Dr. Bennell is crazy, he too must determine the sanity of the rest of Santa Mira. The crisis that returns Dr. Bennell to his hometown is what the movie first FROM MAdNess tO the PROzAC AMeRICANs 57 calls “an epidemic of mass hysteria” (48); his patients have become convinced that their friends and relatives have been replaced by imposters. Dr. Bennell’s job is to help his patient Wilma realize that her Uncle Ira really is her Uncle Ira. He explains, “No matter how [she] feel[s], he is” (43). “My business is people in trouble,” he claims, and he promises to help Wilma realize that “that the trouble is inside [her]” (44). But the moments when Dr. Bennell determines the relative health of the townspeople go beyond mere differential diagnosis. Evaluating symptoms, he inadvertently circumscribes a boundary between the ostensibly sane and the so-called insane. More important, he begins a process that defines being “crazy” (Dr. Bennell’s term), not merely by recourse to symptoms, but ultimately as a state of being, in and of itself. This chapter is centrally concerned with such moments of diagnosis, because through these diagnoses, and the logic that informs them, the ontology of what is variously called insanity, mental illness, or madness can be parsed. The term chosen depends on what precisely this condition (or this constellation of conditions) is thought to be. To call it an illness, as Dr. Bennell does at first, is to understand it as a deviation from the norm, an affliction that ultimately prevents the self from its proper functioning, and that ideally would be cured, fixed, or in some way compensated for. Yet even if one accepts the idea of mental illness, one is left with the question of its source: does it stem from a bodily or moral weakness, or is it, in the words of novelist and essayist Walker Percy, “a wholly appropriate reaction” (“Crisis” 254) to the degradations of modern life?2 At the other end of the spectrum is the term “madness,” which, as the historian and philosopher Michel Foucault understands it in his 1961 study Histoire de la Folie á l’âge Classique (1961; abridged English translation, Madness and Civilization, 1965), is a way of being in its own right, a form of self that has been lost to us through the dominion of classical reason. If such states of being represent an alternative—but equally viable—version of human existence, then treatments of the type Dr. Bennell imagines are not cures, but rather coercion. The competing ontologies of such conditions, as either mental illness or madness, are crucial for understanding the ways authenticity and selfor subjecthood interact during the mid-twentieth century. Analyzing...

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