A Film Canon

This astonishing film translates the late 1940s prison topos into a feminine register, elaborating an insane asylum in which nurses are frequently little more than superintendents, bent on an arbitrary display of power whose logical conclusion is their own incarceration, and contributing to the prophecy voiced towards the end: "When there's more sick ones than well ones, the sick ones will lock the well ones up." That said, the few serious proponents of Freudian psychoanalysis exhibit a sophistication unprecedented in Hollywood - particularly Dr. Mark Kik (Leo Genn), whose diagnosis of Virginia Cunningham (Olivia de Havilland) refuses to pull any punches, forcing her to confront her disarming identification of father and husband (that is, the identification lurking beneath all melodramatic American cinema) and, more radically, to acknowledge an irreducible blankness at the core of her subjectivity, corresponding to the first few months of her life. To this end, de Havilland achieves an elusive slippage between her character's mind and body that both clarifies the latter as agent of hysterical repression, and finds most poetic expression at those moments at which she confuses herself with other people and objects, culminating with her temporary integration into the writhing, seething bedlam of Ward 12, or the 'snake pit'. Used to house the most extreme patients, this terrifying space embodies the film's penetrating insights into the problems posed to the public mental health system by its particular reliance on an individualistic - and ultimately idealistic - doctor-patient relationship, and poignantly anticipates the asylum choir's rendition of "I'm a-goin' home".