A Film Canon

This extraordinary film translates the polarities of manic depression into the tension between cavernous, agoraphobic sets and abrasive, claustrophobic noise - depth of field and breadth of sound - in an effort to identify it with the parameters of the suburban home. As a result, struggling schoolteacher Ed Avery's (James Mason) symptoms seem less a product of his cortisone addiction than of his dismay at the drabness of suburban life, encapsulated in cinematographer Joseph MacDonald's circumscribed palette. This produces a radical identification between Avery and his home that both takes the right-wing fantasy of suburban insularity to its logical conclusion, and aestheticises it. Not only does Ray continually draw poetic parallels between Avery and his home (such as his first blackout, which takes place after he has turned off every light in the house), but gradually exploits the distortive power of CinemaScope in such a way as to suggest that neither is capable of being contained within the ambit of a single gaze, or shot. Throughout the third act, Avery is continually elevated to a threatening distance from the camera that, combined with increasingly grotesque lighting, contributes to his status as a perverse, hyperbolic law-giver ("I will not tolerate your attempts to undermine my program") - a conflation of God and Abraham that corresponds to the conflation of doctor and patient bound up in his self-medication, transforms his staircase into a mountainous altar, and over-compensates for the drastic disorientations of his covert job as an impoverished taxi pick-up co-ordinator; a fantasy of a suburban house so ideologically pure that it is cleansed of its very inhabitants.