s usanne r ohr The Aesthetics of Madness In this essay I explore current depictions of madness in American culture, particularly in American film, and what these representations tell us about contemporary conceptualizations of mental illness in the US� 1 What is more, I argue that in some new films the condition of autism, particularly Asperger Syndrome, is staged as the embodiment of a new normalcy and that the interest in autism has originated new forms of representation and new aesthetic patterns that break with firmly established traditions of depicting madness. I will explain my terminology in a moment, but I first would like to start my argument with the observation that many recent works of American art, in several media, deal with mental illness� For instance, the rock musical Next to Normal, a huge 2009 Broadway hit and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for drama, tells the story of a woman struggling with worsening bipolar disorder� Pink’s music video for her song “F**kin’ Perfect” (2011) visualizes the story told in the lyrics by showing a young woman in distress starving and cutting herself� The documentary film Autism: The Musical (2007) follows five children with autism as they rehearse for a musical production� A number of mainstream and art house movies engage the topic� Among them are The Scribbler (2014), whose protagonist suffers from dissociative identity disorder; and a number of films in various genres represent the phenomenon of amnesia, such as Michael Sucsy’s romantic comedy The Vow (2012)� Perry Blackshear’s psychological thriller They Look Like People (2015) follows the protagonist’s descent into schizophrenia� The protagonist of Woody Allen’s film Blue Jasmine (2013) is afflicted with anxiety disorder and is dependent on psychoactive drugs� Adrian Monk, the protagonist of the police procedural series Monk, shown on USA Network from 2002-2009, represents the pathologization of the classic detective figure as he suffers from obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, whereas Carrie Mathison, a character with bipolar disorder in the political thriller TV series Homeland (broadcast on Showtime since 2011) confronts the viewer with the question as to whether or not she functions more efficiently on or off her medication. Touch, a thriller drama television series that ran on Fox from 2012 to 2013, features an emotionally disturbed child protagonist; and in the comedy-drama TV series Parenthood that ran on NBC from 2010-2015, one of the children is diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome� The medical drama The Good Doctor, currently broadcast on ABC, features a young savant surgeon� The series is 1 This is the enlarged and revised version of an article that has been previously published as “Screening Madness in American Culture,” Journal of Medical Humanities 36�3 (2014): 231-240� Reprinted by permission from Springer Nature� 118 s usanne r ohr developed by David Shore, creator of the Fox hit medical drama House, and can thus be seen as a radicalization of the bizarre House-figure into the autism spectrum� If we turn to literature, in Jonathan Franzen’s famous novel The Corrections (2001), one of the main characters suffers from Alzheimer’s disease and is gradually losing contact with reality and sliding into a dream world� Richard Powers’ The Echo Maker (2006) prominently interrogates a rare delusional misidentification syndrome; and the protagonist of John Wray’s novel Lowboy (2009) is a paranoid schizophrenic off his meds� Kathryn Erskine’s young adult novel Mockingbird (2010) and Lisa Genova’s Love Anthony (2012) deal with autism and Asperger’s Syndrome as do quite a number of recent novels, and in Gary Shteyngart’s novel Lake Success (2018) a hedge-fund manager flees from the stress caused by his three-year-old son’s diagnosis of autism. Clearly, in the new millennium the topic of madness is highly en vogue in the arts in the US. The question is why? While explaining the current infatuation with madness is part of this essay’s focus, I first and foremost want to suggest that it is autism which now appears to receive particular attention in film and literature and that autism seems to have become the embodiment of America’s current cultural condition� As Paul Hellker and Melanie Yergeau assert, “Public awareness and public discourse about autism are approaching critical mass” (485)� Jennifer C� Sarrett even talks about an “autism ‘epidemic’” (142), and an “Autism Awareness Month” was introduced some years ago� A documentary film produced in 2013 bears the telling title The United States of Autism, in 2015 another documentary, Autism in America, was released� Before I explore some pertinent works of art, let me explain my terminology: As my short list of examples indicates, I include a number of mental illnesses—bipolar disorder, dissociative identity disorder, paranoia, amnesia, schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s disease, autism and others—under the umbrella term ‘madness,’ diseases that have diverse causes and produce very different symptoms� What unites all these mental dysfunctions is, however, their physiological effect, that is, their power to deeply affect a person’s perception of, relation to and ensuing interaction with reality� With this, I certainly don’t wish to imply that there exists ‘a reality’ which is the same for everyone, much less that there is one ‘normal’ version of it� 2 But as the physiological effects of mental dysfunctions define the term ‘madness’ at its core, I will continue using it in this essay, fully conscious of the fact that it surely is disputable to call autism or Alzheimer’s such and that the word has lost traction over the last decades and has been banned, due to its stigmatizing potential, 2 As a discussion of the various concepts of reality, and reality constitution, would almost coincide with a presentation of the main phases of Western philosophy as well as literary and cultural theory, it cannot be traced here. I have published extensively on the topic from a semiotic-pragmatist perspective, cf� for instance Rohr, “The Tyranny of the Probable,” and Rohr, “Madness as a Liminal State”� Also, madness and its counterpart sanity, or reason, are cultural constructs, evidence of a whole network of discourses on social norms active in a particular society at a given time� Thus the interconnected concepts of madness and sanity are open to continuous modification and reformulation, as Foucault and others have shown� The Aesthetics of Madness 119 from politically correct discourse altogether� In deliberately keeping the somewhat provocative or vexing expression, however, I want to profit from the rich field of cultural associations that it opens. The look of madness One of these associations is expressed in the saying “madness is as madness looks,” an assumption that, as Roy Porter explains, has been fed “[e]ver since Antiquity, [through] the theories of physiognomy, humours and complexion developed by Greek medicine” (92)� While the rich history of psychiatry shows that the conception and treatment of mental illness have indeed undergone dramatic changes, there are some noteworthy continuities� Stephen Harper names one: “If historians of madness—and most media critics—agree on one point, it is that madness has been systematically stigmatised in Western culture” (2)� Another continuity rests in the sustained belief that the mad look “different�” Yet how can mental phenomena that for the most part defy observation be made visible and revelatory of the otherness of the insane? A powerful and elaborate iconography of madness originated over time in medical as well as artistic contexts to represent and clearly demarcate that which transgresses mental normality and makes it identifiable and culturally perceptible� In spite of their historical contingency, in this vocabulary of madness some images have become somewhat standard� These recurring images constitute a visual continuum of “otherness,” and they concern predominantly a person’s facial appearance, expression, body build and gestures as well as features like wild, unkempt hair and tattered or inappropriate clothing� 3 Representations that display these characteristics mark the person in question as mad, or, to put it differently, portray the mad as culturally recognizable� Accompanying and interacting with these images, certain social codes have evolved over time into a vocabulary of their own� Three dominant views display a peculiar mixture of confining and liberating dimensions that go along with conceptions of mental illness, developed and exploited in innumerable accounts of madness in Western culture, artistic or other: 1� The mad seen as benign, as “wise fools” embodying some kind of wisdom or deep knowledge about eternal human truths� In this perspective, the mad are understood as playing a tolerable, if not valuable role in a society’s organization� As David Cooper holds, in the Middle Ages madness was even considered a somewhat consecrated state; it “was respected as a different way of being and knowing, perhaps a privileged way with a more direct access to heaven” (155)� 3 Cf� Gilman, Seeing the Insane, “Preface” n�pag� I owe a great amount of inspiration to this excellent in-depth study of the history and iconography of madness. I would also like to thank Sander Gilman for his highly appreciated comments on this paper� Cf� also Cross 199� 120 s usanne r ohr 2� In the contrary perspective, the insane are seen as wayward, animal-like savages, as ferocious, given to violence, or possessed by evil spirits� In this view, the mad need be taken away, as society must be protected from them� 3� Madness has also been associated with certain special mental talents, above all a heightened creativity, or clairvoyance� Hence concepts like the mad genius, as expressed, for example, in the form of the brilliant mad scientist or the ingenious mad artist� As Stephen Harper and others have shown, constructions of madness closely intersect with discourses of gender, class, and race and, as such, clearly bear an ideological dimension� For instance, the depiction of mental illness is highly gendered, and images of male and female madness tend to differ in important ways� While male madness is traditionally marked as tough or aggressive, even heroic, the female state of mental distress is usually staged as fragile and helpless, even if—or especially if—contemporary strategies of female self-empowerment and self-monitoring seem to promise control over mental health� 4 Wise fools, beautiful minds and black swans—madness in American film Although Western art has always been interested in the phenomenon of madness, the medium of film, with its interest in visualizing a person’s frame of mind, bears a particular potential when it comes to representing mental illness. Thus madness has always played a role in film, but when perusing the history of film productions in the US it becomes apparent that the number of films dealing with the topic of madness has indeed increased drastically over the last ten years. A closer look at the latest films reveals that their general layout follows the age-old iconography in a surprisingly seamless fashion, thereby inscribing the films firmly into the traditional western canon of views on madness. Thus, we find the three classical categories outlined above: 1� The mad as wise fool The motif of the “wise fool” is, for instance, displayed in the comedy The Ringer (2005), where the protagonist impersonates a mentally handicapped person in order to qualify for the Special Olympics� This attempt proves to be a humbling experience for the leading character as his team colleagues who are truly mentally challenged teach him a lesson in integrity and the values of friendship, fairness and team spirit� 4 Cf. Harper 186. The Aesthetics of Madness 121 2� The mad as dangerous villain Quite a number of films play out the thriller, thrasher and suspense potential seen in the view of the dangerous and uncontrollable mad villain à la Hannibal Lecter or Patrick Bateman, a recent example being M. Night Shyamalan’s psychological horror thriller Split (2016) that follows a man with 23 different personalities� 3� The mad as genius The mad as genius and gifted artist is a recurrent motif in movies such as Ron Howard’s celebrated biopic A Beautiful Mind (2001) or Joe Wright’s 2009 The Soloist� The latter features a former violin prodigy who has succumbed to his schizophrenia and leads a homeless life on the streets� His gradual process of recovery through the help of a journalist who befriends him is dramatized through the changes in his outward appearance, which turns from outrageous to more and more conventional� Finally, concerning the gendering of madness, quite a number of recent movies explore the topic of female self-construction gone awry, and the ensuing mental breakdown. A good example is Black Swan (2010), which earned Natalie Portman an Academy Award for her performance as an ambitious ballerina displaying signs of a borderline personality disorder and suffering from increasingly psychotic interludes� The movie shows how the protagonist falls to pieces under the internalized pressure to be perfect� In one scene, she claims to be “nothing” if she is not “perfect” (1: 22: 17). The film investigates female self-actualization through the dialectics of self-empowerment and abjection, leading to simultaneous success and failure in the final deadly “perfect” performance� Pink’s already mentioned video that accompanies her song “F**kin’ Perfect” functions almost like a response to this call (both film and video/ music came out December 2010), as it tells the story of a distraught young woman, who, bullied and ostracized by her class mates and misunderstood by her teachers, turns to stealing, cutting and starving herself as an outlet for her exasperation. Unlike the dancer in Black Swan who pays with her life for her striving for perfection, Pink’s video protagonist finds liberation and fulfillment through creative activity and becomes a successful painter; the singer all the while pleading with her audience “Pretty, pretty please / Don’t you ever, ever feel / Like you’re less than / Fuckin’ perfect�” Interestingly, both the movie and the video stage the climactic turning point in their narratives through the absence of language� Black Swan uses the well-established iconography of female madness and reverts to the corporeal dimension by showing the protagonist in the final performance with staring, bloodshot eyes dancing herself—guided by Tchaikovsky’s dramatic music—as the black swan into a frenzy while visually morphing into the great bird, thereby evoking the old concept of the mad as beastlike creatures� The video, on the other hand, chooses the opposite, quite effective strategy by creating a moment of complete stillness to transport the dramatic moment� When the protagonist is shown in her bathtub injuring herself and cutting the word “perfect” into her lower arm with a razor blade, the music 122 s usanne r ohr stops completely for a few seconds, and only the dripping of her blood into the water is audible� This scene illustrates very well what Casey and Long have explained in reference to the communicative or signifying function of the phenomenon of female self-mutilation: “self-mutilation is used as a form of symbolism or expression of mental pain where words and language have failed�” It is a “language of injury” (92)� Movies dealing with madness (and speaking the “language of injury”) are attractive to the audience, as the high number of productions alone tells us� If the phenomenon of mental illness has always caught the attention of scientists, artists, and society at large, movies in particular have a force of their own� As Colin McGinn puts it: “We want, badly, to watch” (3)� In the case of movies, the attraction is twofold� We want, badly, to watch movies— and we want, badly, to see “the other”—and make sure we’re not crazy and one of them� Here, the visual iconography is of vital importance as it helps the viewer to make the distinction between “us” and “them” regardless of how accurately the patterns of mental illness are represented� Thus we not only badly want to see the other, but also the object of our curiosity needs to be markedly different from us� Sander Gilman holds that “We want—no, we need—the ‘mad’ to be different, so we create out of the stuff of their reality the myths that make them different” (Disease and Representation 13)� I must mention the thriving anti-stigmatization discourse that received vital impulses from Otto F. Wahl’s influential study Media Madness: Public Images of Mental Illness (1995)� 5 This discourse is especially concerned with the psychiatric accuracy of the representation of certain mental illnesses in the media� Leaving questions of authenticity aside, I am more concerned with the expressive and subversive power of narratives of madness. Images of mental distress can function as expressions of social conditions, be those social alienation and political disempowerment or joyful denial and selfauthorization, and they have the force to interrogate what Erich Fromm has called the “pathology of normalcy�” 6 Adding a category: the mad as normal In this vein I propose that some of the contemporary movies screening madness have added a fourth category to the ones already mentioned: the category of the mad as normal, with the autistic personality, particularly those persons diagnosed with high-functioning forms of autism such as Asperger’s Syndrome, as the embodiment of this normalcy� More precisely, in these new films, the autist seems to become the epitome of individualization in contemporary society� These representations, however, overrun concepts that would understand, as, for instance, Erich Fromm did, the madness of modern society as humanity’s fall from biophilia, that is, from a sense of relatedness, rootedness and orientation� 5 Cf� also Harper, Cross, Sakalys and Sarrett� 6 Cf� Harper 6� The Aesthetics of Madness 123 Following Ulrich Beck’s individualization thesis, I argue that the autistic personality comes to constitute the paradigmatic “normal” individual in times of dramatic change, that is, in the transition from industrial society to the second society of informational modernity� In this “epochal shift” from one social condition to the next, Beck explains, there is a necessary interim period of anomie, or anomic individualism, of unsettling normlessness and the breakdown of social values� To quote Beck: “a fundamental change is occurring in the nature of the social and political—an erosion of anthropological certitudes” (xx). The emergent modernity is characterized by processes of globalization and cosmopolitanism and by a crisis of the traditional institutions such as state, class and family� The resulting indeterminateness and uncertainty create chaos that claims to be normal, leaving the contemporary individual displaced and, as Beck would have it, ‘fundamentally incomplete,’ driven at the same time by the persistent necessity to make fast choices and decisions and to find rules instead of simply following or applying them� The pressure to adjust to the normal chaos is complemented by high technological competence� In the practice of social relations, the individual of globalized modernity is forced to renegotiate the conditions of social co-operation in each and any new interpersonal encounter as none is prescribed per se in the ‘freedom culture�’ Some of the new movies depicting autism, such as Temple Grandin (2010), Adam (2009), Mozart and the Whale (2005), The Accountant (2016), Please Stand By (2017), or the TV series Atypical (2017-), currently shown on Netflix, interrogate just this contemporary conditio humana, and they do this by spreading out the disease pattern of autism� They depict globalized modern individuals caught in the endless constraint to look for and install rules, as a person with autism cannot fall back on a canon of preestablished standards: thus their pressing need to set up routines in order to structure daily life and to curtail reality’s normal chaos� As autism is a disorder that impairs sensory input and how it is processed, one of the primary symptoms of autism is the extreme disturbance of communicative functions. Consequently, autists can decode social interactions only with great difficulty and have problems comprehending another human being’s emotional situation� They lack, in turn, the possibilities to verbally communicate their own ways of perceiving reality, and, as such, these films try to visualize a reality that is constructed under alternative parameters, one of them being the literality of experience. In order to restrict the unfathomable complexity of impressions, the condition does not allow for the ambiguities of irony, satire or word play� An autistic reality is thus a literal reality, ordered according to the laws of scientific regularities, not playful creative improvisation. Hence a constant need ensues to renegotiate the common ground of communication in each new interpersonal encounter between individuals� Thus, these movies reflect the present social and cultural condition that all individuals have to confront during the epochal shift that, according to Beck, is currently taking place� The need to adjust to eroding rules, regulations and certainties is a universal challenge haunting both individual experience 124 s usanne r ohr and interpersonal encounter� In prominently and painstakingly staging the autistic person’s difficulties in coping with the overwhelming mass of sensory perceptions, the movies, to my understanding, bear an epistemological dimension in that they draw the viewers’ attention to their own predicament— the point here being not to showcase an autistic or non-autistic person’s particular cognitive capacity or lack thereof� This view is different from contemporary perspectives on autism in the field of disability studies, such as Melanie Yergeau’s research on autistic authorship and its special power and ability� To Yergeau, autistic authorship has the capacity to reconceptualize rhetorical traditions� She writes: “I believe in the potentialities of autistic stories and gestures, of neuro-queering what we’ve come to understand as language and being� I believe that autistic rhetorics complicate what we traditionally hold dear across a plurality of fields” (5). My own perspective connects, rather, to current discussions in literary and cultural theory that show a revived interest in analyzing interconnections between aesthetic form and social action, such as Caroline Levine’s plea for a new formalism in Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (2015), and in affect theory such as Sianne Ngai’s recent publication Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (2012)� Ngai here develops a theory of aesthetic categories that classic aesthetic philosophy has traditionally neglected in its focus on exploring the sublime and beautiful. Ngai discusses why the categories she examines—the cute, the zany and the interesting—formerly considered trivial or marginal have become central to late capitalist culture� She is particularly interested in their potential to elicit equivocal affects— calling something “cute,” for instance, leaves it ambiguous whether one regards it positively or negatively� In reaction to Ngai’s analysis, I would hold that the present interest in ambiguous reactions well connects to the current fascination with the autistic personality’s puzzling obscurity in intersubjective processes� As already indicated, I argue that the attraction that the autistic personality’s struggles in identifying and applying rules for organizing interactions with the outside world currently holds for a wider audience can also be explained on an even deeper epistemological level� In his pragmatist semiotic theory, the American philosopher Charles S. Peirce explains how every act of understanding, an act thereby of creating reality, is at its core a process of creative guessing. Peirce calls these guesses “abductions,” next to induction and deduction a particular form of inference that seeks to produce explanatory hypotheses about what might be the case in every given situation� Abductive inferences, he holds, are not only indispensable for identifying—or creatively inventing—the rules that would make sense of one’s own perceptions; what is more, they produce the hypotheses that are then inductively and deductively examined until a satisfactory explanation of a given situation is momentarily formed. This procedure of producing and testing hypotheses evolves infinitely on an unconscious level and constitutes the cognitive basis of individual existence. According to Peirce, it is the infrastructure of the universal process of making sense by which individuals locate themselves within a The Aesthetics of Madness 125 cultural context: As the rules are not found or invented ex novo, they are a mixture of subjective and culturally preformed elements. Yet the whole process is as inescapable as it is precarious for one can never be entirely sure that one’s guesses are right: 7 there is always a residue of insecurity that cannot be overcome and causes the ontological situation of fundamental alienation characterizing an individual’s existence. 8 Thus, on these grounds I would argue that the current preoccupation with the autistic personality’s processes of making sense of it all that we see prominently reflected in recent film is not only geared to introducing a fourth category of normalizing deviant behavior but on a deeper level to negotiating fundamental alienation as conditio humana� The movies attempt to represent the autistic personality and its ways of constructing reality on both the thematic and the aesthetic levels� In their expressive power, I hold, movies surpass any other artworks that deal with the topic� I would argue that this is, to a large degree, because movies rest on close-ups, particularly on close-ups of the human face, and viewers feel particularly drawn to those� As Colin McGinn writes: The close-up affords a uniquely powerful window onto the mind of the character, more powerful than any encountered in the world of ordinary perception� […] The face on the screen becomes a means of psychological revelation to which the viewer’s eye is attuned. The close-up exploits what psychologists call ‘mind reading’: the minds of the characters become overwhelmingly present to us—more so than in real life. Part of our visual relationship to the screen is a kind of magnified reading of minds—soul seeing, as it were� […] Viewing the screen is a dynamic interplay between two minds, the actor’s and the audience’s; and the way we see and interpret faces is a central part of this� (52) This general (somewhat voyeuristic) fascination with close-ups of the human face is amplified in the context of films depicting autism. Not only are we drawn to deciphering the actors’ states of mind and realize that our “mind reading” of the autistic personalities they embody has to overcome severe obstacles, we are made aware at the same time that mind reading is precisely that which people with autism cannot perform or perform only with great difficulty. 7 In producing more or less extravagant explanatory hypotheses, it is thus a fine line that separates psychosis from creativity or madness from sanity, and a highly movable line it is� C�W� Spinks found the following image to account for this situation� He writes: “It may bother puristic minds that validity and invalidity, psychosis and creativity, truth and arbitrariness come from the same well, but then they will have trouble with the polarities of things” (204)� 8 This is a very brief summary of a highly complex process. I have published extensively on Peirce’s philosophy, cf� for instance Rohr, “Pragmaticism” and Rohr, “‘Amazing Mazes’”� 126 s usanne r ohr I would like to consider two examples. The first is from Temple Grandin (2010), a biopic that describes the youth of Temple Grandin, a highly functioning person with autism who received her doctorate in animal science and is a professor at Colorado State University� Grandin is both an eminently influential humane livestock facility designer and an important and much sought-after spokesperson for patients suffering from autism. In one scene, the film tries to visualize both Temple Grandin’s way of scientifically ordering reality and the literality of her experience. The protagonist, when visiting her aunt and uncle on their farm, surprises them by her ability to tell objects apart that seem identical to most people, in this case teaspoons� In a scene where the protagonist stands in the kitchen doing the dishes together with her aunt who tells her she and her husband both have trouble discriminating the different kinds, Temple Grandin holds up the spoons in question. The film tries to show her way of thinking visually by projecting a diagram onto the spoons, making the slight differences in size and form apparent (07: 28)� When her aunt suggests they all go to bed because they get up early on the farm, Temple Grandin does not understand the metaphorical quality of the expression “to get up with the chickens” and the movie in the next shot shows how she imagines her aunt and uncle in their pajamas up on the rooftop, crowing (07: 38)� One of the acting strategies that Claire Danes, who is playing Grandin, pursues to express an autistic personality is an unchanging facial expression of wide-eyed discomposure which in its consistency becomes quite unnerving after a while� The second example is taken from Max Mayer’s Adam (2009), in my reading a particularly significant example of the new movies featuring an autistic protagonist, although markedly not a mainstream blockbuster movie� It seems to me, however, that sometimes art house productions possess a particular power to express cultural conditions as they are not primarily geared to garner large amounts of money and don’t necessarily have to subscribe to dominant discourses� Adam depicts a decisive phase in the life of a young man who is left an orphan after his father’s death� Adam is suffering from Asperger’s Syndrome and is, like Temple Grandin, a high functioning autist� He is a genius in physical astronomy, yet lacking in many social skills, as autists typically are� Adam begins an intimate relationship with a young woman, his neighbor, who teaches him certain rules of etiquette and ways to interpret other people’s emotional states� When she realizes that her partner has come to depend on her entirely, she ends the relationship, leaving a more mature Adam who is now able to start a life of his own� In the opening scenes, the main character is shown attending his father’s funeral� Very few people are present at the event, no interpersonal exchange takes place, and no emotions are displayed on the part of the son� A close up of the protagonist’s face shows his somewhat bewildered expression, difficult for the viewer to interpret. What state of mind is expressed here? (01: 44). Arriving home again, Adam reacts by reverting to his own rules and rituals and by adjusting them precisely to his new situation as he crosses out the category “Dad’s chores” from the board of household duties� Otherwise, the routines structuring The Aesthetics of Madness 127 Adam’s reality remain intact, as we see when, still in his black suit that he wore at the funeral, he starts sweeping the floor because that is on that day’s list for him� The somber colors, minimalist background music and the setting of the tidy apartment all underline Adam’s need for monotony and reliability, as does the scene where the camera, in a non-traditional eyeline match, follows his perspective as he checks on the uniform and meticulously ordered contents of his freezer and kitchen cabinet� Seemingly undisturbed in his routines, Adam calmly takes his meal in front of his computer whose screen displays a complex mathematical diagram, hinting at the fact that Adam is a scientific genius (01: 08-03: 05). The strategies we see in both films to visualize the autistic experience and construction of reality have by now developed into a standard aesthetic repertoire of their own. All of the movies I named above try to express a somewhat scientific or rule-regulated ordering of the world governed by unfailing repetition� In this monotonous universe, every object has to compulsively be arranged in a specific manner, according to certain parameters such as color or form, and every activity is obsessively performed according to fixed rules. The execution of these routines serve the creation of a reliable, controllable environment that the movies try to realize through calm camera moves, slow motion sequences, dimmed light and soothing music, as illustrated by the opening sequence of Adam� Every breach of procedure is shown as a painful intrusion whose force is affecting both the protagonist and the viewer, through sudden noise, vertigo shots, hand-held camera simulation or blurred colors, all indicating a sensory overload� To further illustrate these observations, I would like to mention two examples from recent productions, The Accountant (2016) and the series Atypical, currently running on Netflix. In The Accountant, we see the protagonist as he pursues his daily regimen of compulsive arrangement when preparing and eating his dinner (00: 38)� In Atypical, by contrast, the mental breakdown of the autistic teenage protagonist, brought about by his therapist’s rejection of his declaration of love for her, is visualized through uncomfortable visual and auditory techniques (“The Silencing Properties of Snow” 01: 23)� In all the movies just mentioned, mental illness, or autism, is played out as highly functioning� What is more, a comparison with Barry Levinson’s paradigmatic Rain Man (1988) reveals a fundamental redefinition of the autistic personality� The autistic Raymond in Rain Man functions as counterpart to his selfish yuppie brother, who typifies the excesses of the greedy generation à la Gordon Gekko� Stephen Harper convincingly argues that “the ‘madness’ that such dramatic portrayals announce is not only that of the individual characters, but also that of the capitalist system which they embody; this satirical use of madness parallels the finding of psychologists that some ‘personality disorders’ are more prevalent among managers than criminals” (6)� If Rain Man is a critique of 1980s capitalism gone wild, where the motif of autism is staged as its innocent opposite, in Adam the autistic personality now gets center stage and has come to embody the new individual in times of disorganized capitalism� Moreover, Adam and Temple Grandin are 128 s usanne r ohr highly functioning in their social contexts, and they are explicitly described as savants, i�e� as human beings with brilliant yet restricted talents that are in contrast to their developmental disabilities, as they both are geniuses in mathematics and technology� Interestingly, Ronald Bass, who wrote the screenplay for Rain Man, shows this very change in how autistic personalities are conceptualized in one of his later scripts, the romantic-drama Mozart and the Whale (2005). This movie, my next example, is about the love story of a young man and woman, Donald and Isabelle, who are both diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome. As in the other recent films with autistic leads, the two main characters are not contrasted to concepts of normalcy but shown in their very own reality� What is more, Donald, described much like Rain Man’s Raymond as a savant with the ability to perform difficult mathematical calculations in his head, is the founder of a self-help group for adults with autism who suffer more severely from the condition than he does� Thus, the dimension of community is added to the discourse on high functioning autism, as both Donald and Isabelle help the members of the group, and in the end, when both are finally married, they all gather around a large table as a single family to celebrate Thanksgiving� Asperger’s Syndrome, so the movie tells us, does not keep the main characters from falling in love or creating relationships, they are the most socially competent in their group and able to help others who fare worse� In the twenty or so years that separate Rain Man from Mozart and the Whale, we thus witness a complete reversal in the way autistic personalities are staged� In this movie, they certainly emblematize a kind of new normal� Hellker and Yergeau’s remarks support my diagnosis of the growing attention autism is receiving in the current cultural situation� Concerning the first World Autism Awareness Day they write: “CNN marked the occasion by launching one of its ‘worldwide investigations’ devoting the entire day’s programming to discussions of autism. Three recent documentary films, Autism Every Day, Autism: The Musical, and Her Name Is Sabine, all attempt to broaden the public’s understanding of the condition” (485)� Aesthetic reorientations In closing, I would like to return to a discussion of the formal design of the films mentioned. As my brief presentation of the movies has already indicated, contemporary films dealing with mental illness, particularly autism, have turned their backs on the postmodernist interest in narrative extremes such as Memento (2001), a movie concerned with amnesia and characterized by furious cutting and editing techniques, or extraordinary final plot twists made plausible by the protagonist’s associative identity disorder, such as in Fight Club (1999). As exceptions always prove the rule, Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island (2010) follows this very pattern, and so does, to a certain extent at least, Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010). By contrast, the new films featuring images of autism follow the rules of narrative coherence and narrative The Aesthetics of Madness 129 closure; their overall aesthetic is calm and sedate, trying to capture the perspective of the autistic protagonists and to visualize their processes of constructing reality. The formal characteristics of the films seem to be in direct dialogue with the characters’ attempts to make sense of it all, to methodically structure the chaos of reality and establish a system of routines, and this, in turn, refers us back to the theoretical framework of Beck’s individualization thesis� Interestingly enough, the same aesthetic reorientation seems to be at work as well in movies that would traditionally and in conformity to their genre be presented very differently. For instance, a film like Michael Lender’s brilliant psychological thriller Peacock (2010) stands in very close intertextual dialogue with Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) and features a Norman Bates-like protagonist with dissociative identity disorder. This film, its extreme proximity to Psycho notwithstanding, completely relinquishes any attempts to shock its audience through scenes such as Hitchcock’s famous bathtub killing� Instead, it follows the same sedate narrative pace as Adam� Finally, considering the equally calm narrative strategies of new novels such as John Wray’s Low Boy (2009), where the protagonist is a paranoid schizophrenic off his meds, it might be well worthwhile to also discuss the recent realist turn in fiction along these lines. The aesthetic strategies of both the films and the novels in question might well have a peculiarly mimetic core in that they seem to reflect the meaning-making processes of their mad protagonists� 9 Watching the movies and reading the books, a process of subtle “narrative knowing” might evolve, a concept that psychologist Donald E. Polkinghorne explored widely in the context of his research on narrative approaches to knowledge in therapeutic practice� 10 Polkinghorne explains how, by decoding the narrative structures of a client’s tale of past events, the listener is able to understand the particular meaning this person ascribes to the presented episodic units (11)� When interacting with the new works of art we might experience, then, in the evolving process of “narrative knowing,” a certain uneasiness about the proximity of the patterns of high functioning autism and the structures of our contemporary cultural condition� 9 Some research has been done on the question of whether works of art, particularly literature and film, can be used to teach social workers or the general public about the nature of madness� This, however, is not my line of argument as it assumes a different understanding of a mimetic relation and starts from the assumption that there might be a “right” or “authentic” way of representation� Works to be considered here are, for example, Oyebode, “Literature and Psychiatry,” Crawford and Baker, “Literature and Madness,” Bhugra, “Teaching Psychiatry,” and McGrath, “Problem of Drawing from Psychiatry”� 10 Similarly Baldwin, “Narrative, Ethics and People With Severe Mental Illness,” Oyebode “Fictional Narrative,” and Roberts, “Narrative and Severe Mental Illness,” all reflecting the “narrative turn,” a paradigm change that took place in certain psychiatric and psychological circles in the 1980s that were open to postmodern views on identity and reality construction� 130 s usanne r ohr Works Cited A Beautiful Mind� Dir� Ron Howard� Universal Pictures, 2001� Film� Adam. 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