Life's Ghastly Pageant
After 40 years, ‘Titicut Follies’ retains its shock
By Ron Garmon
Shot amid a state-supported horror and suppressed for decades, Titicut Follies was the first feature by lawyer-turned-documentarian Frederick Wiseman and probably the most corrosive banned movie in U.S. cinema history. Film enthusiasts ought to rejoice now that most of the pioneering vérité filmmaker’s work is on DVD, but little currently in cinemas can equal the gutpunch of this 1967 debut screened several times larger than life-size, as a cynical and blank-eyed Muse plainly intended. Glimpses afforded into warehousing and what passed for treatment of the mentally ill back in the Great Society are not in themselves disturbing, seeing as how by now we’re all-but-numbed at the sight of the untreated mad defecating upon public sidewalks. What is truly mind-bending about this film today – and the legal controversy it engendered – is its stark, lidless-eye view of state power in a proto-Gitmo.
Trained as a lawyer and trusting to careful accumulation of fact, Wiseman specializes as artist in fly-on-the-wall observationalism, which turns an already horrifying premise like filming a variety show put on by guards and inmates at the State Institution for the Criminally Insane in Bridgewater, Massachusetts into a horror show to beggar anything by Tod Browning or Wes Craven. Twitchy doctors jabber about sanity in terms considerably less lucid than some of the more eloquent schizophrenics. Meaty keepers harry patients with racist insults, and run their charges through corridors before locking them skinned-rabbit naked in medieval stone cells. Guards at this onetime almshouse bitch chummily for Wiseman’s camera about difficulties in getting the smell of tear gas out in the wash. The inmates are regimented and dehumanized in ways that look queasily familiar to us now, dismally desensitized as we are to waterboarding and legalese about “unlawful combatants” alike. These treats of institutional life are contrasted with performing-flea inmates belting out weird pop Dada like “Chinatown, My Chinatown” and “Ballad of the Green Berets.” There are long and glazed passages that beggar any Gen-X notion of irony, as we see the banal lunacies of both pop culture and regimented modern life – so curiously symmetrical – impose themselves as sanity upon the highly personalized lunacies of a haul of social rejects. In 1964’s Shock Corridor, B-movie maverick Sam Fuller played with the same theme of America-as-madhouse like a bored punk with a hand grenade, but here, Wiseman pulls out the pin and tosses the grenade into the audience.
Bay State politicians tried without success to stop Titicut Follies from screening at the New York Film Festival, where it received an impressive freight of rave reviews. Early the next year, an obliging Massachusetts Superior Court judge decided the movie was trash and ordered it confiscated and destroyed to protect patients’ privacy. The film survived, but the ban lasted until 1991, long enough that several of the patients depicted in the movie had died. In 1987, a lawyer for one who died in custody suggested that had the state not been so keen to protect his client’s privacy, the man might well have survived care at the facility. Most of the big state-run giggleworks are shut down today, with people like the inmates of the Follies now left to beg in the street, but Bridgewater is amazingly still extant, despite the scandal and investigations following Wiseman’s documentary. Albert DeSalvo, the confessed Boston Strangler, was briefly an inmate the year this film was shot, but managed to escape, leaving a note to the superintendent protesting conditions. Less footloose were some 250 “forgotten” prisoners, men whose sentences had long since run out and were illegally imprisoned, some for decades.
This dense, complex and intensely horrifying film screens at 8 p.m. this Saturday evening at the Downtown Independent as centerpiece for Banned Movie Nights, a monthly happening, with 10 percent of the proceeds going to Doctors Without Borders. If you feel like partying after that, DJ Mathieu spins until an Invite Only Afterparty sponsored by the super-secret Revanchist Movement slated to go on well into the small hours.
Titicut Follies at the Downtown Independent, 251 S. Main St., Los Angeles, (213) 617-1033. RSVP at bannedmovienight.com.
Published: 03/25/2009
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