For an identity category, I wanted to discuss mental health and “sanity”. While this has no bearing on appearance, mental health can greatly affect the way an individual identifies just like age, race, gender and class. All of these characters I have chose are either heavily suggested or blatantly stated to have a mental health issue, to varying degrees. Lets look at examples of good, and bad examples of treating characters with mental health issues with respect and dignity.
Negative Examples – Identity Unsupported
Dexter Morgan – Dexter: Dexter is born with an undeniable urge to kill. The show revolves around him only killing other serial killers, therefore taking the “moral” choice. Painting dexter as a anti-hero vigilante can give uninformed viewers the idea that people who have harmful urges are barely holding back from murder sprees like Dexter shows.
Kevin Crumb – Split: James Mcavoy plays a character with a bipolar disorder so severe, he almost doesnt even appear the same when he switches personalities. Many of these personalities are extremely dangerous. He is violent, unhinged and tries to kill the main characters. His 23 dissociative personalities are a poor representation of people with bipolar disorder who have no desire to harm others.
Sheldon Cooper – Big Bang Theory: Sheldon has autism, and is often played as the butt of many jokes. Sheldons awkard tendencies are written to be laughed at, such as being a steryotypical nerd who has trouble talking to others. He frequentley harasses women and other people, and the viewers are expected to accept and laugh at this since he is different than normal. In reality, people with autism are no way as rude, vapid, and antagonisitic as sheldon
Riggan Thompson – Birdman: Riggan is a washed up actor who played a superhero in the early 90s. The birdman persona speaks to him throughout the movie and riggan is often shown and acts upon, suicidal tendencies. His saving grace is a broadway play that he created and poured his heart into. While the movie is a comedy, and we often laugh with riggan, he is shown to suffer greatly from the strain of fame and pressure from others. We never laugh at riggan in these dark moments, and we want him to succeed. The movies touching ending shows that riggan cares deeply about those close to him, even if he has trouble showing that.
Nina Sayers – Black Swan: Nina most likely suffers from Schizoprenia and a disscociative personality disorder. Nina is a ballet dancer who auditions for a play. She gets into conflict with the director and other actress. She is plauged by intense hallucinations throughout the movie, increasing in severity each time. At the end of the movie, she even tries to fight a hallucination of herself, but is revealed that she stabbed herelf in the confusion. She goes on to perform and gives a perfect performance. I am summarizing greatly, but the movie shows us a look at how dangerous obsession can be. We feel ninas struggle as she desires to be the best. Vicitms of schizoprenia can suffer grealty just like nina from visual and auditory hallucinations.
Arthur Fleck – Joker: A very topical and recent release, Joker shows one mans desenct into unhinged madness. Arthur is for sure not a good guy, or even an anti hero. In fact, he is a villianous and evil character. However, I think the movie does a good job of portraying how he ended up this way. Arthur suffered head trauma as a result of physical abuse from his mother when he was young. This left him with an unnamed disease that makes him extremely socially inept, visual hallucinations, fits of anger, and outburts of random laughter. The city also cuts funding to arthurs physciatrist and leaves him without any of his essential medications. Combine that with a city that is unforgiving to the poor and ill like arthur, and its easy to see how he ended up as the joker. I do not agree at all with his methods of revenge and spreading of chaos, but i think that the movie does a good job at highlighting how a negligent system can create unhinged people like arthur.
Part 2
Thinking of a digital tool that allowed me to create an alternate self and discover more about other things that wouldn’t be allowed usually, I instantly was reminded of YouTube. I’m not talking about uploading videos or anything, I’m talking about the recommendation feature specifically. Most people are familiar with YouTube unique recommendation system, even if they don’t know it. The recommendation system is unique in the sense that it doesn’t just suggest new videos, but allows for old deep cuts from almost a decade ago to become filled with new viewers again. If you click on most of the odd videos suggested to you, you will find comments from people who are not sure why they got this recommended to them, but they are glad they watched it.. Many of these videos are odd, funny, and all around weird.
Although many are hilarious videos like above, my favorite subsection is the music recommendations. If I listen to one of my favorite songs, YouTube will often recommend similar stuff. But every know and then, there will be a recommendation completely out of left field. For example, listening to a song by Johnny Cash can lead me down a country-esque recommendation rabbit hole until I end up discovering Sturgill Simpson, a Grammy award winning country artist who fuses many genres to create songs and visuals like this.
This would not be possible before the internet, for someone to discover hidden gems that they would have to scour through record stores for before. I have discovered music from many different cultures, many different levels of production, and wildly different genres through YouTube. This is one example, but I know that me and my friends have discovered new, old, obscure and hidden music that we can call some our favorites.
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