9-14-05, 8:54 am
The Exorcism of Emily Rose is about the effects of mental illness left untreated. Emily Rose (Jennifer Carpenter) is a young woman with a complex of serious but treatable mental disorders that cause her to hallucinate, convulse, and mutilate herself. She has all medical care withheld from her on advice of her family priest, Father Moore (Tom Wilkinson), who is convinced that she is possessed by demons. Not needing much persuasion, the deeply religious family turns over the care of Emily to Father Moore. The priest subsequently tries to 'exorcise' the demons, fails, and the girl dies. Put on trial for negligent homicide, the priest’s day in court, aided by a cynical lawyer (Laura Linney), is the central drama of the movie.
Only loosely based on the 1976 death of Anneliese Michel in West Germany, Emily Rose is a grinding and decidedly unscary (I yawned incessantly) theological thriller that asks moviegoers not to believe in demons as much as it asks them to doubt science. In fact, the film’s argument plays and preys on existing doubts about medical science, which, even with its great advances, so often fails us.
The real life Michel was a young woman who did not receive adequate medical treatment for her illness due mainly to backward methods used in the mid-20th century to treat epileptics and the mentally ill. She was diagnosed with epilepsy in 1968, but her treatments failed, forcing her into more destructive psychotic episodes. Because improvements in drugs designed to control epileptic seizures did not occur until later, Michel’s health worsened. Her parents, who had all along believed that she was under attack by demons, eventually sought the help of a priest who tried to convince his superiors to allow him to perform an exorcism. It took a year to convince the local Bishop – a serious deviation in the film says the Bishop immediately consented – who reluctantly acquiesced. The exorcisms failed and less than a year later she died in her mother’s arms, weak and emaciated from starvation and self-mutilation (on this point the film again seriously deviates, changing the story’s meaning).
The film strays from the true story, drawing it into the present and suggesting that faith in rituals and incantations had as much of a chance to save Emily as medical treatment. In fact, in order to accomplish its effort to create the faith-science dilemma, the filmmakers chose to present a distorted representation of mental illness science as simply a matter of ingesting the correct medicine. Along the way, the film depicts scientists as uncaring drug distributors who lack any real devotion to their patients, unlike the loving priest who cares deeply for Emily. As a matter of fact, he displays his devotion by ordering the girl to stop taking prescribed medicines to control the epileptic seizures that cause her mind to distort reality and hallucinate. Drugs prevent real therapy, the loving priest believes.
The film’s success, if it can be called such, lies in its convincing manipulation of the general audience’s fears of the unknown, superstitions, and lack of knowledge about mental illness.
Certainly, in our capitalist society where much medical research funding goes towards finding cures for erectile dysfunction, baldness, and enlarging our sex organs, while researchers for cures for cancer, AIDS, and other serious diseases literally have to beg for money, skepticism about the medical industry is warranted. Our society cultivates a self-concept as marred with imperfections that only expensive treatments can cure easily. Many of us rightly view this narcissistic element of some fields of medicine as a blot on the entire medical profession.
In addition, capitalism, as an ultra competitive system that demands a 'dog eat dog' outlook to get ahead and encourages self-blame for failure, takes its toll on our psyches. Social divisions such as racism, poverty, sexism, homophobia and the like compound mental trauma. In fact, a wide range of genetic and environmental factors contribute to serious mental disease.
For these reasons, there is an epidemic of mental illness in our society. Close to 40 million people are currently being treated for some form of mental illness from mild depression to severe psychosis. The extent of the epidemic became so great in the 1980s that, instead of adequately funding Medicaid and Medicare to provided needed resources for additional treatment for many chronically ill patients, and instead of making a serious commitment to finding treatments and cures for mental illnesses, President Reagan ordered massive cuts in federal grants to mental health care facilities and funding for Medicaid and Medicare. Hundreds of thousands of mental health patients were literally forced into the streets. To cover this atrocity, right-wing ideologues went on the attack charging that the field of psychiatry was a sham and that mental illness was a scam.
The turn to religious explanations for mental illness as depicted in this fictional story are as detrimental and despicable as the fabrication pushed by Tom Cruise a couple of months ago in which he charged that mental illness is the result of the lack of vitamins and the invention of self-interested fabrications of money grubbing doctors. One hears in Father Moore's claim that Emily Rose's story is about a struggle between the forces of good and evil, the echo of Cruise's near manic and somewhat paranoid diatribe against the field of psychiatry to Matt Lauer on NBC's Today Show.
Anti-psychotic drugs, Ritalin, therapy, and the (misunderstood) barbarism of electro-shock treatments are the real cause of human dysfunction, shouts this lunatic fringe. Prayer, vitamins, a good life and lifestyle are the cures. The tragedy is that Anneliese Michel isn’t the only victim of this mindset.
The key to healing our minds cannot be found in turning to the past, to repressive doctrine, or pseudo-scientific fads. More knowledge, more understanding, more hard science are starting points. Exchanging a for-profit health care system, for a humane one would also decisively favor real therapy.
It is unfortunate that Laura Linney's excellent and subtle portrayal of a cynical lawyer, the main character of this story, is wasted on such a horrible piece of anti-science schlock. Her’s is the lone saving grace of this unintelligent swill.
--Contact Roberta Jones at pa-letters@politicalaffairs.net.
