Here And Now: A Conversation With Jacqueline Bisset

Veteran screen actress Jacqueline Bisset stars in the dramatic feature, Here And Now. In which she portrays the mother of Sarah Jessica Parker, a celebrated singer faced with sudden, traumatic issues in her life. And Bisset as her estranged mother struggling with issues of her own - namely an inability to emotionally connect to her troubled daughter, hard as she may try.

Here And Now, directed by Fabien Constant and originally titled Blue Night, is an impressive showcase for three eminent actresses that includes Renee Zellweger as well. And the delicately layered ways in which women bond and unbond, however awkward or misread, when men aren't around.

And though Parker's character Vivienne has fashioned a far from typical career as a musical star, what comes across most poignantly is the critical meaning and significance in one's life, of the work they do no matter what. And how profound the potential loss, even of one's core identity, when that threatened loss looms.

  55 STEPS REVIEW

While over-medicating the institutionalized, whether mental patients or nursing home residents, has always been promoted as a benevolent medical practice, a horrendous dark side has existed. Namely, not only pressure from the pharmaceutical corporations on the government to permanently purchase these often ineffective and perpetually physically harmful medications, but enabling as well staff layoffs and cuts, substituting the drugs as essentially immobilizing, synthetic caretakers instead. And though 55 Steps, well, side-steps those alarming political issues, with the doctors in question as as essentially a cover for the true medical/pharmaceutical industrial complex villains, at its core this film based on a true story is a remarkable and heart wrenching dramatic feature.

Hillary Swank is Collette Hughes, a Native American San Francisco lawyer whose passion is defending psychiatric patients against institutional abuse. When she receives a phone call from Eleanor Riese (Helena Bonham Carter) seeking help against the policy of forced medication at St. Mary's Psychiatric Hospital, Hughes along with legal partner Mort Cohen (Jeffrey Tambor) face off against the formidable medical establishment with their enormous funds likely enabling them to prevail in court. And in the course of the struggle to champoin the rights of psychiatric patients, the two women, despite class differences, develop an extraordinary female relationship that emotionally nourishes each in turn.

Noteworthy of mention which I've addressed previously, regarding the history and politics of psychiatry, especially in connection with the institutional persecution of females, is that this was a time when women began to liberate themselves from second class citizenship, both during WWI when assuming male positions on the domestic front, and as the women’s suffrage movement gained steam and finally became a reality in 1920, with the 19th Amendment. This, in the context of the Roaring Twenties, though it was in many ways no howl for women. Because as they became more outspoken and independent-minded, the male establishment in turn devised new methods of female disempowerment, of which the mental hospital was key.

And today, there can be found many elderly women forced into mental hospitals back then and warehoused for a lifetime (until no longer capable of functioning in the outside world), precisely for being difficult, rebellious, ‘uncooperative,’ or simply ‘inconvenient.’ In other words, a dumping ground by parents of free thinker daughters, or husbands with a yen for a new woman. And the infliction of medical torture in order to break female spirits and enforce obedience, that really happened on a secretive and routine basis.  And as portrayed previously in the 1983 biopic Frances, about the scandalous mental institutionalization of Hollywood star Frances Farmer (played by Jessica Lange), in large part for her radical politics.

And it wasn’t that long ago in time, that medical researchers openly concurred that women had smaller brains therefore unsuited for professional vocations – a male-imposed cultural expectation. This, while the General Psychiatry archives reveal conclusive agreement that domestic violence is not only acceptable but even therapeutic, with “the husband’s aggressive behavior as filling masochistic needs of the wife and to be necessary for the wife’s equilibrium.”

And politicizing so-called psychosis has a deep-seated history in this country. Dr. Benjamin Rush, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, concocted the medical term ‘anarchia’ as a category of ‘insanity’ in order to negatively label the many Americans at the time who were unhappy about the limits of that document, as it did not address issues like any human rights for other than white men with property, not to mention the existence of slavery.

Dr Rush also addressed the discontent of slaves by declaring a mental disease called ‘negritude.’ And by announcing that there was no cure for this condition, but that the ‘disease’ could be contained by isolating black people from the ‘healthy’ white population, the medical profession in effect initiated and legitimized segregation, a scourge that would not be outlawed until several centuries later.

And similarly, Louisiana physician Samuel Cartwright added ‘drapetomania,’ to the shameful lexicon, a mental affliction supposedly causing slaves to attempt to escape. Whipping and toe amputation were prescribed to plantation owners as effective cures. A seasoned Hollywood screenwriter couldn’t make this stuff up.

But curiously, why has this outstanding film been marginalized, while so many releases that pale in comparison have been promoted extravagantly this year. Perhaps related to the questioning of existing corporate institutions in this country, however indirectly. Just sayin.'

Prairie Miller