Hollywood ‘psych-out’

Bill Knight column for 8-22, 23 or 24, 2019

Mental illness is in the news, with claims that mass shootings would decrease if mentally ill Americans were disarmed (which experts say is foolish since there’s no correlation and focusing on such troubled people unfairly stigmatizes them.)

Hollywood has rarely helped, so this week – the 29^th anniversary of the death of influential behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner – here’s a snapshot of the movie tradition that for decades has exploited mental illness and psychology to dramatic, if not therapeutic, effect.

When Jeff Bridges treats Kevin Spacey in “K-Pax” or Billy Crystal helps Robert DeNiro in “Analyze This,” the private/privileged relationship between patient and therapist forms the film’s foundation. There’s a line of psychiatrists and psychologists who deal with something that’s often inexact and usually challenging, and mental/emotional conditions that can be daunting, if not frightening.

Of course, movies’ depiction of psychologists is no more exact than police, housewives or workers. Some doctors exploit their patients; others care too much. Think of kind Bob Hartley (TV’s “Bob Newhart Show”), the understanding Jennifer Melfi (Lorraine Bracco) in HBO’s “Sopranos” or the villainous Robert Elliott (Michael Caine) in the movie “Dressed to Kill.”

“Hollywood has always been fascinated with psychiatrists,” said Glen Gabbard, co-author of “Psychiatry and the Cinema.” “By having a psychiatrist in the movie, you can enter the mind of a character as they confess inner thoughts.”

The first U.S. movie to feature a psychiatrist was “Dr. Dippy’s Sanitarium” in 1906. By mid-century, psychology and its movie image became more common. Since, filmgoers have seen dramas ranging from “Vertigo” and “Love & Mercy” to “The Group” and “The Caine Mutiny”; comedies (Mel Brooks’ “High Anxiety” and “The President’s Analyst”; melodramas (“Possessed” and “Dark Mirror”); thrillers (“Asylum,” “The Shining”); romances (“Lady in the Dark,” “Benny & Joon”) and horror (“Psycho,” “Asylum Blackout”).

Sometimes settings are key (“Shock Corridor”). And for every shallow “Couch Trip” (a sort of big-screen “Frazier”) there’s a substantive “Freud,” John Huston’s biopic of the father of psychoanalysis.

There are many, from “Final Analysis” to “The Dream Team,” but here are 10, so lie back; relax. Now: How does that make you FEEL?

“Captain Newman, M.D.” (1963). Alternately serious and light-hearted, this stars Gregory Peck as an World War II psychiatrist treating GIs affected with PTSD (then called “battle fatigue”). It features Eddie Albert, Tony Curtis, Bobby Darin. Angie Dickinson and Robert Duvall.

“Charly” (1968). Cliff Robertson earned an Oscar for his portrayal of a developmentally disabled man whose IQ is boosted by doctors’ experimental treatment that boosts his IQ, but at a price.

“Girl, Interrupted” (1999). Winona Ryder stars as a delusional teen institutionalized after a drug overdose. Other patients suffer different conditions: a compulsive liar, a sexual-abuse victim, and a mesmerizing personality. Angelina Jolie, Vanessa Redgrave and Whoopi Goldberg co-star.

“Nuts” (1987). Martin Ritt directed this drama about a prostitute (Barbra Streisand) accused of murder and facing a dilemma: be declared insane and go free but suffer the consequences, or be found sane and risk imprisonment. Dreyfuss is a lawyer torn between facts and truth. Its cast includes Karl Malden, Eli Wallach and James Whitmore.

“One Flew over The Cuckoo’s Nest” (1975). Producer Michael Douglas, director Milos Forman and star Jack Nicholson made this adaptation of Ken Kesey’s novel superb -- the first film since 1934’s It Happened One Night to sweep the major Academy Awards. Nicholson plays a petty criminal who manipulates a transfer from jail to a mental institution, supposedly for an exam. While there, he inspires patients to question authority. Louise Fletcher is great as a domineering nurse; Christopher Lloyd, Danny DeVito and Will Sampson co-star.

“Pressure Point” (1962). Sidney Poitier stars in this drama about a doctor treating a racist neurotic jailed for sedition for Nazi sympathies. Through analysis, surprises emerge help explain his condition. Bobby Darin and Peter Falk co-star.

“Prince of Tides” (1991). Barbra Streisand is a psychiatrist who’s helped treating a troubled woman (Melinda Dillon) by the patient’s brother (Nick Nolte). Gradually, the doctor unravels the sister’s background but falls in love with the brother. It co-stars Blythe Danner and George Carlin.

“Spellbound” (1945). Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant star in Alfred Hitchcock’s melodrama about an asylum administrator hiding a problem. A psychiatrist and the promise of love may help. (It features an intriguing sequence by surrealist Salvador Dali.)

 “Sybil” (2007). Based on a true story about a woman whose abusive childhood caused her to develop multiple personalities, this starx Tammy Blanchard and Jessica Lange (It’s better than the sanitized TV mini-series starring Sally Field.)

“Three Faces of Eve” (1957). Joanne Woodward won an Oscar for her role as a shy girl who has multiple personalities, from sophisticate to siren. Lee J. Cobb, Vince Edwards and David Wayne co-star.

Trump favoring industry at expense of EPA - and world

Bill Knight column for 8-19, 20 or 21, 2019

When the Trump administration last week announced that is was significantly weakening regulations protecting endangered species and other threatened wildlife, most folks weren’t stunned and some undoubtedly feel bad for animals, but few probably thought of the endangered species closest to home: human beings.

The move came from the Interior Department, not the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), but it’s part of a pattern of backward action and controversies about our environment.

Last month, the White House defended the administration’s environmental performance.

“President Trump’s leadership and policies have made the air, water and environment cleaner,” said Deputy Press Secretary Judd Deere. However, as Washington Post fact-checker Jacqueline Alemany reported, “There is little substantiating that statement.”

Indeed, despite overwhelming scientific consensus, Trump still scoffs at climate change’s existence and withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Agreement; his administration deleted climate change references on government websites; and this summer he relaxed regulations on coal plants – when Alaska recorded 90-degree temperatures for the first time in a century, Antarctica sea ice was measured at record low levels, and July was the hottest month since records-keeping started in 1880,

It all casts doubt on EPA’s purpose, and first became obnoxiously obvious a year ago, when the administration cut official estimates of the financial consequences of climate change. Instead of about $50 in economic damage from each ton of carbon dioxide (the previous EPA’s estimate), the administration said it would be between $1 and $7. New York Times journalist Brad Plumer explained that Trump’s EPA is confining its analysis to the country, not the planet, AND deemphasizing the impact on future generations.

There’s much more:

* Last year, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt resigned after questions about his spending and apparent ethics violations;

* in June, four former EPA Administrators (Democrats and Republicans) criticized Trump and his EPA. Gina McCarthy (Obama’s EPA chief), William Reilly (from the George H.W. Bush administration), Lee Thomas (Ronald Reagan’s head of the EPA), and Christine Todd Whitman (George W. Bush’s EPA Administrator) told a House Energy and Commerce hearing they’re alarmed by Trump’s EPA’s direction. “EPA is supposed to pay attention to the economic benefit of its regulations, but the environment and health come first,” Reilly testified;

* also in June, a report by State Department analyst Rod Schoonover was blocked by the White House from a House Intelligence Committee hearing. His 12-page statement detailed how greenhouse-gas emissions raise global temperatures and acidify oceans, and contribute to storms’ frequencies and intensities;

* the EPA in May changed the way it calculates how many people could die from pollution. “The Trump administration analyzed the cost of replacing the 2015 Clean Power Plan with a new plan that lightens restrictions on the coal industry,” reported Rolling Stone newsman Ryan Bort. “The [proposed] Affordable Clean Energy could result in up to 1,400 deaths per year by 2030 [but] it will not include this death estimate. The administration is using a ‘new analytical model’ based on the false idea that there are no public-health benefits to making the air any cleaner than what federal law requires”;

* current EPA administrator Andrew Wheeler – a former lobbyist for the Murray Energy coal company, this summer announced the deregulation of rules controlling coal pollution, letting states exempt plants from doing anything; and

* EPA Assistant Administrator Bill Wehrum, the Washington attorney who represented fossil-fuel interests, resigned in June amid a Congressional inquiry about him improperly helping former industry clients.

Maybe it will take states to help. Illinois is one of 18 states where previous targets for decreasing CO2 emissions have been achieved.

“State legislatures across the country during 2018 accepted the reality and energy consequences of closing coal and nuclear power plants and the desire by many to transition to ‘green’ energy sources,” reported the Boston-based Nixon Peabody law firm, which specializes in government relations and regulatory issues.

Illinois officials are backing away from coal. For instance, in June the Pollution Control Board unanimously proposed changes that, if approved, decrease caps, require the reduction of at least 2,000 megawatts of electric generation by coal-fired electric generating units this year; and require Illinois’ EPA to reduce the annual mass caps if some operators retire any units before the effective date of this rule.

Despite such steps, the White House and its industry bootlickers make protection difficult – and illogical

Howard Learner, director of Chicago’s Environmental Law and Policy Center, told Chicago Tribune reporter Michael Hawthorne that Trump’s attempts to bail out fossil-fuel corporations is like “subsidizing landline telephones while the cellular market grows bigger.”

Except that the United States is Earth’s second-biggest polluter, and pollution and climate change are far more harmful than phones.

Yes, humanity may be endangered.

Decades after Pullman, ‘general strikes’ could return

Bill Knight column for 8-15, 16 or 17, 2019

This summer 125 years ago, about 1,000 troops moved from Fort Sheridan in Chicago to the company town of Pullman on the city’s southeast side to enforce a court ruling to stop a nationwide strike tied to that company because it interfered with the U.S. mail.

In the following weeks, soldiers, company thugs and scabs eventually got trains going again, and then the government arrested, tried, convicted and imprisoned Eugene Debs of the American Railway Union (ARU) and others for “ordering, directing, aiding, assisting, or abetting” the work stoppage, now remembered as the Great Pullman Strike.

The month-long fight was preceded by weeks of organizing and became the country’s largest general strike and a significant demonstration of union strength, involving up to 250,000 people in dozens of states.

Besides Pullman workers, its had workers from many companies and communities ensuring that railroads west of Detroit were halted since strikers either refused to touch Pullman’s cars or just uncoupled them from trains, stranding passengers and leading to increased food prices and shortages of resources for factories, power plants and other businesses.

Today, the idea of such a sympathy strike is gaining traction.

“Look at how unions banded together during the Pullman Strike,” said Association of Flight Attendants president Sara Nelson. “The president of the Chicago Federation of Labor said at the time. ‘We all feel that in fighting any battle against the Pullman Company, we’re aiming at the very head and front of monopoly and plutocracy.’

“This is again a time when people have a growing consciousness of the ruling class and those with an insatiable need for more money, power and control,” Nelson added. “Working people are just now understanding the power they have when they stand together and claim our share of the profits we create.”

In the “Gilded Age,” from the 1870s to the turn of the 20^th century, industrialists made enormous profits and dominated the labor force (and politicians). It was a time of economic chaos, too, with frequent crashes, and in 1893 the country fell into a depression. But tycoon George Pullman – who amassed great wealth by monopolizing fancy train cars for the rich – maintained stockholder dividends by slashing workers’ pay but not cutting their rents. (Five years earlier, Pullman bought thousands of marginal acres by Lake Calumet and built his factories and also an industrial version of a coal camp, with hundreds of houses rented to many of his 10,000 workers, along with company stores, a school and other features of a “company town” where he was landlord as well as boss.)

It was illegal to unionize then, but dozens of workers organized into a committee to ask that wages be restored and rents reduced. Pullman refused, and on May 12, 1894, thousands of Pullman workers walked off the job. Debs’ emerging ARU starting helping, having won the Great Northern Railroad strike the year before.

“The forces of labor must unite,” Debs told the ARU convention that June 12. “The dividing lines must grow dimmer day by day until they become imperceptible, and then labor’s hosts, marshaled under one conquering banner, shall march together, vote together, and fight together until workingmen shall receive and enjoy all their fruits of their toil.”

The ARU voted to boycott Pullman cars, and two weeks later the sympathy strike officially began on June 26, lasting until armed troops, police and National Guardsmen confronted unarmed strikers, provoking riots and attacking workers. Train cars were destroyed; more than 20 strikers or supporters were killed.

After the strike ended that Aug. 2, President Grover Cleveland named a committee to determine the strike’s causes. Its report blamed Pullman.

Most sympathy strikes and union boycotts are now prohibited by law, so they’re rare. However, the flight attendants union’s threat of such a walkout during Trump’s government shutdown, and recent teachers strikes from coast to coast, show that mass solidarity can still be powerful. Nelson said her call for a general strike had an effect in January. Some air traffic controllers called in sick, Nelson publicly warned that flight attendants were mobilizing, and that day Trump backed down and reopened government.

“No one knew what a general strike was,” Nelson said, “but it scared the p*** out of them.”

In 2019, a large-scale sympathy strike may not be imminent, but Nelson thinks one is possible again.

“We’re not quite there yet,” Nelson said at a commemoration of the Pullman strike, “but when I called for a general strike during the government shutdown, I absolutely expected people to say, ‘You’re crazy, lady. You can’t do that!’ Instead, what I got was, ‘What are we waiting for? Yeah, let’s go!’ ”