David Coleman’s theme is declared in his subtitle, to which he brings credentials as a produced screenwriter who knows about bipolar disorder from the inside. He argues for what he calls ‘bipolar cinema’ – that body of film work which portrays the disorder in its on-screen characters, or is created by people who experience it. He argues that bipolarity enhances the perspectives of these film-makers and therefore the work they produce: and further still, that many film-makers effectively use their work as a kind of therapy.
He argues his case with a decade-by-decade survey of cinema from its very beginnings to 2012’s Silver Linings Playbook, picking out in detail many cases of films and film-makers to demonstrate his central theses. There is clearly something in this, and some of his examples, such as Charlie Chaplin, provide strong backing to his argument. But he undermines his position by overstating it, in prose which is by turns breathless or overwrought and which uses the near-sneering term ‘neurotypicals’ to describe those who do not have bipolar disorder.
Although Coleman pays lip service to the existence of other mental disorders, he repeatedly falls back to the implied view that all mental disorder is manic depression and any portrayal of mental instability or distress in movies is a portrayal of bipolar disorder. He goes further: any film made by someone with bipolar disorder – whether it is about mental disorder or not – is part of ‘bipolar cinema’ which ‘can be argued to include every slasher film ever made, as well as nearly every film noir, war movie, superhero film and other genre variants in which psychopathologies are examined (however inaccurately)’. That is a lot of movies.
A single case in point: he includes in the canon of bipolar cinema the 1962 adaptation of Scott Fitzgerald’s semi-autobiographical classic novel Tender is the Night. But Fitzgerald, like his protagonist Dick Diver, was an alcoholic, and his wife Zelda, like his heroine Nicole, had schizophrenia.
Coleman also risks alienating his fellow screenwriters when he asks: ‘if a director or actor is bipolar should every film or performance therefore be included [in the filmography of bipolar cinema]?’ The implication is that either all the output of writers with bipolar disorder is so classified, and they are therefore defined by their condition in a way other film-makers are not, or they are the anonymous surrogates who first bring films to life but whose progeny are immediately adopted by others.
By overstating his case, Coleman does himself and his subject a disservice, because the meat of the book is a well-researched resource about films portraying – or made by – those with mental disorder. Interested readers are advised to buy it for that meat, even if they do not swallow whole the message.
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