I won’t say what made me think of this topic (except to say that it doesn’t involve me or anyone I’m close to), but I was just thinking: what are the best movies and books about people losing their minds? There’s various Poe short stories, John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samara, what else? I don’t mean stuff like Fight Club or I Am The Cheese, I mean stuff where the narrator or protagonist is not obviously insane at the beginning but is by the end. Seems like it should be a very rich genre but I’m not able to think of that many examples.
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dmsilev
A large swath of Lovecraft’s stories ended with the protagonist or narrator going completely insane after what they witnessed or experienced.
Edit: Taking “losing their mind” very literally, Flowers For Algernon.
khead
The Caine Mutiny
3am
Sirens of Titan by Vonnegut sort of fits the criteria.
zhena gogolia
Well, Crime and Punishment sort of goes in the opposite direction.
zhena gogolia
@khead:
obligatory The Mess Boys Ate the Strawberries
Wakeshift
What About Bob?
Not Bob, though… it’s Dr. Marvin (Dreyfuss) you watch lose it.
Love this movie
A Ghost to Most
A Beautiful Mind
Mike J
Art of the Deal?
khead
@zhena gogolia:
I proved beyond a shadow of a doubt…..with geometric logic….
Love the ending too.
germy
Videodrome? Is the whole movie the hallucination of the main character as he goes insane from watching the transmission?
The Tenant shows a man slowly losing his grip in the apartment where a woman killed herself.
Sarah in Brooklyn
He’s Knew she Was Right by Trollope. Chilling depiction of madness and its effects.
Baud
One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, if you mean literally losing your mind.
germy
@zhena gogolia: How about The Double ?
Another haunting novel is Notes From Underground (although he begins the novel rather unhinged)
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Mike J:
I can see why being around you might drive folk to drink.
(Actually that was pretty funny.)
khead
Sunset Boulevard
zhena gogolia
@germy:
Again, they start out pretty crazy, don’t they?
germy
Lots of Poe short stories.
And Poe himself, I was taught, before more recent theories of his last days emerged.
John
In the Mouth of Madness. John Carpenter take on Lovecraftian universe.
zhena gogolia
Oh, how could I forget — “Diary of a Madman” by N. V. Gogol! The dates in his entries get more and more bizarre until the last one is printed upside down.
germy
Night Must Fall (the Albert Finney film).
He starts out crazy, but at the end of the film he can no longer keep up appearances. At the beginning of the film he’s charming and manipulative, at the end he’s a gibbering wreck.
Boudica
The Open Window by Saki although I think it was more terror than insanity.
Schlemazel
@khead:
The best part is the actual end. The part where Farrar invades the celebration and rips the mutineers apart verbally and challenges McMurry to a fist fight. “and I am just drunk enough you might stand a chance.” He proves that McMurry is a coward and a very little man.
sharl
On behalf of myself and The Racist Elf, gonna have to go with Reefer Madness here.
JPL
A tad different but similar is “The Bad Seed”. You know the outcome earlier, but that book/movie always stayed with me.
germy
The Aviator
Leonardo DiCaprio as Howard Hughes
Ang
Gaslight.
The Yellow Wallpaper.
Bonus points for both involving a husband intentionally fucking with his wife’s mind.
woodrowfan
Frozen. the trolls were all in Elsa’s mind…
JPL
@woodrowfan: How about Prince Charming being the evil villain.
SiubhanDuinne
@Mike J:
Win.
Emma Anne
The Shining
Snabby
The Ruling Class. Peter O’Toole is amazing as he descends from light madness to yikes…
Dingo
Donnie Darko
Yutsano
@germy: That does make me think of “Nightfall” by Asimov. The vast majority of the populace does go mad at the end. The fact that it’s cyclical is even more interesting.
sharl
As usual I didn’t recognize the lyrics in the post title – now, if you had used a line from English Beat’s Mirror In The Bathroom, I actually know THAT song – but a search for the line’s source drew me into an interesting labyrinth. The Rolling Stones used this line in their version of Stop Breaking Down, but I couldn’t figure out if Robert Johnson used it – or something close to it – in his 1937 original version. Apparently, later musicians who have covered this song have messed with the lyrics.
ETA: D’Oh! The very excerpt I blockquoted pretty much answers my question. Short term memory fail!
khead
@John:
So, this movie is worth my time? Because IIRC, the reviews were… bad. Loved “The Thing” and “Prince of Darkness” though.
FlipYrWhig
Don Quijote.
lollipopguild
@woodrowfan: Let it Go.
A Ghost to Most
As for music, Quadrophenia was a double album on the subject.
FlipYrWhig
@Ang: Yellow Wall-paper is a great suggestion. I love the way the ending is both deranged AND feminist. Per _The Madwoman in the Attic_, there are subversive women being locked up all over Victorian literature.
smintheus
When I read Conrad Aiken’s short story “Silent Snow, Secret Snow” aeons ago, I took it to be a description of the child’s descent into mental illness.
More obviously, Catcher in the Rye has a protagonist who is quickly slipping into insanity though that remains surprisingly murky until late in the novella.
chris
@Snabby: Second The Ruling Class!
Also, Repulsion. Saw it 35 years ago and still have clear images in my head.
FlipYrWhig
@A Ghost to Most: As is The Wall.
Stan
Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (Herman Melville)
John
@khead: It’s for Carpenter fans mainly really. Not bad but requires some knowledge of Lovecraft to make much sense. It’s been a really long time since I saw it, but I remember liking it. And I am also a fan of Prince of Darkness. That movie has possibly the most horrifying ending ever, in the non-gory, actually horrifying sense.
A Ghost to Not
@FlipYrWhig:
And many Counting Crows songs.
father pussbucket
Amadeus.
moonbat
Keeping with the Victorian feminist theme: Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick — Substance D mess you up
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov — although you might argue that the narrator was NEVER right in the head
FlipYrWhig
Lots of madwomen in Romantic poetry, too. Like Wordsworth’s “The Thorn” and William Cowper’s “Crazy Kate”:
There often wanders one whom better days
Saw better clad, in cloak of satin trimmed
With lace, and hat with splendid ribbon bound.
A serving-maid was she, and fell in love
With one who left her, went to sea, and died.
Her fancy followed him through foaming waves
To distant shores, and she would sit and weep
At what a sailor suffers; fancy too
(Delusive most where warmest wishes are)
Would oft anticipate his glad return
And dream of transports she was not to know.
She heard the doleful tidings of his death
And never smiled again. And now she roams
The dreary waste; there spends the livelong day,
And there, unless when Charity forbids,
The livelong night. A tattered apron hides,
Worn as a cloak, and hardly hides a gown
More tattered still; and both but ill conceal
A bosom heaved with never-ceasing sighs.
She begs an idle pin of all she meets,
And hoards them in her sleeve, but needful food,
Though pressed with hunger oft, or comelier clothes,
Though pinched with cold, asks never. Kate is crazed.
p.a.
Oskar in The Tin Drum? Was he ‘sane’ at the start?
The car dealer in Fargo. Huffman’s husband, blanking on name…
Patricia Kayden
@A Ghost to Most: That’s what came to my mind as well.
Perhaps also “Sunset Boulevard” although the protagonist appeared to always be delusional.
phantomist
Kurtz in The Heart of Darkness. “The horror! The horror!”
germy
I recall more than a few Bugs Bunny cartoons where his antagonists were reduced to insanity at the end.
Also, calling all Balloon-Juicers:
Have dirt that could impeach Trump? Larry Flynt will pay you $10 million.
FlipYrWhig
@FlipYrWhig: And how could I forget Charlotte Smith!
Sonnet: On Being Cautioned Against Walking on an Headland Overlooking the Sea, Because It Was Frequented by a Lunatic
J
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway.
St. Clair McKelway, The Edinburgh Caper.
Aleta
One kind of madness, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie; perhaps others by Jean Rhys.
varmintito
Michael Kohlhaas. A wronged man takes revenge to an insane extreme. He was the model for Coalhouse Walker, Jr. in Ragtime.
Patricia Kayden
@Wakeshift: That’s one of my favorite comedies. Never fails to make me double over in laughter.
John Cole
Memento?
sharl
I’ve been wracking my brains in regard to Doug’s original question, then I remembered the story arc from the TV show Wiseguy featuring guest stars Kevin Spacey and Joan Severance as brother-and-sister Mel and Susan Profitt. Their characters started out as kinda nuts, though they were highly functional wackos, with Susan Profitt slipping into complete madness toward the end after her brother’s death (at his request, she facilitated his suicide by overdose).
I hardly watch TV anymore, but I loved that series, and the way the stories were developed and acted.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@germy: Ya know, a statue of John Wayne is in front of the Larry Flynt Productions(LFP) headquarters building. It used to be the Great Western Savings building and Wayne did commercials for them.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@John Cole: I take it you made it to the market and got wet food, so Steve will let you live for another day.
RSA
The most obvious recent novel (and movie) is Lisa Genova’s
.
I’ve read a few modern novels where the protagonist or narrator seems to lose his mind, but the progression may instead by the reader’s understanding of the protagonist’s state of mind:
Dennis Lehane,
Stewart O’Nan,
and maybe Stanislaw Lem,
, though that’s a little iffy–it could be the planet.
germy
@J: Didn’t St. Clair McKelway have his own personal experience with madness?
germy
@?BillinGlendaleCA: I didn’t know that. I wonder if old Marion would approve.
RSA
Jesus. Sorry about screwing up my HTML. The system doesn’t allow me to correct my comment.
khead
Misery
Jeffro
How about the Stephen king short story where the doctor get stranded on a deserter island and ends up eating his own fingers ???
Doug!
@sharl:
I was quoting the Stones version
?BillinGlendaleCA
@germy: Here’s a picture of the statue, his family wanted it removed; it’s still there.
ETA: Another bit of trivia about Marion, he was a graduate of Glendale High School.
hitchhiker
Mosquito Coast, horrifying b/c the cray cray dad has his wife & kids as hostages to his deterioration. Harrison Ford, Helen Mirren, River Phoenix, Andre Gregory. Amazeballs film.
germy
@?BillinGlendaleCA: I never cared for him or his rotten opinions.
khead
@John:
Thanks! I wondered if critics just didn’t know what the hell was going on. Plus, I looked it up on RT and it has a 51% rating. Better than I expected given what I can remember from the reviews I saw “back in the day”. So I will check it out now. Also, very glad to find a “Prince of Darkness” fan. That movie scared the shit out of me when I was a kid.
ThresherK
<What if the bubonic plague was diagnosed during a World’s Fair?
This is one rendition of the theme, and others may not have the same ending.
Barbara
@Aleta: Wide Sargasso Sea — the “prequel” to Jane Eyre.
sharl
@Doug!: I figured that was the case, I was trying to see if that very same line has an earlier provenance. I strongly suspect it does not.
MaryRC
H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Rats in the Walls”. The narrator is already insane when he starts to describe the events that drove him mad, but because he seems so lucid at first, the reader doesn’t realize that he’s insane until the last 2 paragraphs.
dexwood
John Turturro as Barton Fink in the Coen Brothers film. He’s pretty nuts by the end.
CapedJA
I posted on Twitter, but I throw it here as well, “Falling Down”.
Shana
@Sarah in Brooklyn: Yeah Trollope! OMG The Pallisers are amazing about British politics and society. Everyone shoud read him, he’s amazing.
magurakurin
Citizen Kane?
ThresherK
@CapedJA: Michael Douglas was also primed for disaster in “The Game”.
Aleta
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest if forced excessive electroshock (or lobotomy–don’t think it was though) counts.
eta Baud already
Pamela
The Yellow Wallpaper
magurakurin
how about Treasure of the Sierra Madre?
Shana
@FlipYrWhig: Oooh. French Lieutenant’s Woman.
Hawes
Shutter Island was a good call, Insomnia.
Does dementia count? On Golden Pond
On the novel front, Despair by Nabokov
Another Scott
“12 Angry Men” just finished on one of our PBS stations. Great film.
Ed Begley as Juror #10 seems to have been channeling Donnie… :-/
Cheers,
Scott.
Ruviana
House of Leaves?
BretH
+1 for Shutter Island. Will not say more.
Another Scott
@A Ghost to Most: Great film.
Cheers,
Scott.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Another Scott: According to Olbermann, that was pretty much the way most of New York felt at the time.
BretH ok
Robin and Marian. Not mad in the normal sense but still…
Another Scott
Birdman seemed to have elements of insanity of the main character to it. Another neat film.
Cheers,
Scott.
ThresherK
@Aleta: If we’re going there, “The Plague Dogs”.
Aleta
The Mandarins (gf of protag)
surely some of Philip K Dick’s, though I can’t say which had characters that started out sane
smintheus
Dr. Strangelove.
khead
@Another Scott:
Check out Henry Fonda smiling in response to Joseph Sweeney right before the 2 minute mark of this clip. Just fantastic.
smintheus
Come to think of it, a lot of anti-war films with their “degenerate, sadistic old men”…most awesomely Paths of Glory and Catch 22.
donnah
Black Swan
germy
@khead:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96LgRmOF9_o
raven
How bout them Dawgs!!!
zhena gogolia
@sharl:
Me too. But I liked the Mister Sardonicus arc even better.
germy
@raven:
Here’s the new Mavis Staples track:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHRiiwRMpBk
Steve in the ATL
@raven: and Florida and Auburn lost!!
john bowman
Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
JR
Aguirre, Wrath of God.
Psych1
@Stan:
Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (Herman Melville)
This, more than any. Get the Kraked Ed. It shocks me how many supposedly educated/literate people have never taken the time to work through this. Best read, and reread, in a therapy group (There is great history for this). There is also a terrible movie best seen only after reading, not before.
Susan
The Conversation.
middlelee
The Conversation, starring Gene Hackman
Tenar Arha
Anybody mentioned The Snake Pit yet?
raven
@Steve in the ATL: I went to the “Get The Picture” tailgate. A bunch of 1980 UGA Law School grads, buncha wise guys!
khead
@Susan:
@middlelee:
Yeah, The Conversation is a good one. Finally watched it just this month.
joel hanes
2001 A Space Odysssey
raven
Apocalypse Now
joel hanes
Flowers for Algernon
joel hanes
Denethor, Steward of Gondor, in The Lord Of The Rings
danielx
Now I have to listen to Joan Osborne’s version of Stop Breaking Down to see which lyric version she likes. And find it; I swear I’ve heard it.
No Drought No More
Catch 22 is the only book that springs to my mind, the question being: Did Yossarian lose his mind when he decided to emulate Orr and row to Sweden in the final chapter? Or had he found it?
joel hanes
My analyst told me
That I was right out of my head
He said I need treatment
But I’m not that easily led —
He said : I am the type who is most inclined
When out of his sight to be out of my mind
And, he said I was nuts
No more if or ands or buts
jl
@zhena gogolia: the theme brings to mind a number of Gogol’s stories.
s
Roger Moore
@Aleta:
A Scanner Darkly would definitely qualify. I would also mention Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, which involves a major character deliberately courting madness.
cynthia ackerman
The Prisoner
King of Hearts
Seconds
Death in Venice
Paris, Texas
sharl
@zhena gogolia: Your Dr. Sardinicus reference rang a distant bell, but I was surprised at how difficult it was for me to find more information about it. Then again, it did air in 1990, so it’s been awhile.
Wikipedia refers to it as the Lynchboro/Seattle storyline. I remember being impressed with that story arc as well, but like I said earlier, I liked most of their story arcs.
The references I found reminded me that the Ken Wahl character had a breakdown at the end of that story arc, though I don’t recall that bit being very memorable as a plot development, or for its quality acting or whatever.
Jacel
“It Happened in Boston?” by Russell H. Greenan.
“The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop” by Robert Coover.
Read the first if you like painting. Read the second if you like baseball.
frosty
@john bowman: Great last line: “Somebody threw a dead dog after him down the ravine.”
lol chikinburd
Brazil?
jl
I read an interview of the author of American Psycho where he suggests that the protagonist is nuts by the time he starts his infamous murder and mayhem sprees, and they are hallucinations..
I can see 80s culture doing that to a person. I couldn’t get into the novel at all, so I have no clue whether the author, Bret Easton-Ellis (I better look it up), yeah, that’s the guy. I found the book’s portrait of the shallowness of 80s culture so much torture that I never made it to the sensational stuff.
RepubAnon
@MaryRC: “Dagon” by HP Lovecraft may also qualify.
jl
I think there is an O’Henry story about a man going mad looking for a lost lover in NYC. Can’t think of the name right now.
sharl
For fans of both H.P. Lovecraft and Patton Oswalt, in a recent podcast Oswalt related the story of his pilgrimage to Lovecraft’s burial site in a Providence RI cemetery. My summary won’t do it justice,* but on a dreary day he took a cab to the cemetery and couldn’t find Lovecraft’s gravestone on his own, so stopped to ask a woman apparently working as an attendant. Before he could get a word out, she asked him “you want that monster man?”
This was “years ago” as Oswalt related it, so only other Lovecraft nerds or Providence locals might know if the number of pilgrims to the grave site still merits a Lovecraft attendant. He didn’t have a long life, but he clearly had an impact.
*if you want to listen to it, start at just before the 33-minute mark here.
PIGL
@FlipYrWhig: I’d never read this before … it’s absolutely amazing. thank you.
Shantanu Saha
Every thing Charlie Kaufman ever wrote for the big screen.
Being John Malkovich
Adaptation
Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind
Anything I’m missing here?
(((CassandraLeo)))
Gravity’s Rainbow. It’s a difficult book to get into but the way Pynchon depicts the fragmentation of a particular character’s mind at the end is probably unlike anything else in English-language literature.
All the other choices I can think of have already been mentioned.
MaryRC
@RepubAnon: dmsilev was right, it seems that a lot of Lovecraft’s narrators went insane. I had never heard of “Dagon” but when I looked it up just now I found a site with (apparently) the text of all of Lovecraft’s short stories and started reading one at random called “The Thing on the Doorstep” and that narrator went mad too. Arkham Sanitarium must have been packed with these poor people.
Brooklyn Dodger
Turn of the Screw.
gocart mozart
The Shining
Jacob’s Ladder
Taxi Driver
Catch 22
The Matrix 2017 aka this ‘reality’ DougJ
gocart mozart
Fear Strikes Out, the Jimmy Pearsal Story
gocart mozart
Joe Versus the Volcano
Castaway*
* in the end it seems all you need is a shower, change of clothes and a shave and a haircut to get your sanity back.
JDM
“Who is Harry Kellerman and Why is He Saying These Terrible Things About Me”. Dustin Hoffman movie.
Scott S.
Very, very late to the party, but I’d recommend “The Drowning Girl” and “The Red Tree,” both by Caitlin R. Kiernan. Both are shades of horror, both about women with greatly tenuous holds on their sanity who try to stay sane and end up failing utterly. I know a writer friend who considers “The Drowning Girl” to be one of the best depictions of mental illness, and “The Red Tree” is weird and terrifying and often wildly “What the fuck did I just read” shocking.
There’s also “A Head Full of Ghosts” by Paul Tremblay, another horror novel, this time focusing on a family with a teen girl showing signs of mental illness, her father believing she’s possessed, a reality TV show that exploits their dysfunction, and the younger daughter who witnesses everything. The ending is still something I think about and worry over in my head.
And there’s also “Random Acts of Senseless Violence” by Jack Womack, a near-future sci-fi novel. It follows a girl and her family living in a society fraying to shreds, and we get to watch as her life goes straight to hell, as she loses everything, as she changes from a normal, happy teenager to an angry, murderous street rat, complete with a new personality and vocabulary. It’s one of my favorite books, and it’s absolutely heartbreaking and horrifying to read. (I read it for the first time during a week-long power outage just before Trump was inaugurated, which was the wrong damn time to read something about societal collapse.)
Tokyokie
The great roman noir author Jim Thompson specialized in unreliable, usually mentally unstable first-person narrators. But in A Hell of a Woman, the narrator goes completely schizo at the end, offering two different, yet equally horrifying endings in lines of type that alternate between Roman and italic. I found it so disturbing, I couldn’t read another Thompson novel for several years.
Frank McCormick
I have no mouth and I must scream!
sm*t cl*de
Would an autobiography count? AFAF
Stan
@Psych1: There is also a terrible movie best seen only after reading, not before
Yes, quite terrible, but i found the Glenn Branca orchestra reference fascinating!
Matt McIrvin
@MaryRC: Lots of early science fiction had characters who would go mad at the drop of a hat, if they saw anything slightly outside their experience. I assume they were getting it from writers like Poe and Lovecraft.
Johannes
@Sarah in Brooklyn: Brilliant in the slow, subtle way it shows Trevelyan’s decline into madness.
Johannes
@Snabby: outstanding move, though Jack, as you note, isn’t exactly sane at the beginning. Utterly chilling conclusion after a frothy, funny start.
Raven
Today is the Boolebark Dog Parade! 125 dogs registered and my bride has been off the hook with preparation. Lil Bit and Bodhi are going as Driving Miss Daisy and I get to push the cart that has been transformed into a car!!!
Zinsky
Doug – I always like to identify the song from which you get the title of your threads. In this case, it’s a lyric from the song, “Stop Breaking Down” off Exile on Main Street by the Rolling Stones. As far as novels where the characters start out normal and descend into madness, the first one that came to mind was Catcher in the Rye, which several people noted upthread. I would also mention Tim O’Brien’s challenging book, Into the Lake of the Woods, a great, underappreciated American novel.
Doug!
@Tokyokie:
I’ve never read Hell Of A Woman but I saw a great movie version of it in French years ago.
Doug!
@Zinsky:
Oh, yeah, Into The Lake Of The Woods is a good example. I read that years ago.
Sasha
“Bartleby the Scrivener”. Probably “Moby Dick”.
Also a personal favorite, “Santa Sangre”, one of Ebert’s Great Films.
Don
Brazil
mere mortal
Vampire’s Kiss (1988)
catatonia
Affliction, both the book and the movie. Regarding the latter, Nick Nolte was unforgettable.
Stalk-eyed Fly
Going After Cacciato
tjlabs
@Boudica: Excellent! That’s what I was going to suggest. And its got one of the best punch lines ever.
Citizen_X
Psycho. Yes, Norman is obviously koo-koo, but he passes for sane at first. As a matter of fact, as far as the original viewers were concerned, one of the main twists is that (SPOILERS!) the psycho is him, not his mom.
@Scott S.: Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower is perhaps a more hopeful take. Its teenage protagonist becomes the leader of a group trying to flee total social breakdown for safer regions. She’s heroic because she’s a visionary; she doesn’t want the group to merely survive, but to build a more stable, more just society. Very harrowing read, though.
ishkabibble
I Claudius and Claudius the God by Robert Graves. it’s a really fun example of a man going insane while writing his autobiography. As people have said above, “The Yellow Wallpaper” is wonderful and chilling. And I second He Knew He Was Right by Trollope–one of my favorite of his books, and a wonderful example of the slow progression of jealousy and insanity. Agatha Christie plays with insanity in Endless Night, and has a character undergo a mental break in Unfinished Portrait, (which is largely taken from her own life), written under her pseudonym Mary Westmacott. Of course, my favorite Westmacott, Absent in the Spring, is not really about going insane, but the opposite–a character getting a complete view of her own life and what people think of her, briefly, and then losing sight of it all again, so it is almost as creepy as if she were going insane.
Fred
“Repulsion”
No doubt someone must have already suggested this one but my gosh there are too many comments to read ‘em all. ?
agorabum
Breakfast of Champions; Vonnegut.