In Silver Linings Playbook, the menace is all in in the mind – it’s a film about mental illness. It is presumably for this reason that director David O. Russell has chosen to reproduce that shower scene in it – though, represented via a series of individual flashbacks, he’s added some more visceral cuts into it, as well as a middle-aged professor who’s having an affair with this Norman Bates’s wife.

The film follows Pat (Bradley Cooper), who is bipolar, and his quest to get his marriage back together after returning home from a psychiatric hospital. We learn that his most recent breakdown was precipitated on discovering his wife Nikki in the aforementioned shower with a colleague; he attacked the man, which brought him up against assault charges and eventually landed him in the institution. Back home at the beginning of the film, Pat wants to get Nikki, and his marriage, back – despite his continuing mood swings, refusal to take medication and restraining order.

Then he meets Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence), a young woman whose husband has recently died in traumatic circumstances. She is similarly Troubled (she’s been fired for sleeping with all her co-workers) and they hit it off, in a vague way. She agrees to take a letter to Nikki if Pat will partner her in a dance competition.

The inevitable happens.

If you listen to Hollywood, there are dance competitions happening in every small town, every three minutes, just waiting for someone to do some self-actualisation through dance – as in dance movie stalwarts such as Strictly Ballroom, Flashdance or, its British equivalent, the Arts Council-funded Billy Elliot. This one brings plenty of opportunities for personal development, which – though not so pronounced as the ur-dance movies – is actually why Pat agrees to do it: he wants to prove to Nikki that he has changed, and grown, since the shower incident. Cinematic history tells him this is the way to do it.

But nonetheless, in Silver Linings Playbook, development through dance is not really the point: the dancing pops up towards the second half of the film, and while the rehearsals do force the characters to spend a lot of time doing semi-erotic stuff together, it’s not the primary impetus behind their falling in love.

Indeed, if you accept that dance in golden-era Hollywood is usually implied sex¹, often in the context of romantic relationships between show-people who dance as part of their job (here, Fred Astaire tries to win Ann Miller back as his g/f by getting her to do the dance they perform on stage), you could say that Silver Linings is less about sex than it is about Feelings.

Feelings (that’s a capital F), are by contrast the preserve of the classic romcom, which – a true product of the Eighties – features extended, over-analytical examinations of the Self. It’s Hugh Grant and Woody Allen being neurotic and too self-aware; it’s realising you’re in love just in time to run down an aeroplane. It’s the power of the mind – its hopes, fears and wants – to overcome practical obstacles. And in Silver Linings Playbook, as I say, it’s all about the mind. It’s a romcom for the post-Hugh Grant generation, if you will.

Now, personally, I didn’t find the treatment of mental health as offensive as I know some did – David O. Russell has commented in interviews that he drew a lot from the experience of having a son with bipolar disorder, which does help. One thing that did bug me, though, was its pairing of a bipolar man with longstanding mental health issues with a hypersexual woman recovering from a traumatic bereavement. Pat’s problems are longstanding, but Tiffany’s troubles clearly have their origin in grief, and they happen to manifest themselves in a pattern of sexual behaviour that, as recounted, elicits visible salivation from her male companion. We might say, in fact, that in this film, there is Serious Mental Illness, and there is Sexy Mental Illness. That Pat’s initial crime puts him in the cinematic shoes of Norman Bates, whose murder is at root sexually motivated – though it is repeated here as a grotesque husband-on-lover attack – underscores this, though admittedly at one remove.

This is why the Psycho crib, for me, was a key moment – and partly because its appearance in the film is so downright weird. It parallels the dance competition trope as an interjection of popular film history, but I suppose it also draws together some of the film’s key themes: notably, though arguably ironically, psychosis (Hitchcock’s film played a major part in popularising the slang word psycho) and what you might very crudely call Hollywood ‘monster-cam’.

I suppose one reason for including the scene (something I spent a long time puzzling over) was that, by putting the audience in the eye-view of a man mid-breakdown unleashing his rage upon two people who happen to be naked (and one of them a woman) shows the terrible power of the mental threats the film explores: we see their vulnerability, and we are invited to consider the gender issues the attack brings to the surface. Within the context of the plot, it makes sense of Nikki’s need for a restraining order and perhaps even makes an ironic comment on the thigh-rubbing Hitchcock is widely accepted to have been doing throughout his own shower scene. It certainly makes you think back to the portrayal of mental illness in the deeply exploitative Psycho. In that sense, Silver Linings Playbook actually comes out reasonably well.

So, should you go and see it? I’d imagine if you were going to, you’ll have done so by now. But I think it’s worth seeing – despite those dodgy gender politics, it certainly makes you think.

1. Considerably less ‘implied’ in the 1980s, as with the eponymous moves of Dirty Dancing.

My taxidermy adventure

After reading about Amanda’s Autopsies taxidermy workshops on the fabulous Mookychick I signed up for the next one as quick as you could say “lifelong interest in stuffed animals”. Our victims: guinea pigs.

Me with Boudica G. Pig

The workshop was fascinating, absorbing, and not as gruesome as I had feared. Having been frozen and bashed about a bit, my subject (who I’ve since named Boudica) didn’t look anything like a live guinea pig when I met it, so its thingness made it surprisingly easy to cut into.

Although I’m a big fan of badly stuffed animals, from the famous Horniman Walrus to the facebook page du jour, following the workshop I have a newfound respect for the taxidermist’s art. Taking the skin off was reasonably straightforward, but my god it’s difficult to get the creature into the right shape.

But I was reasonably pleased with the result, and Boudica G. Pig proudly adorns my mantelpiece. At some point I need to get her a spear, helmet and tiny chariot but that’s a project for another day.

Women wield the scalpel

Interestingly, as well as the glamorous Amanda herself and her assistant on the day I’d estimate that the workshop participants were nearly all women. Taxidermy is clearly kinda fashionable at the moment, and although I can’t say it was at the top of my equality agenda I’m pleased that women are getting stuck in.

As noted on the brilliant website of academic Rachel Poliquin who has just written a book about taxidermy, there are a surprising number of stuffed animals finding their way into contemporary art. I first heard about Polly Morgan‘s work a few years ago, but there’s also Merel Bekking, Claire Morgan, and the incredibly disturbing work of Kate Clark.

There are even signs that the tired old TV trope of taxidermy as a hobby for creepy men is being eroded, with a friendly, sympathetic taxidermist as a central character in Dinner for Schmucks and even a sexy indie flick with a kooky girl taxidermist as the romantic lead.

Creepy cool

That said, no matter how cool it becomes I doubt taxidermy will ever stop being creepy altogether. Firstly because it makes you think of death. Stuffed animals act as a kind of hipster memento mori. Secondly because part of taxidermy’s appeal (particularly as part of an artwork) is its uncanny effect, the ambiguity of animate or inanimate, alive or dead. And finally because taxidermy is so firmly lodged in the symbolic language of horror, where it also takes on a fascinating gendered aspect.

One of the victims in Cabin In The Woods gets friendly with a stuffed wolf head. Image: MGM

As TV Tropes notes most haunted houses, villain lairs, and cabins in the wood contain a trophy deer head with antlers that cast eerie shadows, or a stuffed owl, wolf or bear with glinting eyes and gleaming teeth. Whether predator or prey these creatures provide a handy visual signal for danger to the audience (and occasionally the protagonist) and get them meditating on the theme of death.

Taxidermy and patriarchy

But there’s also a number of influential horror films that contain some form of human taxidermy as an especially unsettling treat, most of which draw some of their grisly inspiration from the sickening ‘trophies’ of real life serial killer Ed Gein.

In The Horror of Everyday Life: Taxidermy, Aesthetics, and Consumption in Horror Films Jeffrey Niesel argues that taxidermy in horror films is often used as a way to silence feminine subjectivity. He quotes from Jane Caputi’s book The Age of Sex Crime, in which she argues that sexual serial killings, far from being ‘deviant’, represent the logic of patriarchy taken to an especially brutal extreme:

Serial sexual murder is not some inexplicable explosion/epidemic of an extrinsic evil or the domain only of the mysterious psychopath. On the contrary, such murder is an eminently logical step in the procession of patriarchal values, needs, and rule of force.

For Niesel, “taxidermy represents the most literal expression of male violence, and reveals both the violence and the ultimate instability located at the core of a patriarchal system that relies on validation from passive feminine subjects.” He views taxidermy in Psycho, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Silence of the Lambs as an expression of the crisis of masculinity as Norman Bates, the Sawyer family and Buffalo Bill strive to possess women while silencing their subjectivity, turning them into objects. As Niesel observes, “a stuffed woman is the perfect woman because her male companion can make her say whatever he wants.”

“As harmless as one of these stuffed birds”

Norman Bates with one of his owls. Image: Paramount

I’ll share some of his thoughts on Psycho, because it’s my favourite, and because it features animal and human taxidermy, hooray! In Psycho the connection between women and “stuffed birds” is made pretty clear. Norman tells Marion that “you eat like a bird” and shortly afterwards describes his mother as being “as harmless as one of those stuffed birds”, a comparison ‘she’ herself makes later. He also tells Marion “I think only birds look well stuffed because they’re kind of passive to begin with.” As Niesel points out:

Birds are not really any more or less active or passive than other creatures, but his statement resonates throughout the film because it describes the way women are treated. Women are expected to be stuffed birds, and there is a constant tension involved in trying to enforce their “passivity.” Women pose a threat in the film because they might do something like steal $40,000 (as Marion does)

I particularly like Niesel’s reading of the moment when Lila Crane finally confronts the stuffed Mrs Bates: she is in fact confronting the full horror of violent suppression of female agency and subjectivity. She is facing herself. Well no wonder it always makes me jump.

Turning the tables

Applying Niesel’s analysis to one of my very favourite examples of taxidermy in popular culture, Roald Dahl’s short story The Landlady (published in 1959, a year before Psycho was released) gave me an insight into why it’s so incredibly effective. It’s not just the chill as you realise that the unnamed landlady is a serial killer with a penchant for human taxidermy, but her tremendous gender transgression in being so. She collects handsome young men, and wants the protagonist, Billy, as her latest possession. She even eyes him up in an objectifying gesture that will be familiar to most women on the planet:

“And it is such a pleasure, my dear, such a very great pleasure when now and again I open the door and I see someone standing there who is just exactly right.” She was halfway up the stairs, and she paused with one hand on the stair rail, turning her head and smiling down at him with pale lips. “Like you,” she added, and her blue eyes traveled slowly all the way down the length of Billy’s body, to his feet, and then up again.

Even though he can see she’s a bit unhinged Billy’s mistake is to assume that she is harmless (“there was no question about that”) because she is a middle-aged woman. He is not prepared for such a dramatic reversal in their gender roles, from predator to prey, from subject to object.