The Dark Mirror Psychiatry and Film Noir [Hardcover]

Marlisa Santos The Dark Mirror: Psychiatry and Film Noir is a significant addition to the body of work on film noir. Drawing together the forms often unremarked fascination with psychiatrists, psychoanalysis, asylums, and insanity, Santos builds on previous scholarship to help explain why the noir worlds often mannered depictions of the real, the everyday, and the conscious mind so consistentlyand disconcertinglyslip into the imagery of dreams, the abnormal, and the unconscious.Dark Mirror provides a well-researched, convincing and necessary return to a topic that much recent noir scholarship has repressed: the inextricable relation between film noir and psychiatry in all its forms. Marlisa Santos breadth of knowledge about classic noir is staggering and her analyses of individual filmsranging from the celebrated to the truly obscureilluminate film noir as a veritable catalog of psychopathology. Delusion, anxiety, hysteria, paranoia, memory loss, perversion. . .without these, there is no noir.The Dark Mirror explores the richness of psychiatric imagery in film noir and how the popularization of psychoanalysis in the U.S. during the 1940s and 1950s influenced film noir as a whole. Santos examines many little-known films and unearths surprising discoveries about the psychological underpinnings of noir.The Dark Mirror: Psychiatry and Film Noir probes the meanings behind the depiction of psychiatry and psychological illness in film noir, and how these depictions contribute to an overall understanding about the noir cycle itself. In this study, Marlisa Santos examines the role that the popularization of psychoanalysis in the 1940s and 1950s, beginning with the use of psychoanalytic techniques to treat World War II soldiers, had on writers and filmmakers of noir. This popularization had a lasting effect on American culture, especially as ideas such as introspection and a morally neutral universe became status quo, and thereby became reflected in the noir seriesl&