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Movie Crazy: Insanity and the Cinema, 1900–1930

On 23 March, 1914, a headline in the Los Angeles Times described a tragedy from the day before: “Suicide: Bridal Gown Death Shroud.”1 The story explained how, “dressed in her bridal gown” and with her engagement having just been broken off, Mary Horvas, recently emigrated from Bohemia, “turned on the gas in her room [and] lay down on her bed.” The headline and the broad outline of the death invoke Victorian images of Miss Havisham, living for years in her wedding dress after having been jilted at the altar in Great Expectations, or perhaps the more lurid narrative of a late-nineteenth century theatrical melodrama. But the details seem far more modern, with a mix of psychiatric practice and leisure technologies. The young woman’s fiancé apparently had called off the wedding when he learned that Mary had spent two years in an “insane hospital” in Vienna. Then, Mary gave him back her engagement ring “on the street, after they had visited a nickelodeon,” where a situation in a movie mirroring their own “seemed to have affected the girl strongly.” The article made no further mention of the film, but the implication was clear; the movie that Mary watched had a significant impact on her decision to commit suicide. Here we have an installment in one of the important popular discussions about the movies from the beginning of cinema to at least the mid-1930’s. Of all mass media, the movies possessed a particular power to coerce the unstable viewer into suicide, murder, or other crimes. At least, the discussion played out this way in one of the more important mass media of the period, the urban daily newspaper. In stories that combined the motion picture and mental instability, newspapers argued that the cinema exposed viewers to new dangers, dangers difficult to avoid because of the suddenness of the effects of movies.2 We might be tempted to see this as further indication of the link between cinema and modernity.3 In what simply could be a felicitous coincidence, the stories linking movies with a very broadly defined sense of insanity—at least in the newspapers that I consulted—seem to begin at around the same time that Sigmund Freud came to America for his lecture series in 1909. Those lectures, and the 1913 publication of an English translation of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, certainly helped facilitate a popular American interest in psychoanalysis, and may have contributed to perceptions of the psychological impact of visual media; Freud himself, of course, in the Interpretation of Dreams, used photographic metaphors to explain the workings of dreams and the unconscious.4 And an American interest in the melodrama of insanity (and the insane asylum), as narrativized in urban newspapers, can be traced at least to the latter part of the 19th century. In just one example, Nellie Bly’s 1887 exposé series for the New York World, “Ten Days in a Mad-House,” in which Bly went undercover as an asylum inmate to report on conditions at the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island, became a newspaper sensation.5