This is from a New York Times artcle written it seems by a shrink or pdoc.. the
stuff they never tell us!
The adult David of the film is a strange, beguiling man. As a psychiatrist, I
try to fit him into the analytic flow charts and diagnose him into
comprehensibility. But he doesn't fit anywhere. His speech is driven, loose,
clanging, childishly volatile. His moods and emotions are unpredictable and
often inappropriate; his social approach is indiscriminate and puerile. I wonder
about too much electroconvulsive therapy, or too many major tranquilizers for
too many years, leaving him with pressured speech patterns and agitated, jumping
gait and posture.
November 17, 1996
Where Creativity Ventures, Must Madness Follow?
HOWEVER MUCH PRODIGIOUS talent may fascinate us, it is not universally welcomed
by those endowed with it. As a performing musician for 30 years and a child
psychiatrist for 20, I have had the privilege of watching the growth and
development of dozens of children with such talent in the performing arts. Few
are unequivocally thrilled with the power and drive to create and perfect their
talent.
Certainly, parents, teachers, coaches and agents can whip such talent into a
frenzy, but the fire within burns brilliantly on its own. Once these youngsters
have tasted a moment or two of pure artistic expression of their own making, it
is hard to keep them down on the farm. And that is where the trouble begins, as
well as the pearl it burnishes. The desire to find that feeling, sense, buzz or
flow again and again can feel like a privileged pilgrimage or a horrific
obligation.
''Hardly anybody else will ever get it,'' a 14-year-old prize winner once said
about why he practices until his fingers bleed despite having been told to slow
down. ''Yeah, I blame my teacher, but I think it's really me. I know how good
this can be, but I drive myself nuts trying to be perfect every time.'' Such is
the fate of so many of the young lions of the keyboard (or oboe or violin or
whatever).
Is the duality of madness and creativity, therefore, just one more esthetic
maxim? Must you be a bit crazy to be great? The Australian film maker Scott
Hicks examines this presumption in ''Shine,'' which opens on Friday in the wake
of considerable acclaim when it was shown at the Sundance Film Festival in
January. The movie dramatizes portions of the real life of David Helfgott, a
prodigiously talented Australian pianist who spent a decade in obscurity because
of mental illness as a young adult only to return to performance decades later.
The story is so remarkable and improbable that it could only be true, and
therein lies its strongest seduction.
David, as portrayed in the film (by Alex Rafalowicz as a child, Noah Taylor as a
young man and Geoffrey Rush as an adult), is one of four musical children born
to Polish-Jewish refugee parents who escaped the Holocaust, though most of their
own families evidently did not. His exceptional talent is developed by his
father, Peter (Armin Mueller-Stahl), whose appreciation of David's gift comes
accompanied by several caveats: ''Music will never let you down. . . . I will
always be there, forever and ever. . . . No one will ever love you like me. . .
.. Life is cruel.''
We already sense that we are being drawn yet again into the tortured-genius
stereotype as we see Peter alternately torment and adore David. We cheer for the
loving dad to prevail. He allows David his first autonomy in studying outside
the family, with a teacher who seems to appreciate both the scope of David's
talent and the father's toxic ambivalence about letting his son follow his own
star. But Peter's lacerating fears of separation prevail. He tries to protect
his family's (and David's?) integrity, as he sees it, by railing against his
son's acceptance of an invitation to study in America at 14.
A friendship develops with a famous older writer, Katharine Prichard (Googie
Withers), who supports David's increasing discipline and maturing passion in his
music. She encourages him, at 19, to accept a scholarship to the Royal College
of Music in London, and with her encouragement he defies his father and leaves.
There David who has always been a bit odd, finds a talented and equally odd
professor (John Gielgud) who joins him in the pursuit of Rachmaninoff's Third
Piano Concerto. This monumentally difficult piece was coveted by his father but
shunned by David's first teacher as ''too dangerous'' for his young talent. In
the movie's turning point, David learns of Katharine's death and lurches toward
the ''Rach 3''; he performs it beyond his strength and collapses into early
stages of what appears to be catatonic illness.
SOMEHOW HE STAGGERS home to Australia, where he deteriorates into a decade of
serious mental illness (diagnosed as schizoaffective disorder by Mr. Helfgott's
real-life psychiatrist, though not in the film). He is presumably treated with a
variety of aggressive psychiatric procedures in a desperate attempt to preserve
his shattered mind. The clinical decision is made to censure his piano playing,
probably on the theory that to play would set back the therapeutic regime,
triggering traumatic memories or associations.
A series of chance musical encounters with the outside world, however, convinces
David that it is ''safe'' to return to the keyboard. He finds his way out of the
nether world of institutional life with the aid of his music. It does not let
him down. He meets Gillian the astrologer (Lynn Redgrave), who sees his soul,
refuses to patronize him or his illness, lovingly demands that he behave and
make music, and eventually marries him. David has one reconciling meeting with
his father, who dies shortly thereafter. We sense a great relief in David and in
the film after Peter's passing, but the reasons are far from simple. In fact,
for good and ill, no one had loved David as his father had.
The adult David of the film is a strange, beguiling man. As a psychiatrist, I
try to fit him into the analytic flow charts and diagnose him into
comprehensibility. But he doesn't fit anywhere. His speech is driven, loose,
clanging, childishly volatile. His moods and emotions are unpredictable and
often inappropriate; his social approach is indiscriminate and puerile. I wonder
about too much electroconvulsive therapy, or too many major tranquilizers for
too many years, leaving him with pressured speech patterns and agitated, jumping
gait and posture.
Yet at least as he appears on screen, he is witty, even charming. His
relationships are rich and devoted, his intentions generous. These are not the
hallmarks of a hopelessly fragmented self. The blunted emotions of
schizoaffective illness are completely belied by the relentless passion, the
vitality, even the humor of his piano playing. So if diagnosis is elusive, can
stereotype be far behind? It is here that Mr. Hicks, the director, invites us to
start thinking about the tortured genius as a tortured metaphor.
Certainly there is no shortage of tragedy in the lives of many great composers,
playwrights and other artists. But it is far from universal, and only cynics
would suggest that it is an essential navigational aid to finding the muse. Mr.
Hicks offers us the Holocaust-surviving father, unwittingly imposing his tragic
suffering on the next generation, smashing his son's ''instrument'' as his
father had smashed his years before. In his desperate drive to keep his family
united, he damages his son's health and art. Have the sins of the father been
visited upon the sons, and if so, is that sufficient explanation?
The real-life David Helfgott was interviewed recently on the Australian
television program ''Witness,'' which suggested instead that the sheer weight of
his talent ''spilled over into mental illness.'' This certainly fits an enduring
stereotype, one that those who do not have prodigious talent hold with regard to
those who do. But those of us with an interest in the medical problems of
performing artists have been looking into this supposition for some time and
find that it is simply not borne out.
True, performers seek psychological and psychiatric support at rates slightly
higher than lawyers or business folk. But they are quite an insightful group to
begin with, and they show a special interest in figuring out the business of
their emotions, their conflicts and their art. In addition, being emotionally
attuned and aware is considered an asset in the performing arts. Ultimately,
their rates of mental illness are no higher than those of other professional
groups.
So for every Mozart or Rachmaninoff, there are many more highly gifted
performers or composers who do not totter on the brink of decomposition in
service of their art. That is not to say that the demands of lasting creativity
are not punishing and rigorous. But they are not in and of themselves
pathogenic. Music and madness are hardly universal bedfellows.
Still, stereotypes endure for some reason. If we set aside the simplistic notion
that Mr. Helfgott was pathologically traumatized by his father and that his
genius may have predisposed him to suffer in a peculiarly musical way, how are
we enlightened? What made his Rach 3 petrify? Why could he ''not hear the music
for a while,'' as his psychiatrist reported on the Australian television
program? Even Beethoven's deafness did not rob him of the ability to ''hear''
his music internally. What does Mr. Hicks want us to see?
Perhaps the movie's Peter should be recast as a metaphor for the tyranny of our
expectations and the resulting ''abuse'' we heap on the talented and the
geniuses among us. Why do they make us uncomfortable? Why are they hard for us
to educate, befriend, support, reimburse and admire, however easy they may be to
exploit? So many of them, even as children, speak of being alone with their
gift, uncertain what to do with it.
Simply put, they intimidate many of us with their single-minded passion and
devotion. Our relative sloth and shallow sensibilities suffer mightily by
comparison. So we keep our distance or, worse, encapsulate them in a stereotype,
where we can emulate them instead of relate to them.
Not satisfied with distancing, we often seek to drive the talented and
courageous among us to precocious deeds. It is as if we feel better driving them
out in front of us, where we can see them better. They seem different anyway.
The younger, the faster, the sooner, the better. Sign the contract; cut the CD;
hire the agent; leave school; enter every competition. Nowhere is this mechanism
more destructively applied than in the lives of children. The death of a
delightful pre-teen-age brunette in her single-engine plane might seem a
grotesque comparison to the young Mr. Helfgott's near-frantic push to do the
Rach 3, but the results were equally shattering.
In ''Shine,'' the psychological train wreck that occurred in David's mind was an
event born of Promethean conflict. David sought to give this monumental gift to
his father at the very time when he had managed to flee Peter to save his life
and his music. Forgiveness, victory, redemption and a transcendent performance
of the ''war'' concerto may have been too much to ask of this one mind and body
all in the same instant. The resulting split saved the organism but changed him
forever.
David's return to ''us'' in the film seems almost too facile. But some of the
chronic forms of mental illness that are variously represented in David's
symptoms do ''burn out'' to an extent over time. I found myself wondering what
would have happened to David had he had lacked prodigious talent and thus been
less ''attractive'' to his rescuers. And what might have befallen him had he not
had time to recover to the extent that he did because of health-care reform or
other forces.
FOR ALL THE INTENSITY generated by the film's characters, however, nothing
endures in my mind as vividly as the score. The score of this film, with
selections performed on the soundtrack by the real David Helfgott, is not simply
music. It is its tissue. While other images and symbols serve to keep us
informed, oriented and visually gratified, the score sustains us spiritually
through an intensity that alternately soothes and scarifies.
Ultimately, the film does not so much affirm the stereotypic duality of madness
and creativity as remind us that how one is treated while mad is what matters
most. Katharine, the professor, David's friends and, eventually, Gillian, his
wife, never treated him as defective, and they were his true healers. Still, he
started odd, suffered much, stayed odd and created incredible, transporting
music with his hands, mind and soul.
What a loss had we been unable to find a place for him among us. This film
reminds us that we know how to do this if only we will.
Kyle Pruett is performing tenor and a clinical professor of child psychiatry at
the Yale University School of Medicine. <br />BYL>By KYLE PRUETT
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections
XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Back to Top
The truth about drugs and ECT 
Linear Mode
