Thinking About Insanity Via Jean Seberg, Lilith and Shirley Jackson

Kristen Stewart as Jean Seberg

(Spoiler alert: this post contains spoilers for the 1964 film, Lilith and for the Shirley Jackson novel Hangsaman.)

Insanity yesterday. I watched a film called Lilith (1964) about a man named Vincent (Warren Beatty) working at a sanitarium who falls in love with a patient (Jean Seberg) named Lilith. Peter Fonda plays a patient who is also in love with the title character. I watched Lilith because I’ve been going through a mini obsession with Jean Seberg, inspired by the new biopic about her called Seberg, starring Kristen Stewart. I saw Seberg on Saturday.

It can be argued that Ms. Seberg herself was driven to severe emotional distress by the harassment of the FBI, at the time a nefarious organization. Director J. Edgar Hoover and the bureau did not take kindly to Ms. Seberg rallying to the causes espoused by the Black Panthers. They also bristled at the fact that she donated sizable amounts of money to the Panthers. I suppose saying she had emotional issues is an understatement inasmuch as she was driven to suicide.

In 1970 as part of their Cointelpro, the FBI spread the false rumor that Seberg (who was married to French writer and director, Romain Gary) was pregnant with the child of a black activist. The FBI's stated goal was an unspecified "neutralization" of Seberg with a subsidiary objective of causing her "embarrassment and...to cheapen her image with the public", while taking the "usual precautions to avoid identification of the Bureau.” The rumor went — in today’s parlance —viral. The pregnancy story eventually reached Newsweek magazine and so upset Ms. Seberg that she went into premature labor which, two days later, resulted in the death of the infant. Seberg held an open casket funeral for the dead baby girl to show the world that the child was not black. She won a defamation suit against Newsweek. But emotionally the damage was done to Ms. Seberg, as evidenced by repeated suicide attempts, many of which were on the anniversary of the dead child’s birth. Seberg eventually successfully committed suicide at age 40.

Seberg the film does not live up to its powerful story nor to the excellent performance by Kristen Stewart. In Seberg Ms. Stewart proves again that she is one of our finest acting talents as she did in Clouds of Sils Maria (2014), Personal Shopper (2016) and Certain Women (2016). One wishes this particular film had been in the hands of a more accomplished director.

I also thought about insanity yesterday when I finished reading a novel by Shirley Jackson called Hangsaman about a 17 year old girl named Natalie. The book covers the time shortly before Natalie goes off to college and her first few months at school. She suffers from mental illness but it is different. She is not tortured by demons so much as she entertains them to the point where they assume control. Jackson is a brilliant writer and the book is captivating in part because it is so easy to see the world through Natalie’s eyes. Natalie is smart, precocious and has a certain charm. I found myself lulled into Natalie’s world and her vision and realized I was not distinguishing between Natalie’s reality and fantasy. This is an excellent metaphor for mental illness as there is such a fine line between sanity and insanity and it can be so easy to step across it. Shirley Jackson was a grand master at creating simple, mundane stories that were still somehow engaging and even enthralling, where banality gave way to the mysteries of the human mind. The ordinary could suddenly become macabre or frightening or fascinating. Stories could glide ever so subtly from routine depictions of everyday life into dramatic episodes of a world flipped on its head. Such is the case with Hangsaman.

The real Jean Seberg

Like Natalie, Lilith is engaging and interesting, not to mention beautiful (she’s played by Jean Seberg, so, of course). But there are signs that all is not right with Lilith (not the least of which is her being a patient in mental hospital). Unfortunately the story focuses more on Vincent. He is an earnest young man but it is unclear what his motivation is to take up this new line of work after his release from the army. He says he wants to help but all we see of him is a growing obsession with Lilith. It is also not entirely clear why he develops mental problems of his own. We are left to guess at this as well as why the film slows to a snail’s pace in its second half and what the purpose was of a long, uninteresting scene in which Vincent visits an old girlfriend and her husband (Gene Hackman). (Why on earth was the husband yelling at his wife for coffee while drinking beer? Why did we need to know that he was about to head off to a meeting that sounded like it could have been a version of the White Citizen’s Council? Why was he ever introduced in the first place? And what significance was there in Vincent’s visit, especially considering he hardly said a word while there?) Unfortunately much of Lilith’s mysteries derive from the strange choices made by screenwriter/director Robert Rossen.

Lilith is a tragedy and it is made so by the actions of the supposedly sane Vincent. It is his actions that drive a young man to suicide and it is that suicide that sends Lilith into a state of catatonia at the end. And it is all this that causes Vincent to go from caretaker to would-be patient. It was the supposedly sane and sober FBI that drove Jean Seberg to serious emotional turmoil. And how much of Natalie’s troubled state in Hangsaman can be placed on the shoulders of her imperious and domineering father? Insanity is not created in a vacuum. While there are physiological issues that often contribute to mental illness, there are also the actions of the supposedly sane (see, Trump, Donald) that create in others anything from mild emotional distress to outright insanity.

(Question: if a person who is generally acknowledged as being a sane, respectable citizen sexually abuses a child and that child suffers from PTSD, can we/should we acknowledge that the perpetrator himself suffers from a mental illness? To put it bluntly: don't you have to be crazy to do things to a person that will drive them crazy?)

It is arguable that Jean Seberg was emotionally fragile and if it hadn't been for the actions of the FBI she would have eventually developed emotional illness from other causes. Maybe Natalie from Hangsaman would have lapsed into fantasy even had her father been more loving and kind. Lilith was already mentally unstable enough to be institutionalized when Vincent came along -- although the roots of her psychosis could be found in her brother's suicide. For many of us all it takes is a push. I often wonder how different my life would have been if my mother had not been a paranoid schizophrenic who emotionally abused me. Would I still have severe panic attacks and depression? Likely not.

As the story of Jean Seberg shows, we are all vulnerable.