If you ever had any lay interest in human psychopathology outside the corrupt spectacle of media glamorisation and extensive exploitation, searching in vain for an entirely original yet scientific perspective on the phenomenon of evil — and the rise of the serial killer in 20th century collective nightmares, then Alex Gibney‘s Crazy, Not Insane (2020), on HBO, is the doc you’ve been looking for.
Stuck in the manic shuffle of pandemic releases, it lost its momentum in the collective consciousness and online discourse — and that’s a shame. So I decided to rewind, and write about it, after being drawn back to watching it again.
Narrated by Laura Dern, it follows the research of forensic psychiatrist Dr. Dorothy Otnow Lewis. Fascinated with mechanisms of subduing our own aggression, after hearing the stories of the Holocaust in her childhood, and avidly following the Nürnberg trials, she studied medicine, and specialised in psychiatry, and then began researching the homicidal impulses in children and violence in youths in the 1970s — very quickly delving into the neurology and dark psychology of adult serial murderers.
Human motivation for evil deeds, extreme violence, and sadism is probably one of the most enduring moral dilemmas of any civilisation, thoroughly examined within the religious discourse. However, psychology, itself, suffers from somewhat of a tunnel vision on the topic, reluctant to step into a more radical examination of a phenomena that is so pervasive, and so terrifying.
In Crazy, Not Insane we get something different than the traditional types of analysis, and venture towards more bold conclusions.
A combination of Dorothy’s striking drawings, filmmakers’ innovative use of animation, archival footage of interviews, scientific accounts by Dr. Lewis and her colleagues — and a more poetic narration by Dern of Dorothy’s own writings — all takes us down the hellish path of the most base of human impulses, unimaginable depravity, and monsters that lurk beneath the veneers of civility. Surprisingly, this journey brings us to the realms of not evil itself, but a condition (Dr. Lewis dislikes the use of the word in scientific terms), one that is termed dissociative identity disorder, resulting in multiple and separate identities within one individual.
In literature and pop culture it might be otherwise known as the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde split.
What is the cause of the dissociation? If indeed it exists in the perpetrator — and is not the invention of the devious criminal mind in order to lure us away from their own responsibility, thereby perhaps avoiding a straight-forward prison sentence, and in some cases — execution.
Challenged by the disregard of her theories in the broad scientific community (mid-1980s, in the US), and faced by a wave of ridicule in the media after one of her expert testimonies (even inspiring a jingle), she was further called out by some of her peers as enabling a hoax (at the beginning stages her interviews sometimes included hypnosis).
Nevertheless, Dr. Lewis still charged on with her research, both neurological and psychological, interviewing a string of extremely violent individuals, including such notorious ones as Johnny Frank Garrett and Ted Bundy.
The Bundy tapes, made one day before his execution, and hidden in Dr. Lewis’s storage boxes under the date, and not the name, reveal certain details from the past of the serial killer that might lead towards solving the puzzle of his extreme pathology. And, perhaps, opening the possibility of a new way of understanding evil done in our world.
“Dorothy is not linear, and that is part of her genius.” says collaborator Richard Burr, defence attorney (who also opposes the death penalty), adding that this style of communication can present a problem in systems requiring linearity, like the judicial system. There is a circularity in Gibney’s narration which aligned itself with the doctor’s methods, following her through a storytelling maze — as she interacts with the very top of the predator pyramid. Dr. Lewis is exceptionally empathetic, at the same time, she is painstakingly, surgically inspecting every facet of the perpetrators’ lives, contacting their family, friends, neighbours, and colleagues, examining their neurological records — as well as (most provocatively) interviewing their multiple alters (alternate personalities), tracking the one that was “the instigator” of the crime — like a true detective would (a parallel she would appreciate), tracing the villain origins of its creation.
All of which prompted her daughter to comment that her mother was the only therapist she heard of performing group therapy with one person.
Through it all I was most struck by a comment made by Dr. Lewis on the way she neutrally approaches the conversation with the alternate identity that was the culprit in the crime committed: “never badmouth an abuser, because that is an invitation to murder“, she says. And in the process of being the impartial observer, she uncovers not only the specific motivations for the crimes committed, but the most horrific abuses suffered in childhood suffered by almost all the murderers interviewed:
“Violent alternate personalities are usually caricatures of evil created in the minds of tormented children to take their pain and defend them against real or imagined enemies.”
What Dr Lewis essentially proposes is that some of these murderous criminal minds were created in immense trauma. They were not born evil.
Equally devastating and fascinating, a difficult yet riveting watch, it suffers perhaps from an overall visual and narrative fragmentation causing a certain dizziness in the viewer, while we are snapped back and forth in time, switching storylines, transgressing identities, facing the bloodiness of the crimes depicted.
The question posed in its title is what the gist of the inquiry of both Gibney and Dr Lewis entails: the open question of whether the murders done were perpetrated by people sane enough to know what they were doing when these crimes occurred. Or not.
From my own vantage point, I could not escape the feeling that something of what we saw in the interviews conducted was a deliberate charade by the people interviewed (particularly the devilishly clever Ted Bundy), an attempt to circumvent blame by confirming the doctor’s theories. On the other hand, Dr. Lewis is careful in reaching any conclusions too quickly. She did her research on the Bundy family more thoroughly than most.
There is another facet of what I have seen in the interviews that is perhaps more controversial, at least for this viewer — the archival footage gave me the impression that if there were switches in identities in the minds of the interviewed criminals, they were not done unconsciously. In fact they seemed to have been “group efforts”. Gibney is an excellent filmmaker, and it cannot have escaped his discerning eye for drama, despite the framework of his central protagonist, Dr. Lewis, which favours memory gaps.
In the end, we do not get anything close to an answer to the initial question. The approach proposed by Dr. Lewis is not without its merits, quite the opposite — it opens up a multitude of questions and valid avenues of inquiry, and certainly allows for a more in-depth analysis of what can make a person become extremely violent and perverted to such a degree.
In allowing extreme in rage and often fear to overtake any other impulse — a monster is internally created, in a moment of extreme vulnerability — who then adopts both an identity and a name.
However, what this doc does do, and decisively, is depict the age-old human thirst for retribution. The prevalence of the drive towards punishment and mob justice over understanding and healing.
The most aberrant amongst us have been both demonised and glamourised in our media — which presents a pathology existing in the very fibres of society, not too unlike the one that had driven the violence of the individual, in the first place. In the doc there is even a strange interlude, in which Dr. Lewis interviews a traveling executioner, admitting that she might have been most fearful of this man, over all others.
To its credit, Crazy, Not Insane concludes with exactly this point, focusing its steady gaze on the ethics and aberration of the death penalty, itself.
A case of society as executioner.
★★★★✩
Author: ©Milana Vujkov
Lola On Film 