“The
most merciful thing in the world…is the inability of the human mind to
correlate all its contents.”
—H.P.
Lovecraft, from The Call of Cthulhu
(1928)
The
previous post discussed Lovecraft’s depiction of psychic possession and transfers
of personality in The Thing on the
Doorstep. Incidents of characters exchanging personalities with some malign
entity or succumbing to the more powerful will of this entity are frequent in
Lovecraft’s fiction. So is the trauma of
recalling repressed memories of either personal or ancestral history. After I wrote the post I began thinking of
horror and science fiction movies that have depicted this dynamic—that involved
a character with a dissociated mind. Classics
like Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) come
immediately to mind, as well as the Cold War thriller, The Manchurian Candidate (1962), among others.
A more
recent but lesser known film, and one of the most horrific I have ever seen has
to be Session Nine (2001). In my view, this film should be mandatory viewing
for fans of psychological horror. It is
an impressive film all the more because of its low budget, cast of relatively
unknown stars, (with the exception perhaps of David Caruso and Peter Mullan),
and minimal but effective use of gore and other special effects. It is a horror within a horror within a
horror—a ghastly matryoshka doll of a scary movie.
A
team of hazmat workers, desperate for work and a $10,000 bonus, arrive at an
old, closed down mental hospital, to clean up the asbestos. Gordy is their boss and the owner of the
company. He appears tired, worried, and
distracted. In fact, he is ‘not all
there.’ He bid quite low on the job so
that he could get some work for himself and his four employees.
Gordy
and his wife have just had a baby and money is tight. Phil, his partner, is increasingly concerned
about the stress his friend Gordy is showing.
Hank is the hired hand with attitude, who wants to win big at the
casinos and is not-so-secretly seeing Phil’s girlfriend. So there is tension between these two, which
flares up periodically. Mike is the
intellectual of the group, always reading and now and then regurgitating some
creepy snippet of history about the old mental hospital. Finally, there is Jeff, Gordy’s nephew and
the youngest of the crew—a “mullet head.”
Jeff suffers from severe nictophobia—fear of the dark—which is very
unfortunate in some of the later scenes.
The
interior of the run down building—the Danvers State Hospital, an actual place—is
unsettling even in the daylight. Much of
the film, even its climactic scenes, occurs in broad daylight. Inside there are plenty of cobwebs,
claustrophobia, dripping water, medical equipment that looks like torture devices,
and weird sounds. The unnerving auditory atmosphere is exacerbated by
the noisy hazmet machinery, plastic sheeting, and protective clothing.
Even
on the outside, in the noon day sun, the place is disquieting. On the grounds is a graveyard containing a
hundred numbered markers—case numbers—but no names. There are several lovingly prolonged scenes
of stinging insects cavorting in the weeds surrounding the building. The hospital environment, and the task of
removing hazardous material from its interior, serves as a powerful ‘house as
human mind’ metaphor. A very disturbed
mind is in view. Whose?
On
the first day of work, Gordy is greeted by a deep throated demon toned voiceover
that no one else can hear. It says, “Hello
Gordon!” and “You know who I am.” The men
banter and go about their tedious but dangerous work. Bit by bit the viewer and the characters in the
film begin to piece together an incomplete understanding of the place and the
terrible situation the men are in, but there are many red herrings.
All
the pentagrams and satanic graffiti on the walls—was this the site of devil
worship after the hospital was closed down?
Why is Gordy limping? Hank
discovers a treasure trove of old coins, gold teeth, glass eyes and other metallic
flotsam and jetsam in a hole in a wall—not realizing the awfulness of what lies
on the other side of the wall he has broken through. The generator keeps failing at odd,
inopportune moments, sending poor Jeff into nictophobic fits when the lights go
out. Is there going to be some trouble
between Hank and Phil over the girlfriend?
And more ominously, it is apparent that Gordy is having marital problems—his
wife will not speak to him on the phone, and he has had to stay at a local
motel.
But
there is a story within a story, and it forms the axle around which everything
else turns. Mike, the more thoughtful
and curious of the men, discovers the office of one of the hospital
psychiatrists. It is filled with cobwebs
and dusty files and tapes of therapy
sessions—numbered one through nine—that were conducted twenty years earlier. Mike sneaks away from the group to listen to
these tapes, and even visits the place at night to find out more. This is far and away one of the creepier
scenes of the movie.
The tapes
reveal the clinical history of Mary Hobbes, a young woman who suffered extreme
multiple personality disorder, (now known as ‘dissociative identity disorder’),
resulting from trauma over the gruesome deaths of her parents and brother. The doctor on the tape is interviewing Mary,
as well as “The Princess”, “Billy” and other separated parts of her
personality, all of whom know something about the traumatic event, but not the
whole story. Billy lives in the eyes, “because
I see everything doc” while the Princess lives in the tongue, “because she’s
always talking”. It is a very disturbing
effect, because the young woman’s voice changes its prosody dramatically as
each part of her splintered personality “wakes up.”
As
Mike listens to later tapes in the series it is clear that the doctor is trying
to get the disparate parts of Mary’s personality to communicate with each
other, so that she can remember and deal with the terrible event that shattered
her soul. But the doctor needs to get
the mysterious “Simon” to speak. Simon
knows the whole story. Finally, Simon does speak on tape. Mike does not recognize the voice, but the
audience certainly will. It is the ominous
voice Gordy heard when he arrived at Danvers State Hospital.
Even
on its better days, the human mind is far from unitary in its structure and
operation. Like the American congress,
it is a melee of competing interests and perceptions, barely heedful of each
other, and prone to disunity and disintegration under duress. Every level of human organization, from the
political on down to the single human being is a collective, not a unified, single entity. We are divided beings. To experience an ultimate
and enduring sense of unity we can only look to God.
I
will not go further except to say that Session
9 powerfully depicts the horrors that ensue when one cannot abide advice
like that of Polonius in Hamlet: “To
thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst
not then be false to any man.” Or as
murderous.
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