Why do I feel like everything’s trying to get in my head? Why do I feel dementedly hyper, or depressed, my thoughts spinning out of control, repeating over and over? Why does her face look evil? Why can’t I comprehend her expression? He’s telling me something. He’s saying something, but I don’t really understand it. I’m trying so hard and I still can’t stop thinking about the scary face I saw earlier. What is happening to me? Why do those trees look ominous, or unreal, or incomprehensible? What is happening to me? Why does music not feel right? Is that guy in the movie talking to me? Is he coming to get me? I have to get out of here. Have to escape…everything’s wrong, wrong, wrong. I’m being brainwashed, I’ve been drugged, controlled. Nothing’s real, nothing’s real. I’m in a video game. Why is this happening to me?
Psychosis. A break from reality characterized by paranoia, dissociation, disorganized thoughts, and, in the worst moments, delusions and hallucinations. In bipolar II, these symptoms are manageable and easier to distance oneself from, but they often interfere with being present in the moment. I am still recovering from psychosis. But mental illnesses like these are things you have to deal with all your life. There’s no break from the break from reality. But one advantage does exist: in the better moments, your altered perception allows you to see the sublime beauty in the world. You get more creative, you get more energy, you get a grandiose sense of self that lends you massive amounts of confidence (these specific characteristics are mostly present in those with bipolar disorder, keep in mind). People compare mental illness to a superpower, and it’s easy to see why. Maybe some people in history with great abilities actually had mental illnesses that turned them from ordinary into seers, strongmen, prophets. But make no mistake: no heightening of abilities is worth the paranoia and delusions that accompany it.
Sam Raimi’s Darkman is one of the few superhero films to capture the dichotomy between enhanced abilities and the instability that mental illnesses like psychosis bring. Most superhero stories, especially as of late, focus on iconography or character interactions to appeal to a mass audience. Darkman, on the other hand, is style and mood-oriented. Raimi pushes his typically frenetic, explosive camerawork and purposefully phony-looking digital effects to the limit, recreating the unexplainable sensations experienced during psychosis in a purely visual way. In terms of story, the titular Darkman’s onset of mental illness and patterns of behavior like paranoia and seclusion eerily mirror that of my own and many others. Coupled with a conceptual throwback to Universal’s 1933 film The Invisible Man, you get a movie about a mentally unstable outcast who will never be accepted by society, who is forced to suffer alone.
Dr. Peyton Westlake (Liam Neeson) thinks he’s finally found the perfect cure: an artificial skin prosthesis that will help burn victims. All he has to do is make it survive in the light for over 100 minutes. He and his girlfriend live happily together and are even considering marriage. Life couldn’t be better. This is how it is in the first days of psychosis. Dopamine, the reward chemical, floods the brain and brings euphoria at first. Everything seems to be going fine: you’re more in sync with the world, everything seems strangely beautiful, you have more motivation, etc. That is, until you wake up one day and everything feels off, or you experience something traumatic that activates your symptoms. And it only compounds from there. In the film, this “wrongness” settles in when Westlake’s girlfriend, Julie (Frances McDormand), finds documents proving that corrupt developer Louis Strack, Jr. (Colin Friels) bribed city council members. Strack sends crime boss Robert Durant (Larry Drake) to find said documents in Westlake’s lab. Durant beats and mutilates Westlake with acid and explodes the compound, which sends him sailing into the river. At the hospital, they can’t identify the body, and the doctors choose to cut off his pain receptors to afford him some relief from his burn. This in turn gives him surges of adrenaline and makes it hard to control his emotions, creating an altered, deranged perception of reality.
Raimi and legendary cinematographer Bill Pope’s camerawork captures this destabilization in internal sensory ways. The psychotic symptoms of Darkman start right away in the burn ward. As soon as Westlake awakens to find himself restrained, he freaks out, and the camera digs past his bandaged face and into the chaos of his mind. His synapses literally fire off chemicals that shoot around and make him feel as if he has gone insane, seeing himself dressed in a clown costume and haunted by disturbing images like an animate skeleton. This is not dissimilar to how delusions function: for a moment, and often more, one is convinced that the reality they perceive or something about themselves is deathly wrong. Nothing happens to him, yet he’s overcome with the feeling that he is in danger, another bipolar symptom. This fear and energy is literalized through his lack of pain and abnormal strength, things that people with bipolar or other mental illnesses might think they have while experiencing delusions. Later in the film, the camera zooms around inside his cell walls, replicating the unexplainable sensation present in psychosis that something is moving under the surface of one’s skin.
In psychosis, one’s imagination is projected onto the physical world. Take the scene where Darkman hunts his first victim: cloaked in darkness, a burst of snap zooms, canted angles, and oversaturated fill lights on his face shatter the reality of a mundane dinner party. Images of lightning and microscopic trails of chemicals and organisms interrupt the very reality of the moment, splicing together Darkman’s “death” with the present moment in a storm of raw energy. It’s no longer an objective view of events; instead, Darkman’s perspective is literalized. Many of these sensations are also fairly close to how real bipolar psychosis makes one feel. In the worst moments, one’s imagination bleeds into their perception of reality. Everything is intensified: things feel closer or farther away than usual; a normal conversation like the one in this scene can come off as persecutory even when it is innocuous; objects moving toward you feel in your face like a snap zoom; the overlaid imagery is not dissimilar to the visual distortions one gets frantically glancing around for some sort of stability.
Darkman as a character also processes his trauma similarly to how many people come to terms with having a mental illness in real life. At first, he tries to ignore it while getting his revenge, then he realizes he can’t control it. His emotional lability during the scene where he taunts his own freakish nature reflects how many bipolar people lash out, throwing and destroying objects around with the maturity of a child. This scene is especially important because it marks the point where he begins to understand how to grapple with his condition rather than rage out. It’s no coincidence that this is the moment where the artificial skin machine finally creates a copy of his visage; he now literally puts on a face to look like he’s a normal, functioning human being. Trying to act like everyone else when suffering a mental illness is one of the hardest things to do, as symptoms can be triggered at any time by anything, no matter how insignificant. Everyone expects you to act normally because you don’t have an obvious physical disability; we see this with his girlfriend Julie in the fair scene. Donning some of his artificial skin, Westlake attempts a date with Julie at the local fair to convince her that all is right. Though her intentions are innocent, she incessantly asks Westlake when he’ll finally return to normal life, never acknowledging his constant discomfort at trying to do ordinary things. However, his symptoms really kick into overdrive when a rude game-runner cheats him out of a prize he won. He flips out and breaks the man’s fingers before running away, ashamed of what he’s become. This only adds to him placing the blame on himself for not being normal, as his identification with the lizard boy at the fair’s freak show emphasizes.
In the third act, Westlake finally accepts his illness and learns how to live with himself. Weaponizing his clever mind and skin masks, he quickly outwits most of Durant’s men and tricks them into killing each other. His strength and adrenaline come in handy with escaping the hot pursuit of Durant’s helicopter, and his reflexes enable him to disappear and stay nimble on top of a skyscraper still under construction. All the while, Raimi and Pope remind the audience of his heightened perspective with their most effective use of tricks yet. Strack takes Julie hostage on top of one of his new buildings in order to lure out Darkman. While he monologues about his control over the city, a slow dolly zoom magnifies him to the absolute embodiment of sleazy villainy; despite his normal stature, he becomes larger than life to Darkman. When Strack shoots a nail at Darkman, we get a close-up of the nail from the side as it flies through the air. Hyper-focusing on certain images is another bipolar symptom, which Raimi and Pope represent by isolating the nail from its surroundings after it is shot at Darkman. His sensory enhancements allow him to avoid a few of the nails, but not all: he is not a true superhuman, but a man who barely clings to his humanity.
Darkman kills Strack and lets him fall to his death, finally accepting that his condition has irreparably changed him and the only way to survive is to embrace it. The film avoids returning him to society’s idea of normal because, even once someone in the real world receives treatment for conditions like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, they are not 100% cured. It’s something you have to work with for the rest of your life and take as it comes. Thus, he is an outcast; he is different; he is a bit of a monster. But though society may find him repulsive unless he covers his face with the fake mask of normalcy, he still has the capacity to work through his issues and contribute a heroism that ordinary people cannot.
