The Aviator flies high, until dinner is served.
In the film version of the life of Howard Hughes, the man can’t get himself out of the bathroom, scrubbing and scrubbing until his hands bleed, paralyzed by the fear of what he might get from touching the restroom door.
The heroine of the comic book thriller Elektra counts her steps, goes through fits of house cleaning — and recognizes her traits in others who, just like her, want to hide them.
In Assault on Precinct 13, the police department psychiatrist may be treating the post-traumatic stress of a cop who has seen his entire team gunned down by the bad guys. But she has issues herself.
“I have OCD,” she says, knowing that this is all she needs to say.
Obsessive-compulsive disorder is Hollywood’s disease du jour, the fashionable malady of the moment. We’ve long had movie heroes and heroines with major flaws — addictions, phobias, manias. Why not heroes who count everything or scrub themselves silly or organize, organize, organize?
The award-winning mystery series Monk, about a brilliant investigator who suffers from the disorder, was just the start of this trend.
“The show brought OCD to the public eye, but the fact that The Aviator was nominated for all these awards will raise the profile of OCD even further,” says Boston College psychologist Joseph Tecce.
Having a character who has obsessive-compulsive disorder can make for compelling drama, says John Logan, who wrote the Oscar-nominated screenplay for The Aviator.
“It’s this thing that this character must deal with every second of his life,” Logan says. “For writers, it’s a great way to explore duality in a character. Howard Hughes was very sensual. He loved to touch women and airplanes. But a doorknob could scare him to death. That dichotomy makes him that much more interesting.”
Obsessive-compulsive disorder manifests itself in myriad ways, all of them colorful enough to make the disorder catnip to screenwriters. The common obsessions, according to the Obsessive-Compulsive Foundation Web site (): fears of germs, dirt, etc., which leads to obsessive washing (as in The Aviator); excessive religious or moral doubt, which manifests itself in counting rituals (Elektra); a fear of “forbidden thoughts,” which can lead to a mania for ordering and arranging.
“People can watch Monk and see a man who is brilliant and serving a useful function in society,” says Tecce. “Sure, he needs a nurse with him to function, but he does. They also see a guy who is really messed up, and you have to think, ‘There but for the grace of God go I.’ We all have these tendencies. Guys like Monk and Hughes take it to an extreme.”
Dr. Delbert Robinson treats patients with the disorder at Zucker Hillside Hospital in Glen Oaks, N.Y. The illness has long been diagnosed, “but in the ’90s, we had this explosion in interest in it because of all these new drug treatments that came along,” he says.
Robinson says Hollywood’s interest in the illness is understandable, “given that it’s now, according to the World Health Organization, one of the top 10 causes of disability.”
Robinson says he treats doctors and lawyers with the disorder, and the fact that some people can cope with it and use its symptoms to their advantage makes it an intriguing personality quirk to give a character. “Just so long as the movies recognize that there’s a difference between the disorder and people with obsessive-compulsive personalities. A lot of people have rigid personalities. But the actual disorder can be terribly debilitating.”
Tecce sees the nature of the illness as being one that creates a lot of sympathy in the viewer, and perhaps that explains its appeal to TV producers and filmmakers.
“You look at somebody like Monk, and maybe you think, ‘I’m in bad shape. But at least I’m not as bad off as him.’ And there, too, you have the example that these characters can set. They have OCD, but they function and excel.”
Hollywood has long had “a faddish way of treating [psychological] subjects,” says Patrick McGilligan, author of Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light. Hitchcock was one of the first to explore the field of psychoanalysis in Spellbound (1945) because his producer, David O. Selznick, “was very busy [unburdening] himself to a very well-known doctor who was treating half of Hollywood at the time.”
So obsessive-compulsive disorder’s day will come and go.
“Next year, it could be alcoholism, or savants like you had in Rain Man,” says Tecce.
When examining the fickle nature of the movie business, there is only one diagnosis — attention-deficit disorder.
The Orlando Sentinel is a Tribune Co. newspaper.
