Traumatic Imprints by Tsika Noah

Author:Tsika, Noah
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520969926
Publisher: University of California Press

FIGURE 17. Gene Kelly’s severely disturbed sailor breaks down in the Navy’s Combat Fatigue: Irritability (1945). Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration.

In 1946, the mass-circulation magazine Popular Photography covered Kelly’s “process”—with prose that paraphrased Navy psychiatrists—in an issue that repeatedly touted the military’s documentary enterprise, including advertisements placed by commercial production outfits under military contract (like the Jam Handy Organization and Caravel Films).61 Presenting the actor as an agent of rehabilitation (both his own and that of his institutional counterparts), Popular Photography persistently blurred distinctions between Kelly and the role that he played, pointing to “Kelly beginning to understand his problems and making a constructive effort to work [them] out.” This slippage between Kelly and a historical “case study” was hardly accidental, however. It was part of a developing psychiatric doctrine that placed a premium on acting as a therapeutic exercise, and it was almost certainly prescribed as such by the public affairs strategists who, representing the interests of the Navy, shared with Popular Photography and other mass-circulation magazines information about the making of Combat Fatigue: Irritability, a docudrama whose famous lead actor provided an appealing point of entry for readers unaccustomed to coverage of “therapeutic film.”62

As depicted in Combat Fatigue: Irritability, the function of a Navy rehabilitation center is to restore “happy equilibrium” to traumatized men, but the function of film acting was far less stable, if only because of the risks (Freudian and otherwise) attached to the reenactment of trauma. Popular Photography goes so far as to suggest that acting, as observed by military psychiatrists, offers a way of figuring out if a performer is “ill and needs treatment.”63 Rooted in a sociological respect for the pervasiveness of role playing in everyday life, this investment in acting as a barometer of mental illness is central to the representational strategies of Combat Fatigue: Irritability, in which Kelly’s character, forced to assume the role of a war hero when visiting his demanding friends and family members, fails miserably (by, in fact, “performing inappropriately”), thus “proving” his need for immediate psychiatric treatment.

If Kelly passed his own performance test, simulating psychoneurosis with professional aplomb and an empathic doggedness that signaled a certain inner strength, other performers (particularly inexperienced ones) were thought to require opportunities to act precisely because they were “psychically scarred”—unable to behave “normally” without guidance.64 Such men may have been monitored by those institutional agents eager to stamp out psychoneurosis, but a more generous understanding of their participation in documentary production often pivoted around an appreciation for acting not merely as a pedagogic vehicle but also as a form of occupational and recreational therapy. For professional performers like Gene Kelly, the opportunity to perform psychoneurosis in a documentary film offered challenges that were beyond the scope of commercial cinema—and, in particular, of a Hollywood governed by the restrictions of the Production Code, which plainly forbade the sort of expletive-laden outbursts so central to Kelly’s simulation of psychosis. Kelly’s pedagogic and therapeutic turn in Combat Fatigue: Irritability, then, was understood as benefitting both the hypothetical spectator and Kelly himself.

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