In The Mountain, Rick Alverson turns the psychiatric institution into a kind of catacomb for the living, or rather the half-alive. It’s all shadowy corridors of gray and white enamel, cold tiled floors, spacious rooms with long, barred windows and nothing but rows of beds dressed with the same white linens. Patients don’t so much rest in these places as wait and languish, strewn about freely but docilely in every corner of the many buildings of this type Alverson shows us. Silence dominates without question, even when it is easily penetrated. “Why are they screaming?” a patient flatly asks protagonist Tye Sheridan, who knows the answer but doesn’t provide it.
I say “turns” but it’s likely that what The Mountain gives us is as close as any film outside of Titicut Follies has come to reproducing the “insane asylum” as it may have been experienced at its cultural peak. Through the film’s lens it betrays so many conflicting elements: immaculate yet barren, serene yet severe, enclosed yet expansive. They appear to be endless in design and in number, as if they hold the entire landscape in place. Its strangeness may not be a cinematic additive so much as a compatible pairing. The 1950s were stranger, and apparently more Hopperesque, than the popular imagination suggests. It just happens that one filmmaker had the right aesthetic and moral regimen to clarify the strangeness. A critic at The Atlantic was most apt in praising Alverson for spinning “a surreal yarn about a country at its most self-confident and horrifying.”
Alverson paints his horror delicately, but neither faintly nor obscurely. His two earlier films, The Comedy and Entertainment, may be understood as respectively acerbic and surreal inversions of the man-child. The typical comedic framing of his inertia is twisted into a self-delusion against the isolation he endures, whether in the Brooklyn of Tim Heidecker’s irony-soaked aging hipster in The Comedy, or the American southwest of Gregg Turkington’s touring hack standup in Entertainment. But The Mountain propels this setup to an unnerving distance.
Tye Sheridan’s Andy is not so much inert as he is incomplete. His frame has reached young adulthood, but his hushed, lurking demeanor suggests a prolonged and endlessly dominated childhood. He lives with his austere father (Udo Kier), whose only line in the film is a putdown to his son and whose greatest affection seems more directed to his figure skating students at the rink where he and his son work. His mother is institutionalized and he is forbidden from seeing her. After the father dies suddenly and effectively orphans Andy, Dr. Wallace “Wally” Fiennes (Jeff Goldblum), the physician who treated his mother, comes into his life and, through reasoning appropriate to his enigmatic elan, invites him to assist him in his work.
You would not be wrong in suspecting that this rather thin plot resembles The Master. Like Paul Thomas Anderson’s film, a troubled young man with more than a few sexual hang-ups1 is taken under the wing of a charismatic but erratic older man with a feel for greatness but not a grasp. And like Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Lancaster Dodd, Goldblum’s Fiennes is fixated on curing the ills of the mind. In the case of The Mountain, Fiennes is a lobotomist who travels from institution to institution to demonstrate the enduring effectiveness of his procedure. Andy’s task is to help present and document the doctor’s work as his photographer.
Andy says very little throughout the film but sees, both professionally and incidentally, a good deal. He sees and takes portraits of patients before and after Dr. Fiennes has treated them. He sees the full process of what Dr. Fiennes puts them through—including a round of ECT. He sees a patient being taken against his will into an examination room where Dr. Fiennes and his tools await. He sees when the procedure goes wrong. Wandering through these spaces practically unnoticed he seems almost spectral, yet becomes more and more material the more closely his own mental state appears to overlap with theirs, until he submits, almost voluntarily, to Dr. Fiennes’s treatment.
What ensues is a kind of grotesque road trip drama with two mismatched buddies. Fiennes is virile and vigorous against Andy’s repression and almost porcelain fragility. When Andy speaks it is usually through his camera, while Fiennes cannot seem to stop talking, whether entertaining, seducing, or justifying. Goldblum deftly plays his showman’s arrogance against a strong undercurrent of insecurity. Being interviewed outside an institution, Fiennes is rattled when a reporter asks him about the FDA approval of psychotropic drugs offering a safer alternative to his lobotomy. Inside, Fiennes botches that very procedure. Bloodstained, he carts off the failed patient, regains his composure and says “Let’s do another,” to the immediate compliance of the administration.
Dr. Fiennes is based on the American physician Dr. Walter Freeman. Though not the inventor of the lobotomy, he was its refiner and its most fervent advocate. Like the European “psychosurgeons” that preceded him, he believed the cure to mental illness would be found in direct intervention into the brain’s frontal lobe. Going off the innovations of his mentor António Egas Moniz, who won the Nobel Prize for his leucotomy procedure, and Amarro Fiamberti, Freeman simplified the treatment for maximum efficiency without diminished result. The transorbital lobotomy could be performed outside of an operating room in as little as 10 minutes. It did not need to be administered by a neurosurgeon and used ECT in place of anesthesia. From 1936 to 1942, Freeman and his partner, neurosurgeon James Watts, performed around 200 lobotomies. By 1952, Freeman was able to perform 228 procedures in 12 days.
The lobotomy has never failed to captivate us. Its primary tool, the orbitoclast, essentially an icepick, is an enchanting icon of scientific progress. This simple device, inserted into the eye socket and tapped through the skull with a mallet, was an eraser of suffering that, for once, seemed not to compound suffering elsewhere. Mental illness always had more interpretations than solutions, but now a real solution was here. Institutions would finally be unburdened of overcrowding, and people otherwise destined for institutions could have their destinies averted. Even from a purely aesthetic standpoint it is the most beautiful medical instrument ever made, conveying to perfection its elegance and its severity. Holding it in your hand gives you the closest feeling of holding a bolt of lightning. It is the power not just to make someone better, but to make someone over.
In our era of chemical tablets and abandoned asylums, such sentiments seem delusional. But such was the situation of the time, and it made for a stable career. As in the film, Freeman was the toast of the psychiatric ward. At its postwar peak, as many as 50,000 lobotomies were performed in the United States, with Freeman doing around 3,500 of them. Though his aim was to treat the most severe patients—those with schizophrenia and clinical depression—the procedure came to be perceived as a catchall. A 1937 New York Times article claimed, seemingly without much outside research or inquiries to Freeman or Watts, that lobotomy could cure the most basic symptom, from apprehension to crying spells to nervous indigestion. It could turn “wild animals into gentle creatures in the course of a few hours.”
In typical fashion, who counted as a “wild animal” could be quite broad. To someone like Joseph P. Kennedy, the emotional outbursts and disciplinary lapses of his oldest daughter Rosemary could qualify for such an intervention, even though no one was able to conclude the exact source of her behavior. Freeman himself was not the most stellar diagnostician. Freeman’s biographer recounts the examination of a six-year-old girl who’d stopped talking, tore at her clothes, and lashed out violently with her toys. Though her family doctor had diagnosed her with encephalitis, “Freeman and Watts thought childhood schizophrenia more likely.” The girl was lobotomized in 1944 and a second time eight months later when her behavior relapsed.
Freeman believed that lobotomies could increase a patient’s intelligence while describing its most common post-operative effect as “surgically induced childhood,” in which patients had to relearn how to talk, read, and use the bathroom. As many as 15 percent of his patients died. Some, like Rosemary Kennedy, only worsened, from becoming totally catatonic to developing grand mal seizures. Eventually, James Watts saw no future in the procedure, though Freeman performed them on his own, often door to door for $25 a piece, in the face of increasing marginalization. He only stopped when he was forced to in 1967, after a patient died of a cerebral hemorrhage.
The prestige of the lobotomy declined markedly by the 1980s along with the institutional system in which it thrived. It became a gothic legend. Though there is no record or outside confirmation of the long-suffering actress Frances Farmer ever having been subjected to a lobotomy, the very lurid deduction made its way into a mostly fabricated biography and the film on which it was based (it even features an early depiction of Freeman, noted by his theatricality and lack of protective wear) and became a key aspect of her American martyrdom. It felt as if a social corrective had been issued. Thorazine, though considered lobotomy by other means, was fine, or at least adequate.
Yet The Mountain is not simply interested in the cerebral contortions of yet another arrogant Man of Science; it also presents, in the coldest fashion, the authoritarian habit of mind that that Great Man helped foster within the system in which he was given the fullest sway to act, even as that system was questioning his competence.
More than horrorizing the man-child, Alverson is intent on demystifying the father figure. He does not so much critique it as show how one mode fails into another, until there is none left. Andy’s actual father is indifferent at best. Fiennes, as a replacement, simply wants to prove his worth to his new son. That hits a wall when Fiennes effectively zombifies Andy, leaving him in the care of another surrogate, Jack (Denis Lavant), an unstable Frenchman who hired Fiennes to lobotomize his own institutionalized daughter (Hannah Gross) into oblivion as well. Jack is a therapist, but of a curious variety; using interpretive dance, hypnotism, and dual xylophones to treat his voluntary patients.
While Alverson’s esotericism reaches a hazardous potency in these scenes, they indicate at first that Fiennes is not the future. The cold, regimented, tool-based interventions are in the decline while the expressionistic, liberated care of R.D. Laing’s wildest dreams is just over the horizon. But the difference in method does not, in this instance, betray a difference in desired outcomes. Under his charge, Jack harangues Andy and his daughter in riddles and cryptic aphorisms as they stare into nothing. The father who can barely function has passed on his “son” to a father who can’t function at all. They leave Sheridan and Gross no option but to scale the mountain, quite literally, driving up a winding road flanked by the towering sublimity of northern American flora and to Daniel Lopatin’s ethereal electronic score. Yet the enigmatic conclusion leaves a muted impression that even freedom is confinement by another name.
On that basis alone, The Mountain may forever be condemned to a status of cult curiosa—at least to the extent that anything can be these days. That condemnation is compounded by the film’s refusal to provide the vindication today’s mass audience seems to crave without end. The Mountain prefers ambience to polemic, though it is a chilling ambience. Alverson finds neither wild animals nor gentle creatures in Fiennes’s banal system of wellness. The system doesn’t even seem interested in the polarity. The pole itself is needle-shaped and only points in one direction.
The lobotomy may never again have a vogue equal to what Freeman carried virtually on his own for decades, but the icepick’s magic is as marvelous as ever. The simplicity and certainty of its promise can carry over into new, more operationally humane forms. Its promise is the possession of absolute knowledge and the resolve to apply it upon anyone in your charge, telling them what they fail to see and how they are going to see it again and more clearly so long as they follow the approved directives. In such circumstances the pursuit of mental wellness, even the most carefully considered and well-intentioned pursuit, can mean anything but a cure or even a way of coping. I would be tempted to call this its own madness; but the will to impose grand plans where autonomy is negligible is a man’s domain, and in every sense as Alverson sees it, not an animal’s or a creature’s.
The film is riddled with allusions to hermaphroditism and gender ambiguity that I, personally, could not wrap my head around. If there are Reddit groups dedicated to untangling them I have not sought them out. It is, in any case, an interesting (perhaps psychoanalytically inspired) contrast of Andy’s sexual stuntedness against Fiennes’s insatiable sexual appetite.