‘I am tired from all of these feelings’ : Narrating suffering in the film Sick

Abstract

This article explores ‘the politics of sentimentality’ with specific reference to the documentary film Sick, which represents the narrative of a young lesbian woman, Ana, who was confined in a psychiatric hospital in Croatia and ‘treated’ for her homosexuality. We consider the ways our most intimate emotional relationships and states, such as pain and suffering, articulate with a wider context of familial citizenship and critically examine the political limits of compassion within the sentimentalised public sphere. In this analysis, we problematise the film’s emotional logic, which presents an individualised narrative resolution at the expense of dwelling on the political question of institutional violence. We examine the role that politics of sentimentality plays in neutralising the film’s political critique of the state apparatuses (psychiatry and family) that enforce heterosexual norms.

Keywords

Narratives of suffering redemptive narrative the politics of sentimentality compassion heteronormativity

Introduction

This article explores the individualised narrative of suffering in the Croatian documentary film Sick (Bolesno), written and directed by Hrvoje Mabić, and released in 2015. Sick positions itself as a humanist critique of psychic suffering caused by homophobia. It follows the life story of the central character, Ana, who was confined in a psychiatric hospital in Lopača, Rijeka, Croatia after her parents conspired with the hospital’s director, Dr M.V., to ‘cure’ her of her homosexuality. While at Lopača, Ana suffered traumatising experiences, which would continue to haunt her after her release from confinement. Sick strives to show Ana’s life in the aftermath of her experience at Lopača, her emotional suffering and her struggle to re-establish a semblance of a ‘normal life’ in a redemptive narrative that follows her attempt to rebuild a stable romantic relationship after trauma.¹

In this article, we problematise the film’s emotional logic, which, we argue, presents an individualised narrative resolution – in the healing of internal wounds – that restores Ana to herself at the expense of dwelling on the political question of institutional violence. We examine the role that the politics of sentimentality – as an outpouring of feeling elicited by Ana’s singular, personal journey – plays in neutralising the film’s social and political critique of the state apparatuses (psychiatry and family) that enforce heterosexual norms. In this respect, the film’s emotional register both affirms and denies the social fantasies and prohibitions that influence the psychic life of the self.

Visual creative media and documentary film, in particular, are powerful forms of representation of the complex relationships between individuals and society. Like the relationship between the artwork and its audience, the ‘self’ that emerges through the narrative device is interpreted and understood within a sociocultural frame, in its relationship with a community of others. As Butler (2005: 82) explains, the I ‘cannot even begin to refer to itself outside the relation to the other by which its capacity for self-reference emerges’. Zahavi (2005: 105) also suggests that self-understanding is narratively structured, ‘multiple-authored and under constant revision’. Conventions of sentimentality in film invite audiences to occupy the internal emotional worlds of others, but emotions are also a vehicle for the representation of multiple narratives of self, which can be creatively revised in the limitless capacity for storytelling within the various forms of artistic practices. Documentary films bring the other close to us in life stories that are narratively represented as the most natural, engaging and truthful form of human storytelling, especially in the depiction of human suffering.

Over the last two decades in Croatia, narratives of suffering have flourished in the media – for example, the suffering of war veterans and impoverished and socially marginalised families, particularly single-parent families. These individual narratives are represented in various mass media genres such as news reportage, documentaries and talk shows. As Sara Ahmed argues, such stories draw audiences composed of individuals into a larger national collective, in which private experience is ‘evoked in public discourse as that which demands a collective as well as individual response’ (Ahmed, 2004: 20). These narratives are designed to make viewers more empathic and compassionate towards the suffering of others, but this empathy and compassion are not neutral as it seems at first glance. As Ahmed suggests, we must look to the question of what unequal relations of power are revealed in the knot of feeling between the suffering object and the compassionate subject (2004: 20–39). The national narratives of suffering briefly discussed above draw audiences into familial pain if it were their own (and in many cases might be) – but this shared pain also functions, crucially, to reveal the burdens of the nation. Emotions move us towards particular objects, but, as Ahmed states, the relationship between movement and attachment is a paradoxical one:

What moves us, what makes us feel is also that which holds us in place, or gives us a dwelling place. Hence movement does not cut the body off from the “where” of its inhabitance, but connects bodies to other bodies. (Ahmed, 2004: 11)

In other words, it creates communities of feelings and nations as objects of feelings.

Following Ahmed, in this article we analyse how a national collective – drawn together through feeling – becomes mobilised around the protagonist Ana’s pain in the film Sick. Although this is a film with a lesbian subject at its centre, it is positioned within a broader spectrum of dominant heteronormative narratives of familial crisis that demand a compassionate response. As we suggest, Ana’s personal narrative is not isolated from the culture and context within which the documentary film about her emerged.

We explore how the cinematic representation of Ana’s suffering articulates with a set of conservative national values in contemporary Croatia that support traditional arrangements of gender as well as pro-natalist and anti-abortion ethics. In the current Croatian political context, narratives of pain inviting compassion are part of the construction of familial crisis, in which the happiness of the family becomes an urgent site of national importance. At the present time, the family has become the primary locus of politically conservative discourses of ‘caring communities’. Sick, we argue, is a part of the broad network of projects that put on display personal stories of suffering that produce emotional identifications with the embodied agents of pain and suffering. As part of this analysis, we consider how Ana’s suffering – as the effect of a homophobic society – becomes eclipsed, in the film, by a compassionate narrative that seeks to resolve her pain in a happy ending. Although the film is clearly critical of the state’s role in causing Ana’s suffering, it undoes this work by simultaneously reframing her experience as an individual story of overcoming pain in letting go of anger and reconciling herself to both the nation and the family, and to find reparation in the forging of new romantic relationships.

If, as the marketing blurb suggests, the film is about ‘a girl who needs to re-establish her faith in people’, then the question for us is about how the story of her rebuilding of trust in other people displaces that of the abuse of trust in the institutions of the state and family. That is, in appealing to the pain and compassion of individuals, the story neglects consideration of the social determinants of pain, and the impossibility for queer subjects to entrust themselves to the care of heteronormative institutions by which their sexual subjectivity is denied. Hence, we question ‘naturalised’ assumptions of compassion, which often frame representations of narratives of pain, love and anger in the service of systematic inequalities. Or, to paraphrase Lauren Berlant (2004), we examine how compassion, as an imagined aesthetic and politics of viewer response, becomes more valued than suffering. We ask what kind of politics are inscribed, and what fantasies and contradictions are performed through the process of representing Ana’s narrative in the documentary Sick.

Compassion and national intimacy

In her book The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship, Lauren Berlant writes that since the Reagan era, the political public sphere in America has been filled with narratives of suffering, with ‘portraits and stories of citizen-victims – pathological … heroic, and grotesque … putting on display a mass experience of economic insecurity, racial discord, class conflict, and sexual unease’ (1997: 1). While on the one hand, personal stories make people public and generic, on the other, their publicity and experience of social hierarchy is ‘intensely individuating’. She argues that the political public sphere in the United States has become an intimate public sphere. Public time has been produced moment by moment through media, and intimacy has come to act as an arena through which public questions are addressed. In other words, questions of social inequality and injustice have been covered over by personal narratives of suffering that demand compassion of fellow citizens. In this way, the state mandate for social justice has been replaced with a privatised ethics of responsibility that becomes a form of nation building (Berlant, 2004). In this process, the nation’s values have been oriented towards the family sphere, and the national symbolic has become constituted through appropriations of ‘demonic and idealized images and narratives’ that fall outside the familial ideal. The purpose of these narratives of suffering is twofold: on the one hand they are designed to offer audiences the possibility to appropriate the experience of suffering in relation to desired conventions and national values; but on the other, they also participate in the construction of subjects whose narratives do not fit, or do not have ‘stable spaces of culture in which to clarify and to cultivate them’ (Sim and Vickery, 2014: 2). Accordingly, a new morality has developed, which is based on a sense of rightness, one that has shifted collective fantasies about national stability from topics related to economic problems and social justice to those related to sexuality.

A similar process of developing national intimacies, through the coupling of private and public, can be seen elsewhere in the contemporary world. In Croatia, this coupling of private and public, or the intimate public, is linked to discourses of a crisis of family that have come to constitute the new morality. Recently, individual narratives about emotional suffering have become more prominent in the official national public sphere. Both conservative and liberal major parties and political groups have exploited sex, marriage and reproduction, developing a new nationalist oriented politics of intimacy, or what Berlant calls ‘national heterosexuality’. In that process, national heterosexuality has become ‘the mechanism by which a core national culture can be imagined as a sanitised space of sentimental feeling and immaculate behaviour, a space of pure citizenship’ (Berlant and Warner, 1998: 550).

The sorts of legal and political discourses that produce national heterosexuality in Croatia are diverse and include the implementation of legal and economic policies that support parents with three or more children, an increase in school subjects’ content promoting traditional gender roles of citizens, intensified concerns about decreasing fertility rates, and rising anti-abortion and pro-life activism advocating the rights of unborn children. The result of such policies and social activism has transformed foetuses and children into subjects in whose name the institutions of marriage and family are defined, and the proclaimed national platform is protected. In short, fantasies about the national future and the ideal unborn citizen are constructed through heteronormative practices, in the Foucauldian sense of micro-practices that constitute a wider discursive formation that shapes ordinary notions of everyday life. Berlant and Warner define heteronormativity as

the institutions, structures of understanding, and practical orientations that make heterosexuality seem not only coherent – that is, organized as a sexuality – but also privileged … It consists less of norms that could be summarized as a body of doctrine than of a sense of rightness produced in contradictory manifestations – often unconscious, immanent to practice or to institutions. Contexts that have little visible relation to sex practice, such as life narrative and generational identity, can be heteronormative in this sense, while in other contexts forms of sex between men and women might not be heteronormative. (1998: 548, emphasis in original)

In Croatian society, heteronormativity manifests itself, among other things, in a concern for the future of its citizens, which becomes a justification for continuous moral education about issues related to family life and reproduction. Like many European countries, Croatia has been affected by the global financial crisis, and austerity measures have been introduced ‘manipulating an intricate set of relations between economic, … [ethnic], and sexual processes’ (Berlant, 1997: 3). Thus, a solid platform led by conservative political forces has been established which spurs citizens to support and form ‘caring communities’ in accordance with the desired social values advocated by the proponents of the new conservative political spectrum.

In service to these goals, social, political and media spaces have been saturated with a wealth of narratives about suffering, which arouse the compassionate engagement of their audiences. Suffering is usually presented as a component of moral lessons designed to elicit from citizens a desired set of emotional values. Therefore, becoming a citizen in this context means becoming a caring, compassionate individual regardless of the societal structural inequality that underpins individual narratives of suffering. But, as Ahmed (2004: 192) argues, within the frame of this new politics of sentimentality, only certain aspects of suffering can be considered worthy of compassion.

In light of these heteronormative practices and the politics of sentimentality, the question is how do we understand the identification of the audience with the individual when ‘improper bodies’ – in the case of the film Sick, a lesbian body – embody the narrative of suffering. Which values are appropriated, if any, when others, those who do not fit, suffer? And finally, how are we to understand the role of a documentary frame through which Ana’s narrative is represented?

Ana’s story

The documentary Sick follows a year in the life of the main character, Ana. It depicts Ana’s life after her discharge from a psychiatric hospital and her struggle to re-establish a semblance of ‘normal life’ through her relationship with her partner Martina. At the age of 16, Ana was hospitalised in Lopača, a public mental health hospital in the city of Rijeka, Croatia. Lopača is a psychiatric institution that specialises in the treatment of severe mental illnesses, including treating patients involuntarily. Lopača had no juvenile or adolescent wards, so all patients, regardless of age, were hospitalised under the same regime as adult patients.² Her hospitalisation was initiated by her parents and she was officially diagnosed by a psychiatrist as a ‘drug addict’. However, in reality, she was ‘treated’ for homosexuality, as her parents could not accept that Ana was a lesbian. Ana was initially hospitalised for two years and then released after convincing her doctor that she was heterosexual. When she confessed to her parents that she was still attracted to other girls, they had her re-hospitalised for a further two years. Upon her final release, she suffered flashbacks, was hearing voices and became anxious, depressed, prone to self-harm and suicidal. In 2007, the Croatian media framed her story as a case of human rights abuse. Following the media reports, the Croatian Ministry of Health instigated a review of Lopača psychiatric hospital, but no legal action was taken. Martina was Ana’s partner at the time and had met her after her release from the hospital. In the documentary, she is supportive and patient, and eager for them to move on with their lives as a functional couple. However, this proved difficult as, according to Martina’s account, Ana was ‘stuck in the past’ and ‘obsessed with revenge’. At one point, Ana seeks redress by suing her parents and her hospital psychiatrist, Dr M.V. Her relationship with Martina subsequently disintegrates and she contemplates whether she is able to sustain emotional relationships.

The film opens with a quotation from William Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun: ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past’. The audience is first introduced to Ana’s pain through her description of her days at the psychiatric institution:

When you’re tied down, that’s when the windows are open. There are bars. You can also hear rain [she cries]. And you’re not allowed to ask why they torture you. And I want out … They don’t let me … From my bed, all I could see was that small window, and the bars, and outside the birds kept singing. In the end, no matter how much I yearned to be somewhere close to those little birds, when I got out, they frightened me. Because it all felt as if I was still up there, in hospital – and it still does.

The image of birds in flight, in different seasons, is a recurrent visual theme evoking Ana’s pain, suffering and longing for escape. As the movie unfolds, Ana reflects on her past, the memories of her happy childhood, and her teenage experiences, when she met her first girlfriend, Natja. She recalls one significant evening when the two were arrested and detained by the police for allegedly using drugs. Ana denied the accusations and instead declared herself a lesbian. According to her account, her parents were unequivocal in their rejection of her sexuality and tried to convince her to become straight. She refused to comply, which resulted in her parents hospitalising her in Lopača, supported by Ana’s treating psychiatrist, M.V., who, at that time, was also the executive manager of the hospital. In her account, Ana contrasts memories of happiness with Natja with the ‘hell’ of the psychiatric institution to which she was confined:

That’s the worst. Thinking about what I left behind. In my past, there is that hell. And before that, a great happiness. I met Natja at art school in 2002. When I look back, there is always a smile on my face. I am sixteen again when I think of that happiness … I knew from a young age who I was, but I didn’t know how my parents would react, so I kept it secret. When I told them that I was in love with a girl, Natja, they were terrified … They started hating me and doing horrible things to me. My mother would look at me with hatred, saying, ‘You are not my child anymore, you are sick’ … My father accused me of embarrassing him … The whole town knew about our lesbian relationship … And then my parents found a way to ‘fix’ the problem. They lied to people that I was a drug addict. That was less embarrassing for them than having a lesbian daughter. And then they found a psychiatrist, M.V., who believed that lesbianism was a disease. My parents arranged everything with her … I remember, it was autumn. We were driving for a very long time. I don’t remember the way to the hospital … Only the eerie forest … I couldn’t see anything through the tears. Then I saw a man in white opening the door, a technician. Then a nurse showed up and said, ‘Here’s the new girl’. The technician grabbed me and … took me to a ward. They put me in a dressing gown and a diaper … I watched as they prepared the jacket, the belt, the injection … At first, the therapies wear you out so much that you can only sleep. The first four months I only slept. Slept and drooled, slept and drooled.

Ana was involuntarily held in Lopača initially for two years, until she turned 18. She reflected on the therapies she was subjected to, including ‘working therapy’, which consisted of cleaning the toilets, assisting other patients (changing their diapers), washing clothes and working in the kitchen. She was not allowed to leave the main hospital building and was punished for minor transgression of hospital imposed rules and regulations, such as talking to other patients. As a consequence, Ana was repeatedly placed in solitary confinement (which one of the doctors sarcastically called ‘Hawaii’). During her time in isolation, she was heavily medicated and tied to her bed for weeks.³

According to her account, as a part of ‘therapy’, Ana was repeatedly told that homosexuality was wrong, sinful, immoral and a kind of mental illness.⁴ She was required to behave in a ‘feminine way’, encouraged to ‘sit and walk like a girl’ and finally to admit that she wanted ‘to convert’ to a ‘straight lifestyle’. Ana eventually feigned submission to the authority of her treating psychiatrist in an attempt to avoid what she described as further ‘torture’.

Doctor M.V. … she’s a monster. She’s such a manipulative person … I didn’t know how to rescue myself … The others told me to confess. To lie. They told me, ‘If you don’t lie, you won’t make it’. I resisted for a good nine months and then I lied … I said that I was an addict. She was happy then, and she stopped torturing me with the drug story … From then, every therapy session she would ask, ‘Are you sure that you like girls … maybe you are just experimenting with your sexuality … It’s what people of your age do’. She also asked me if I thought that was normal, to be a lesbian. I said it was normal for me, and then she asked, ‘What about children? Do you not want to have kids? And a husband?’ Every group therapy I would sit there with my head down, praying that she would choose someone else. I was sitting without crossing my legs … In the end, she forced me to sit like lady, with crossed legs … Then I lied that I also liked boys.

As a result of Ana’s performance of submission and obedience, she was temporarily discharged from the Lopača. However, after admitting to her parents that her sexual orientation had remained unchanged, the involuntary commitment was re-initiated by her parents and again signed by M.V., still the executive manager of the psychiatric institution where Ana spent another two years. During that period, she lost all connection with her parents: she felt they abandoned her and stopped loving her.

Ana’s story became public in 2007 when journalists from Rijeka published a series of critical articles about the treatment of patients in the Lopača, especially about treatment of adolescent patients.⁵ Under media pressure, Dr M.V., the executive manager of the Lopača, resigned in 2008, and in 2009, a court case was filed against her. Ana was the main witness. A scene in the film shows a montage of radio, TV and newspaper reports about Ana’s court case against Dr M.V. These media clips are juxtaposed with footage of Ana trying to confront both her mother and the psychiatrist. A journalist in the radio clip comments: ‘According to Ana, forgiveness is not an option’. However, the case against Dr M.V. was dismissed. Her ‘wrong-doings’ were seen as job-related neglect, which could not be prosecuted.⁶

The film goes on to document how, after her release, Ana is haunted by memories of involuntary hospitalisation: torn by anger, fear and a desire for revenge, Ana seeks professional help and engages a psychotherapist. The audience is also introduced to the medical history of Ana’s partner, Martina, who has been struggling with addiction since her teenage years. In an emotionally intense scene, the audience is offered a narrative of redemption, where the two women offer support for each other in their suffering. The film continues with Ana’s narrative about the new chapter in her life. She and Martina are planning to get married – and we see them doing ordinary things and exchanging affections. However, their relationship does not endure the pressures of Martina’s struggle to remain ‘clean’ and Ana’s intense emotional distress, which is illustrated in the film by nervous, excessive smoking and the taking of medication. The relationship crisis escalates in what is supposed to be a rendering of Ana’s nervous breakdown, as described by Martina in her dramatic description of a distressing event at their home:

She [Ana] locked herself in the toilet. I didn’t know what was going on, so I broke in the door. I scared her – I’ve never seen such fear in someone’s eyes. She started throwing things at me: ‘Don’t hurt me. Stop!’ she yelled. Whatever it was she saw in me, it wasn’t good. She was back in the hospital [mentally] and I was one of the people from that time. She would just curl up on the bed and cry. I could imagine what it was like for her, alone up there.

Martina’s narration of that event in the film is accompanied by footage of a car speeding in the rain, composed as a series of short cuts and rapidly changing camera angles and Martina returning home from work fearing for Ana and breaking down the bathroom door. At the conclusion of the scene, we watch Ana and Martina cry together as they retell the story to one other. Another cut leads into a scene where Martina announces the break-up of their relationship and her intention to leave. She explains that she can’t take the burden of Ana’s emotional distress, anxiety and anger, and her obsessive focus on the court case. It is not an easy decision for Martina, and she explains to the camera how hard it has been for her, emotionally. She feels she will break down if she does not leave and take care of herself.

The film then takes us two years forward. We see Ana appearing more reconciled with her life, as she describes how Martina is not a part of it anymore and that she is continuing with her psychotherapy sessions. She also reveals that her mother has had a heart attack and that she went to visit and comfort her. At the same time, she reflects on her relationship with her father and reads the letter she posted to him in an attempt to achieve emotional resolution:

Father, so many years have passed that I am not sure if we know each other anymore. I wonder how much you’ve aged … I don’t know how visible your wrinkles are, or how visible the burden you carry in your soul … How do you look now? I don’t want something happening to you without saying how I feel. I want you to feel peace. I wish you all the best. I want you to be happy. I don’t want you to suffer. Until that day, you gave me everything you could give me: love, protection.

Yet in spite of her plea, Ana’s father refused to contact her.

He didn’t want to read the letter. But my sister conveyed it to him. So at least I won’t regret never having done it. I felt relieved because I released a big part of that hatred and anger. At that moment, I decided to let them go. I started focusing on my own life … on my own future.

At this point in the film, Ana offers an optimistic view of life and a future free from painful emotions related to her past experiences. In the last therapy session, she describes the forgiveness she offers to her parents, and in the closing scene of the film, Ana appears at peace with herself, playing with her dogs on the beach in the sunset.

Sick and the politics of sentimentality

While Sick opens with Faulkner’s meditation that ‘the past is never dead’, it ends with the idea of the possibility of a ‘good life that becomes a promise, as if the future itself is what will overcome injury or any other signs of hurt’ (Ahmed, 2010: 113). This relationship between Ana’s past and her hope for a better future is a paradoxical one: on the one hand, the film presents a story about injustice, but on the other, Ana’s pain is depicted as a lonely and private thing. Her pain is made transparent to a viewing public in the documentary frame through which her story is told. As Judith Butler argues, for the story to become part of the public sphere, it must be constituted, in part, ‘by what cannot be said or by what cannot be shown. The limits of the sayable, the limits of what can appear, circumscribe the domain in which … certain kinds of subjects appear as viable actors’ (2004: 7). These are the terms under which all narrations operate. Within this domain, there are certain narrative conditions that enable Ana to emerge as a subject of both suffering and salvation.

Ana appears as a wounded subject in a story that is grounded in the painful conditions of structural inequality that underpin the relations of power between the family, mental health institutions and sexual minorities. Her story also emerges from a historical political context, that in which nationality and sexuality converge in the official public sphere in Croatia, as in the majority of other Eastern European states. From the early 1990s, there has been an intensification of political rhetoric – on the part of both conservative and liberal politicians – directed towards sex, marriage and reproduction. It indexes a new politics of intimacy and practices of citizenship based on ‘personal acts and values, especially acts originating in the family sphere’ (Berlant, 1997: 5). National heterosexuality has been imagined as a space of pure citizenship, problematising practices of non-reproductive, sacrilegious sexuality. The ‘coming out’ of local sexual minorities and their demands for social and legal equality has precipitated homophobic reactions of fear, disgust and rejection.⁷ However, in 2013, following a referendum on the constitutional definition of marriage previously defined as a unity between a man and a woman, the Croatian parliament recognised gay and lesbian relationships as legal through the Life Partnership Act.⁸

Ana’s narrative is constituted within all of these circumstances, which inscribe her narrative with ‘signs of undoing’ that signify social and psychic breakdown, in her ‘lost ties’ with her parents and the broader society (Butler, 2004: 23). But different kinds of limits of the sayable and ‘signs of undoing’ operate within the domain through which the story is told – the medium of documentary film. On one level, the film is about the abuse of basic human rights and can therefore be seen as an attempt to expose the structural violence of the twin institutions of psychiatry and the family. Yet there is another narrative in operation which prioritises compassion for individual suffering over outrage at the systems that produced it and insistence that they change. This story takes place within the context of the politics of sentimentality, through which individual suffering is appropriated into public sphere.⁹

According to Kleinman and Kleinman (1996) and Kokanović et al. (2008, 2010), it is possible to trace two stages of appropriation of individual stories of suffering into public sphere: through victimisation and pathologisation. Kleinman and Kleinman (1996: 10) suggest that ‘the person who undergoes torture first becomes a victim, an image of innocence and passivity’, then s/he becomes a patient with a mental disorder, someone who is scared, made sick with the experiences, someone helpless. But in recent times, we can also trace a third stage, the narrative of survival and ‘recovery’. After being made a victim and then a patient, the person is reconceptualised as a survivor, someone who endured the most horrific traumas through individual courage and heroic perseverance. Sick follows this pattern of appropriation that culminates in the survivor narrative of ‘recovery’ and hopes for a pain-free future split off from the memory of past trauma. Soon after positioning Ana as a helpless victim of her parents, the film then reconstructs her as a victim of psychiatric oppression. In experiencing the deferred symptoms of psychological trauma, Ana then becomes a ‘real’ patient. At this stage, Ana is suffering from PTSD and hallucinations, panic attacks, anxiety and suicidal thoughts. Through the accounts of Ana and Martina, we are given to understand the seriousness and complexity of Ana’s suffering. This is confirmed in the scenes depicting Ana working with her new psychotherapist in his office, where her pain is reframed as individual pathology – that is, as a personal, rather than political, problem. Kleinman and Kleinman pose the question:

In what way does the imagery of victimisation as a pathology of an individual alter the experience – collective as well as individual – so that its lived meaning as moral and political memory, perhaps even resistance, is lost and replaced by “guilt”, “paranoia”, and a “failure to cope”? (1996: 10)

This insight enables us to understand how the means of the medium of film we analyse here depicts this shift from victim to patient. It also depicts Ana’s transformation from someone who was helpless to someone who takes control of her own life, someone whose ‘recovery’ depends entirely on ‘letting go’ and ‘moving on’.

As viewers of Sick, we become witnesses of Ana’s transformation. We observe Ana’s pain, but we also witness at the end of the film Ana’s willingness to forgive her family and her hopes for a future without pain. Through such witnessing, it is not her pain and suffering but the promise of future happiness that becomes, as Sara Ahmed defines it, ‘a happening in the world’ (2010: 29). It involves an act of identification, and, as an audience, we move from observing Ana’s suffering caused by institutional and parental abuse to the salvation of her sanity through forgiveness. The narrative shifts Ana’s experience of suffering on account of her improper desires towards the promise of a new life and love that are achievable on the condition of filial forgiveness. This restoration of Ana’s body as a lovable object can only occur once the improper lesbian body – constituted by social abjection – is banished from the scene of her intrapsychic drama, where her forgiveness functions as the ‘sign of assimilation into the national body’ (Ahmed, 2010: 137). That is, Ana’s desire to have a ‘normal’ life is premised on this identification with forgiveness.

As we have argued, although the political impetus for the making of the documentary film Sick is a concern for human rights, the narrative becomes caught in a problematic politics of sentimentality. While Sick clearly condemns the injustices experienced by the main protagonist, it turns compassionate audiences away from social suffering towards individual suffering. In depicting Ana’s transformation from being a subject of political pain – whose anger is legitimate and justifiable – to becoming a trauma patient and, finally, a forgiving daughter, the film undermines its own political potential by obliging the audience to congratulate her emotional reintegration into the state and the family that failed her. In the end, it is Ana’s obligation to summon renewed love and faith in the state, psychiatry and the family, the very institutions that caused her harm, while the audience is spared from any lasting feelings of grievance at the social causes of mental illness, since these can be resolved through individual means. The domestic, or local, social narrative of homophobic violence underpinning Ana’s experience of incarceration then becomes reduced to a deeply individualised story of pathology and recovery. Ana only comes to herself as an agentic subject through this narrative turn towards a story of suffering and forgiveness, and the possibility of a brighter future. In this future, Ana successfully reintegrates into the world, but to do so, she must relinquish her experience of institutional and family sanctioned abuse. In this temporal leap from the present to the future, the unhappy feelings engendered by discrimination are resolved as the appearance of the sentimentalised subject displaces the scene of political injustice.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author Biographies

Senka Božić-Vrbančić works in the Department of Ethnology and Anthropology at the University of Zadar, Croatia and holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Auckland, New Zealand.She has worked in the School of Philosophy, Anthropology and Social Inquiry at the University of Melbourne, Australia; the Center for Sociology and Cultural Studies in Lviv, Ukraine and the Institute for Anthropological Research, Zagreb. Her work spans the fields of anthropology, cultural studies, gender studies, visual culture, and memory studies. Her work has been published in various journals, including Ethnography, History and Anthropology, and Emotion, Space Society. Her book Tarara: Croats and Maori in New Zealand – memory, belonging, identity has been published by Otago University Press.

Renata Kokanović Professor and Vice-Chancellor's Principal Research Fellow in the School of Global, Urban & Social Studies (GUSS) at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia, and Adjunct Professor in the School of Social Sciences, Faculty of Arts, Monash University. Renata is an interdisciplinary researcher working at the intersection of the social sciences and humanities. She has written on phenomenology of depression, informal care, refugee mental health, addiction and narratives of living with chronic illness.

Jelena Kupsjak is a PhD student of Anthropology at the University of Zadar, where she works as a teaching assistant at the Department of ethnology and anthropology. She received her MA in sociology and ethnology and cultural anthropology at University of Zadar in 2012. She is a member of the Center for Research in Social Sciences and Humanities and a member of the Editorial Board of [SIC] – Journal for Literature, Culture and Literary Translation. Her research interests include politics of difference, gender and sexuality, popular culture, psychiatry, ethnography and politics of memory.

References

Ahmed

(2004) The Cultural Politics of Emotion, New York, NY: Routledge.

Ahmed

(2010) The Promise of Happiness, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Beldie

et al. (2017) Stigma in midsize European countries. In: Gaebel

Rossler

Sartorius

(eds) The Stigma of Mental Illness – End of the Story?, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing, pp. 417–435.

Berlant

(1997) The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Berlant

(2004) Introducing compassion (and Withholding). In: Berlant

(eds) Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion, New York, NY and London: Routledge, pp. 1–15.

Berlant

Warner

(1998) Sex in public. Critical Inquiry 24(2): 547–566.

Butler

(2004) Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, London: Verso.

Butler

(2005) Giving an Account of Oneself, New York, NY: Fordham University Press.

Human Rights Watch (2010) Once you enter, you never leave: Deinstitutionalization of persons with intellectual or mental disabilities in Croatia, 23 September. Available at: www.hrw.org/report/2010/09/23/once-you-enter-you-never-leave/deinstitutionalization-persons-intellectual-or (accessed 21 September 2016).

10.

Human Rights Watch (2014) Croatia: Locked up and neglected, 6 October. Available at: www.hrw.org/news/2014/10/06/croatia-locked-and-neglected (accessed 21 September 2016).

11.

Kleinman

(1996) The appeal of experience; the dismay of images: Cultural appropriations of suffering in our times. Daedalus 125(1): 1–23.

12.

Kokanović

Dowrick

Butler

et al. (2008) Lay accounts of depression amongst Anglo-Australian residents and East African refugees. Social Science and Medicine 66(2): 454–466.

13.

Kokanović

May

Dowrick

et al. (2010) Negotiations of distress between East Timorese and Vietnamese refugees and their family doctors in Melbourne. Sociology of Health and Illness 32(4): 11–27.

14.

Milković

(2013) Brutalna Stvarnost: Istraživanje o Nasilju, Diskriminaciji i Zločinu iz Mržnje protiv LGBTIQ Osoba u Republici Hrvatskoj, Zagreb: Zagreb pride.

15.

SICK [Bolesno] (2015) Documentary motion picture, Drugi plan, fade In, Zagreb Film. Directed by Hrvoje Mabic.

16.

Sim

Vickery

(2014) New feelings: Modernism, intimacy, and emotion. Affirmation of the Modern 1(2): 1–14.

17.

The 4th Monkey [4. Majmun] (2013) Documentary motion picture, fade in, Hrvatska Radiotelevizija (HRT). Directed by Hrvoje Mabic.

18.

Zahavi

(2005) Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First-Person Perspective, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.