Page 154 - Flaunt 171 - Summer of Our Discontent - Lili

Psychiatrist Walter Freeman later brought this practice to America, but changed the name to “lobotomy”.
Freeman gradually became a travelling crusader of this procedure, as a total of 50,000 lobotomies were performed over the years. At the time, lobotomies were a method to improve
all mental illnesses, ranging from schizophrenia and bipolar disorder to occasional mood swings in growing teens. Accord- ing to neurologist Elliot Valenstein, “Some patients seemed to improve, some became ‘vegetables,’ some appeared unchanged and others died.” The risks were large, but the alternatives were worse: drugs weren’t introduced until the mid-1950s, and psychiatric institutions were overcrowded. Patients, like Mona Gables’ mother, were desperate to try anything.
Mona Gable—as told in Not All There: My Mother’s Lobot- omy—for as long as she could remember, always questioned the origins of what was underneath her mother’s bangs. There, beneath the bangs, sat a shiny square dent that Mona figured came from a fight, or a fall from a seizure (something she ex- perienced often). Growing up, Mona resented her mother for the mysterious head dent, along with the wild and alarming stunts that she would pull: she had fits, she slept with military guys she would meet in a bar on Shelter Island, sneaked the keys to the station wagon to take it on a joy ride, and would start to cook hamburgers at 5:30 AM under the impression that it was dinnertime.
When Mona was seven, her father decided he no longer wanted to sleep with her mother. So, naturally, her moth-
er moved into Mona’s room, and they slept alongside each other in twin beds for the next nine years. When her mother went out to drink, Mona would lie awake for hours awaiting her drunken arrival, and was thankful on the nights that she didn’t come home at all.
Not until Mona moved out for college and began therapy did she start to question the reason why her mother was the way she was. She slowly pieced together that her mother was a victim of a lobotomy in the 1940s, and was supposedly a fun and normal teenage girl prior to the surgery. Mona has since come to terms with the uncontrollable fits that her mother encoun- ters to this day.
Mona’s mother’s surgery has undoubtedly invaded her understanding of one’s self for the remainder of her life. What was the results of the lobotomy and what was her real mother? Nowadays, it is easy to recognize these surgeries as ludicrous; in the 1940’s, however, the surgery was synonymous with re- covery: the only chance at becoming “normal”.
The question still remains: if the surgery was technically an elected one, can it be seen as invasive? The lobotomies were meant to help—in fact they were proven to help in many cases. If Mona’s results had been different, would she still coin the lobotomy as “invasive”? Or her cure?
Oscar Winner Jordan Peele’s 2019 film, Get Out—now expressed in a hardback book this Fall, Get Out: The Complete Annotated Screenplay’ (via D.A.P.), with an essay in support, a wealth of film stills, alternative endings and crib notes—elab- orates on this contrast between invasive and elective, and the equivocal middle ground between the two. Peele illustrates how a white family invades the minds of its Black employ-
ees through three layers of manipulation: hypnotism, mental preparation, and brain transplantation. The brain transplanta- tion “keeps intricate connections intact, so you won’t be gone, not completely. A sliver of you will still be in there somewhere; you’ll be able to see and hear what your body is doing, but your existence will be as a passenger.”
These conditions impose the illusion that you retain little autonomy, but autonomy nonetheless. Through this, Peele suggests the blurry line between what is self-determined and what is involuntary—specifically with the advent of modern-day technology, especially used against minority groups that hold less power—and that of choice. Are we being indoctrinated invasively, or does this electively come with the territory on a night out in 2020?
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