There are doors that lock and doors that don’t
There are doors that let you in and out but never open
And there are trapdoors
That you can’t come back from
- “Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors,” Radiohead
Resilience is a word so overused that I should beg Janet Frame’s—whose care for and enchantment with words is the through line of Jane Campion’s tenderhearted An Angel at My Table—forgiveness. But it is a word fit to Ms. Frame.1 Janet Frame, or “Jean,” as she is often called, experiences tragedies and setbacks of significant import time and time again: her family lives in poverty; her dad, who provides the film with some of its greatest moments of tenderness, is still a powder keg of anger and control; her older sister dies drowning; her brother has epilepsy; her younger sister also later dies of drowning; she spends many long stretches painfully alone and isolated; she has profound social awkwardness; and she is misdiagnosed with schizophrenia and is subjected to over 200 rounds of electroshock therapy, “the fear equivalent equal to execution” every time, she says. She is saved from lobotomization by winning a prestigious literary prize mere days before her scheduled surgery, at which point the doctor decides that removing a part of her brain might not be a great option.2 Yet the motion of Janet’s life is never halted completely; she finds ways around or under or over or through, and she gets out the other side of things. Resilience seems appropriate.
Diagnosing, naming, classifying—these acts are only as meaningful as they are helpful. They can close doors as much as open them. To diagnose, to classify, is to communicate in shorthand; exposition of a self. Sometimes, diagnosis is treated as a sentence terminated by an immutable period. Prophetic or pathetic, to be lived up to or to be warded off as the plague.
Janet’s misdiagnosis of schizophrenia is terrifyingly bad exposition.3 And when that diagnosis is identified as faulty, it becomes its own inverted exposition. Of that opened vista, Janet says that it was even scarier than the initial diagnosis: what meaning did the eight years of hospitalizations and inhumane treatments have if there was “nothing wrong with me”? But if she’s not able to easily put it into words (mental health vocabulary not being what it is today), her own actions prove that she doesn’t believe in anything so binary as “schizophrenia or nothing’s ‘wrong.’” She is acutely aware of her own social awkwardness and anxiety, and particularly the cold ways in which others respond to her own awkwardness. But she keeps trying doorknobs until one opens. And when it does, she walks through.
Perhaps the better function of diagnosis, then, is as a set of words that expand access to the world of a self. Naming and classifying can provide a framework (no pun intended) for moving forward in life in one’s own particularity. If there’s one thing An Angel at My Table believes in, it’s that words possess power. The entire film is punctuated with recitation of poems and prose. Words in particular arrangement conjure possibility on a grid blocked with dead ends: it’s Janet’s award-winning collection of short stories that spring her out of hospitalization; it’s her choice to keep a word in a poem that her sister insists she change through which she finds some confidence in her writing; it’s for her writing that she travels to Europe and lets her independence blossom in the face of lack and experience; and it’s the joy of finding the perfect ending phrase that cuts short her timid attempt at dancing alone and sends her back ecstatic to her typewriter in the final scene of the film. These words pave Janet’s pathway as she walks it, whether by still waters or through the valley of the shadow of death.
She finds words to break through the words that have hemmed her in.
Social challenges are a constant for anyone on the edge of “normalcy” (and for most people within “normalcy,” too). But there is such richness to life that is not negated by the challenge. Campion is not interested in making a martyr of Frame, nor of evoking heaps of pity. Frame’s social awkwardness and muddied mental health is not her super power, either. This is what connects the otherwise disparate Sweetie and An Angel at My Table: Campion is less interested in diagnosis as a solution to a problem and more as an acknowledgement of the peculiar richness and terrifying singularity of every human being. Campion is already one of the most anti-expositional narrative filmmakers I’ve seen; it’s no wonder to find her so attuned to the power and limits of finding words for things. Resilience is a good word for Janet Frame. But, as Campion knows, its limits are commensurate to Frame’s unfathomable interiority.
An Angel at My Table is a wonderful film, and is far gentler and more generous than my summary can capture. It’s not as bleak as it sounds!
I’ve been waiting a long time to see next month’s film—perhaps Jane Campion’s most well-known work—The Piano! I know very little about it, so I’m excited to experience it after seeing Campion’s early work. It doesn’t look like it’s currently streaming anywhere in the U.S., but it is rentable. Or you can find it at your local library.
Janet Frame the Character; I’m sure the same can be said of Janet Frame Historical Person, but my preference is to treat biopics as total fictions and not to get too hung up on the so-called historical accuracy side of things. Maybe in the future I’ll delve deeper into thorny questions of narrative, truth, textual fidelity, and the like, but for now let’s treat this film as fiction—albeit, fiction inspired by a real person and some actual events. And I think I’m in decent company for such an approach. Jane Campion said of the “real” Janet Frame: “She is a very mature woman who knows that the narrative of her life is also a fiction.” (Campion in an interview at Venice, September 14, 1990, as quoted in Ciment, Michel. Jane Campion on Jane Campion. Abrams, Inc, 2023. p. 71)
That part is, horrifyingly, actually factual!
More terrifying still: 1950s psychiatric treatments!