There’s a new drama called Black Box debuting tonight. I want to watch it, because I like to watch any show, or read any poem, or devour any memoir, that concerns “crazy” women and mental illness. Though this show doesn’t sound like anything particularly different or new, whatever, I’m going to watch it anyway.
Predictable Mental Illness Portrayal
Apparently Black Box is about a fancy-pants big-shot neurologist named Catherine Black. She’s special because she’s bipolar, and her illness magically equips her with a weirdly divine sixth-sense type thing that allows her to see more deeply into the lives, minds, and troubles of her troubled patients. “Catherine has an insight into her patients that no one else has, allowing her to communicate with them on a different level,” ABC’s press notes explain.
I’m not surprised that the show, at least according to this New Republic review, falls back on the tired old trope that’s been thrown around in film and literature and art and, well, pretty much anything and everything creative, for pretty much all of time: that insanity is a superpower, a type of godly gift. That brilliance and illness are inextricably linked, always and forever. That the best minds of any generation are also the most f*cked up and self-loathing. That artists of any ilk are bereft of “material” if their lives aren’t brimming with loneliness, misery and pain. The tragic hero(ine) is real, at least in our cultural fantasies.
And when you think about it, don’t most of our supposed artistic heroes—usually the tragic ones, duh—have some kind of mental pitfall that keeps them forever stuck in otherworldly amounts of excruciating pain? Both fictional ones and real ones. Oh, and they tend to commit suicide. Think Kurt Cobain, Sylvia Plath, Ernest Hemingway, Diane Arbus, Frida Kahlo, Vincent Van Gogh, Anne Sexton, Mark Rothko, the list goes on and on and on.
Nothing New Yet
So yeah. To me, Catherine Black just sounds like pop culture’s latest incarnation of the nutty messed-up wild child gone straight, via the world of medicine—but not too straight, never too straight, she’s only been kissed by madness, remember? And the mad ones are the most alive. Err…until they’re dead by their own hand.
It would be great if we could start conceiving some new tropes, Hollywood. Though I’ll admittedly keep watching and reading all the crazy-woman crap until you do.
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