Plath took her own life in 1963. I will be talking about that, and about related and unrelated non-G-rated ideas in what follows.
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| Gwyneth Paltrow as Sylvia Plath |
The film Sylvia was born in querulous circumstances. Sylvia Plath's daughter, Frieda, opposed the whole project and banned any of her mother's poems from being included in it in full. Their absence was a weak point for some viewers (I didn't notice because I didn't know Plath's poetry that well) but only an iceberg tip for a biopic with a potentially more intense than usual circle of stakeholders. Amongst them, the Sylvia camp, the Ted Hughes (poet and Sylvia's husband) camp, scholars of the couple, living friends and family, feminist narrative collectors, artist suicide fascinatees, mental health speculators, et al. Reviews of the film often concentrate on only one of its many dimensions, which does make for an interesting body of complementary criticism. One of those dimensions is death. A recent review of Sylvia I read in a blog about British biopics called the film a 'thanatopic' (1). I suppose I can't object to that term too much if I'm praising Sylvia for its quality depiction of morbid depression.
I have to start with the personal. Since the first time I saw Sylvia, I felt this film was the one that most got right, or somehow matched, my own experience of depression.
Accepting that major clinical depression is something which can be incapacitating and can drive a person to destroy themselves, you might wonder in what sense does someone for whom this all might be close to the bone enjoy material like Sylvia? Or – must things about depression always be depression-making?
Part of the response to these questions must be part of what goes for any story with much scope. A story is usually not about one thing to the exclusion of all else, and Sylvia is not a film about depression to the exclusion of all else. Its title says as much. It's about Sylvia Plath, who led a short but interesting life. The IF Depression Quest was explicitly about depression, and I did find it depressing, but it also had a primary goal of raising awareness of depression. Sylvia does not have that primary goal.
A doctor once said to me, 'You're not just your anxiety.' She didn't say only that (and then – 'You're fixed!') but it was a summation point of numerous conversations. I like Sylvia as a film dealing with depression because it's holistic. It doesn't present its subject as just being made up of depression.
Gwyneth Paltrow plays Plath as someone capable of emitting great blasts of passion, but who also succumbs to bouts of brittle paranoia and a sense of total futility, especially regarding her relationship and the quality of her work. She also experiences periods of inner-looking depression which render her immobile.
The sequences showing Plath alone in empty rooms, combined with Paltrow's focusing-inwards performance and the film's score, create an abstract dismal atmosphere that I recognise. Sylvia benefits from the film medium's initial outside-looking-in stance, and also from its temporal effects. The unchanging spaces Plath sits in invite viewer speculation and anxiety regarding the only thing apparently happening in the scene: the movement of strange thoughts through her head.
To convey the nitty gritty of the catastrophising of the depressed, or of thoughts going in uhelpful directions in general, I think prose is potentially a stronger vehicle than film. In writing, one can describe each thought and the amplification of its imagined negative consequences. Films can do this kind of thing by voiceover (which I view as crutchy in general) or by showing flashes of outcomes imagined by characters. Sylvia does some of the latter about as well as I've seen. It edits together Sylvia's speculations on her husband's affairs with the reality of some of those affairs, but with a deliberate lack of clarity, recreating her experience of paranoia in the viewer. That's still different to a depiction of the raw level machinery of spiralling negative thoughts.
Several scenes in the film show Plath speaking frankly about her suicidal urges and suicide attempts, and also show a writer friend of hers, Al Alvarez, telling her about his own suicide attempt. The suicidal urge was obviously a strand of thinking in the depressed Plath that never really went away. She just tried to stave it off. I like the manner in which the film shows how she ventures into the topic, usually in an instinctive manner during emotional moments, or when testing out intimacy on someone new.
My favourite scene in the film, for all kinds of reasons – dialogue, performances, ideas – is the one in which Alvarez (an excellent performance by Jared Harris) responds to her suicide talk ("All I want is blackness and silence") with speculation on what death might be:
"One thing I do know about death is it is not a reunion or a homecoming. Your life doesn't flash before you and the missing piece of you clicks into place. There's just fuck all. There's nothing."
Since the day I first saw the film in the cinema back in 2003, the summation of death as 'just fuck all' has always been near the top of my thought queue whenever that impossible business of contemplating non-existence from the perspective of existence comes by. I don't mean this in a nihilistic sense. What I mean is that this bit of dialogue is the kind of pithy slap to remind anyone that suicide doesn't actually get you away to a quiet place.
When Plath fixes on her final plan to kill herself, she is shown experiencing a mood of melancholy beauty. Since she's trapped in her head, the film observes that she can only dig up a beauty that's about a foot away from her body, a light in a hallway that suddenly looks hazy and beautiful.
The interesting thing about melancholy is that it involves a romanticisation of being down. Since Plath's time, medicine and psychology have tried to lay out more solid ideas about where 'being down' ends and being clinically depressed begins. My own experience of depression, my interactions with medical/psychological communities and my reading have led me to believe that sufferers of major depression need to favour anti-melancholy as a practicality for their health. Plath's minor, uncaring rapture in the film evokes romantic mythologies about the tragic sensitivities of aritsts, both their gift and their curse, but it also directly precedes her death. The film shows her corpse being removed from the house, the street empty, Ted Hughes left there on his own.
Sylvia is emotional and wields a lot of cinematic beauty, but it's also psychologically realistic. It's one of the best depictions of the difficult-to-convey experience of severe depression that I've seen. Maybe more importantly, it's one that I enjoy watching.
1. Real Lives on Screen - Sylvia. By Hannah Andrews. https://reallivesonscreen.wordpress.com/2015/07/27/sylvia-2003/
(Below is a screenshot from a game on the Sylvia movie site, no longer online. It let you spam people with your bad fridge magnet poetry while promoting the film.)
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