Psychopathia Sexualis

From psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s 1886 tome of the same name as well as his 1905 Text-Book of Insanity comes a new film by Bret Wood, the writer/director who brought us the darkly hilarious and highly recommended documentary Hell’s Highway: The True Story of Highway Safety Films (2003).

You’ve probably heard the name Krafft-Ebing before, but if you’re like me, you didn’t know much about him. His claim to fame was popularizing psychiatry and elevating discourse on sexual perversions into the realm of science, legitimizing them as medical conditions in a time when they were even more taboo and misunderstood than they are today. His vast influence is evident in the work of Freud (a contemporary of Ebing’s), Alfred Kinsey, and Jung, who was inspired to study psychology after reading Psychopathia Sexualis.

Ebing gave his book its scientific title and wrote its more salacious passages in Latin, “to discourage the lay reader.” This is a good example of his complicated personality, for, while he might have only meant to dissuade people interested in the book solely for erotic purposes, this also kept his knowledge exclusive to those who could afford an education. Then again, he also gave numerous public speeches on sexual psychopathy, and has probably done more to bring frank discussion of sex into the mainstream than anyone in history. And despite his seemingly regressive views towards homosexuality, as the film illustrates, he later declared that he no longer felt homosexuality was a pathological perversion.

Wood’s film provides an outstanding window into the good but conflicted doctor’s mind by adapting real case studies from the book in the form of vignettes, accompanied by Ebing’s fascinating commentary. Narration is so often used superfluously to tell us what we’re already seeing, or to lazily advance plot points that are easier said than done. I was thrilled, then, to actually hear voiceover being used effectively; we get to listen to Ebing in his own words, complete with all his marvelous revelations and contradictions. And this is but one way in which the film brilliantly employs sound and picture to put us inside the head of a headshrinker.

The film is beautifully shot and highly stylized, and yet it somehow manages to refrain from sensationalizing the delicate subject matter. In case you’re curious, this includes prostitution, pederasty, mutilation, lust murder, necrophilia, vampirism, poultry sex, golden showers, leech bloodletting, mustache fetishes; pretty much every form of S&M you can fathom (incidentally both “sadism” and “masochism” were named by Ebing, the former after De Sade, the latter after Leopold von Sacher-Masoch). But don’t let this scare you away, because no matter how lurid you might perceive the act in question to be, the filmmakers and the actors (especially standout Lisa Paulsen) do a marvelous job of avoiding the obvious temptation to exploit the many unorthodox sex acts practiced by the characters populating this film for cheap visceral effect. Like Todd Browning did in Freaks, the camera treats them respectfully (with almost no shock cuts) and mostly objectively. It all feels almost too detached at times, until you realize that this was clearly a conscious decision on the part of the artists. For by juxtaposing unflinching shots of these sympathetically portrayed characters next to Ebing’s highly judgmental narration, his frequent moralizing becomes more and more unsettling.

Take, for example, a scene where Ebing is going on about the “diseased conditions of the homosexual mind” while we’re shown the long unrequited love between two lesbian friends finally being consummated in a beautifully photographed and heartfelt union. Or the scene where he intones, “It’s quite common for hysteric paranoid women of insane asylums to complain of sexual violations by demonic or divine beings, often on a nightly basis,” as we’re being shown a doctor raping a restrained patient.

His labeling of his subjects’ bedroom pastimes as “unnatural,” and his mingling of ethical and religious language with that of science with words like “tainted,” “polluted,” and “degeneracy,” all work to betray his hubris. “No soul is beyond redemption,” he once remarked. And to him, both homosexuality and onanism are “repugnant.” “I abhor the love of men, as it is against religion, nature, and law,” he makes a gay man repeat under hypnosis aimed at “curing” him. He later writes of the same man, “Patient is showing signs of improvement, as when he discreetly requested the address of a brothel.” Much healthier!

The dangers of the scientist playing God come full circle in the epilogue, where we see how science continues to supplant religion. One of Ebing’s protege’s boasts, “People will no longer go to judges and priests for answers, judges and priests will now come to us!” His patient then asks his doctor. “So you’re starting a church?”

This surreal tone is furthered by David Bruckner’s outstanding cinematography, whose edge-blurred framing devices and repeated use of iris shots gives the viewer the discomforting feeling of a being a voyeur spying on these people through a peephole, or, perhaps, a microscope. In fact, every element of the movie works to complement the others, from the lighting to Paul Mercer’s eerie score to the many period details of costume and dance. There’s even a shadow puppet sequence that is both gorgeous and disturbing, in keeping with the entire movie. If only all those awful reenactments on the History Channel were this good!

The film raises many questions about the modern day fields of psychology and psychiatry, and about how our legal system deals with these aberrations. Personally, if it’s consensual and doesn’t hurt anyone (unless, of course, that’s what they want), I don’t think any practice should be illegal. When private acts are criminalized, it just makes more criminals, many of whom are so repressed that the sex act becomes a guilty, joyless need that must be fulfilled illegally, and then never spoken about, like the masked orgy participants in Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. But what of the extreme cases? Are they immoral? Merely sick? Or is it society that sickens? Psychopathia Sexualis doesn’t give us the answers, it challenges you to.

-Andy Gately