Mental Illness and Narrative Complexity : An Experiential Approach to Puzzle Films and Complex Television

Kreitler, Melanie

Edinburgh University Press（2025/12発売）

• 製本 Hardcover:ハードカバー版／ページ数 264 p.
• 言語 ENG
• 商品コード 9781399542012
• DDC分類 362.2

Full Description

Mainstream media's relationship with mental illness is fraught. Deemed to misrepresent and sensationalise non-normative mental states, productions are said to solidify harmful attitudes in their audiences. Over the past two decades, puzzle films and complex TV shows have broken with time-honoured tropes of mental illness, offering alternative ways of visualising and narrating non-normative mental states.

Bringing together cognitive media studies, narrative theory and cultural studies, Melanie Kreitler explores the synergy between complex narrative structures and representations of mental illness. Focusing on US American films and TV shows since the mid-1990s, the book shows how complex productions strategically use their narrative structures to evoke in viewers an experience similar to that of the neuro-non-normative protagonist. Moving beyond the formal characteristics and cognitive effects of narrative complexity, this book argues for the cultural impact that puzzle films and complex television can have on our understanding of mental illness on and off screens.

Contents

List of Figures

Introduction: American Psychology, or Mental Illness in Medicine, Media and Culture

Part I. In(ter)ception, or Mental Illness and Complex Narratives

1. From Classical Structures to Cultural Effects of Complex Narratives of Mental Illness

2. An Experiential Approach to Narrative Complexity

Part II. No Country for Old Narratives, or Mental Illness in Puzzle Films

3. The Experiential Plot Twist in Fight Club

4. Looping Truths in Twelve Monkeys

5. Reading an Unreadable Mind in Memento

6. Blueprints of Lived Experience, or Mainstreamification and Consciousness-Enactment

Part III. The Unusual Suspects, or Mental Illness in Impossible Puzzle Films

7. The Framedness of Experience in I'm Thinking of Ending Things

8. Breaking out of the Blueprint, or Character Duplication and Consciousness-Attribution

Part IV. Once upon a Time ... in American Television, or Mental Illness in Complex TV

9. Blending Narrative Scripts in the First Season of Legion

10. Metalepsis and Musical Numbers in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

11. Beyond the Blueprint, or Self-Narratives, Metaplots, and the Metaverse

Conclusion: The Experientiality of Narrative Complexity, or Again(st) Empathy?

Bibliography

Filmography

Index