Humorous
Hysteria a Much Needed Conversation Starter
by
Kristin Battestella
In
1880 London, Doctor Mortimer Granville (Hugh Dancy) joins Doctor
Robert Dalrymple's (Jonathan Pryce) clinic for women. Granville works
tirelessly, catering to his patients to the detriment of his hand
until his wealthy inventor friend Lord Edmund St. John-Smythe (Rupert
Everett) experiments with an electric duster that's actually a
powerful, vibrating massager that makes the hysterical patients sing
- literally. The demure Emily (Felicity Jones) catches Granville's
eye, and Dalrymple hopes his protege and daughter will marry and
secure his practice's future. Unfortunately, his older spitfire
daughter Charlotte (Maggie Gyllenhaal) advocates for the poor –
butting heads with authorities who think she should be diagnosed with
the titular medical condition. Granville must choose if he wants to
idle in a safe practice or take a risk in helping Charlotte, who has
no interest in his jolly machine.
A
humorous montage of hungry, crying, depressed women wanting to kill
the unfulfilling men in their lives opens this 2011 comedy directed
by Tanya Wexler (Finding North).
Unfortunately, be they young or old and whatever their problems, the
baffled male doctors have diagnosed them all with hysteria. It's
surgery for that overactive uterus or institutions for the
permanently hysterical, which seems to be about half the women in
London. The waiting room is packed as the trying to be sympathetic
doctors one by one provide their ghastly, tiring women's medicine
with manual stimulation. The patients are fully clothed, buttoned up,
and veiled from view while the medically trained but nonetheless
confused men calmly douse their hands in musk oil. They formally
calculate the shortness of breath over the circular index finger
motions, watch the clock, and take notes. The right hand is too cold,
but the left takes too long without “completing the treatment.”
No mentions of penis or anyone gaining pleasure parallel the inept
male attitudes – Hysteria's not
making a slight, just recounting the then misguided science. Rigid
thrombus phrenology winks in the conversation accent the
multi-layered humor as the whole idea toes the modern line between
being unethical with your lady patients and just downright
preposterous that this was the clueless norm. Here, women
with an opinion are viewed as volatile, and men flustered over the
forward ladies riding bicycles much prefer the easily smitten,
gentile ladies under control. Fortunately, a wacky, spinning cleaning
tool prototype with tingling, tickling vibrations massage the injured
hand and just might hit the right spot. Our male inventors debate how
something electrical and potentially dangerous could work on “a
lady's most gentle areas,” but they put on the goggles as the
generator flutters and the lights dim, astounded over the three
paroxysms in five minutes. Marketing their device is a risky venture,
but their hysteria cure is a success when women want to know what it
is called so they can ask for it by name. Hysteria
is not a
traditional period piece but has a modern viewpoint moving at a
quirky pace with montages, doors slammed
in one's face, and bemusing visuals as all the ladies stare at the
handsome doctors. While it would have been interesting to have a more
dramatic telling, this is shrewdly impish rather than anything
scandalous or torrid. Hysteria is
a lighthearted
tale of the women's experience inspiring a man to invention and
profit framed in an obvious romantic
comedy bend. The guy with the perfect girl really falls for the
radical lady instead and it all comes out at a ball before a public
resolution with his confession of love saving the day. At times,
Hysteria also
relies on millennial parallels and cliches
with a woman talking of feminine revolutions or saying a man needs to
walk a mile in her shoes. Such contemporary intrusions may seems
uneven or ridiculous, however, the women here are punished by loans,
fathers, and police with trials where the only line of defense is a
doctor recommending the accused be sent to a sanitarium for a
hysterectomy rather than prison. A woman cannot defend herself
because she can only speak when spoken to by a man in charge, and the
notion of a doctor simply talking to his lady patients to find out
what other unsatisfied restrictions are happening in their lives is
only briefly addressed. The
upscale refuse to help the poor and the idea that all a woman needs
is an orgasm to make her happy is a happenstance luxury while those
with real medical needs can't afford treatment. Though
the unjust statements are wrapped in humorous dressings, these
Victorian dilemmas are not as far fetched as we'd like to think. We
chuckle at Hysteria's story,
but it's contemporary styling shows us that not much has really
changed. We're still arguing over women voters and the female's right
to be in charge of her own body, amirite?
Hugh
Dancy's (Elizabeth I) idealistic
Doctor Granville can't get a job thanks to his outspoken
confrontations with quack, so-called men of science who won't read
the latest research and con their patients with placebo pills.
Granville wants to help people with the emerging medical revolution,
but he can't make his way in the world without help from wealthy,
winking, experimenting friends such as Lord Rupert Everett (My
Best Friend's Wedding) who jokes that the French use their
tongues to aide female patients diagnosed with hysteria. Pleasure,
however, has nothing to do with it, and Granville puts his duty to
the practice above the randy maid's advances. He keeps his hand in
ice and squeezes a ball to strengthen it as his appointment book
fills with lucrative but exhausting patients. Of course, Maggie
Gyllenhaal's (Frank) progressive and shocking Charlotte is a
different kind of exasperating, arguing that all this hysteria would
be unnecessary if husbands could just appreciate their wives'
pleasures. Desperate to help the less fortunate, she takes the
injured poor to see Granville against the wishes of her stubborn
widower father. Jonathan Pryce's (Tomorrow Never Dies) set in
his ways doctor refuses to give Charlotte her promised dowry to
support her East End humanitarian causes – dowries are for marriage
only and he's not wasting his own money on her efforts when they
tarnish his upscale clinic. Charlotte embarrasses everyone by using
her mind, proclaiming women won't stay in the kitchen or sit idle in
the drawing room much longer thanks to new university options and
suffragette protests. Her expecting equality in a relationship stuns
one and all just as much as when she – gasp!– speaks of a
friend's pregnancy at the dinner table. Such women without decorum
just won't due, yet Charlotte's feisty makes Granville question his
feelings for perfect English rose Felicity Jones (Rogue One: A Star Wars Story). A beautiful
fiancee who knows her place, a partnership in a respected practice,
and moneymaking royalties from his Jolly Molly massager should be
everything Granville wants. However, he listens to his patients and
sees things clearly once Charlotte's trial puts the need to respect
women in perspective.
It's
both silly and scandalous, but the red velvet modesty curtains hide
what's behind the medical stirrups – an elusive inner sanctum
matching all this stiff upper lip decorum. Cheeky almost whimsical
music accents those fancy frocks, feathered caps, furs, spats, and
top hats peppering Hysteria's Victorian
London. Damask wallpaper, carriages, and upscale private
practices, however, contrast with early hospital crowding, dirty
aprons, leeches, and arguing over sepsis. Sterilizing tools to clean
away blood tainted with invisible infection causing germs does
sound like some new kind of poppycock, doesn't it? East End
settlement houses struggle with impoverished ideals while wealthy
investors nonchalantly toy with newfangled equipment, unusual
contraptions, early generators, and supposedly time saving
inventions. The gizmos and gadgets add to Hysteria's charm,
and the blu-ray edition offers commentaries, deleted scenes,
making of features, and festival round tables alongside a documentary
excerpt from Passion and Power: The Technology of the Orgasm.
It's illegal to own more than six vibrators in some states? People
don't not know what a clitoris is? In this sample from the 2007
feature length release, women authors and sexual experts recall life
in the nineteen seventies when the man was the lion and it was a
woman's job to please him. If she wanted pleasure, however, that made
her a whore. Again, unfortunately, nothing has changed, has it?
Hysteria took over seven
years to make because no one would back such a risky movie by women,
for women, and not just about women, but about women's sexuality.
Today, however, I think a picture like Hysteria would
be treated very differently, not swept under the rug, but sought out
and embraced. Amen.
Then
again, early in my first draft notes, I jotted this comment, and it's
worth keeping:
If
this is Rated R just because they talk about a woman's orgasm without
showing any nudity or sex that is pretty shitty.
Indeed,
Hysteria should be PG-13
at best. In fact, one would think it makes sense to discuss equal
sexual pleasures in media and sex education rather than leaving the
nitty gritty of the human sexual experience to the unrealistic
presentations in pornography, which are designed to please men by
degrading women rather than embracing equal opportunity thrills.
What's with all the choke holds and women being so ecstatic over a
shot of jizz in the eye? Why are our cultural depictions of sex
designed for male gratification while the historical, amusing
conversation about women's pleasure in Hysteria is
restricted with a capital R? The female orgasm somehow still
inspires fear yet western society encourages sexy advertising with a
carefully crafted ideal of the sensual woman to stimulate men.
Hysteria is worth
seeing just to begin a healthy dialogue – illumining this mystique
which is still perceived as something naughty and obscure rather than
normal and natural. The lighthearted approach in Hysteria
makes it easy to wink at the tingling and laugh at the shocks,
intriguing those unaware to look up the tantalizing history behind
the charm here.
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