The beauty of the restless mind

I have spent the last few weeks in the company of people who are losing or have lost their minds. In the autobiography of Sinéad O’Connor Best regards, the 54-year-old singer looks back on a life marked by child abuse, abandonment and long periods in the sanatorium. Her most recent madness spell, according to her own diagnosis, a menopausal-induced psychosis after a hysterectomy for which she was ill-prepared, found her inside and outside the institutions for a period of six years. Great stretches of her life are for her always nebulous; she wrote the book in two sessions, on either side of her time in the “dried fruit house,” as she calls it.

However, the woman was once sent into cultural exile for sketching an image of Pope John Paul II while performing. Saturday night live it is still brilliantly lucid. It wipes out the industry that made her the “crazy lady” with devastating knowledge and, in her madness, reveals a woman who seems impervious to forgery.

Similarly, in its latest Netflix special, Bo Burnham: Inside, who wrote, performed, directed and edited, the comedian explores the anxiety he developed as a result of his lightning to fame and his suicidal feelings, which he mostly puts into the song. A comic book savior who found international recognition as a teenager streaming YouTube sketches from his bedroom, Burnham recalls a millennial Tom Lehrer.

Inside is an inner odyssey in which he harmonizes mental illness, cultural wars and the experience of the pandemic with black humor and strangely universal themes: my favorite is a sketch in which he agonizes over his decision, in high school, to dress -se of Aladdin for a birthday party and whether he will be exposed for cultural appropriation by people on social media.

Finally, a The father, Florian ZellerHis directorial debut, the French writer directs Anthony Hopkins to an Oscar in an adaptation of his own work on Alzheimer’s, filling the screen with a Polanski-like foreboding to create an atmosphere in which the audience , like the protagonist, feels anomic and confused. .

Although some of these projects were conceived and even executed before Covid, they constitute a set of creations that will surely be judged within the genre of “pandemic art”.

Looking The father, whose play was first produced in 2012, struck me as Zeller’s portrayal of the trap is terribly familiar: it perfectly captures the horror of meaningless repetition and inhabiting a shrinking world quickly. Sinéad O’Connor writes with astonishing clarity about the agoraphobia he now feels after a long period of loneliness and how, despite his efforts to try to socialize, he would rather be at home. Bo Burnham ends his special by dramatizing his departure from the claustrophobic space in which he has worked for a year with his material, only to find it lit in front of a spotlight when he tries to walk out the door.

Ironically, perhaps, that these studies of psychosis, misery, and brain dysfunction should have had a much more powerful echo than the resounding hoopla that now accompanies our return to normal life. I shuddered when I read New York magazine’s exhortation about “The Return of FOMO,” a recent cover story devoted to the return of pre-pandemic social anxiety that might be “losing”.

Ironically, perhaps, these studies on psychosis should have had a much more powerful echo than the hopla that now accompanies our return to normal life.

“FOMO could have been in hibernation for a while,” writes Matthew Schneier, “but now we can be on our way to a new golden age as we try to make up for the year we lost by doing more than ever … The city works with FOMO , a connoisseur of opportunities and possibilities, the catechism of “You have been invited, are you on the list, can you get a table?”; the execution of the plans “. Eurgh. While Sinéad O’Connor made me feel pretty euphoric, the expected uproar of being on the right list suddenly made me depressed.

In the United States, or perhaps it’s a particularly New York mentality, the pandemic is now considered almost like old news. “Now that Covid is behind us. . . ”I have read numerous emails from my American colleagues in recent weeks. America is supposed to have eliminated the virus. For the more robust of the constitution, we can now anticipate a #hotgirlsummer like no other. If you want to believe in the new underground advertising hoardings, we will now begin a roaring summer in scenes reminiscent of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s new musical At the heights.

For now, I am much more comfortable in the company of the marginalized. The “nutjobs,” as O’Connor is given permission to describe, have something much more interesting to say. This long pause in production has allowed for a powerful introspection. I hope this is the time when great new works are done.

After all, Alfred Hitchcock’s genius as a “visual poet of anxiety and accident” can, as suggested in Edward White’s new biography. The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock, is attributed to the excessive fears he developed as a teenager in World War I. The paranoia and terror of almost everything provided him with the fuel to shoot about 50 movies. And as the meme pandemic reminds us, Shakespeare produced King Lear in a year of plague, possibly when he was in quarantine.

Is he destined for Bo Burnham to be our Covid Bard? Maybe not, though Inside is a brilliant study of the mind stirred by social media. Also, with his own portrait of “madness,” O’Connor becomes the most unlikely seer this year.

Email Me to jo.ellison@ft.com

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