S Inside the cuckoo’s nest
OUTH Africa has a good line in investigative TV work. From Debora Patta grilling Julius Malema on why he drinks so much Heineken, to Carte Blanche depressing us all so much on a Sunday evening that we can barely get out of bed on a Monday, we’re no strangers to hard-hitting exposés.
What we are less good at, however, is TV journalism that tries to unpack a subject in a neutral, nonconfrontational way. This is the kind of TV where the end goal is not to jump out at someone and say, “Gotcha! We’ve been filming you with our hidden cameras and now you’re busted!” Instead, it aims at immersing the viewer in a certain world in a way that often up-ends preconceptions about goodies and baddies.
The king of this type of investigation is Louis Theroux. A mildmannered, unassuming Brit, Theroux has the most important knack in journalism: for asking the questions everyone wants answered, even when those responses are bound to be awkward.
In By Reason of Insanity, a twopart series on DStv’s BBC Brit, Theroux spends time in psychiatric wards in Cincinnati and Ohio, interviewing doctors and patients who cannot be found guilty of violent crimes by virtue of mental illness. Theroux treated all the patients with the same degree of respect and interest, even when the crimes they had committed were truly chilling.
One of the most memorable was Jonathan, a man who had stabbed his father to death seven years earlier. Jonathan had developed delusions that his father had sexually abused him in childhood, which he now acknowledged was not the case.
“So how did it happen that you actually ended up killing your father?” Theroux asked, in his trademark neutral fashion. Jonathan came across as an earnest, polite fellow — the kind of man you’d be happy for your daughter to bring home to dinner. His diagnosis was one of schizophrenia.
Jonathan seemed extremely in control, but I did wonder what the ethics were of interviewing other mental patients who seemed less composed. Can someone who is seriously mentally ill give informed consent to appearing on television? Then again, there was some doubt about whether certain patients were malingering — faking symptoms. This was part of what Theroux was looking into: whether some patients are feigning insanity to avoid the legal consequences of their actions.
One patient, Charles, essentially admitted as much to Theroux. “I’ll never be competent to stand trial,” he told him. “If I did, I’d do the rest of my life in a penitentiary.” What made Charles’s case more complex, however, was that even though he was definitely “gaming the system” to some degree, doctors confirmed that he did also have some authentic symptoms of mental illness.
The most heartrending part of the series came when Theroux interviewed the mother of a patient called Dean who had seriously sexually assaulted her when he was 18. She had chosen to forgive her son for his terrible act, and visited him every week in the hospital. “My father said it was either forgive me, or kill me,” Dean said. Despite her forgiveness, his mother said she would never be able to be alone with him again for the rest of their lives.
“I go in to tell stories, to reveal the truth, to try to understand. Not to set people straight,” Theroux told the Guardian earlier this year. “I don’t go into this with the agenda of saving the world.” Yet in his own way, Theroux makes an important contribution.