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Psychological thrillers built around mental illness are a dependable subgenre for Hollywood, though they often miss the mark when it comes to capturing the experience with much accuracy. Even the most prominently successful ones, like Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind, fail to capture the full scope of what a severe mental illness actually does to a person’s psyche on a daily basis. This is more than likely because Hollywood filmmakers know they have to sell their films to a broad audience, and the real deal of a condition like schizophrenia is far too upsetting for most people to handle. Case in point, one film that actually does depict schizophrenia with full honesty is Clean, Shaven, and it’s a grueling film that demands a lot of those who choose to watch it.
What Is ‘Clean, Shaven’ About?
Peter (Peter Greene), who is severely mentally crippled by schizophrenia, has just been released from an institution. Once a family man with a young daughter that he hopes to see again, Peter now spends his days aimlessly searching for her while living in his car and attempting to visit his mom. He abhors the notion of perceiving himself or anyone else perceiving him, covering up every mirror and window he must be near with newspapers or tape. His every waking moment is completely subsumed by nonstop sensory stimuli, with every little noise in the natural world ramped up and radio messages playing in his head on a loop. He’s steadfastly convinced that there are transmitters in his body that he must pull out at all costs, which compels him to engage in gruesome self-harm behavior that is stomach-churning to sit through. All told, Peter’s existence is a living hell that makes his search for family less of a conventional story and more of a stream-of-consciousness live diary of his mental state.
‘Clean, Shaven’ Forcibly Immerses Viewers Into Peter’s Headsapce
Paramount to how much the film digs its way under your skin is how much it interprets every scene through Peter’s perception. While nothing that happens ever crosses over into pure fantasy, the sound design and editing specifically force his inner thoughts to take up enough space that they dictate how a scene will play out. Static, metallic crunching, intense wind, children whispering, screaming, all that and more collide together in his head in an inescapable loop. For instance, when he’s driving around in his car and listening to a radio show, Peter hears it espousing raving commands that align with the inner thoughts and compulsions that drive him. In another scene, he’s looking for information on local children in a library and has to completely stop what he’s doing and repeatedly push against a shelf in order to drive the constant scratchy noises and hushed murmurings out of his head.
Director Lodge Kerrigan smartly shows the audience how chaotic this plight is by having a subplot involving a detective investigating the murder of a little girl, and this subplot’s sound design is dead silent the whole time. Since the film had literally been drowning you in static noise and chaos from the opening shot, you realize what a huge reprieve being removed from Peter’s headspace is for even a few minutes. It’s one of the many subtle yet twisted ways that Kerrigan builds demonstrated sensory-based empathy for a figure who is usually rendered completely deplorable and thrown aside by not just typical Hollywood films, but society as a whole.
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‘Clean, Shaven’ Is Powerful Advocacy for Mental Health
The fundamental issue with many Hollywood films’ attempts at showing mental illness is that they’re reverse-engineered to still be a “pleasurable” experience, therefore obligating the rough edges to be sanded down. The symptoms must be made to fit into the context of a genre, or serve the logic of a plot. While Clean, Shaven does have somewhat of a plot in the daughter-searching and murder investigation, everything about its presentation intends on pushing the audience away in favor of emotional truth. It intentionally stacks the deck against Peter and asks you to extend empathy for him almost entirely out of a sense of psychological understanding, a sheer “I wouldn’t want to know how that feels, oh my God.” It runs the risk of becoming misery porn, but Peter Greene’s performance is so lived-in and so unsparing while never being melodramatic that you can’t turn away from his pain. Film can often do a better job advocating for those in need, not by explaining what’s wrong, but by showing us how said person has to live in intimate detail, and Clean, Shaven is an uncomfortably brilliant example of that.
- Release Date
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September 5, 1993
- Runtime
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79 minutes
- Writers
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Lodge Kerrigan
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Peter Greene
Peter Winter
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Robert Albert
Jack McNally
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Molly Castelloe
Melinda Frayne
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