Paranoid Schizophrenia, the Musical

Give My Regards to Broadway,

A ruin of antiquity

In the case of a protracted but thourough
decline and fall, one may imagine that each tiny bit of rubble--could it only speak--might have its own individual tale of woe.

© 2008 DS Gaus Corp

ONE TRULY HATES to see the decline of New York City, and perhaps this production, even if it never gets beyond the web-page stage, can do a little something to help New Yorkers better understand what it is that they have to cope with circa 2008.
         We think it might be a good thing, though, if a wider audience did have a chance to be made aware of the problems touched on here--here on a humble web page, which is likely to be veiwed only by a discriminating few. If you'd like to be an angel for this proposed production, feel free to give me a call at 317 523 6943.
      The murder of psychologist Kathryn Faughey by one of her patients in February 2008 suggested that, unfortunately, mental health professionals in New York weren't adequate to their task, and didn't really understand the urban environment in which they were working. In that toxic NYC environment, therapists themselves--as an occupational class--have diminished capacity and competence.
        Let's look at just one aspect of this, involving theater, which should be one of New York's own unqualified economic assets.
        In the past fifity years there've been some modest medical advances made in the way that doctors think about mental health issues--such as paranoia and schizophrenia. Unfortunately, though, the advances made in this same area by the theatrical community have been much greater. We might call this "theatrical applied psychiatry."
      We could also talk about advertising in a similar vein. For the sake of brevity, though, we'll confine ourselves to theater.
      Now, extremely unfortunate is the fact that the theatrical community and other communities--such as the gangster/sociopath and corrupt-public-official and corrupt-TV-executive communities--overlap to a considerable degree.
         Are you shocked? How do you suppose that the people who produced The Sopranos possessed such an intimate knowledge of their subject matter?
          Let's imagine an unpleasant person, willing to hurt people in the pursuit of profit. His name, perhaps, is "Mr. Tony Schizoprano."
          Dead bodies can be hard to dispose of, Tony Schizoprano knows.
         But what about this angle? Suppose a certain someone is "inconvenient," nothing personal, you understand, but inconvenient simply for business reasons.
      Why not drive that preson crazy?
      The government then will come and pick up the inconvenient person and put him or her away.
        Or the maddened person may be goaded into a rash action and meet with an untimely end--an end with which Mr. Tony Schizophrano has no direct or obvious involvement.
          It should be clear that, for Mr. Tony Schizophrano, this approach has many advantages. Just think: no messy blood stains, no bodies floating to the surface of a body of water at an inconvenient time!
          Another advantage is that by involving government people in one's efforts to dispose of inconvenient people, one enlists the vanity of said government people on one's own side. Having declared an inconvenient person schizophrenic, a psychiatrist may be reluctant to admit a mistake later on.
        And like the US border, the line between theater and real life is poorly defended and there's a lot of traffic in both directions. And while a psychiatrist might seek to calm a person's anxieties, the director of a horror movie might seek to enhance them.
      And, of the two, the director might be, in some respect, the more skillful, the more knowledgeable.
        Another factor is that certain technical advances such as in electronics and fiber optics can be employed quite devilishly in a warren of adjoining rooms and cubicles such as New York City. The writer Evelyn Waugh, whose novels were made into movies, was himself fooled badly by a gang of improvisational actors on a cruise ship, a smaller but similar warren.
         To read about what happened to Evelyn Waugh, click at left.

While I don't have a complete script ready for Paranoid Schizophrenia, the Musical™ at the time of this writing, much of the factual basis is outlined on this site. And, as a writer, I've tried to research the subject as well as I could. One of the reasons my effort might be good, if translated into a theatrical effort in New York, is this: some TV and movie producers and some actors are themselves compromised by the same facts and circumstances that it would be desirable to depict and/or make fun of and/or describe in the production. Other in the TV movie industry might not themselves be personally compromised--but, nevertheless, might be unwilling to act as "snitches."
      For that reason a TV or movie production might be unlikely. And independence of the production would be desirable and independence would be easist to acheive for a small, low-cost production.
       As suggested already, this web page does exemplify a small, independent, low-cost effort, but perhaps it would be a good thing to go up the ladder by one or two steps.
         Also, New York has many theaters and many aspiring actors. There are also aspiring producers; but, since I'm the producer of this, it might be better to note here that there are many aspiring assistant producers in New York.
         While I'm a nice person with good intentions, one should be careful to respect my intellectual property rights. Note the ™ at top of screen. If all goes well, we will soon be selling action figures at McDonald's. When you press the poor plastic man's nose, his plastic hands will rise up and cover his plastic face. A small embedded speaker will squawk something on the order of:
      "Those voices, those voices--why won't they shut up?"

Am I being callous?
      While I may seem to be making fun of a very unfortunate situation, I think that may be the best thing I'm personally able to do. Those who should have been acting in a serious, responsible way weren't doing so in 2008, and I wasn't equipped to precisely supply that lack.
         Nor was I equipped to do a serious epidemiological study of the exact extent of New York's unacknowledged problem.
        But I was willing to do what I could and this article is part of the effort I made.
       Out of New York and to my mailbox came the August 11, 2008 issue of Newsweek with an article relevant to our topic. That article, "When Life is Like a TV Show," by Jesse Ellison, was on page 10. It seems that the Director of Psychiatrics at New York's Bellevue Hospital Center has identified something new. Dr. Joel Gold now speaks of, "The Truman Show Delusion."
        Young, white men think they're part of a reality TV show.
         There's a difference between an hallucination and a delusion: if one hears voices that aren't being caused by sound waves in one's environment, that's an hallucination. If one is hearing voices that are indeed caused by sound waves but deriving the wrong implication from what one is hearing, that's a delusion. So Dr. Gold, who has perhaps not had as much to do with the dark side of the TV business as I have, may himself be suffering from a delusion, in company with some of his patients.
        I have to confess to not having actually seen "The Truman Show." From what I read of it, it seemed similar to other artistic productions based on our own theme here and also a kind of "confession" by people involved in the TV or movie industry. Unlike my treatment of the subject here, the "Truman Show" confession wasn't sufficiently explicit as to endanger the bottom line of anyone in the industry.
         To "gaslight" somone is a term that you may not find in any dictionary, but you may sometimes hear it in a TV show. People involved in theater, TV, etc. are more apt to be familiar with the term than members of the general public. It means to create an illusory enviroment for someone with the intent of driving him or her crazy. It comes from a film with that title made in the late 1940s.
         It could be that Dr. Gold should consider reclassiflying some of his "patients" as "victims".

From what I've read of him in Newsweek, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg seemed a rather admirable person. He seemed innovative, responsible--and to have reacted appropriately as a person to the congested, over-stimulated New York environment.
        Indeed, it was very telling that the Mayor chose to live in spacious houses outside the city.
        Mayor Bloomberg was like a virus, emerging from a complex milieu only to reenter the same milieu at a later time. This metaphor should be clear to any reader who might be familiar with my scientific views on the nature of viruses. An article on that subject may be viewed by clicking at above left.
         Adults get their news from newpapers or PBS and other sources, while children get a sort of news or digest of recent history from watching cartoons or other children's programing. So cartoons are continually updated--although, of course, not as frequently as that fabled New York production, The Chockablock Evening News with Sam Servility and Bertha Breathmint.
          From the sound of that mythical production, it would emanate from NBC.
          Now, for cartoon revisions, I've imagined a new character, "Michael, the Very Competent Virus™," which would pop in and out of cells without harming them. (There are some viruses that do that.)
         "Michael Virus" should be a boon to Hollywoood, I imagined, since it could force a wholesale revision of the entire cartoon zoo, beginning with viruses, the of smallest of all biological entities. That would provide work for animators.
     And "Michael Virus" might actually help New Yorkers by contrasting his escape environment with the environment of those who remain always in the city. The difference isn't just one of the degree of luxury in the two environments but also of the degree of sensory oppression and the degree of privacy.

Mayor Bloomberg seemed to be the one New Yorker able to think fairly clearly--and perhaps the only one afforded enough personal space to preserve adequate psychological detachment. A city of several million people, however, should have more than one individual who is able to maintain a clear mind.
       I once lived in New York, long ago--went to movies and museums and dated a beautiful girl. The city was already on the way down, but I enjoyed many of my experiences there nonetheless.
      Imagining it now, I have a comic-book image of further decline: I picture human leaves blown by the wind through desolate canyons. Zombies, controlled remotely by radio waves from high towers, roam the streets on secret missions. The zombies have vacant eyes. Each wears the badge of one of the eleven permited psychological types and a uniform. The uniform is either one of the thirty-one occupations (that are both licenced and mandatory)--or else of one the five acknowledged dependents classes supported by socieity.
           The reader may say, "What are you talking about? There are a lot of bright people in New York."
            That's true. But while a given individual in the bright-person category might produce an article or an artistic work depicting, for example, a theme of "REBELLION," to get such a work published or displayed, the individual must, in reality, submit himself or herself to the grinding system and play the corrupt New York game.
          Thus rebellion lives on as an image, but dies in the reality of the city.

In New York (as we carefully analyzed it from a safe distance), the population moved around so fast and talked so fast as to produce a visual or video blur with inchoherent jumbled noises for an accompanying soundtrack.
         Just what was going on here?
         One perhaps needed to be an outsider, an out-of-state Mike Bloomberg, to be able to ask a few questions and add a little clarity to the confused picture.
        For example: "How did the writers of Law & Order pretend to divine the 'intent' of criminals?" That was an interesting question that one might like to put to Law & Order creator, Mr. Dick Wolf. I have, in fact, done my best to get Law & Order to respond to my concerns, without much luck.
         I knew from my personal experience that NBC wasn't above bugging an apartment of someone they don't like. With NBC's electronic capability, NBC people could essentially be inside a person's apartment, seeing as well as hearing everything that transpired. That capability could surely be helpful in understanding the intent of whoever was inside, but it was also Orwellian.
        Indeed, it was more that Orwellian.
        And New York police liked to see themselves depcicted favorably on the NBC news. In all cities of the country in 2008 that sort of thing was leading to or was an aspect of overly-chummy relations between police and TV reporters. How much difference, then, was there between NBC surveillance (illegal but nevertheless permitted) and the same surveillance by government itself? Information that it might be illegal for the police to obtain could perhaps be garnered for them by their friends at NBC.

In this troubling picture, one shouldn't look for complete behaviorial consistency. Another aspect of the situation was that Law and Order was holding a rather flattering electronic mirror up to the face of the New York police and judiciary. But to obtain all the images and ideas for its show, NBC had probably had to do as many illegal acts as the mafia was doing worldwide.
       It's true NBC's crimes may not have usually involved murder or direct theft of tangible property.
        But they contributed greatly to the decline of the city. In my experience, actors aren't always above manipulating people, or leading people astray--of even leading people to commit crimes. By means of "theater games" actors can impose schizophrenia on susceptible people.
        For New Yorks police and judiciary, NBC's electronic mirror was like the pond into which Narcissus once gazed. How beautiful the reflected image!
        And like Narcissus, the New York city government reached out its arms eagerly to embrace such beauty . . . .

Well, these are among the issues I'd like to explore in my proposed production. I'm not interested in increasing either paranoia or authoritarinism, and I think there are logical ways to improve the situation.
     Thus, I recommend a light tone for a play or something similar.
       And there are other things that can be done to deal with this problem, such as improving the way buildings are constructed, so as to make it harder for NBC or other parties to intude.
       And one very important step in solving any problem is to admit that the problem exists.

Paranoid Schizophrenia, the Musical™

Experiences of Evelyn Waugh

Article about viruses