Proxy Medico: Alternative Therapeutic Communities in Cinematic and Literary Narrative

Abstract

ABSTRACT Michel Foucault has enumerated four locales as institutional “sites” from which a physician operating in a medical setting makes their discourse. Yet it is a typology that neglects somewhat recuperative locations falling outside the conventional parameters of therapeutic care. Non-traditional sites such as hotels functioning as sanatoria, island retreats, isolated villas, and other similar venues do not explicitly feature as a modality. Frequently depicted in literary narrative and the cinema, such alternative locales often display intriguing parallels with their real-world counterparts including marginal discourses and exclusionary practices usually associated with larger, state-run institutions – a central concern for Foucault. Consequently, quasi-medico settings – both real and fictional – can be thought of as governed by many of the same authoritarian rules and Cartesian scrutiny found in traditional hospital environments. Yet countering such exacting observation are resident patients who operate outside the established rules or in ways that undermine the standard therapist/patient dialectic. In many of the literary and film narratives under discussion below, subjects are even witnessed accomplishing a role reversal with their professional caregivers. Critique of these works reveals the extent to which imagined proxy-medico landscapes can thematically mimic, and even subvert, larger real-world counterparts thereby enhancing the scope of therapeutic modalities Foucault proposes.