The laughter and the tears: Comedy, melodrama and the shift towards empathy for mental illness on screen

Abstract

In her survey of Australian screen production in the 2000s, Fincina Hopgood identifies a trend in representations of characters with mental illness she describes as ‘the shift towards empathy’. Building on earlier films such as An Angel at My Table (1990) and Shine (1996), these Australian films and TV shows offered portrayals of mental illness that went beyond cliché and stereotype, and instead presented complex, empathetic characters who were the protagonist or the point of audience identification. To illustrate this shift, Hopgood examines five feature films that traverse melodrama and comedy-Romulus, My Father (2007); The Home Song Stories (2007); The Black Balloon (2008); Mary and Max (2009); and Mental (2012)-and finds that each employs a range of strategies to encourage our empathy for the character living with a mental illness.