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.
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Acknowledgements
This chapter draws on research I conducted as a Research Fellow at the Australian Film Institute’s Research Collection in 2014 and as an Associate Investigator with the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions in 2015. I am most grateful to these institutions for their support and the expert guidance of their staff and fellow scholars. Portions of this chapter are based on earlier work published in feature articles written for The Age and The Conversation and my journal article 'Walking in Her Footsteps: Migration, Adaptation and the Mother’s Journey in Romulus, My Father', Adaptation 9.1 (2015): 22–34.
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Hopgood, F. (2017). The Laughter and the Tears: Comedy, Melodrama and the Shift Towards Empathy for Mental Illness on Screen. In: Ryan, M., Goldsmith, B. (eds) Australian Screen in the 2000s. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48299-6_8
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