Lobotomy - Literary and Cinematic Portrayals

Literary and Cinematic Portrayals

Lobotomies have been featured in several literary and cinematic presentations that both reflected society's attitude towards the procedure and, at times, changed it. The 1946 novel All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren described a lobotomy, saying it "would have made a Comanche brave look like a tyro with a scalping knife." The surgeon is portrayed as a repressed man who couldn't change others with love but instead resorted to "high-grade carpentry work." In Tennessee Williams's 1958 play, Suddenly, Last Summer, the protagonist is threatened with a lobotomy to stop her from telling the truth about her cousin Sebastian. The surgeon says, "I can't guarantee that a lobotomy would stop her babbling." Her aunt responds, "That may be, maybe not, but after the operation who would believe her, Doctor?"

A damning portrayal of the procedure is found in Ken Kesey's 1962 novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and its 1975 movie adaptation. Several patients in the mental ward receive lobotomies to discipline or calm them. The operation is described as brutal and abusive, a "frontal-lobe castration". The book's narrator, Chief Bromden, is shocked: "There's nothin' in the face. Just like one of those store dummies." One patient's surgery changes him from an acute to a chronic mental condition. "You can see by his eyes how they burned him out over there; his eyes are all smoked up and gray and deserted inside."

Other sources include Sylvia Plath's 1963 novel The Bell Jar, in which the protagonist, Esther, reacts with horror to the "perpetual marble calm" of a lobotomized young woman named Valerie. Elliott Baker's 1964 novel and 1966 film version, A Fine Madness, portrays the dehumanizing lobotomy of a womanizing, quarrelsome poet who in the end is just as aggressive as ever. The surgeon is depicted as an inhumane crackpot. In the 1968 film Planet of the Apes, time travelling astronaut Landon (Robert Gunner) is subjected to a lobotomy by Dr. Zaius (Maurice Evans) and rendered catatonic in an effort to shield the truth from the Ape race by covering up the fact that man was once an intelligent being capable of speech. The 1982 biopic Frances includes a disturbing scene showing actress Frances Farmer undergoing transorbital lobotomy. The claim that a lobotomy was performed on Farmer (and that Freeman performed it) has been criticized as having little or no evidence supporting it. In Unruhe, an episode in the fourth season of The X-Files, a kidnap victim is discovered wandering aimlessly along a road, staring blankly ahead and not responding to any of her surroundings. She is hospitalized and a PET scan reveals that a transorbital lobotomy, done incorrectly, has been performed on her. It is performed on another woman and Scully herself narrowly escapes the procedure. In the 2011 movie Sucker Punch, Babydoll's impending lobotomy is what drives her to try to escape from the Institute. An ice-pick type leucotome forms part of the detail around the "S" of the film's title, counterpoised by the final upright of the "H" being a Samurai sword. In The Simpsons 2F03, Treehouse of Horror V, Moe is subjected to a full frontal lobotomy after undergoing 'Re-neducation' leaving him drooling and somewhat incapacitated. He keeps the removed piece of brain in a jar. Lobotomization is a plot element in the 2001 film, From Hell with Johnny Depp and Heather Graham. It also features in the 2010 film Shutter Island with Leonardo DiCaprio, who, at the end of the film is led off to be lobotomized. Lastly, the 2011 film Grave Encounters depicts a gruesome lobotomy at the ending of the movie, in which takes place at a psychiatric hospital. In 2012, the series American Horror Story: Asylum featured a lobotomy in episode 5.