The beauty of the unquiet mind

I have spent the past weeks in the company of people who are losing — or have lost — their minds. In Sinéad O’Connor’s autobiography Rememberings, the 54-year-old singer looks back on a life marked by child abuse, abandonment and long spells in the sanatorium. Her most recent spell of madness — according to her own diagnosis, a menopausal-induced psychosis following a hysterectomy for which she was ill-prepared — found her in and out of institutions for a period of six years. Large tracts of her life are for her forever hazy; she wrote the book in two sessions, either side of her time in the “nuthouse”, as she calls it.

Yet the woman once sent into cultural exile for ripping up a picture of Pope John Paul II while performing on Saturday Night Live is still brilliantly lucid. She skewers the industry that cast her as the “crazy lady” with devastating insights, and in her madness reveals a woman who seems impervious to guile.

Likewise, in his latest Netflix special, Bo Burnham: Inside, which he wrote, performed, directed and edited, the comedian explores the anxiety he developed following his lightning flash to fame, and his suicidal feelings, which he mostly puts in song. A comic savant who found international recognition as a teenager streaming YouTube sketches from his bedroom, Burnham recalls a millennial Tom Lehrer.

Inside is an interior odyssey in which he harmonises mental illness, the culture wars and the experience of the pandemic with pitch-black humour and strangely universal themes: my favourite is a sketch in which he agonises over his decision, in junior school, to dress as Aladdin for a birthday party and whether he will be exposed for cultural appropriation by the social media mob.

Lastly, in The Father, Florian Zeller’s directorial debut, the French writer directs Anthony Hopkins towards an Oscar in an adaptation of his own play about Alzheimer’s, filling the screen with a Polanski-like foreboding to create an atmosphere in which the audience, like the protagonist, feels anomic and confused.

Though some of these projects were conceived and even executed before Covid, they make up a body of creations that will surely be judged within the genre of “pandemic art”.

Watching The Father, the stage play of which was first produced in 2012, I found Zeller’s depiction of entrapment frighteningly familiar — he captures perfectly the horror of mindless repetition and inhabiting a quickly shrinking world. Sinéad O’Connor writes with striking clarity about the agoraphobia she now feels having spent a long period in solitude, and how despite her best efforts to try to socialise she would rather be at home. Bo Burnham ends his special by dramatising his exit from the claustrophobic space in which he has laboured for a year on his material, only to be found cringing before a spotlight when he tries to leave the door.

Ironic, maybe, that these studies of psychosis, misery and brain malfunction should have resonated far more powerfully than the clanging hoopla that is now accompanying our return to normal life. I shuddered as I read New York magazine’s exhortation on “The Return of FOMO”, a recent cover story dedicated to the return of the pre-pandemic social anxiety that you might be “missing out”.

Ironic, maybe, that these studies of psychosis should have resonated far more powerfully than the hoopla now accompanying our return to normal life

“FOMO might have gone into hibernation for a while,” writes Matthew Schneier, “but we may now be on the way to a new golden age as we try to make up for the year we lost by doing more than ever . . . The city runs on FOMO, a connoisseurship of opportunities and possibilities; the catechism of “Did you get invited, are you on the list, can you get a table?”; the performance of plans.” Eurgh. While Sinéad O’Connor left me feeling quite euphoric, the anticipated buzz of being on the right list made me suddenly depressed.

In the US, or maybe it’s a particularly New York mindset, the pandemic is now regarded almost as old news. “Now that Covid is behind us . . . ” have read numerous emails from my US colleagues in recent weeks. America, it is assumed, has vaxxed the virus out of mind. For the more robust of constitution, we can now anticipate a #hotgirlsummer like no other. If the new underground advertising hoardings are to be believed, we will now commence a roaring summer in scenes reminiscent of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s new film musical In the Heights.

For now, I’m far more comfortable in the company of outcasts. The “nutjobs”, as O’Connor gives herself permission to describe herself, have something far more interesting to say. This long pause on production has allowed for powerful introspection. I hope that this will be the moment in which some great new works are made.

After all, Alfred Hitchcock’s genius as “a visual poet of anxiety and accident” can, it is suggested in Edward White’s new biography The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock, be attributed to the excessive fears he developed as an adolescent in the first world war. Paranoia and a terror of almost everything provided him with the fuel to fire some 50 films. And as the pandemic meme reminds us, Shakespeare produced King Lear in a plague year, possibly while under quarantine.

Is Bo Burnham destined to be our Covid Bard? Maybe not, but Inside is a brilliant study of the social-media-scrambled mind. Likewise, with her own portrait of “madness”, O’Connor becomes this year’s most unlikely seer.

Email Jo at jo.ellison@ft.com

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