MAD HOUSE OR MAD WORLD

Series Site

“I’m not crazy / You’re the one that’s crazy!” This bellowed assertion—from Suicidal Tendencies’ 1983 thrash classic “Institutionalized”—encapsulates the dilemma at the center of the films in Mad House or Mad World, movies in which the casually accepted insanity of the “normal” world is juxtaposed with the behavior of those whom that world has deemed mentally unwell. Including the attempted asylum insurrection of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Frederick Wiseman’s harrowing depiction of institutional abuse in Titicut Follies, and much more, this series of provocative films asks viewers to question the behaviors that an aberrant society deems abnormal, and to wonder if we aren’t all of us living in Bedlam already.