From asylums to anarchy: The straitjacket and popular culture

In the early 1910s, the straitjacket became known in popular culture through escapology. The straitjacket stunt is usually attributed to the great escape artist Harry Houdini, but his younger brother, Theodore Hardeen, was the first magician to conceive escaping from a straitjacket in full view of the audience, rather than behind a curtain. 

National Photo Company Collection, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons Image source for Harry Houdini, wearing a straitjacket, dangles from a crane above a large crowd

 
Houdini took the stunt to spectacular levels, however, including escaping from one while suspended from a crane above Manhattan in front of a crowd of thousands.

Paramount Pictures, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons Image source for Illustrated film poster showing men in white coats restraining a man in a straitjacket

The popular stunt also featured in his first feature-length Hollywood film, The Grim Game (1919), and was the focus of the film’s promotion. The film was considered lost but was rediscovered and restored in 2014.

Alongside its continued use in horror, the straitjacket became a countercultural symbol in the 1960s. One example is the comedy film Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment (1966), directed by Karel Reisz, one of the pioneers of British New Wave cinema. In the film, working-class artist Morgan Delt (David Warner) undertakes a series of bizarre stunts, attempting to win back his upper-class wife (Vanessa Redgrave) who has just divorced him. In addition to the trauma of divorce, Morgan feels caught between the inherited Communist politics of his parents and the capitalist culture of 1960s London. This prompts Morgan to enact an internal rebellion from both, escaping into fantasy worlds.

Courtesy of STUDIOCANAL.

Morgan’s anarchic behaviour and frequent flights of fancy prompt a psychiatrist to diagnose ‘specialist mental troubles’ that make him a ‘suitable case for treatment’. Morgan ignores the psychiatric advice, and amps up the surreal attempts to win back his wife from her new fiancée. After gate-crashing and sabotaging their wedding dressed as a gorilla, he is washed up on Battersea dock. Still wearing the gorilla outfit, his fantasies turn nightmarish as he imagines himself hoisted above London in a straitjacket and lowered down to face a firing squad made up of friends, family and Russian revolutionaries. 

This descent (or escape) into ‘madness’ sees Morgan admitted to a mental hospital in the film’s finale. The image of him hoisted aloft in the straitjacket was used heavily in the film’s promotion, and not only symbolises psychiatry and society’s view of him as ‘mad’, but also evokes the spectacle and liberatory potential of Houdini’s escapes. The film should be understood in the context of the anti-psychiatry movement, which challenged coercive practices of modern psychiatry such as electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) as well as questioning the very idea of ‘madness’. 

Anti-psychiatry is associated with key radical psychiatrists, most famously R.D. Laing, who inspired Morgan! writer David Mercer and with whom he collaborated on his later screenplays for In Two Minds (1967) and Family Life (1971). These films staged authentic depictions of ECT treatment filmed on location at real NHS hospitals, but also represented alterative therapeutic communities where psychotherapy and art therapy allowed individuals to express rather than repress their differences. The experimental ward in Family Life was based on ‘Villa 21’, a short-lived therapeutic community set up by David Cooper—the doctor who coined the term ‘anti-psychiatry’—in the 1960s at Shenley Hospital, Hertfordshire.

The straitjacket was a potent metaphor for anti-psychiatry. Laing argued in 1964 that even ‘in the best places, where straitjackets are abolished’, these are often replaced by more subtle forms of internal restraint and control ‘inside the patient’ designated as ‘mad’. As Laing explained, this normalising adjustment was enacted through new antipsychotic drugs such as Largactil, referred to by the aligned anti-psychiatry and counterculture movements as ‘chemical straitjackets’. The (mis)use of straitjackets also featured prominently in U.S. anti-psychiatry films, most famously Miloš Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoos’ Nest (1975).