He Wants to Itch at It: A Novel, Play, and Movie Imagining Dementia

Send us a text

What could it be like to have dementia? We can’t know. But the arts can imagine what people with dementia could be going through, and many works have been produced for that purpose. We feature a literary novel (The Wilderness), and a play (The Father) and its movie adaptation, offering sophisticated renderings of dementia for consideration. In the course of our conversation about these works and how they imagine dementia, we include: how an illusionist was part of the creative team in The Father to produce a sense of disorientation among audience members; how the metaphor of “the wilderness” is used in the novel and more broadly in various texts from the beginning of civilization; and how well the psalm used in the novel worked and builds on the place of psalms as texts for understanding how people react when threatened by significant life events.
Featured Content Sources:

• The Wilderness, by Samantha Harvey, Anchor Books, 2009.
• The Father (play), Florian Zeller playwright, Doug Hughes director, Christopher Hampton translator, NYC Broadway 2016 + tour sites, London West End 2015 + tour sites.
• The Father (movie), Florian Zeller screenwriter and director, Christopher Hampton translator, Trademark Films, release date US – 2/26/21, available through many streaming services.

Links:

Russell Teagarden’s associated blog pieces at According to the Arts:

• The Wilderness: the novel and literary excerpts compared with biomedical text
• The Father: the play and the movie

Russell Teagarden’s review of The Father (movie) in the journal, The Pharos.
Podcast episode 6, which features dementia related to Parkinson’s disease and expressed through the poetry (sonnets) of Micheal O’Siadhail is here.
Background information on development of Alzheimer’s disease as an obscure and rare disease to a broad categorization of dementia:

• Patrick Fox. From Senility to Alzheimer's Disease: The Rise of the Alzheimer's Disease Movement. The Milbank Quarterly 1989; 67:58-102.
• Claudia Chaufan, Brooke Hollister, Jennifer Nazareno, Patrick Fox. Medical ideology as a double-edged sword: The politics of cure and care in the making of Alzheimer’s disease. Soc Sci Med 2012;74:788-795.

Please send us comments, recommendations, and questions to: [email protected].
Thanks for listening, and please subscribe to The Clinic & The Person wherever you get your podcasts, or visit our website.

Executive producer: Anne Bentley