Mental Illness and Narrative Complexity: An Experiential Approach to Puzzle Films and Complex Television

About the Book

Mainstream media's relationship with mental illness is fraught. Deemed to misrepresent and sensationalise non-normative mental states, productions are said to solidify harmful attitudes in their audiences. Over the past two decades, puzzle films and complex TV shows have broken with time-honoured tropes of mental illness, offering alternative ways of visualising and narrating non-normative mental states.

Bringing together cognitive media studies, narrative theory and cultural studies, Melanie Kreitler explores the synergy between complex narrative structures and representations of mental illness. Focusing on US American films and TV shows since the mid-1990s, the book shows how complex productions strategically use their narrative structures to evoke in viewers an experience similar to that of the neuro-non-normative protagonist. Moving beyond the formal characteristics and cognitive effects of narrative complexity, this book argues for the cultural impact that puzzle films and complex television can have on our understanding of mental illness on and off screens.

Table of Contents:
List of Figures Introduction: American Psychology, or Mental Illness in Medicine, Media and Culture Part I. In(ter)ception, or Mental Illness and Complex Narratives 1. From Classical Structures to Cultural Effects of Complex Narratives of Mental Illness 2. An Experiential Approach to Narrative Complexity Part II. No Country for Old Narratives, or Mental Illness in Puzzle Films 3. The Experiential Plot Twist in Fight Club 4. Looping Truths in Twelve Monkeys 5. Reading an Unreadable Mind in Memento 6. Blueprints of Lived Experience, or Mainstreamification and Consciousness-Enactment Part III. The Unusual Suspects, or Mental Illness in Impossible Puzzle Films 7. The Framedness of Experience in I’m Thinking of Ending Things 8. Breaking out of the Blueprint, or Character Duplication and Consciousness-Attribution Part IV. Once upon a Time … in American Television, or Mental Illness in Complex TV 9. Blending Narrative Scripts in the First Season of Legion 10. Metalepsis and Musical Numbers in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend 11. Beyond the Blueprint, or Self-Narratives, Metaplots, and the Metaverse Conclusion: The Experientiality of Narrative Complexity, or Again(st) Empathy? Bibliography Filmography Index

About the Author :
Melanie Kreitler is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Giessen in the Department of Anglophone Literary, Cultural and Media Studies. Her research interests are in the intersections of cognitive and cultural approaches to film, television and videogames, and critical approaches to empathy afforded through narrative fiction. She is co-editor with Silvia Boide, Benjamin Brendel and Maaike Hommes of the special issue Illness, Narrated (On_Culture 2021), co-editor with Laura Borchert of the special issue Queer Politics in Media and Legal Cultures (Amerikastudien/American Studies 2024), and co-editor with Marta Lopera-Mármol of the special issue Mental TV (Series 2025).

Review :
Melanie Kreitler's book stages an important intervention in debates on narrative complexity. It shows convincingly how complex form is not only a source of attractive puzzlement but a tool of serious cognitive and even phenomenological exploration of mental illness. Developing this argument through a series of case studies drawn from contemporary film and TV, Kreitler overturns assumptions about cognitive approaches to media by demonstrating how cognitive and social meaning-making can work in tandem. This timely book not only identifies and thoroughly theorizes a productive nexus between mental illness and narrative complexity in contemporary film and television, but it also mobilizes its emerging insights to argue for the positive—de-stigmatizing—impacts that engaging with this new breed of perplexing fictions featuring mentally ill characters has on viewers.