SMILE: Toxic Positivity and Therapeutic Nightmares

Warning: HARK! There are spoilers here, traveler. Take the road less littered with thought.

TW: mentions psychiatric abuse, death, murder, the carceral system, police brutality, inmate abuse, and patient abuse.

I thought Smile(2022)(dir Parker Finn) was a very interesting (and somewhat exhausting) movie! For two hours, the audience is relentlessly thrown from jump scare to jump scare, along with the most terrifyingly stunning and hard-to-forget visuals I'd ever seen. Smile is a moving image in the way that a fire engulfs a burning car; nightmares pasted within the folds of your eyes like one does with posters in their rooms, permanently changing the interior, even when eventually removed. I'm still afraid, despite taking a well-needed horror break and non-stop watching Bob's Burgers for the last three days and it continues to linger, still. It's not that Smile was inherently gory or violent, nor was the movie terrifying in ways that felt unwarranted or cruel. Smile prowled within the theater like a cat chasing a mouse. Alive on its own terms and aware of the audience's every heartbeat and sweaty drops, dripping off their clenched palms; Smile could be a sinister sibling to It Follows. Related in terms of suspense.

What I really appreciated about Smile was that behind the reductive message, obvious speculations on the movie's cliched depiction of the main character's, Dr. Rose Carter's (Sophie Bacon) troubled past, along with other tropes such as the monster eats trauma, fear, sadness, etc., was a missed take away from Smile. However, I believe there is another fascinating point bubbling beneath the surface. This a strong undercurrent of suspicion most psychiatric survivors are quite familiar with, but are so rarely challenged within psychological thrillers and horrors, especially if the movie is showcasing individuals in psychiatric wards. If anything, we've seen a large uptake of patient-to-therapist content, where therapists are not only romanticized as perfect humans but victims of their patient's "violence" as well. And the following, Dr. Carter, is still depicted as an innocent person victimized by an invisible evil force. However, she experiences a transformation of ideals, and the evilness in Smile is just a catalyst that forces her to see the inevitable: There is evidence of harm in the hands of the "helping". That there are inheriting flaws within these carceral systems of un-change.

I loved the way this movie destroyed the sainthood of someone like Dr. Carter. In the beginning, we are told over and over that she is somewhat of a self-titled martyr; her husband, boss, and even the local police, praise Dr. Carter's intellect as sacrificial property, claiming that her talents are "wasted" in the psychiatric hospital. Though not encouraging the compliments, Dr. Carter does silently accept them, and it's not till we witness her meeting Smile's first victim, that her "heroic" tendencies begin to unravel, almost somewhat used against her when Smile realizes how incredibly hypocritical her saviorist values are and then exposing out from the shadows of her past and into the reality of her present actions: That the same little girl, who feared her mother's depression and promised the world to help others like her, is most likely aiding individuals with the same distant and petrified empathy she harbored in childhood. Dressing it up in a white coat and calling it growth; Smile is fantastic in its blunt and harsh delivery. How Dr. Carter's own realization of how incapable the psychiatric industrial complex is of helping its vulnerable targets and instead is one of the acting agents that perpetuate and establish new traumas, is masterfully done. One of the highlights for me personally was witnessing Dr. Carter's face after she realizes that she must, dreams of, and dauntingly considers killing a patient in order to save herself. Though she doesn't, it is clear that even contemplating murdering someone, especially a patient with no support system and whose disappearance would go "unnoticed", is enough to unravel her entire perception of self. Coming to terms with the fact that she too is capable of dehumanization, much like the rest of society, her boss, and the police working alongside her.

Smile is also a movie that wastes no time revealing the relationship between the police and the industrial psychiatric complex; By disclosing a past romantic relationship between Dr. Carter and her cop ex-boyfriend, and focusing on rekindling their romance once Dr. Carter's family distances themselves from her, Smile exposes how quickly psychiatric therapists will jump into bed with carceral logics. Both Dr. Carter and the cop-ex-boyfriend misuse their authority to gain more answers about the force behind Smile, yet fail once again to humanize the other victims of Smile as well as being victims of the state. Literally re-introducing a past victim to the diseased nature of Smile and disregarding his safety by taking advantage of his inability to refuse authoritative agents of the state without the threat of corporal punishment. Being a black intimate, and one specifically imprisoned in the psychiatric unit due to the nature of how Smile pegged his life, not cooperating with Dr. Carter and the cop could be deathly, as well result them to interfere with his sentence, Dr. Carter could "professionally" mess with his treatment plan out of revenge, etc. And yet, even after non-consently providing them an answer to how to end Smile's tirade, Dr. Carter leaves without helping. Leaving him there, to continue his sentence, though Dr. Carter and the cop know the truth and thus could advocate for time off his sentence, allowing him to only serve for murder and not "insanity". Proving again how in-genuinely deep Dr. Carter's performative restorative mindset actually goes.

The eventual demise of Dr. Carter, and soon the cop ex-boyfriend, is not even fully felt at the end of the movie, nor is their end explicitly celebrated with the audience. I think it's normal that a lot of people would empathize with Dr. Carter, as everyone in society is imperfectly trying to do their best and survive beyond their jobs, but I do think it's notable that in the end, the evil force in Smile, is indeed treating Dr. Carter's end as a sort of payment; I would argue that instead of feeding off trauma, as the movie non-subtly hints at, the monster instead feeds off toxic denial and worship of individualized identity. Of over-believing in hospitals, beds with restraints, to answer the calls of suffering in our society, or demonizing anyone who dares asks for non-carceral help. If Dr. Carter, and a lot of us, lived in a community that took responsibility for our wounds, even if they weren't the perpetrators, would the evil force in Smile still be able to feed? If we took care of each other instead of suggesting non-profits, Instagram therapist gibberish, or any other means of distancing ourselves from others' pain, would trauma then look appetizing for the monster? Would toxic positively nest comfortably in our given comfort?

Happy Halloween! :) :) :) :) :) :)