Crooked Beauty and The Embodiment of ‘Madness’
by Ken Paul Rosenthal
c. 2010

A filmmaker delves deep into the creative and conceptual process of embodying madness in the poetic documentary, Crooked Beauty.

You must comply

Or we’ll stick our nanoprobes in you

Wonder what Startrek

Was talking about and who

When they wrote the Borg.

They want a hive mind

With a leader in control

In square space-ships

When humanity wants to be free

To think and create

To experience visions and explore

In their holograph machine

To get wrapped up

In whacko plots

And think about the unknown.

The end of the evening, when everyone's about to leave and head for warm beds and gentle therapy.

The relationship between genius, artistic creativity, and mania has been studied at length, and it’s a deep vein. But to say that mania is a state of pure creativity is an oversimplification; rather like saying an erupting volcano is a good source of energy. There is truth to the statement, but who among us can control a volcano? When I was writing Invisible Driving, my memoir of manic depression (http://www.invisibledriving.com) (Amazon.com) I had to reconstruct my manic episodes with great care. In doing so, two things became obvious. The first was that my creative energies were at their highest, I existed in a state of constant, unfettered creativity. The other was that creativity was far beyond my grasp, it was controlling me, in a sense, my new persona was the greatest single product of my uncontrolled creativity – I was a fabulous fiction. In hindsight I understood that, while the sensation of unbridled creativity was seductive, it could never qualify as art, since art is the result of a careful balance between creativity and control. In mania, there was no control.