ROSE-TINTED RUINS
1. Asylum, p. 5.
2. Ibid., p. 204.
3. The Last of Us (Naughty Dog, 2013).
4. Erving Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (New York: Anchor Books, 1961).
Oliver Sacks contributed a wistful foreword to this collection of photographs by Christopher Payne, imbuing these images of American ruins with emotional warmth:
Payne’s photographs are powerfully elegiac, perhaps especially so for someone who has worked and lived in such places and seen them full of people, full of life. The desolate spaces evoke the lives that once filled them, so that, in our imaginations, the empty dining rooms are once more thronged with people, and the spacious dayrooms with their high windows again contain, as they once did, patients quietly reading or sleeping on sofas or (as was perfectly permissible) just staring into space. They evoke for me not only the tumultuous life of such places, but the protected and special atmosphere they offered when … they were places where one’s madness could be assured of finding, if not a cure, at least recognition and respect, and a vital sense of companionship and community.1
Sacks repopulated the empty spaces of the pictures, but it is easy to wonder, reading his dreamlike reminiscence, whether the sedentary (and presumably drugged) inmates were really as contented as their psychiatrist suggested in retrospect. Patients in a mental hospital reading, drifting off, gazing into the distance, passed out: this scene is if nothing else wordless. No one was saying anything to anybody; then and now Sacks the doctor in charge could speak cheerfully for all, without contradiction, and Payne also discovered a caretaker’s authority in the barren environments he roamed freely in: “Being alone in the buildings, I couldn’t help but feel a certain intimacy with them, and a strong sense of protectorship and responsibility.”2
But the photographs themselves are in truth terribly bleak. The repetitive detail of peeling paint soon starts to seem grotesque, a necrotic sign not just of disrepair but even blight or some strange institutional leprosy. The walls and ceilings are decrepid, disfigured: they repel intimacy. Page after page of the book offers up a world resembling the post-apocalyptic video game The Last of Us,3 except that it isn’t inhabited. Even the sight of a mutant creeping round the corner would be welcome distraction from the horrible dereliction.
Only towards the end of the book do stories—and politics—emerge from the surroundings, though you wouldn’t know it from the self-satisfied commentaries. There are reminders of asylums’ industrial reality. Erving Goffman called mental hospitals “total institutions” because they were both socially and materially self-sufficient.4 Asylum has pictures of a slaughterhouse, water treatment plant, bowling alley, gymnasium, café, barbershop, beauty salon, cinema, even a TV studio. These versions of small-town Americana can’t, however, erase more abject images: brightly coloured straitjackets like jester’s costumes, toothbrushes in neat rows, an electroshock machine, a hydrotherapy room, an autopsy table overlooked by spectator seats, coffins, a cemetery, shelves stacked with uncollected cremation urns, and finally a patient’s text painted on a wall: “If my heart could speak, I’m sure it would say, I wish I were someplace else today.” All of this challenges the commentaries’ nostalgia. At the end of the book it becomes possible to look back at the earlier photos of ugly dilapidation from a different perspective.
It is conceivably the perspective of someone looking speechlessly into space in a hospital day room, experiencing neither Sacks’s serene togetherness nor Payne’s protective intimacy, but only emptiness and decay. Perhaps the peeling-paint pictures of abandonment can be considered as images of what these places always looked like from the point of view of someone who from time to time was put in a straitjacket, doused with a hose, electroshocked, and who, if they were unlucky, ended up cremated on site with no one ever coming to collect the remains.