Psychosis in Roman Polanski's Repulsion (1965)

Vallari Saxena

One of Hollywood’s most thrilling tales of psychosis, Polanski’s Repulsion (1965) doesn’t overtly ascribe itself to any particular mental disorder, but plunges its audience right into the middle of a psychotic breakdown. Refusing to argue his protagonist’s condition in Freudian key and naming her psychosis, Polanski allows the viewer to observe her behaviour first objectively and then, to an extent, see her surroundings subjectively as she slowly and painfully descends into madness. 

On analysing the symptoms ailing Carol, played by Cathrine Deneuve, the movie seems to dramatically portray a case of paranoid schizophrenia. The film begins with Carol’s colleague at the beauty parlour asking her if she’s asleep, on noticing her she sitting, nail file in hand, staring off into the distance in a catatonic state. Other friends and acquaintances in her life seem to be concerned for her health, as the early symptoms of the disorder set in. Carol takes on a schizoid personality, characterised by a blank slate, withdrawn and distracted. Other indicators of her psychosis include the fact that she has little regard for food and often thinks there are bugs or spiders crawling on her when there isn’t anything.  

Although she doesn’t display disorganisation in her speech, she has severe hallucinations and delusions coupled with isolating herself and engaging in increasingly bizarre behaviour. She deludes herself that every man she’s in contact with is out to rape her, which is not a difficult assumption to make in the highly masculine world of the sixties portrayed in the film. Her palpable anxiety stems from an innate fear of and disgust towards men and all kinds of sexual activity. She gives in to and then consistently wards off the propositions and advances made by Colin, a decent man who finds himself in love with her and is also incredibly troubled by the presence of her sister’s boyfriend, Micheal, in her apartment. 

Once her sister leaves Carol alone in the apartment for two weeks while she’s off on holiday is when Carol begins to hallucinate intensely and lose touch with reality entirely. She goes through a bout of agoraphobia, not leaving her apartment and eventually cutting her phone line and all ties to the outside world. She has no regard for cleanliness, living among filth, death and decay in her house and not engaging in any sort of personal care. Carol hallucinates the walls of her home cracking, first small and then as loud as claps of thunder, as though her world is crumbling around her. She further has a rape fantasy, where a man with Micheal’s face comes and takes advantage of her at night. When Colin breaks into her apartment, adamant to see her and declare that he can’t live without her, she attacks him, bludgeoning him to death, realising her violent reaction only once he’s stopped moving. Her hallucinations get worse, with hands coming out of the walls to grab her inappropriately and her rape fantasy getting more violent. 

After repeatedly stabbing and killing the landlord that comes into her apartment and tries to rape her, Carol irons one of Micheal’s undershirts left at the apartment, puts on her sister’s red lipstick and lies in bed awaiting the nightly rape. Following this, the cracks get louder and hands from the walls more aggressive till she imagines the ceiling falling down on her. Her sister and Micheal come home to find the dead bodies and Carol, lying catatonic under her bed. The film ends with zooming in on an old family picture, where Carol stands away from her smiling sister and parents and glares at her father with a troubled and disgusted expression. 

Employing a Freudian explanation for the onset of her schizophrenia, as it is implied that her father probably raped her as a child, Carol carries a deep set anxiety stemming from the fear of the intention of men. She is overwhelmingly disgusted in their presence, getting violent when they don’t leave her alone or come on to her. In both, psychoanalytic and film theoretical discourse there has been a longstanding tradition of considering disgust in connection with the notion of pleasure. Carol has incredibly repressed sexual frustrations, where she desires men and sex but is also repulsed by her desires and seemingly by the existence of men in her space. This is evident in her listening to her sister and Micheal engage in sexual activity whenever he is over, which translated into her rape fantasy of him. Her dressing up for and ironing his undershirt for him indicate that she awaits the man that comes to her at night. However, she cannot deal with her wanting this, which is why she sees it as a highly violent act.  

Polanski effectively uses repeated sounds of bells and drums to suggest the madness creeping up on his protagonist. She slips from a fairly normal functioning, social girl to an isolated shell of a person trapped in her house and in her head. Although the film doesn’t really give us insight into Carol’s life or behaviour before the onset of her disorder, he accurately captures the harrowing process of living through her version of the world and the trapping isolation of her fears. The symptoms of her schizophrenic paranoia are seamlessly incorporated in her daily actions, and in the larger decisions she makes with respect to the men who try to enter her life.