Cinematic madness is clichéd as ego-inflation while schizophrenia can show as withdrawal and self-erasure.

Evidence

Cronenberg’s Spider — adapted from Patrick McGrath’s superb novel — is a study of schizophrenia that couldn’t be further removed from the clichéd image of “madness” in cinema. There are numerous examples of this, but the one that comes immediately to mind (perhaps because I watched it recently) is Windom Earl in the second season of Twin Peaks: gibbering, histrionic, megalomaniac. Think also of Nicholson’s Joker in the first Batman movie. Madness is here imaged as a kind of absurdly inflated ego; a self that knows no bounds, which wants to expand itself infinitely. As played by Ralph Fiennes in Cronenberg’s film, Spider, too, has a precarious sense of his own limits, but, far from wanting to spread further into the world, he seems to want to make himself disappear. Everything about him — his mumbling speech, shambling movements — screams withdrawal, retreat, terror of the outside. That’s because, as ever in Cronenberg’s schizoverse, the outside is already inside. And the reverse. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 308

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s running theme of the schizo and Ballard’s schizoverse from earlier chapters — the outside already inside echoes ch9-11 discussions of interiority and objectification.