Film and Contemporary Audiovisual Media colloquium – MELANIE KREITLER (University of Giessen): Mental Illness and Narrative Complexity: An Experiential Approach to Puzzle Films and Complex Television

Mainstream media’s relationship with mental illness is fraught. Deemed to misrepresent and sensationalize non-normative mental states, films and television shows are said to solidify harmful attitudes in their audiences. Over the past two decades, however, puzzle films and complex TV shows have broken with time-honored tropes of representing and narrativizing mental illness, offering alternative ways of engaging with non-normative mental states.

This presentation brings together cognitive media studies, narrative theory, and cultural studies to explore the synergy between complex narrative structures in US films and TV shows since the mid-1990s and representations of mental illness. The formal-structural characteristics of narrative complexity depart from, challenge, or introduce variations on classical storytelling and conventions of representation. Yet, these challenges are not limited to musings about form but extend to viewers’ usual ways of understanding mental illness in fiction. This form of cognitive engagement provides a creative means of breaking free from the small repertoire of stereotypical images, tropes, and narratives of neuro-non-normativity and encourages viewers to question their understanding of these conditions and mental states. Zeroing in on the cognitive effects that complex narrative structures have on audiences, this presentation argues for the cultural implications that puzzle films and complex TV shows have on viewers’ commonly held beliefs, attitudes, and values about mental illness.

Melanie Kreitler is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Giessen in the Department of Anglophone Literary, Cultural, and Media Studies. Her research interests are in the intersections of cognitive and cultural approaches to film, television, and videogames and critical approaches to empathy afforded through narrative fiction. She is co-editor of the special issues Illness, Narrated (On_Culture 2021), Queer Politics in Media and Legal Cultures (Amerikastudien/American Studies 2024), Mental TV: Changing the Narrative of Mental Disorders on Television (Series 2025), and the edited volume Diversity Issues in the USA: Transnational Perspectives on the 2024 Presidential Elections (transcript 2024).

Contact: Miklós Kiss