Joan of Arc The Messenger

I like watching films because one can get a more artistic and different perspectives on different subject matters, and music also gives me a better understanding of things in terms of understanding changing and creating forms. The film Joan of Arc The Messenger goes into Joan of Arc's life and hearing voices experiences, and it enlightened me on some aspects of hearing voices. The first and last parts of the film went into her hearing voices experiences, with the first part enlightening me on childhood experiences of hearing voices, and the latter part making me aware of medical psychiatric interpretations in the film.

In addressing the issue of hearing voices, the beginning of the film looked at some aspects of imagination and heightened senses, mysticism and religious experience, and then the effects and responses stemming from very painful and traumatic events - because according to the film, Joan of Arc witnessed her sister being intruded upon, killed, and then defiled by an invading English soldier, and which was supposedly a strong factor on her wanting to later take revenge on the English.

The first part of the film suggested to me that willingly and knowingly self-created voices may be a part of the natural process of the heightened senses of childhood driven by the free and creative imagination, but that a very traumatic event or events may disrupt or reverse this process.

When this process is reversed, the heightened senses take over the imaginative mastery and result in an overwhelming or traumatic perceptual experience, which then absorbs itself intrusively into the imagination or drives it. This is what the film shows very well, and what it to be most praised for. (There are lots of people around - including film writers, artists, and directors - who know a lot more about hearing voices and other mental health problems than most psychiatrists and professionals do).

So when the natural heightened sense of perception and awareness is dulled, stunted, repressed, or blocked, then the natural process of imagination and heightened senses becomes reversed, intrusive, fragmentary (hallucinatory), and negative, and that this dulling or blocking of those heightened senses occurs before any such ‘splitting’ or perceptual fragmentation (hallucination) occurs.

However, there is still one aspect of the beginning of the film I disagree with in its interpretation of hearing voices, and that is the matter of supposedly initially intrusive voices. The first part of the film implies that as a child Joan of Arc heard intrusive but positive voices, although we can’t even assume at that age that her voices were initially intrusive (or as ‘startling’ as described by the Romme and Escher model as the initial ‘startling phase’), because she may have well deliberately created her voices to begin with.

This is very key for me, because I believe that all voices were deliberately created or constructed during childhood, but that we forget about these origins in adult life, and to that extent we are all potential voices hearers if we suffer from abuse or very traumatic events.

The first part of the film showed how Joan of Arc organised and disorganised her voices, and the middle part of the film portrayed her voices as more rationalised and organised, when this might not have been the case because her free voices experiences were disrupted and reversed after the traumatic event of seeing her sister killed (I use the term free voices to mean those which are willingly and knowingly self-created). The ending of the film after her unfair trial and maltreatment, showed her voices to be negative, intrusive, aggressively cross-questioning, tormenting and undermining.

The middle part of the film were the battle scenes where her voices appear to be more structured in some way, and the third part of the film (about her unfair trial and execution) dealt with her hearing voices experiences very much in terms of the Freudian/superego/conscience and cognitive-behavioural professional approach to voices, and which I think is still very much psychiatric, and still very much a part of the medical model, as the medical approach denotes the causes of hearing voices as coming from just inside the person, and not (also) from environmental, external, and objective life events and experiences. In reality, hearing voices are caused by a certain combination of internal imaginative processes and external sensory perception, and to suggest otherwise is to deny a persons sensory and life-experiences.

As a character in the film, Joan of Arc came across as little bit like Marilyn Monroe (as it is more or less a Hollywood film), but the character portrayal captured the unease and mental distress of the real character, as well as her militaristic fanaticism, and her genuine courage for rebellion against tyrannical religious and state authority. The character was played quite well on the whole, but the whole film did tend to stereotype the soldiers and the women in it.

I lent the film to a friend who has just returned it, and he said he thought it was racist about the English, portraying the English as all scoundrels, rapists, and barbarians. Other than that, he didn't comment on it except to question whether the real Joan of Arc really had blond hair, because he said that she was more than likely dark-haired if she was Celtic.

According to the film, Joan of Arc did have negative voices during her mistreatment and trial which supposedly tormented her about the causes of her voices, and about her militaristic fanaticism, and these negative voices were presented in the form of a visual and audio hallucination of an angel in her prison cell (played by Dustin Hoffman) and which was called 'her conscience' in the credits. Other than that, her voices were supposedly positive and intrusive, although what was positive for her wasn’t always what was positive for others.

It could be accurate that Joan of Arc had negative voices at the stage when she was being cross-questioned - not by psychiatrists - but by their processors the religious authorities, and it went into the aspect of her voices which were intrusive, implying that originally she didn't have negative voices, but had positive but intrusive voices.

Whether all intrusive voices are regarded as negative I'm not sure (according to Romme and Escher model they aren't necessarily negative, and you can have intrusive voices which are positive), but all intrusive voices would be regarded as negative by my high standards on the matter, and only the ones that are deliberately and consciousness self-created (or free voices) are somewhat positive.

So her voices were intrusive most of the time, and therefore interpreted as positive and "messengers" for her, but most of these intrusive voices (as far as we know) were positive for her, except (according to the film) up until her maltreatment and trial when the voices became aggressively cross-questioning, undermining, and tormenting.