Mark Reviews Movies: CRAZY, NOT INSANE

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | November 17, 2020

The question Dorothy Lewis has pondered since childhood, when she was learning about the Nuremberg trials as they happened, is what makes people kill. In the decades since, Lewis became a psychiatrist and has studied multiple murderers—both serial killers and, as she puts it, "the regular old" kind. In Crazy, Not Insane, a documentary about the psychiatrist and her research, Lewis chuckles at that latter description. She chuckles at a lot we might not think is funny, but that lends considerable authenticity to what she has to say. She has become accustomed to the horrors of this world.

There are plenty of horrors here, but the grisly details of various murders don't serve as the point of director Alex Gibney's film. As Lewis takes us on a tour of her career, we're forced to grapple with the same questions she has asked and the conclusions she has made.

The primary inference of Lewis' decades of study is that murderers are not born, but made. Specifically, all of the killers she has encountered share one trait in common: They suffered regular abuse as children. There are psychological and, observable through brain scans, neurological consequences to such abuse. Basically, through trauma or actual physical changes, the brain is, in layman's terms, re-wired in a way, allowing killer's impulses—ones that we all have, by the way—to take control.

Lewis gives us real-world examples by way of recorded interviews with killers. We watch them show obvious signs of dissociative identity disorder (or "multiple personalities" in the popular parlance) and describe their history of terrible abuse.

Lewis wants more time and more opportunities to research these people, their psychological state, and the connection they share, if only so we might have a better understanding of why people kill. Her studies, though, often have been stymied by skepticism and the fact that a good number of her subjects are ultimately executed by the state. At one point, Lewis interviewed a "traveling executioner," enacting government-approved killing of convicted murderers. She thinks he might be the exception, an actual "sociopath," until he starts talking about his own past.

Gibney's film doesn't ask us to excuse or forgive these killers, but it does want us to empathize with what they have suffered. Crazy, Not Insane makes the point that, if we want to understand murder, we have to.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products