PTSD and Mal. Really?
POSTED BY: Bytemite
UPDATED: Monday, January 27, 2020 20:08
VIEWED: 36442
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I'd add Zoe and River to the list.
(Yes, River's a no-brainer in this regard, I understand.)
I feel a little silly doing a psych eval on fictitious characters, but it's really no worse than a theoretical case study.
I'd even venture to say that Zoe hits the bar on more behavioral symptoms than Mal.
However she's got Wash to help her work through the intimacy issues. You could argue that she's even overly attached to Mal, and he can be viewed as her touchstone to the past traumatic event(s).
Ack! I need to go get some sleep.
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Rallem: Yeah, I think I might have heard you talk about that before, and that story might have been the reason I originally started researching this.
Rouka: Possible, he sure didn't have a high opinion of the Alliance even back then. I get the impression all his reasons were initially tax related (most Rim world economies were thought by the Independents to be unable to support an off-planet tax) as well as the issues of self-government we're all more familiar with. I don't think his dislike of the Alliance was an irrational one.
But the overprotectiveness, I think that may be kind of telling. The extremes he's willing to go to in order to keep the people he cares about safe, while admirable at times, are definitely irrational. He may have had a streak of that before the war, but I think he has a genuine fear of loss now that's kind of suggested at in Better Days. Did anyone else interpret Inara as accusing Mal of telling about the money just so his crew wouldn't leave the ship to start new lives? I don't know if I like that, because I'd always liked to think that Mal always put his crew first, but that seemed to be implied.
I agree about River's problems being on an entirely different level. And I don't really know much about Mal/River myself; now and then I try to broaden my horizons and read unusual pairings, but usually I don't get very far before I run into some personal mental hangups over some aspect or another. I was just using it as an example of a group that would probably consider Mal to have PTSD.
Katesfriend: Nice insight on the wobbly-headed dolls post Niska! That could definitely be construed as avoidance behaviour. Here I am trying to recall evidence for PTSD, and it turns out my magnifying glass just wasn't powerful enough. Might have to look more closely for clues next time I'm watching.
Mal4Prez: Yeah, I think your story was actually the first time I'd ever encountered the post-war internment camp idea, and I also really like jetflair's. The two of them and others I've seen made me wonder if that was made official somewhere. I've REALLY got to pick up the Visual Companion. Thanks.
And yeah, I agree, the definition of a disorder is when a person experiences a loss of function in everyday life. Mal? He's physically healthy, but he's not really functioning in any social or life capacity, is he? I think Nathan Fillion once described Mal's only goal as just to continue. I wonder if Mal thinks he's capable of handling anything more than that.
Cellardoor: Can any of us honestly imagine Mal being a sound sleeper? The man has got to have nightmares that would make John Wayne curl up in a fetal position.
NCBrowncoat: My interpretation on Mal's loss of faith isn't that he expected God's protection, intervention, or tolerance, but that he was sure that he was on the right side and couldn't believe God would let the right side lose. That God wouldn't let all the men and women he'd fought alongside die for nothing. He wasn't expecting a miracle, he expected men to do the fighting, call in air support, and win the war. It was only retrospectively, after the Independents lost, that he wondered why God didn't do anything to help them, and felt God had betrayed them. He'd be kind of a fair-weather believer if he expected God's helping hand all along.
Doesn't really surprise me to hear that loss of faith is commonly associated with PTSD, though.
Stinking Rose: Ah, Zoe and Mal. There's an interesting look at the issue. Zoe's definitely progressed to a more functional level than Mal has, but every indication is that after the War, she was the worse off. She was the one who joined up the Dust Devils, she was the one raging in the post-war mugshot included in the Serenity movie extras. It's strange, as strongly as Mal believed, and as angry as he is now compared to Zoe, you would have expected him to be worse, but I don't think that's how it was.
They definitely protect and look after each other though, no question. They know there are times the other is weak and needs help. Little bit of th
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Quote:
Originally posted by Bytemite:
Rallem: Yeah, I think I might have heard you talk about that before, and that story might have been the reason I originally started researching this.
Rouka: ...
But the overprotectiveness, I think that may be kind of telling. The extremes he's willing to go to in order to keep the people he cares about safe, while admirable at times, are definitely irrational. He may have had a streak of that before the war, but I think he has a genuine fear of loss now that's kind of suggested at in Better Days. Did anyone else interpret Inara as accusing Mal of telling about the money just so his crew wouldn't leave the ship to start new lives? I don't know if I like that, because I'd always liked to think that Mal always put his crew first, but that seemed to be implied.
I agree about River's problems being on an
Katesfriend: Nice insight on the wobbly-headed dolls post Niska! That could definitely be construed as avoidance behaviour. Here I am trying to recall evidence for PTSD, and it turns out my magnifying glass just wasn't powerful enough. Might have to look more closely for clues next time I'm watching...
Mal4Prez: Yeah, I think your story was actually the first time I'd ever encountered the post-war internment camp idea, and I also really like jetflair's. The two of them and others I've seen made me wonder if that was made official somewhere. I've REALLY got to pick up the Visual Companion. Thanks.
And yeah, I agree, the definition of a disorder is when a person experiences a loss of function in everyday life. Mal? He's physically healthy, but he's not really functioning in any social or life capacity, is he? I think Nathan Fillion once described Mal's only goal as just to continue. I wonder if Mal thinks he's capable of handling anything more than that...
NCBrowncoat: My interpretation on Mal's loss of faith isn't that he expected God's protection, intervention, or tolerance, but that he was sure that he was on the right side and couldn't believe God would let the right side lose. That God wouldn't let all the men and women he'd fought alongside die for nothing. He wasn't expecting a miracle, he expected men to do the fighting, call in air support, and win the war. It was only retrospectively, after the Independents lost, that he wondered why God didn't do anything to help them, and felt God had betrayed them. He'd be kind of a fair-weather believer if he expected God's helping hand all along.
Doesn't really surprise me to hear that loss of faith is commonly associated with PTSD, though...
Sorry about the long post, everyone.
I was thinking along your lines but my mind wandered off on a bit of a tangent, wondering if there was a more more personal component to Mal's loss of faith.
And I totally forgot about the protectiveness issue. A good Sargeant always takes care of his troops (crew) but it's magnified in Mal.
And that leads to the intimacy issues...volumes has been written on that.
http://fireflyfaninnc.livejournal.com/
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I was originally thinking about the soldier whom Zoe tasked to cover them while Mal went duck hunting and the soldier just froze. Even though it happened while the traumatic encounter was still occuring couldn't that have been PTSD too? They were there for quite a while.
http://www.swyzzlestyx.com/index.html
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Yeah, that's a symptom of PTSD as well. Soldiers freezing up like that in battle was actually initially how PTSD was discovered. Back then, it was called "shell shock" (as in artillery shells) or the "1000 yard stare."
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Commander whats-his-face (the one they're "not gonna tell on" for losing it, screamin about how he'd lost his limbs)-- is the stage just before extreme shock, I believe, and we are shown him in extreme shock; fixed stare, frozen etc. Although shock can occur in PTSD it is different from PTSD as a syndrome.
Mal: I think he qualifies, definately. But as we don't see inside anybody's head (excepting River's on several occasions), we can't tell if he's Hollywood Flashbacking. But the startling, the continuity "gaps", the emotionally blocked tangle, and his "off" moments are there, as portrayed by Nathan Fillion, intentional or not. Mal is not flying with all sails, clearly. Joss said it was Mal's story through River's eyes, which I think says a lot about intent.
For the obvious, there is Serenity Valley, and Zoe's quote on that concerning her difference from Mal: "All I ever lost there was a war."
This implies a big loss for mal.
And one of River's plot functions seems to be to tell the audience (and other characters) what makes people (eg Jayne, Book, the boss in Safe, Badger, Saffron, Mal...) tick. So:
I'm not sure if it remains in the movie, but in the start of the shooting script there's a very lucid and candid moment between them where she looks straight at him, says "everyone leaves you", then goes back to the usual thematic word salad.
She's just summed up what I believe is Mal's greatest fear. Where everyone and everything he fights so hard to keep and protect is just...gone.
Out of Gas is literally that episode, right up through "You all gonna be here when I wake up?" Funny as all get out that Book's the one who comforts him, considering Mal's MO. Irony.
All these completely aside, there are what I see as tons of PTSD moments and reactions for Mal; in fact River is the only one who outdoes him. Mal is the high-functioning version. Besides having a brain in one piece. I'll see if I can make a list later, but the biggest example is Mal's "double personality"--even ever-tactful Inara mentions in the Movie that she doesn't know who he's going to be next when the stress gets piled on. Mal tries to be stable, but I don't think he is--that's his character weakness, which combined with his "honest streak" gets him in a lot of scrapes.
Nathan mentions that Mal is "hollowed-out inside"
and that hollow is filled with an anger that is distilled fear. Mal has major rage issues, that you can definitely see when spark touches gunpowder--he's easy-going, quiet, doesn't want a fuss and then wham--there's a bullet in your brainpan, and not in cold blood neither. Considering this fact that Mal is not a happy killing machine under normal circumstances (read: Jayne), something else must make him do this.
I wrote elsewhere that he seems to make the change when a crisis situation escalates to a temporary apocalypse.
List later. Always need proof.
"I think we lost our fuzzy dice back there."
"Going for a ride"
Another Sky
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Perhaps Nathan had some experience acting the PTSD symptoms from his role in "Saving Private Ryan," even though his role was not that big in the movie. I know the main characters except for Matt Damon had to go through a form of Basic Training together, and Matt Damon had to go through his form of Basic Training alone so the other actors wouldn't have a sense of familiarity with him. I wonder if the extras like Nathan had to go through a form of Basic Training too.
http://www.swyzzlestyx.com/index.html
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I just saw this on the FFF.net quotation marquee, for what it's worth:
"He lost more than the war. He lost a sense of compassion and forgiveness. He lost his faith in God." - Nathan Fillion on Mal
Aside: isn't it phenomenal that we can have discussions like this about a show that lasted only one season and a movie? I continue to be astounded by the quality and complexity that Joss Whedon created in Firefly.
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I wanted to say something to the affect that Mal lost his belief in God, but I think due to the evidence of the series that he hadn't lost his ability for compassion and forgiveness.
http://www.swyzzlestyx.com/index.html
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Another Sky: You're right, emotional shock is different from PTSD. A person has to suffer symptoms of PTSD for longer than six months for it to be considered such. Although, while Lieutenant No-arms-no-legs might be just freezing up in shock for an uncertain amount of time during the battle and after, we don't know how long poor Private Bendis (pilot episode) has been in his state. Serenity Valley was a campaign that lasted several weeks, and didn't exactly end when combat was (mostly) over.
Good points on the unpredictability and instability. He has very abnormal responses to stress. So far, his reactions seem scaled to the magnitude of the stressor, if surprisingly violent, but that could only be a matter of time.
You mention that he has continuity gaps and off-moments, could you elaborate on those?
A side comment: Jayne may be a crude brute, but I don't think he's a killing machine. I don't think it's the blood, explosions, or people dying that motivate him, but rather survival and the thrill of the hunt or fight. He's been shown to be bothered by death (Jaynestown, Serenity movie), and while it's not always a consistent reaction, I don't think that would be the case if he was JUST a killer.
Rallem: Hmm. Well, sometimes yes, and sometimes no. He definitely still has a conscience and even a bit of a noble streak, but compassion and forgiveness seem to be on a strictly case by case basis. He's not a soft-hearted man by any stretch of the imagination. He won't like it, but if he has to, puppies WILL be shot.
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