In the years-long debate between realism and expressionism, one of expressionism’s most oft-employed arguments against realism is that the objectivity it aims to achieve is a lie, that because our experiences of reality (and by extension, the art we create) are always confined to the subjective, any work of art claiming to be closer to objective, real experience is no less a subjective depiction than any other work. While this argument has understandably been criticized as over-simplistic, it is no less penetrating, and for this reason, it endures. Clean, Shaven is the debut film from director Lodge Kerrigan, made on a shoestring budget and released in 1993. When I say that Clean, Shaven is one of the strongest cases in this argument against realism, it might seem like an unlikely candidate, but it in many ways turns this centuries-old philosophical debate on its head.

Clean, Shaven tells the story of a schizophrenic man named Peter Winter (Peter Greene) attempting to reunite with his daughter. If the film was a Hollywood drama, it probably would have looked like A Beautiful Mind. These conventional films convince audiences that they are learning about another person’s experience while stylistically refusing to challenge the viewer. In A Beautiful Mind, for instance, the events of John Nash’s life have to be tailored for audiences and distorted into something one can easily process, lest viewers become uncomfortable at having an understanding of “objective” reality threatened. Clean, Shaven, meanwhile, despite the humble circumstances of its production, manages to present a much more responsibly researched depiction of the schizophrenic experience. It achieves this cinematically through using impressively resourceful filming, editing and sound design to show the visual and auditory hallucinations its main character experiences.

Many have praised the “subjectivity” of Clean, Shaven’s depiction. Approaching the film through this terminology, however, threatens to undermine its power. Though Clean, Shaven shows most things through the eyes of the protagonist, it naturally takes a step back from his internal world to show events as seen by the other characters who are with Peter. If we apply the word “subjective” towards this film, when really we are only referring to the portions of Clean, Shaven seen through Peter’s eyes, then we are in danger of ignoring the film’s suggestion that the lived realities of the other characters are no less subjective. In fact, it is the very notion that “objective reality” is a place which these characters inhabit and the schizophrenic character is cut off from that reinforces their inability to empathize with him and which in their eyes justifies their discrimination of him. Clean, Shaven, through providing a window into Peter’s world, attempts to instill in audiences the compassion for the protagonist which those around him lack. Its embrace of expressionistic, psychologically immersive techniques and “subjectivity” make it a landmark example of cinema’s capacity as an art form to produce empathy in its audience.

Let’s dive into which specific techniques Kerrigan uses to portray Peter’s schizophrenia. Within the opening minutes of Clean, Shaven, there’s a mix of static and the jumbled fragments of distant voices, as if someone is trying to tune a radio. The audience’s only window into Peter’s time within a mental hospital are a few shots of him cowering in the corner of his cell, intercut with footage of electrical wires and accompanied by sounds of electrical static, along with sounds one might hear in a mental hospital, such as a man’s distant wailing and heavy metal doors opening and closing. Later, Peter drives his car — as Kerrigan shows footage of telephone lines, viewers hear truncated audio clips from various voices, and it is unclear whether these voices originate from Peter’s auditory hallucinations, the radio or a mixture of both. The first three clips seem like they could be clips from news reports: “… but like a wild animal that stalks its prey…”; “… this court believes that under the circumstances of the case…”; “… a 25 caliber bullet lodged in my head about one inch above my spinal cord. As a result of this violent act, my wife has…”. In the next driving scene, there’s an audio clip of an angry man’s threats of violence, which I interpret as likely the remembered voice of one of Peter’s inmates at the mental hospital: “when you wake up in the morning, do you think about ‘‘maybe I’ll have to kill somebody today?’ Is that paranoia? For you, it’s paranoia. For me, it’s a reality.” Every single one of these instances is defined by hostility and contributes towards Clean, Shaven’s  greater atmosphere of menace, but there is a reason why the film chose this tone and why I’ve chosen to draw attention to it.

According to research conducted by Tanya Luhrmann of Stanford University (among other similar studies), the nature of the hallucinations experienced by individuals with schizophrenia or psychosis differs greatly depending on the local culture. Patients diagnosed with schizophrenia in India and Ghana, for example, described experiences with their voices that were more positive and less threatening or debilitating; the voices in their heads they would often hear in the form of the guiding spirits of their ancestors, and sometimes as “playful” or “entertaining.” On the other hand, violent and menacing hallucinations, such as those which affect Peter in Clean, Shaven were the norm among the descriptions from patients within the United States. We must ask ourselves why this is the case, and since Kerrigan’s film is apparently well-researched on the symptoms of the condition, it may also offer up some valuable suggestions on how a person’s environment can shape those symptoms.

In a scene towards the middle of Clean, Shaven, Peter goes to a library and flips through a book of children’s photographs. On each page, the film’s audio track reveals that each photograph causes Peter to hallucinate sounds which pair with the images. The synesthetic phenomenon Peter experiences of “hearing pictures” illustrates how his hallucinations draw from and build off the world around him. When the pictures are of children laughing, he hears the pleasant sounds of children laughing; when the pictures are of children crying, the sounds he hears become more negative and chaotic, and he soon becomes emotionally overwhelmed. In a scene which occurs shortly afterward, the same “hearing pictures” phenomenon occurs when Peter wakes up in his car; it seems as if he is being watched by the eyes and faces in the newspaper clippings which he has used to cover the windows of his car to avoid seeing his own reflection. It turns out he actually is being watched by the disapproving librarian in the car next to him. The connection here is that the hostility which pervades the world of Peter’s hallucinations is fueled by the hostility of the world outside of Peter’s hallucinations.

“He just frightened me to death,” the librarian states in Clean, Shaven when questioned about Peter, “well, he didn’t really do anything, but he made me think that he was going to do something bad to me.” Throughout the film, characters ostracize Peter. They view him through the lens of fear and discrimination; he is viewed as a real-life Frankenstein’s monster, as a beast, as the threatening “other.” The most painful failed connection in Clean, Shaven is between Peter and his own mother, who tries to be accommodating but, with her lack of any understanding of his condition, is blind to the ways in which she exacerbates it. The social discrimination which surrounds Peter reaches its boiling point at the film’s climax, in which he is shot and killed in front of his own daughter by a detective who suspects Peter to be a murderer. Clean, Shaven depicts a culture in which there is little empathy for the mentally ill, perhaps because it is a culture influenced by fictional portrayals in which people like Peter are predominately unfeeling mad killers. It is these stereotypes which influence the detective in his suspicions and ultimately his judgments, but perhaps the structural predisposition of law enforcement to view human beings as potential threats is also to blame.

It would seem that a lot of different issues are being addressed here, when really the ideas presented within the ecosystem of Clean, Shaven are as interwoven as they are within the real-world ecosystem they reflect, and it all comes back to how hostility shapes Peter’s inner world. Regarding the aforementioned research on schizophrenia in different cultures, various theories have been put forward to explain why the voices inside American patients’ heads are so much more violent and threatening. Some of us might think of the newspapers, radios and telephone lines which are omnipresent in Clean, Shaven: has our ability to broadcast sounds of violence and mass-print images of hate created an inhospitable media-saturated landscape? Is this the primary fuel for Peter’s voices? Or does the social ostracism he also faces influence him to see the media around him as hate-filled? The suggested theory which, in my humble opinion, best explains both Peter’s situation and the situation of real-life people within his position is that the hostility of the world towards Peter has over time become hostility Peter carries within himself and directs towards himself.

The film’s title, “Clean, Shaven,” refers to how much Peter wants to appear normal when he meets his daughter. He wants to wear a nice shirt and tie; he wants his hair to be combed; he wants to be clean shaven. When a culture rejects the differently abled, the differently abled reject themselves. When the voices in their head are viewed as a parasite, as a disease infecting them from the outside, the voices become hostile. When you go to war with your condition, your condition goes to war with you.

Let’s go back to A Beautiful Mind. At the core of what I believe is unchallenging about the film’s depiction of its subject matter is that it portrays Nash as a neurotypical person and the schizophrenia as an outside force that he is battling, as opposed to the more complex reality in which a person’s neurodivergence tends to shape the whole of a person’s identity and how they think. Nash himself perceived his mathematical abilities existing in a relationship with his neurodivergence, not in spite of it. He made peace with that part of himself in the absence of medication and subsequently it became less and less debilitating. A Beautiful Mind. instead shows Nash recovering through medicating. To be clear, I do not mention this example to discourage medication, the appropriateness of which should be determined by doctors and patients working in collaboration on a case-by-case basis. I do mention this example to highlight a cultural attitude towards neurodivergence defined by our hesitancy to empathize with those whose experiences of reality are as drastically different from ours as they are in these cases.

If I may refer to the schizophrenia research one last time, it’s important to note that among the suggested theories, an idea was put forward highlighting that perhaps the most significant difference in the cultural environments of Eastern and Western schizophrenia patients was the difference between a collectivist culture and an individualist culture. In an individual-oriented culture, the boundaries between what is me and what is not me are more clearly defined, as are the boundaries for what is “us” and what is “them.” The “us” vs. “outsider” mentality, the “normal self” vs. “invading disease” mentality, the “sane human” vs. “insane beast” mentality, the “good citizen” vs. “criminal threat” mentality are all present in Clean, Shaven and they are all connected, and now that we can see the full picture of how these mentalities turn both Peter’s internal and external world into a living hell, we can also see how the “objective reality” vs. “subjective delusion” mentality contributes to this process of marginalization. According to this cultural mentality, what does not conform to what we all experience as “objective reality” must either submit or become our enemy. The end result is a culture which not only causes people to turn on each other, but causes people to turn on themselves.

What Clean, Shaven really has to offer in respect to the realism vs. expressionism/subjective vs. objective discussion is that regardless of whether or not reality is subjective or objective, we can’t allow ourselves to invalidate with our interpretations, whatever they may be, the experiences or the humanity of those who experience reality differently. In order to avoid dehumanizing the mentally ill, we must see them not as a threat, but as a human being, and this starts through empathy, through seeing the world through another person’s eyes. Cinema is especially privileged in this respect; it has the power to use subjective expression to show us the world through another’s eyes in a way no other art form can. Rarely, though, does a film challenge us to see the world through so radically different a lens than Clean, Shaven.

Julia Rhodes (@headphones_cat) is a video essayist and fledgling writer from Long Island, New York who operates the Essential Films YouTube channel. She currently spends her free time writing screenplays and watching the same 10 movies over and over again. Julia has seen her favorite film, Nobuhiko Obayashi’s House, 16times.