Wexler: Hysteria (2011)

A period comedy about the invention of the vibrator, Hysteria stars Hugh Dancy as Dr. Mortimer Granville, a Victorian physician whose espousal of germ theory forces him to resort to London’s only hysteria clinic for employment, run by Dr. Robert Dalrymple, played by Jonathan Price, and his wayward, apparently hysterical daughter Charlotte, played by Maggie Gyllenhaal. Rounding out the cast is Felicity Jones as Charlotte’s sister Emily and Rupert Everett as Granville’s best friend Lord Edmund St. John-Smythe, bit players in a wacky pre-psychoanalytic lifeworld – specifically, the 1880s – in which the clinical treatment of hysteria basically involves administering as many orgasms through manual clitoral stimulation as possible, with Granville and Dalrymple more or less playing the role of high-class escorts, at least so far as their hands and fingers are involved. Of course, it all takes place demurely, behind embroidered screens and damask curtains, but it inevitably suffuses the film with an overhyped, orgasmic – or immediately post-orgasmic – buzz, a slightly crazed jauntiness that tends to make hysteria seem kind of fun, an appetite for pleasure and a taste for life, as opposed to the “proclivity for frigidity, melancholia and anxiety” that’s spoken about in such serious tones by the male medical establishment. That’s not to say that it discounts hysteria as a constrictive diagnosis, since there’s a quite rousing feminist socialism at the heart of it all, mostly voiced by Charlotte but somewhat cautiously adopted by Granville as well, while Dalrymple’s hysterical practice is such an overwhelmingly cluttered, wallpapered study in lurid Victorian claustrophobia that it tends to induce hysteria – or at least perpetuate it – rather than cure it, both for the patients and for the viewer, in a distant echo of Gyllenhaal’s masochistic entrapments in Secretary. Against that backdrop, the narrative charts Granville’s invention of the vibrator as a simple mechanism for giving his fingers and hands some rest, a process that, at its most comic and evocative, gives the whole film a bit of a cyberpunk feel, as if the vibrator were an invention pioneered about fifty years ahead of its time – or at least a use of electricity pioneered about fifty years ahead of its time, as the entire female population of London starts to experiment with electrical self-stimulation at a time when the city was still predominantly lit by gaslight. Both more and less irreverent than it might seem at first glance, it’s one of the more unusual period comedies to come out in the last couple of years, and a fascinating experiment in reframing the best-selling sex toy of all time as the very “epitome of English virtue and womanliness.”