“Smile and put on a Happy Face” : Madness as Method: Societal Change Through Cinema

Sammanfattning

Drawing on Foucault’s genealogy and Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of deterritorialisation, this study examines how contemporary cinema constructs and destabilises the boundaries between madness and normalcy. Madness is understood not as a fixed medical condition, but as a socially and historically produced category shaped by institutional power, gender norms, and neoliberal rationality. Through Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis and semiotic analysis of ten films (1971–2024), the study demonstrates how cinematic form simultaneously reproduces and challenges dominant understandings of subjectivity, deviance, and social order by disrupting narrative coherence, perception, and rationality through sound, temporality, and visual form.