A Father Disqualified: Schizophrenia and the Family in Lodge Kerrigan’s Clean, Shaven

Abstract

Lodge Kerrigan’s Clean, Shaven chronicles a schizophrenic man’s attempts to find his daughter who is put up for adoption after his wife dies during his incarceration. Hallucinations and paranoia haunt Peter and lead him into outbursts and acts of self-harm that alienate him from mainstream society. This alienation worsens throughout the film: Peter’s mother treats him with hostility, the adoption agency refuses to offer any information about his daughter, and the police suspect him of murdering two young girls. Through this series of unpleasant encounters, Kerrigan exposes the presupposition that schizophrenics are innately violent and unsociable. To the contrary, Peter finds vindication when Nicole chooses to leave her adopted home to live with him and when the police’s case against him falls apart. Tragically, the lead detective only realizes the tenuousness of his case after he shoots and kills Peter in front of his daughter under the mistaken assumption that he had planned to abuse her. Through the exclusion of the medical or psychiatric perspectives on schizophrenia, Kerrigan establishes that Peter’s persecution and violent death result from the social construction of the disease, rather than its clinical reality. While Kerrigan demonstrates that such false beliefs negatively impact both family relations and legal procedures, he extends the responsibility for Peter’s death to the mainstream media because its representations of traditional families implicitly suggest that schizophrenics cannot or should not participate in family life. Throughout Clean, Shaven, media images of happy, playful fathers sharply contrast with the unpredictable Peter.