Empathetic spectatorship, The Sunnyboy, and the sibling (Dr Jodi Brooks)
Kaye Harrison’s documentary The Sunnyboy (2013) has been critically acclaimed for its intimate and accessible portrayal of living with schizophrenia. The film tells the story of Jeremy Oxley, lead singer of the celebrated 1980s band The Sunnyboys, and his experience of living with mental illness for the last thirty years. Moving across and between observational mode (the filmmaker spent a few years filming material of and with Oxley for the film) and archival footage (home movies and footage of the band in its heyday and in its recent reformations), the film works in largely familiar territory in terms of its form. But while the film deploys a familiar documentary form in terms of structure and mode, it works on somewhat different ground in terms of how it addresses the viewer. In this paper I will draw on Lisa Cartwright’s radical rethinking of spectatorship and identification in her book Moral Spectatorship and Belinda Smaill’s work on documentary and emotions to explore the forms of empathetic spectatorship that this film enables. I will argue that it is through the film’s attentiveness to the forms of presence and withdrawal, blindness and insights, losses and gains that can underlie forms of mental illness and the ways it depicts their co-presence that the film offers its most interesting insights into lived experiences of mental illness. I develop this argument through two lines – firstly through the film’s screening contexts and forums (including its screening prior to a performance of the reconstituted band at the Vivid Festival) and secondly, through the ways it depicts and engages with the pasts, presents, and imagined futures of both its various subjects and its viewers. While much of the film’s promotional material has foregrounded the key role of wife Mary in Jeremy’s re-emergence into music and a liveable life with others (and in this respect the film often tells its story as one of healing through romantic love) in this paper I turn instead to the film’s depiction of the relationship between Jeremy and his brother (and fellow Sunnyboy Peter Oxley) in its complex engagement with and solicitation of forms of empathetic spectatorship.
Dr Jodi Brooks, a Senior Lecturer in Film Studies in the School of Arts & Media, University of New South Wales.
Jodie’s primary research has been in the areas of theories of film time, spectatorship, and film performance, and she is currently working on a project on performing children.
Jodi’s work has appeared in a range of journals including Screen, Continuum, and Screening the Past and in edited collections such as Figuring Age (ed. Kathleen Woodward) Aural Cultures (ed. Jim Drobnick) and Off Beat: Pluralizing Rhythm (eds. Jen Hein Hoogstad and Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen). She recently co-edited a special issue of Screening the Past on “untimely cinema” with Therese Davis (Monash).