“Filmitis”: When Movie Fandom Became a Medical Condition

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In 1916, when Hollywood cinema first emerged, “filmitis” debuted in US cultural debate as “the most modern of diseases, the last cry in pathology.” Likened to an infection “over which physicians and scientists have no control,” filmitis described an excessive attachment to cinema, with fans becoming obsessed with a star or with becoming stars themselves. Articles also associated filmitis with female youth, identifying it as “a disease which every girl has in the course of evolution, like croup or measles,” and proposing solutions that could “cure filmitis as the surgeon’s knife leaves a festered spot clean and smooth,” such as having girls confront “the small pay which falls to the beginner.”^[1]

The discourse on “filmitis germs,” “movie bacillus,” and “movie madness” pervading popular and scientific accounts of early US filmgoing reveals how medical knowledge has intersected with new media technology. It also sheds light on past women’s embodied perceptions of health and illness. The conceptualization of passionate film reception as a health problem related to the recent invention of adolescence as a distinct life-stage between fourteen and twenty-four years of age. In 1904, US psychologist G. Stanley Hall published his magnum opus Adolescence: its Psychology and its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education. In it, Hall introduced the new developmental phase as one ruled by “floods of feeling” that left “budding girls” especially vulnerable to external influences, be they schoolmates or celebrities.^[2] Hall’s work also participated in a Euro-American movement to reconceptualize children as psychologically distinct and emotionally valuable members of society. In the US, this movement included advocacy for child-protective labor laws and raising the age of consent for girls.^[3]

Hall’s views on girlhood’s extreme susceptibility to external influences built upon findings by the British sexologist Havelock Ellis. In 1901, Ellis had counseled parents, educators, and physicians to fear “the infatuation of young girls for actresses.” He shared the story of a Philadelphian “girl of 19” who “acquired an absorbing infatuation for Miss Mary Garden,” an opera star “with whom she had no personal acquaintance.” The downward spiral from interested consumer to unwell fan manifested in a daily ritual of fantasy, where “the young girl would kneel before the star’s portrait, and study hairdressing and manicuring in the hope of becoming Miss Garden’s maid.” Tinged with homoeroticism, the pathological attachment culminated in tragedy: “when she realized that her dream was hopeless, [the unnamed fan] shot herself with a revolver.”^[4]

This story was not unique. In the late nineteenth century, US newspapers published reports of “stage-struck girls” who likewise engaged in self-destructive behavior due to theatrical aspiration or attraction to stage stars. With the advent of Hollywood cinema, the first truly transmedial commercial enterprise, newspapers began casting “the stage-struck girl” as the precursor to “the movie-mad girl,” even declaring that “the stage-struck girl is dead; the movie-mad girl has replaced her.”^[5]

Equally feminized, the discourse on movie madness became more potent than that of stage-struckness because of the democratic accessibility of cinema. While a theatrical performance necessitated a physical audience and star, cinema projected the image of an actor on thousands of screens to thousands of spectators at once. Cinema’s admission prices were also typically cheaper than those for the stage, enabling more diverse audiences to attend.

The speed with which the new Hollywood industry captivated the masses, however, alarmed clinicians. In 1916, physician John A. Hornsby told The Lancet that “the present movie craze” was a national “health problem” specifically affecting “our children and young people.” Luring youngsters with fantasy, “the ‘movie craze’ is doing more to destroy the home life of the American people […than] cocaine or morphine or whiskey.” Disseminated as clinical fact, Hornsby’s opinion that “the educational value of the movies is infinitesimal in comparison with its power for harm” resembles later expert views cautioning that television, rock music, video games, or the internet are inherently addictive technologies, bound to have a detrimental effect on young people’s health.^[6]

The discourse on filmitis further exposes a commonplace familiarity with the nineteenth-century germ theory of disease transmission. From their commercial implementation in the 1890s, picture shows raised concerns regarding US public health. From poor ventilation to insufficient fire exits, the built infrastructure of movie theaters could contribute to the loss of human life and health. In 1918, the influenza pandemic rekindled collective awareness of the dangers of public amusements and airborne disease when US cinemas became sites of mass contagion. That same year, Women’s Home Companion collapsed infectious outbreak and film fandom by exhorting movie impresarios to do “something to stop the epidemic” and save “the millions of […] daughters going movie mad at an alarming rate.”^[7]

Debates on high-risk disease transmission and localized outbreaks in the Progressive Era cannot be decoupled from the rise of eugenics, nativism, and white supremacy in US healthcare and social policy. Reported cases of filmitis, movie madness, and other analogous terms indicating dysfunctional fan attachment frequently featured blue-collar, poor, or immigrant female audiences. In 1909, pioneer social fieldworker Elizabeth Beardsley Butler described witnessing a “picture-show” in New York City “packed thick” with immigrant female workers so “determined to be amused” that they stood on the sidewalk for hours, “hot and tired and irritable,” but doggedly waiting “in line for their chance to get in.” Butler argued that working girls’ investment in cinema resembled the unstoppable force “of any river fall that makes electricity or drives a mill.” It was a question of time for such unhealthy attachment to spiral into dangerous behavior.^[8]

Sensationalistic headlines like “The Girl Who Goes Movie Mad” further crystallized the “typical movie mad” patient as a poor, undereducated, “foolish” teenager who despised domestic work, like sixteen-year-old Tilly and “her best ‘pal,’ Annie Heckscher.” In this widely published newspaper article, a rural girl’s fandom bled into the physical and public realms, disturbing both. After having acted out in the local picture house by dancing in the aisles, “movie mad” Tilly ran away to Hollywood, loitering around “the city, angry [and] chagrined” because she did not become a star. Suicide glimmered in the horizon when “a motherly-faced woman in an aid society” rescued the wayward girl “just in time.”^[9]

As this cautionary tale shows, filmitis was part of an early twentieth-century network of moral panics policing young and mobile single women, which also included the “white slavery” sex trafficking and the “girl problem” delinquency scares. The nosological delineation of filmitis as a communicable condition with a charitable pathogenesis (consumption, obsession, self-destruction) and a distinct patient pool (female, adolescent, unmarried, often underprivileged) reveals patriarchal anxieties triggered by an augmented female presence in the public sphere.

The swell of single working women occupying city streets, mass transit, movie houses, offices, schools, factories, and stores in the Progressive Era introduced into public view ways of being and feeling that unsettled conservative ideals of female pleasure, autonomy, and wellbeing, feminist historians have documented.^[10] The work of Kathy Peiss and Nan Enstad, for example, contradicts Butler’s dour views on working women’s leisure by providing evidence that urban moviegoing offered young female workers empowering opportunities to socialize, date, and enjoy themselves outside work and societal strictures.^[11]

The alarmist discourse on movie-mad girlhood thus functioned as a mechanism of social control. It shamed and pathologized a female desire for different avenues of relationality and livelihood. The gendering of movie madness, as of filmitis, also reflected broader medico-juridical attempts to fix a definition of deviance, where disordered behavior became a diagnosable dysfunction stemming from sex, class, race, and ethnic differences. Periodical articles and clinical studies on movie madness deliberately highlighted specific names, occupations, and neighborhoods associated with foreign-born, nonwhite, or non-Christian working female populations. For instance, the surname of Tilly’s accomplice, Annie Heckscher, conjured Jewish ancestry, while Butler’s blue-collar women were described as alienated immigrants attracted to unhealthy built spaces: crowded factories, tenements, and movie theaters.

However, as reporters and researchers pathologized female fan behavior, some girls embraced “movie-mad” language. In audience letters published in movie magazines throughout the 1910s, ordinary young women endorsed the connection between female film fandom and vulnerability to infectious disease. In 1916, adolescent Ethel Hilton and her younger sister Alma, both from Melrose, Massachusetts, told Motion Picture Magazine that they suffered from “Bushmanite” and “Wilburite” respectively.^[12] The neologisms described worshipers of Francis X. Bushman and Crane Wilbur, heartthrobs of the silent screen.

In 1917, Miss Grace Trotter from Dallas, Texas diagnosed herself with a similar acute affliction: “Wilburitis of the Cranium.” According to Trotter, “women and young girls are usually the victims of this disease, whose symptoms were caused by a bite from that well-known insect, the Movie Bug.” If left untreated, “the patient [turned into] a full-fledged movie fan, subject to relapse if not careful. I know,” the contributor concluded, “because I’m having a relapse now or I wouldn’t have written this.”^[13] Playful and shrewd, these self-reports demonstrate that the link between movie fandom, illness, and female audiences grew so ubiquitous that Hollywood female fans not only incorporated it in their slang, but used it to bolster their public performances of self.

In fact, echoes of filmitis remain alive today. In social media platforms like Tumblr, media fans – many women- and LGBTQ+-identified – joyfully describe themselves as “mentally ill people” and microblogging as “free therapy for the hyperfixated mind.”^[14] Like early movie-mad girls, these online fans reclaim pathological language for their amusement and to forge a sense of community.

Historicizing the medicalization of film fandom ultimately shows that lived identification with clinical classifications of health and illness can be fluid. It also evinces that large-scale attempts to police female emotional attachment are not new, nor do they prioritize women’s social power, intersectionality, or mind-body connection. That is left for fangirls to do.

Notes

1. Anna Steese Richardson, “‘Filmitis,’ the Modern Malady: Its Symptoms and Its Cure,” McClure’s Magazine 56, no. 3 (January 1916): 12-13. ↑
2. G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1904), vi. Hall’s theory of female adolescence built upon the work of various scientists, including Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, Harvard physician Edward H. Clarke, and German pedagogue Friedrich Fröbel. ↑
3. See Viviana A. Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (Princeton University Press, 1994). ↑
4. Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex: Sexual Inversion, Vol. II [1901] (Philadelphia: F. A. Davis Company, 1922), 203. ↑
5. “Some Advice to Movie-Mad Girls,” The Barre Daily Times (Vermont), November 18, 1916, 6. ↑
6. John A. Hornsby, “We See a Health Problem in the Present ‘Movie’ Craze,” The Lancet-Clinic (July 22, 1916): 81. ↑
7. William A. Page, “The Movie-Struck Girl,” Woman’s Home Companion (June 1918): 18. ↑
8. Elizabeth Beardsley Butler, The Pittsburgh Survey 1907-1908: Women And The Trades (New York: The Russell Sage Foundation, 1909), 324, 335. ↑
9. Betty White, “The Girl Who Goes Movie Mad,” San Francisco Call, March 28, 1920, 5. ↑
10. See Joanne Meyerowitz, Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in Chicago, 1880-1930 (University of Chicago Press, 1988); Ruth Alexander, Girl Problem: Female Sexual Delinquency in New York, 1900-1930 (Cornell University Press, 1995); and Shelley Stamp, Movie-Struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture after the Nickelodeon (Princeton University Press, 2000). ↑
11. Kathy L. Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Temple University Press, 1986); Nan Enstad, Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular Culture, and Labor Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Columbia University Press, 1999). ↑
12. “Letters to the Editor,” Motion Picture Magazine (December 1916): 169. ↑
13. “Letters to the Editor,” Motion Picture Magazine (May 1917): 163-64. ↑
14. Ashstfu, Aug.7, 2021; youwrotemeletters, Feb. 2, 2022. ↑

 

Feature Image Caption: A teacher points to a diagram of female reproductive organs projected on a screen in a classroom in a scene from Human Growth, an education film on sex education shown to students in Oregon junior high schools beginning in 1948. (Courtesy Tullio Saba)