As for the other 2...one was about drag queens and the other was an extended Freudian metaphor for the devouring mother...so while ladies were prominently featured, it's not really the same thing. You don't have to be crazy to wear drag OR to be a gigantic cave system.
Right? Right!
Now, while "A Streetcar Named Desire" is in another galaxy entirely from "Sucker Punch", and "Black Swan" is within the "Streetcar" planetary system though perhaps many orbits away, they do show certain commonalities in their treatment of insane women.
1. Crazy ladies are hypersexual
Whether they're makin' moves on the paperboy, having elaborate lesbian fantasies, or having elaborate lesbian fantasies with guns and robots and steampunk Nazis...crazy ladies in movies certainly like to get it on. Clearly the corollary is that normal, sane women do not hit on the paperboy. But I have relatives in the suburbs, and, well, sometimes the paperboy is super hot. You'd be insane NOT to hit on him. There is also the insulting corollary that normal, sane women do not have elaborate lesbian fantasies. Sometimes I have my doubts about myself, but I'm pretty sure that this is not the case.
2. Crazy ladies are violent
Crazy ladies in movies hit people, but more often they just stab them. Sometimes they like stabbing folks so much, they get confused and stab themselves. And then they get blood all over their tutus.
This neatly ignores the fact that most people with mental illness are very passive. Depression is one of the most common mental illnesses, and is characterized by social withdrawal. If you are depressed, sometimes you can't even get out of bed in the morning, never mind killing people.
Schizophrenia, which is portrayed by Hollywood as very exciting and entertaining, is also characterized by social withdrawal. In fact, "withdrawal" is one of the main symptoms of schizophrenia listed in the DSM-IV, the diagnostic manual used by American psychologists.
Then there are the anxiety disorders: Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Panic Disorder, Social Anxiety Disorder, and the phobias. A person with such a disorder is much more likely to weep in fear than stab the anxiety-provoking stimuli. PTSD, which is portrayed as very exciting indeed, is also an anxiety disorder. While folks with PTSD might be very angry, the diagnostic criteria include a whole list of avoidance behaviour.
Finally, Bipolar. Bipolar people often enough show all the signs of depression, with the same social withdrawal. In a manic phase, a person with bipolar might engage in risky behaviour, but that risky behaviour generally IS NOT axe murder. Maybe they just write a lot...WITHOUT necessarily murdering their families. I'm not going to say people with mental disorders are never violent, but certainly most of the violence in our society comes without a diagnosis.
3. Crazy ladies are incurable
Once a lady goes crazy in a movie, there's no turning back. She's going to spend the rest of her miserable life in a mental institution, and will most likely die in a tragic manner. In real life, most mentally ill people go to a general practitioner and get a prescription for Xanax or an SSRI. They might go to talk therapy, or a support group, too. These options simply aren't available in the movies. If there are any shrinks around, they are invariably clueless and/or evil.
In real life, you can't be admitted to a mental hospital unless you are regarded as a threat to yourself or others, and most people are let out within a matter of days or weeks. In the movies, you don't get admitted until you've already killed someone.
And of course, you never, ever get out in the movies, unless of course you're a Batman villain and the security at your hospital is highly flawed for keeping supervillains. In real life, the "lifers" might be stuck there because they have no family to take them in afterward, or because they have other cognitive problems that would make it impossible for them to survive on the outside: an old woman with severe depression AND dementia, for example. These folks can barely function. They're not supervillains. That's right -- I'm telling you supervillains ARE NOT REAL.
As you can see, "Hollywood crazy" and actual mental disorders are two very different things. "Hollywood crazy" is characterized by a "twisted childhood" or maybe a single, highly disturbing event, that turns a person into an uninhibited monster. "Hollywood crazy"'s symptoms include serial killing, interest in "minority" sexualities, a great sense of humor, and flamboyance. "Hollywood crazy" makes for much more interesting side characters/villains than the bland lead characters you were meant to relate to. But "Hollywood crazy" mostly makes for villains...because disabled people are scary.
On another note...I could probably rewrite this entire post using links exclusively pertaining to the Batman franchise.
Batman is such a dick to patients.
