Tom Baker?
Yes. (He had written to me in 1989, thanking me for films of myself, my cats, and my family.) He's a plausible nut. He's a plausible nut. He might be The Guy. The thing is, if he
I've boxed myself into a corner. I've said I'd give all this to my husband. If I meet some other guy, and
the one, he's going to say, 'Where's the film for me?' I'm going to have to say, 'I've already sent it away to some other man.'
Earlier, I was sitting out here [I interviewed Robertson on my back porch], and I set the camera up on the tripod and took a picture of me in the corner of your house. Luckily, your house is a nice neutral color, like a lot of other houses.
I don't like taking pictures of other people in my film, because I've been a target. Someone has been breaking into my family's house. They've stolen from my garden, and left, really, some of the weirdest things. They've dug holes the size of a coffin, four feet deep, at the side of my garden. They've left piles of sand with feathers arranged on them. I've found a pile of something that looked awfully like human excrement in my garden. They've broken into my house; they've taken my cats overnight; they've left food and lace panties. They took film and then returned it to my house. I feel my letters have made me a target, and I don't want to get anybody else targeted.
What do the 'experts' you deal with psychiatrically tell you about yourself?
I'm a manic depressive. Sometimes they call it 'bipolar syndrome.' That's just the label for it.
It sounded last night like you've been through a whole evolution of ways in which they think they're dealing with it.
Now they think the miracle drug is lithium. It's not a miracle drug; it doesn't stop you from having grandiose ideas. I left naked parts in my film and irreligious things that I can't even look at now. I was on lithium, and they seemed like perfectly fine pieces of film. When I went off of lithium just this last summer, I went into my film and felt I was looking at it with brand new eyes, with my own eyes, rather than drugged eyes. They told me I had to be on lithium the rest of my life. They've told me that about a number of drugs that have made me feel like a zombie. Every time they give me a drug, they tell me I have to be on it for the rest of my life.
I would be carefully monitored if I were pregnant. They would withdraw me from the drug and put me in a mental hospital. I've seen
Page 219
women who were pregnant in mental hospitals. There was one woman I knew who was convinced they were going to give her electroconvulsive shock treatment while she was pregnant. I kind of doubt that's possible, but I really wouldn't put it past a psychiatrist. I don't have any confidence in psychiatrists anymorenot a single one of them. They're almost all of them drug pushers. Right now, I'm in a situation where I take the antipsychotic drugs and they do a blood test every two weeks and see if I've got it in me. That's all they want to know.
But they would want you to take it, ideally, every day?
Every day and twice the dosage I'm taking.
When you're on it, is it more difficult to make a film? Or is it just a different kind of film you're making?
I don't think I take as many pictures on lithium. I think my mind kind of closes down. What would have happened if van Gogh had taken lithium? They would have prescribed it for him. They probably would have prescribed Thorazine for van Gogh, too. They like to make people take a 'chemical stew.' I don't think he would have taken it. I think he would have had the same problem a lot of mental patients do: they just want to be off all their drugs. There's no one to talk to about it except the doctors, who say, 'Take the drug; that's all you need.' The patients have no way out.
Sometimes, the act of taking a picture every day has kept me sane. I believe in it. I have to take a picture every day. It's true with tapes, too, though diary tapes don't help as muchexcept when I started sending tapes to Tom Baker,
helped (I began in spring of 1986). There was a crisis one winter, when I was so depressed and so agonized because my family kept staring at me. I was the nut in the family and had to be carefully monitored, and I had no friends because the friends had left me because of the mental breakdowns and subsequent depressions. The only thing I could talk about was my films, and they just didn't want to hear about it. I found myself becoming autistic. If my mother said something to me, I'd stammer, and I wouldn't be able to say anything. The only thing that kept me going was taping for Tom every day. I gradually began to be able to talk again. And I still talk to him more than to any other human being. I talk on tape and I'm normal. I have to
to my shrink.
I have to work part-time in order to make my mother think I'm sane. I can't talk to the people I work with. The last few jobs I've had have been extremely paranoid-building. I have hassles as soon as I emerge from a depression and try to pick up the real world again. A lot of people are crazy out there in the nine-to-five world, but they lay it onto me and say
the crazy one.
Page 220
James Benning
