David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook, nominated for eight Oscars, is hardly the first movie to find critical acclaim with a searing portrait of the impact of mental illness. But unlike many films, which portray people who suffer from mental health issues as either saintly or pitiable, Silver Linings Playbook, about Pat Solitano (Bradley Cooper), a former high school teacher who is returning home from eight months at a mental hospital after he beat his wife’s lover and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, is savagely funny and often disarmingly sweet. It’s also a subtle vehicle for larger ideas about mental health care in America, ranging from the damage done by late-in-life diagnoses of mental illnesses, to the fact that for some people, treatment comes only after they come into contact with the criminal justice system, to training about mental health that could help everyone from teachers to cops do their jobs better.

I spoke with Bradley Cooper, who was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor, and Dr. Barbara Van Dahlen, the president of Give An Hour, which coordinates with volunteer mental health providers to get free treatment to American veterans, about the stigma around mental illness, the intersection of mental health care and law enforcement, and what kinds of conversations they hope Silver Linings Playbook can start. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length:

I wanted to ask you about the structural story of the movie, because the real tragedy of Silver Linings Playbook is that Pat’s biploar disorder doesn’t get diagnosed until it’s completely unmanageable. It’s awful that it gets to this point, but it’s also a way that he finally gets care, and that’s not a story we see very often.

Cooper: But reflective of what’s happening. I mean, that’s the whole point. Patrick Kennedy, he likens it to a diagnosis which happens at stage four of cancer. When that’s occurring, it’s a bleak horizon. The whole idea is to have it be diagnosed before he makes a plea bargain with the courts after he beat the hell out of a guy. That’s the only reason he even went to a hospital in the first place and was diagnosed there. But, if somebody recognized, or he had a venue when he was a teenager, to talk about the fact that his brain is working in such a way that make him feel like an outsider, like he’s not belonging, then maybe that would have been prevented, then maybe he wouldn’t have had to serve time and had a 500-yard restraining order out against him, and have no job.

At the same time, the movie treats the ongoing law enforcement involvement in Pat’s life—a local police officer is assigned to check up on him and respond to calls about him—as a good thing in Pat’s life. He doesn’t have a case worker, he has his therapist appointment once or twice a week, but the cops are actually doing a fairly good job of dealing with him.

Van Dahlen: That’s an unusual situation. The issue is having people in someone’s life who are consistent, who care. The police officer in this story was somebody who actually was willing to try when he could to be helpful, rather than just “Okay, I’m taking you back in.” And unfortunately, that’s not often the case in communities, nor is it the case that we’ve got teacher who have the knowledge, even though they care about the kids, they may not understand. So they’re not going to be the one that says “Maybe something else is going on here.” It’s educating all the way down the line in our communities so these folks are identified and have access and it’s part of our normal conversation. It should not be the case that someone has to keep feeling like “I’m going to try to keep it together, I’m going to try to keep it together.” We see this obviously with the service members, that whole culture, trying to keep it together when they can’t. Our society, unfortunately, puts a tremendous amount of pressure on people, and sometimes, they blow.

Cooper: The police officer for our story in the movie, he serves the same way that his friend Ronnie serves, his brother Jake and his parents, who say “You look great. Just adhere to the rules and you’ll be fine.” There’s no investigation into what’s going on. The cop doesn’t pull him aside at the movie theater and say “Explain to me what happens.” He goes “The restraining order. You want to go back to Baltimore?” Those aren’t ways of actually understanding the situation. And that’s the device we use in the movie to then introduce Tiffany Maxwell, who is Jennifer [Lawrence], and that’s the whole idea of somebody understanding him. And that’s where we can then use this movie in terms of spreading an awareness of people actually needing to investigate, and to inquire in what’s going on, so people feel free to share, instead of adhering to a set of rules, and that’s the way it is.
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When 30 Rock premiered on October 11, 2006, I wasn’t a television critic. I barely had the credential that Tracy Jordan would later use to try to sell his Thomas Jefferson biopic, “television watcher.” I was newishly single, living in a newish city, and had recently become the first person in my family to acquire a subscription to cable. As I settled into the rhythms of adult life, one of the things I learned was how to watch television*, whether I was marathoning Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (a useful source of valuable tips for how to avoid being murdered in the big city), scarfing down Sex and the City, which I got on disc from the Blockbuster that once stood on a corner two blocks away, and discovering the wonders of my first broadcast television season.

30 Rock was the first network show I fell in love with, the first thing—in the days before I got a DVR—that I made appointment viewing, that I introduced to my parents. In retrospect, it was perfect training for a television critic. 30 Rock was a clinic in how to balance long-arc character development with a mind-boggling joke density and quality A, B, and C plotting week to week. But it was also a show that taught me how television got made, and that ended up informing my reporting about what happens along the way from a show’s conception to its arrival and survival on the air.

30 Rock didn’t just have a novel-for-television setting: it drew its procedural elements from actual and substantial issues in television. Over the past several years, and aided by the rise of social media and the infiltration of general-interest media sites by trade reporting about everything from ratings data to showrunner hirings and firings, knowing a lot about the business of television has become part of being an engaged television fan. But for me, and I’d imagine for a lot of other people who were watching the show simply as fans rather than as reporters, 30 Rock was an early introduction to a lot of the facts about how the television industry worked. 30 Rock got episodes out of the fact that product integration is both a cost savings for shows, and the result of corporate consolidation that made media companies part of larger conglomerates; that women and people of color in television writers’ rooms are often paid by diversity fellowships that get them their initial jobs, but are structured such that studios have disincentives to promote them to positions where their salaries wouldn’t be covered by fellowships; that Standards and Practices departments can be enormously arbitrary places that question everything from the intensity of the yellow in a urine sample to a couple’s shift in position during sex. The show made clear that these rules and practices were hilariously arbitrary, but also that they were something you had to accept if you wanted to work in the business, and the only way to live with them was to laugh at them, very hard, and to see what space it was possible to create around them.

But for all that 30 Rock could be hilariously pessimistic about the conditions under which television was created, and the extent to which those conditions ground down even the people who had the greatest hopes for what they could do with the form on network, the series has gone out on a subtly hopeful and ambitious note. Sometimes, it suggested, when Jack Donaghy turned NBC over to Kenneth Parcells, people who adore television get to make it for a living. And even if Kenneth represents a kind of cheerful mediocrity—he presented Liz with a long list of “TV no-no words” when she tried to pitch him a new project after TGS ended—30 Rock suggested that progress will continue anyway.
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The bridge is yours.

-Bryan Cranston intends to stay on your television.

-100 of the best 30 Rock quotations.

-Here’s the SXSW movie lineup.

-Yay Kasi Lemmons is back and directing!

-J.J. Abrams on Star Wars:

It’s Friday, and it’s been a long week, and it’s snowing in DC. We all deserve something that will make us happy, in this case, Disney’s Oscar-nominated short movie Paperman:

It’s a great illustration of what’s wrong with most romantic comedies. It’s one of the most predictable genres in movies, because of the inevitable union of the two main characters. But even though Paperman fits squarely in that genre, in six minutes, and entirely without words, it does more to introduce tension and a sense of wonder that the two participants have found each other than most features. Love is a miracle, not a natural force like gravity that we’re all subject to. And there’s a lot more drama in acknowledging that, than in throwing up any number of phony idiocies and obstacles between your main characters.