Raise your hand if you’ve ever said you have OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) without a medical evaluation. You have, I have, we all have. It’s become the term we love to use to name some of our quirks, but we fail to fully understand the disorder and what it really means to live with it. While some people disregard mental disorders, so they use those terms randomly, others who have lived with them are raising awareness about their own experiences to let us know these aren’t things that should be taken lightly. There’s no better way to show it than using comedy to make us understand. Jenny Jaffe explores this through her web series Neurotica, which tells the story of Ivy, a woman who makes a living as a dominatrix while struggling with her OCD.
Ivy wakes up every day in a perfectly tidy bed, with her dominatrix costume on. In the first few minutes of the series, you can see her greeting people from the small town of Mapleton, who come to her for her services. In the brief but friendly small talk they make before starting the session, you see how her clients take care of her by bringing her coffee or food. They already know all the things she likes, noting how they’re aware of what makes her anxious. The interesting part of it is the openness with which she deals with her disorder in front of people, and how she’s created some sort of close relationship with her clients who even visit her just to see how she’s doing. Both subjects, OCD and S&M are treated in a very open and normalized way, removing any trace of controversy and taboo.
If you think about it, the premise of the series seems just hard to picture, which creates one of those irreverent comedies that are hard not to laugh about. However, at the same time, Jaffe’s work makes us think on how these invisible illnesses can affect any professional career or personal goal, regardless of the profession or personality. So, throughout the show we can see Ivy dealing with her goal of being the perfect dominatrix and giving her clients the best experience, while also facing her anxieties and stress.
Inspired by sitcoms of the nineties, in which she believes there was some sort of “escapist comfort” as she states in an interview with Nylon Magazine, and the emergence of sad comedies, Neurotica is located in a blurry frontier between comedy and drama, in that place where humorous situations reflect a terrible and invisible truth that mirrors our general view on mental illnesses. The importance of the series lies on its ability to switch our emotions and our perceptions of entertainment, while giving us a lesson we all need so badly.
As she explains, due to the massive flow of information the Internet provides, it’s easier to access these data, but it’s also quite simple to distort it and make it look like something it’s not. In that way, it’s understandable why all of a sudden we all have OCD just because we don’t like certain things arranged in a particular way, or because we can’t stand when someone takes our hand our touches us. The fact that we’re also able to design the life we want to portray in social media makes it more difficult to really see what it’s like to live with one of these illnesses. Jaffe explains that, even when you want to be seen as a transparent person, it isn’t likely to see someone with OCD, or any other disorder, posting a photo on their Instagram showing how their crisis is. That’s why I think it’s really important to see more of these stories out there, and more importantly, see them being portrayed in comedy, a genre I’ve always felt to be more relatable and approachable.
You can watch a bit here:
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For more on mental illnesses and our perceptions, take a look at these:
Pictures Of Mental Illness Prove That Ignorance Is The Worst Crime
8 Paintings Capture The Unbreakable Link Between Madness and Creativity
How Marvel’s Fantasy Show Is Changing The Face Of Mental Illness
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