The Fits is a coming-of-age film with a distinct difference. Practically a musical, with each scene syncopated by the thudding basketballs, slapping feet on sports halls’ floors, clicking sneakers on concrete stairs and many, many sharp gasps for air, its main character remains near-silent. Toni, a pre-teen tomboy who we meet boxing with her older brother in a Cincinnati sports centre, stands at a little over four foot and sees it’s time to move on. Lured by the mysteries of the dance troupe rehearsing next door, she observes the Lionesses from outside.
The girls duck and flex and flick and stomp and clap back, in unison, hair swinging, hips swishing. Toni decamps to the dance squad - after all, boxing is so full of blood, broken teeth and bile. But what’s stirring inside of the tightly woven troupe of female dancers is something far more intense. And soon, The Fits arrive, scary and beautiful convulsions, picking off members of the Lionesses one by one. A neat little play on words - Toni longs to fit in - The Fits drills right to the heart of the isolation, distance, weariness, anticipation and excitement that come with any young woman’s first foray into an exclusive set of female friends.
And the unexplained, mass hysteria the film depicts has a very real history.
What is mass hysteria or mass conversion disorder?
Reported incidences of psychogenic illness, also known as mass conversion disorder, or hysteria, influenced The Fits’ director Anna Rose Holmer. The science behind them is still incomplete and while Freud’s studies found that people with conversion disorder were more likely to have experienced an earlier trauma, later studies suggest it’s an extreme empathy. Just like we all tend to yawn within a minute of seeing someone else yawn, perhaps copying each other’s neural pathways is a thing. If one individual can convert their own angst into physical symptoms, how hard is it for that angst to skip over to another person they’re close to?
Does mass hysteria only affect women?
Nope! But cases of so-called 'female hysteria' tend to get a lot more media attention because, you know, ‘girls going crazy together’ is a pretty marketable concept (interestingly, press attention can make mass conversion disorder even worse). Although there are plenty of instances where different kinds of mass hysteria have and will go on to hurt women the most - like the Salem Witch Trials, and Donald Trump’s rise to power, including rallies where, whilst frothing at the mouth, hundreds of people chanted ‘lock her up’ about Hillary Clinton while simultaneously supporting a man who promised to make women’s reproductive rights a thing of the past and had boasted of grabbing women ‘by the pussy’.
Cases of mass hysteria in history
Here’s a run-down of actual, IRL incidences of women all suddenly behaving in bizarre, yet similar ways.
The Middle Ages’ dance mania
In 1374, dance mania swept along the banks of the Rhine in central Europe. It later re-emerged in Strasbourg in 1518 thanks to a woman named Frau Troffea, who began dancing and, within a month, was joined by 400 people. The jigging, leaping and jumping caused sufferers’ feet to bleed and in some cases, after barely eating for weeks, the dancers died. Historians are split on the causes of the dance: was it down to ergot, a mould that grows on rye, causing convulsions and delirium? Or were these townsfolk so stricken by previous traumatic events - floods, famines and crop failures - both too stressed out and too superstitious (St Vitus, a Christian saint, sends dancing plagues) to stop themselves from being reeled in by the dance? It is still unknown whether these cases of dance influenced Saturday Night Fever, Sister Sledge’s Lost In Music or Jamiroquai’s Canned Heat.
The Middle Ages’ nun-warbles
In 1400, nuns began misbehaving. For 300 years. Showing signs of possession, purring or climbing up trees, their demeritum would be solved by a priest coming along to do a few brisk exorcisms. Sadly, this wasn’t the case for a nun in Wurzberg, Germany, in 1749. Having initiated a break-out of mass screaming, waiting and foaming at the mouth, she was beheaded on suspicion of witchcraft. The simple explanation of this - from mass hysteria expert John Waller, is that some nuns weren’t always in a convent of their own accord, had a tough time there, so acted out. Meanwhile, that the most devout nuns had an unblinking belief in trance and possession.
The Tigerettes fainting
In 1952, 165 of the Tigerettes cheerleading squad in Monroe, Louisiana, all fainted right before halftime - which was put down to 'overheating and mass hysteria.'
The Tanzanian laughing plague
At a girls’ boarding school, in a tiny village in the Bukoba region of then-Tanganyika, three pupils started laughing, uncontrollably. Soon, they would cry, become fearful and lash out if anyone tried to restrain them. The laughing was so contagious that 95 out of 159 pupils were affected and the school was forced to close. Upon returning home, the girls ‘passed’ the condition onto others. However, tests on the girls and other sufferers showed there was nothing physically wrong with them. As this was the 1960s, and it was pretty much ok to call people savages, an author in the Central African Medical Journal put it plainly: ‘No literate and relatively sophisticated members of society have been attacked.’
The Blackburn assembly
During one school assembly, several girls fainted. Teachers asked the girls to lie along a corridor to make sure that, if they fainted again, they wouldn’t hurt themselves. This made other kids feel there was something serious going on, and they began experiencing ‘dizziness, nausea, spasms and shortness of breath’. Over 140 kids fell ill, 85 were taken to hospital but precisely zero of them had any actual physical problems, according to John Waller in this great Guardian piece. In it, he notes that stress, and exams, can be a huge trigger for incidences of mass conversion disorder.
Morangos com Acuar Virus
Remember how Skins came out in 2007 and all of a sudden everyone started wearing American Apparel? Well, in Portugal the year before, an eerie case of mass hysteria swept across 14 high schools just days after an episode of a popular teen soap opera showed the lead characters succumbing to a terrible disease. The IRL kids - 300 in total - got the same symptoms - rashes, dizziness, heavy breathing - as the TV kids, and 14 schools were forced to close. However, much like that previous doctor in the Central African Medical Journal put it, Portuguese doctor Mario Almeidi wrote off the illness, saying: ‘I know of no disease which is so selective that it only attacks school children’
Le Roy
In this small town in upstate New York, girls on the cheerleading squad began twitching, moving limbs and stuttering. The symptoms would come and go but soon the twitches started affecting more girls. This only upped when the press got interested. Debates were had as to whether there were potential toxins in the local environment affecting the girls, while, secretly, residents wondered whether the girls' backgrounds had any impact on what was happening. In this incredible long-read, New York Times writer Susan Dominus tries to get to the bottom of what’s going on. Strangely, she discovers that even if someone is pretending to have conversion disorder, their symptoms will match those who actually have it…
Black Narcissus
Ok, so this one’s not true, but, based on a book by Rumer Godden, and shot against vivid backgrounds depicting the Himalayas, this film is high-intensity jealousy, dizzying lust and hysteria all mixed up in one heady brew. A group of Anglican nuns who’ve set up a school and hospital clinging to the sides of a sheer mountain fall into disarray when Mr Dean, a local British agent, comes along. Filmed in 1947, its depictions of women falling over each other to jump the bones of a fairly handsome guy is a bit tiring, and Jean Simmons browns up as a local lower-caste girl who a rich Indian heir falls in love with, but as a vision of hysteria, its pretty spot on.
You might also be interested in..
Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophwilkinson
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.