In 1916, when Hollywood cinema first emerged, “filmitis” debuted in US cultural debate as “the most modern of diseases, the last cry in pathology.” Likened to an infection “over which physicians and scientists have no control,” filmitis described an excessive attachment to cinema, with fans becoming obsessed with a star or with becoming stars themselves. Articles also associated filmitis with female youth, identifying it as “a disease which every girl has in the course of evolution, like croup or measles,” and proposing solutions that could “cure filmitis as the surgeon’s knife leaves a festered spot clean and smooth,” such as having girls confront “the small pay which falls to the beginner.”
The discourse on “filmitis germs,” “movie bacillus,” and “movie madness” pervading popular and scientific accounts of early US filmgoing reveals how medical knowledge has intersected with new media technology. It also sheds light on past women’s embodied perceptions of health and illness. The conceptualization of passionate film reception as a health problem related to the recent invention of adolescence as a distinct life-stage between fourteen and twenty-four years of age. In 1904, US psychologist G. Stanley Hall published his magnum opus Adolescence: its Psychology and its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education. In it, Hall introduced the new developmental phase as one ruled by “floods of feeling” that left “budding girls” especially vulnerable to external influences, be they schoolmates or celebrities. Hall’s work also participated in a Euro-American movement to reconceptualize children as psychologically distinct and emotionally valuable members of society. In the US, this movement included advocacy for child-protective labor laws and raising the age of consent for girls.
Hall’s views on girlhood’s extreme susceptibility to external influences built upon findings by the British sexologist Havelock Ellis. In 1901, Ellis had counseled parents, educators, and physicians to fear “the infatuation of young girls for actresses.” He shared the story of a Philadelphian “girl of 19” who “acquired an absorbing infatuation for Miss Mary Garden,” an opera star “with whom she had no personal acquaintance.” The downward spiral from interested consumer to unwell fan manifested in a daily ritual of fantasy, where “the young girl would kneel before the star’s portrait, and study hairdressing and manicuring in the hope of becoming Miss Garden’s maid.” Tinged with homoeroticism, the pathological attachment culminated in tragedy: “when she realized that her dream was hopeless, [the unnamed fan] shot herself with a revolver.