Beyond Diagnosis: Representing the Hotline in The Slender Thread

Abstract

Revisiting the little-noted 1965 film, The Slender Thread, this article argues that its representation of the suicide hotline constellates midcentury anxieties concerning psychiatric care, race, and gender. The Slender Thread provides a story of the suicide hotline at an “early crossroads” in the history of the suicide hotline as it “turned . . . toward cure and the carceral while gloving that power within the protocol of this radical care.” This is the Poitier Effect: Black fury is and must be sublated into Black care to bypass revolutionary action and insurrection.