Uber-emo singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens revealed in an interview with the Guardian over the weekend that he suffered a breakdown while watching Wes Anderson’s “Fantastic Mr. Fox.”
One morning, a couple of years ago, Stevens woke up in a sweat. He felt intensely lethargic and had pins and needles in his mouth, his hands and feet, rushing up his arms and legs. He was experiencing extreme adrenaline surges in his chest, almost as if he had been poisoned. He went over what he had eaten, but what he was feeling was otherwordly. “This was really supernatural,” he explains now, his eyes wide. “It was like I was possessed.”
The illness passed in a few days, but a month later it struck again. Stevens started to see a succession of doctors, from straight-up physicians and holistics to neurologists, psychologists and psychiatrists. Meanwhile, he couldn’t climb stairs or queue at the bank or be in any room with lots of people and noise. He became hypersensitive to stimuli: after steering clear of movies for three months, he sat down to watch Wes Anderson’s animation Fantastic Mr Fox but it was such a sensory overload that he had to take a Xanax in the middle of it (Stevens assiduously points out that he reviewed it subsequently and found it “beautiful” and reported “no negative response”).
Personally, I had a breakdown when I watched “The Notebook,” but we’re just not gonna talk about that right now.
(Pic via)
