This fall I had the pleasure of teaching a course on intersections between disability and technology. In putting together the syllabus, I quickly noticed that one of the most potent sites for this question was the rehabilitation of PTSD among soldiers in the last years. Here, instead, we want to focus on some of the cultural anxieties that get expressed through this figure and scenario. Homecoming offers a tense detective story about the treatment of veterans with PTSD, suggesting the potentially deforming effect of healing technologies on the embodied therapeutic encounter between doctor-figure and patient.
Approximately five years in the past, a woman named Heidi Bergman Catherine Keener was recruited to work as a caseworker and program facilitator for the Homecoming initiative, an experimental treatment facility for vets returning from Afghanistan. She forms a special bond with one of her patients, Walter Cruz Oscar Isaac , one which increasingly puts her at odds with her demanding off-site boss, Colin Belfast David Schwimmer.
In the narrative present, a government investigator named Thomas Carrasco tries to untangle what went on at Homecoming, about which Heidi apparently remembers almost nothing.
And, in a sense, she isβwe ultimately discover that she is subject to the same loss of traumatic memories as the soldiers she treated. Anna is currently preparing a doctorate on intersections between literary and therapeutic cultures of the 20th and 21st centuries. As she taught several of this type of narrative, Roanne hoped Anna could help her understand them better.
As Alison Kafer has demonstrated, the telos of technology in the popular imagination is the eradication of disability, squeezed out between prosthetic and eugenic innovation. But these same popular narratives also imagine dystopian futures in which technology itself is disabling, especially in the realm of mental health. Homecoming thus registers a deeper set of anxieties about technology as such, about the line between being and merely seeming whose violation technological innovation constantly risks.
