Cinema: Children in Darkness

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David and Lisa is a tribute much more deeply touching: a story of two terrified children, lost in the deep black mine of the mind, who are found there by the means that Freud discovered and are led back to life by the bright red thread of love.

David (Keir Dullea) is a 17-year-old boy with a high IQ and an obsessive-compulsive neurosis. He lives in morbid horror of dirt, in insane ambition to stop time and so cheat death, in panic dread that someday someone may touch him—"because a touch can kill." Lisa (Janet Margolin) is a 15-year-old girl with soft brown eyes and schizophrenia. She is split into two well-defined personalities. As Lisa she is a silly four-year-old who talks all the time but only in a "word salad" seasoned with rhyme ("A big fat sow—and how and how"); as Muriel she is a demure adolescent who communicates in writing because she can't talk.

The children, who meet in a home for disturbed adolescents, are almost inaccessible to therapy. But their doctor (Howard da Silva) works with steady devotion, and one day a miracle happens. Lisa comes sidling up to David and says shyly: "Me, the same; Lisa, the name." Startled but pleased, David replies: "Me, the same; David, the name." After that they often talk, though always in rhyme—when they talk in prose, Muriel comes back, and Lisa doesn't like Muriel. But she adores David, and he is half in love with her too.

His sickness keeps him from admitting it. He can't take the risk of relating to people—only to clocks. Clocks he can start and stop whenever he likes, but people he can't control. One night he has a dream in which he tries to cut Lisa's head off with the hand of a giant clock, tries with all his might—and fails. Next day he says to her tenderly: "I see a girl who looks like a pearl. A pearl of a girl." She glows like a pearl. Then all at once Lisa stops bothering about rhyme, and Muriel makes a drawing that shows her two personalities united in an all-inclusive Me.