Shock Corridor

Just how far will one person go to win the Pulitzer Prize?

Journalist Johnny Barrett (Peter Breck) discovers an unsolved murder case and decides to engage in some psychological detective work of his own in order to bring the deceptive culprit to justice. After convincing a psychiatrist that he lacks sanity, his information hunt begins in a state mental hospital where three perennial residents witnessed the crime in question. Challenging his reason as he acclimatizes himself to life in the Shock Corridor, he discovers that when his clandestine lucidity is synthesized with a particular brand of patient curiosity, he can bring his troubled co-denizens back from the brink for long enough to unravel their valuable references. But his search is tempered by a mischievous and seductive mental quid pro quo that subtly reveals its malevolent intensity as he comes closer and closer to delineating the subject of his desire.

Through the passage of time.

Two of the three witnesses find themselves locked up because they have been unable to face the predominant homogenized semantic denominators that structure the social lives of their democratic communities, and have in turn embraced said denominators in a ridiculous fashion, thereby taking control of the means of production, subjectively situating themselves within positions of power.

One, while a prisoner of war, flirted with communism as a reaction against the bigotry that conditioned his family life growing up, and was given a dishonourable discharge after being exchanged. He was shunned afterwards and adopted the persona of an heroic confederate general to compensate.

The other, an African-American student attending a recently desegregated Southern University, was broken by the toxic racist sewer of white supremacy and reinvented himself as a grand wizard in the ku klux klan.

The third, being unable to handle the fact that he had helped to create weapons of mass destruction, reverted to an infantile state in order to forget the past.

Thus, in order for Johnny to solve the case and win his Pulitzer, he must function as an inclusive understanding open minded trustworthy citizen, thereby normalizing the activities his co-denizens engaged in prior to being committed in order to provide them with rational voices.

Unfortunately, Mr. Barrett was concerned primarily with winning the Pulitzer and not with capturing a criminal, and doesn't possess the fortitude required to individually combat madness's cloak and dagger, losing his voice in the process.

I think that's what Fuller's saying.