Posted by eko on January 28, 2000, at 19:12:14
In reply to Re: Movies--girl, interrupted, posted by noa on January 17, 2000, at 16:37:42
I agree with Noa:
"there is something unsettling about the gestalt of the film, the big picture, how the essential conflicts are resolved."
Here's Why:
Overall I enjoyed the movie. Girl Interrupted is essentially a coming of age/ self-discovery story of one young girl (Wyona Ryder). The movie has a formula plot: Girl has problems, girl faces them and girl overcomes them. The girl's name is Susan. Susan's, problems are somewhat unique- she is institutionalized as a mental patient after an
attempted suicide and receives a diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder. Taken on this level Girl Interrupted was a pretty decent, if somewhat generic, movie.But it can be taken as another type of story: the story of a mentally ill patient who is cured of her disease (by vanquishing her demons) and who returns triumphantly to society. This is one of very few movies, novels or TV programs that deal with mental illness as a disease. The Movie Industry seems to be infinitely more comfortable with diseases
like Cancers (about which there have been many movies, documentaries, made-for-TV-movies, television series, etc.) than those that deal with
mental problems- in fact, with the exception of "Who Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" I can't think of a single movie that deals with a struggle against mental illness.What does this lack of media coverage mean? I think Cancers just don't have the same kind of stigma that mental illnesses do. People have difficulty accepting that mental illnesses are caused by biological dysfunction in the brain the same way cancers are caused by cells that proliferate out of control. Often people assume that if someone is
clinically depressed he or she can simply "snap out of it" or that "his or her upbringing is too blame". This is a common myth- that major depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder and schizophrenia- are diseases of moral character and not of neurochemical and structural abnormalities of the brain. Science and Medicine have proven that myth wrong. Unfortunately, neither public opinion nor the people involved in making Girl Interrupted are caught up with contemporary science and medicine.The movie propagates the "just snap out of it myth" in many ways. First, it should be pointed out that the patients in the movie were strikingly normal. If you have ever observed a psychiatric ward of a hospital, you would undoubtedly note that some the patients behave strangely. People who suffer from certain mental illnesses, like OCD or schizophrenia, to the extent that they must be hospitalized inevitably have strange or abnormal behaviors that inhibit their functioning in society. The patients in Girl Interrupted, with perhaps the exception of the girl who hid chicken under her bed, were quite normal. I would describe their behavior as possibly eccentric but not abnormal. The character Angelina Jolie played only once did one thing I would call strange- she called
Susan by the name of Jamie, a patient who had previously committed suicide. So where are the really ill people? Or are we to believe that
mental illnesses were simply figments of the collective imaginations of people living in the psychedelic sixties? I happen to know the mentally
ill do exist (have always existed), and they suffer terribly. Girl Interrupted does not depict their suffering, in fact, it minimizes it and, cruelly, it invalidates it. Susan was able to simply "get better" once her nurse (Whoopi Goldberg) told her she was "being selfish and self-absorbed". In effect she "snapped out of it".So was this a story of a someone misdiagnosed and institutionalized inappropriately? Seems like it. Susan certainly didn't seem to be genuinely suffering (at least not more than the average teen turning adult) and the atmosphere of the hospital was more like summer camp than of a place where people were mentally ill and struggling. Girl Interrupted certainly does not portray the real life struggles (and they exist) of someone with a mental illness. So my question is: Where are the
inspiring movies of those who have suffered from mental illnesses and survived? Why are we so supportive of Cancer patients and why do we so
disregard the difficulties of those suffering from Major Depression?In my opinion, Girl Interrupted was certainly not an inspiring story of one girl's struggle with and victory over a mental illness. It's more a movie of a young girl coming of age which, taken on this level alone, was a kinda cute movie.
-EKO
poster:eko
thread:18272
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20000128/msgs/19926.html