Take 4
Ayushi Y -
Hey Everyone!
This week’s blog post will focus on the movie Girl, Interrupted because it brought a lot of new information to think about for my project. This week I looked at reviews and scholarly articles regarding a few movies I have already watched and focused highly on Girl, Interrupted. A few of the reviews that stood out to me were:
- Jeff Millar: Houston Chronicle – “The film generates real empathy, without too much let’s-laugh -at- the -crazy- people humor or too much stereotyping”
- Chris Vognar: Dallas Morning News – “As we take our mental health for granted, Girl, Interrupted does justice to those who ultimately can’t.”
- Jami Bernard: New York Daily News – “[Ryder] is often just a crumpled, listless figure on a bed, which, while true to the nature of depression, is not, cinematically speaking, the most arresting image.”
- Jay Boyar: Orlando Sentinel – “Almost everyone here seems at least a little cartoon-like.”
- David Ansen: Newsweek – “They’ve managed to avoid the usual asylum-movie cliches.”
- Tom Coates: BBC.com – “You’re left wishing the film had a little more faith in its audience, for then this well-put-together movie might have provoked more thought and slightly less irritation.”
These are reviews from top critics on Rotten Tomatoes and as you can see, many have differing views regarding how the film portrayed mental health. This trend was similarly shown between the general audience’s reviews as well and makes me wonder: why do people perceive this film so differently?
The portrayal of mental health institutions was another key point in this film because I wanted to see if treatments and diagnoses aligned with what we see in our hospitals today. According to many articles I read, the treatments and diagnoses were appropriate for the time when the film came out (1999) but not the time it was set in (1967). Borderline personality disorder wasn’t a clinical diagnosis in 1967 but the main character, Susanna Kaysen, is diagnosed with it. This led to the question, did the change in the time period between the setting of the movie and the time it came out lead to differences in how the movie was shown versus the real-life experience? You can read more about this controversy in this article: https://ps.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ps.51.4.536
Thank you for reading this week’s post, I will try to get more information regarding these questions this week.
Ayushi Yadav
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