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GIRL, INTERRUPTED
AfterGlow Intended for
After You Have Seen The Film
Click here for review without spoiler.
We thank Dawn Drolet from Niagara
Falls, Ontario for the following comment:
"My
take on the movie was a little different. I felt that Angelina Jolie was the
force that drove this movie. Winona Ryder played her part well. I have had the
dubious pleasure of meeting someone almost exactly like Lisa Rowe, and I was
essentially Susanna. Interesting how art imitates life. I too was absorbed,
manipulated, and seduced into the frenzied and compelling world that my friend
lived in. I wasn't as much her friend as I was her hostage. We act as
anchors for these people who know that they are likely to spin out of control at
any moment. We are the touchstone that keep them in our "world"
for as long as they can hold on. Tragically, they all end up in orbit somewhere
no longer connected to us. Tracy and Lisa consume people and leave them feeling
like the have barely escaped with their lives. I doubt that there was a strong
bond between these girls, but there was a mutual parasitism. Susanna used Lisa
to jolt her out of lethargy, and Lisa just used Susanna as her next
puppet/anchor."
Karl
Simanonok questions the authenticity of Girl, Interrupted:
"Girl Interrupted is touted as
'based on a true story' about a woman (Suzanna Kaysen, played by Winona
Ryder) with a mental disease called Borderline Personality Disorder.
Having been unfortunate enough to encounter one of these
'Borderline' psychopaths myself, I have some insights about them that I
expected to be reflected in some fashion in the movie.
Borderlines are lying and deceitful in the extreme. They delight
in pitting people against one another with lies so they can create and
enjoy watching intense emotional psychodramas while pretending to be
friends and confidantes of each victim. (I eventually came to think of
my Borderline as an emotional vampire, hideously selfish, cruel, and
without conscience, feeding on the destruction of relationships and
hiding behind a false face of loving devotion.)
The movie's mild portrayal of Suzanna's
promiscuity, in which she has sex with her boyfriend one morning and
attempts to seduce a security guard the same evening, (and it may have
been the same day she seductively kisses her buddy Lisa, also a mental
patient), is, for real-life Borderlines, a part of their daily routine:
sex with anyone, anytime, and anywhere the opportunity arises. Later,
Suzanna denies being promiscuous at all, as if being caught with two
guys in one day was just an incredible coincidence that could never
happen again because she's basically such a decent person.
The movie doesn't challenge this view,
so we are left feeling sympathetic toward Suzanna. This is exactly what
real Borderlines do: whenever they're caught at something evil, they
explain it away as a misunderstanding, or they pretend they're just
innocent victims of circumstances, or that it was really another
person's fault. Borderlines are natural con artists and experts at
manipulation. They are human chameleons who color their stories to fit
what they want you to believe. And,
they are very good at it, coming across as believable, even
extraordinarily warm and capable people that you want to like for
persevering in the face of so much adversity.
The first few times you catch them being inconsistent with the
personality they've fabricated for your benefit, you will believe their
sincere-sounding stories and try to help them with their problems.
Eventually, however, you will begin to doubt their sincerity,
because they keep doing the same stupid things over and over again, some
of which they will get caught at again and again too. One of the
hallmarks of Borderlines is that they never seem to learn from their
mistakes. What you may
eventually learn if you are watchful and lucky is that the Borderlines
doesn't consider them mistakes at all, but actions they fully intend to
keep doing that they just unfortunately got caught at.
They don't care about anyone but themselves and their own
gratification, so in addition to being promiscuous, they generally have
substance abuse problems and financial problems too (don't ever lend one
your credit card!).
Picture a mother who would drive drunk
with her children in the car, so drunk that when she reaches home she
can't walk or even talk. After
sobering up, she appears genuinely remorseful, crying and explaining it
was just a one-time event in which she lost control somehow because
so-and-so treated her badly that day. She
swears to God she'll never endanger her children's lives again by
driving drunk. She just doesn't know what got into her, but she's
learned her lesson, is thankful she didn't kill herself or anyone else,
and will never do it again. Two
days later, she does the exact same thing anyway. That's the true
real-life picture of a Borderline. In
the movie, when Lisa coldly steals the money from the corpse of the
suicide victim, if that part of the story is based on a real event, I
would be willing to bet my entire bank account that it was actually
Suzanna who took the money, but blamed it on Lisa, because that also is
the true picture of a Borderline. They
have no conscience, no sense of responsibility, no care for others,
nothing even faintly resembling purity in their soul except that which
is deliberately masqueraded. They
are truly evil at their core, because they fully understand what they do
as they delight in hurting people, and they don't care.
They are much more like the Talented Mr. Ripley than the
sympathetic character played by Winona Ryder.
Girl Interrupted can therefore only be
a complete falsehood because the portrayal of Suzanna's 'true story' was
just her side of it. She is
presented as a warm and caring person down deep with just a few problems
that she ultimately resolves at least enough to rejoin society, and so
we should be sympathetic to her. This
is exactly what Borderlines want people to believe, and what they are
able to so expertly con people into believing.
It is a grave insult to everyone who has had to deal with a real
Borderline that James Mangold, the director of this movie, did not do
his homework to understand what he was really dealing with, and instead,
he portrayed a Borderline's false story. It is thus a very shallow and misleading story, like one a Nazi
might make about Hitler, which by the nature of the disease cannot
possibly have happened anything like it was depicted."
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