Re: Jan's movie reviews - Girl, Interrupted (1999)

Posted by Rick on September 25, 2000 at 01:01:55:

In Reply to: Jan's movie reviews - Girl, Interrupted (1999) posted by Jan den Breejen on September 24, 2000 at 11:12:13:

: Compulsively promiscuious? You mean she has a healthy sex drive.

: In psychology there has always been a battle of theory between empirical/biological/genetically/medical/objective oriented psychiatrists and the psychologists who stress the importance of the early years (1-5 years of age) when the environmental stimuli (or lack of them) have an important influence on the 'growing' of the personality around the nucleus of the character. Besides that it is increasingly recognized that traumatic events or situations can CREATE or enhance a personality structure. When they torture you long enough you surely can get a Borderline Personality afterwards because of it.

: The movie Girl Interrupted seems to side with the psychologists. It implies that the strange societal environment in the USA during the Vietnam War with all kinds of 'new liberties' but also 'old moralism' (double standard) can help confusing a person with a weak ego so that the growth of a mercurial ersonality is stimulated. Many woman I know with Borderline problems have complained about things like lack of parental love or sexual misuse at an early age; so I guess it's not such an unbelieveable plot.

: Susanna (played by Winona Ryder), indeed has become 'crazy'. She is diagnosed as "compulsively promiscuous" (among other things) and sent into confinement in an all-female asylum. So as young men, like Susanna's boyfriend (Jared Leto), marched into war (or to Canada, in his case), young women like Susanna marched into psychiatric facilities like Claymoore. We can see that, at 17, she is still unformed and very confused ('lazy and self-indulgent') by the mixed messages she's receiving (that's fatal to a person with a low quality ego). Sex has become a party to which everyone is generously invited, and Susanna has hastily agreed to attend, falling into a poorly thought-out affair with one of her teachers, who also happens to be an old friend of her very well-heeled, hypocritical parents. This impulsive 'hedonistic' escape from negative feelings and lack of self-control is typical for the Mercurial Style person.

: Acting alternately irresponsible and intelligent, sometimes she's hard to understand (capricious). There are periods in the film when Susanna can see things as they are and periods when she's just too knotted up to think clearly. When her patient in-house doctor at Claymoore tells her that she is "pathologically promiscuous" because she slept with her teacher, had sex with her boyfriend on the hospital grounds and flirted with a male nurse, Susanna asks with good cause, "How many girls would a guy have to s---- to earn that label?"

: Good point; since the diagnosis of a 'personality style' certainly has a cultural impurity in it. For example, we might think the French as snobbish but they themselves wouldn't see it that way.

: Jan

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