Analysis of The Film Girl Interrupted

Introduction: “Maybe I was just crazy, or maybe it was the 60’s, or maybe I was girl, interrupted,” is one of the opening lines in the beautifully directed film Girl interrupted, by James Mangold in 1999. This film follows a directionless, careless, and depressed teenage girl Susanna, who is admitted into Claymore Hospital on a failed suicide attempt in the mid-1960s. In the hopes of rendering a young soul we are taken to the girl’s ward in Claymore Hospital where we are faced with numerous characters living a parallel universe of mental illness, ultimately obstructed by society. During a time where modesty consisted of hiding one’s rage, the women in this film find no shame in smoking, swearing, and harassing one another while sneaking around at night breaking rules within the ward. Mangold so perfectly depicted the darkness of this film in using repeated motifs, music, and flashbacks, while capturing the true difficulty of womanhood given societal standards.

Background: To begin and understand the overall meaning of this film, we must understand the 1960s and how society itself deemed mental illness. During a time where mental illness had just earned a title of labeling, it was a hard distortion between deviancy and true illness leaving treatments and diagnosis to be improperly done, stated by scholar Thomas J. Scheff “psychiatric diagnoses were merely convenient labels attached to individuals who violated conventional behavioral norms”. Susanna who appeared to be a normal girl was diagnosed with multiple personality disorder, when in actuality, she seemed to ultimately be depressed, even stating herself “the line between normal and crazy is so wavy that our insistence on making it is blurry indeed.” Thesis statement: The legitimacy of mental illness in the 1960’s was a fine line between social control and conduct rather than true medical diagnosis.

Topic sentence: It seems as if each girl in the film, wasn’t at all a person, but instead a label of their illness, and the story behind there reason for being there. Evidence & citing: Prominent to labeling in the 1960s “the hierarchical structure of the hospital facilitated depersonalization, and labeling led to stigmatization, that it was impossible to distinguish from the sane and insane in psychiatric hospitals (Rosenhan 1973). Societies tainted view of mental illness is greatly depicted in the film by Mangold when all the girl are brought to an ice-cream parlor and a woman, whom Susanna knows, presents herself and wishes upon Susanna that she be locked up forever, within this scene all the girls begin to act outrages and crazy on purpose to get the woman to go away, alienating them all from the normal bystanders. Although, the scene may have not been a true instance, it shows viewers the behavior of mental illness that society expects and labels.

Topic sentence: Could it also be that the labeling of this era by society, that induced such outrages behavior? Evidence & citing: For example, Lisa the queen bee of the ward didn’t seem to necessarily have any mental illness, but more so a taste for getting a rise out of everyone, including the doctors just to put on a show. It seemed as if Lisa, more than anything just liked the idea of being crazy, oppose to actually being crazy, she did things that were ultimately expected by someone with mental illness, but also seemed shamelessly staged. Without proper diagnoses of this era, who was truly labeling these girls as insane? Commentary: The labeling of this time, ultimately constructed an outlet for people to create a deviant self-image to reflect the expected outcome of each individual, although there may have been no true cause. Mental illness was in return treated with institutionalization, which brings us to Claymore Hospital, where Susanna spent a year for a suicide attempt.

In this film we are first presented with an opening scene that is focused on a window and it appears to be gloomy outside, the camera is then directed downwards towards the main character, Susanna whose inner emotion suggest the emotion of the weather outside of the window. The camera then moves down to show Lisa, another girl from the hospital ward laying in Susanna’s lap, motionless and sad. Evidence & citing: The director James Mangold perfectly depicts the feel of the rest of the film, presenting a sort of darkness and concern for viewers. Within this seen he also uses a music score that reflects the emotions of the girls, melancholy, although no words have been said, we are able to feel the emotion rather then be told the emotion. Also implying the implications, we see onward in the film of the bottled-up emotion each girl holds with the labels of their mental illness, yet are unable to directly tell one another. Within the opening scene Mangold also cuts to a cat to reinforce the mood, while also foreshadowing the cat’s significance later on in the film. The cat returns towards the end of the film, when a friend of Susanna’s from the ward Daisy commits suicide, the cat was Daisy’s and then Susanna took it, so the opening scene may also suggest a sadness of Daisy’s death. We then at the very end of the film see Susanna giving the cat to another patient as she is ready for her departure from the hospital, so in actuality that cat is also a symbolization of sickness.

Mangold also uses cigarettes as motif throughout the film whenever dark humor is presented. Evidence & citing: Whenever Susanna is feeling reckless throughout the film with her humor, we will inevitably, every single time see her represent that humor by lighting a cigarette. This is especially enjoyable in the film on Mangolds part, because it depicts the true nature of carelessness Susanna had for her life and wellbeing. In one scene she inhales the smoke of her cigarette and blows it into another patients face as a test, where in return the woman turned and scorned “asshole,” and Susanna reacts by apologizing and leaving the scene. What is most interesting is that Susanna throughout the film is “deciding what kind of woman she will be, and in this arena, there are indeed contradictory, maddening messages, though more for the viewer than the character” (Cross, Alice. “Girl, Interrupted”). The once selfless Suanna showed sympathy for her actions.

Throughout the film we also see Susanna experiencing flashbacks, or time jumps going back to times before she was admitted to the hospital. Evidence & citing: Majority of these flashbacks show things she regrets or things she did that were not modest to the image of herself, such as a precise flashback between a conversation of her and a married professor whom she slept with. Within these time jumps, Mangold seems to use them as a transition from one scene to another. He also at one point abruptly changed scenes to the sound of a dog barking to establish the next scene. Mangold also very carefully uses costume to identify with the characters, Susanna is often wearing dark blues, browns, and greys as she is represented internally, while on the other hand Lisa tends to wear more bright colors that pop out to viewers, as does her personality throughout the film. Light is also played with throughout the film, in the beginning it is very dark and gloomy, but towards the end it seems as if light shines upon Susanna as she is finally deemed better and ready to be released from the hospital. In another instance, when Susanna and Lisa go to Daisy’s house it seems to be very vibrant and light but the following morning when Susanna finds Daisy dead, she walks up a staircase where it becomes very dark again.

Within a institution staff must do checks on patients to ensure that they are ok inside their rooms, so throughout the entire film we hear and see a nurse going through the hallways opening doors repeating “check,” but what’s interesting is that Mangold used this repeition as a way to foreshadow something interesting that is going to happen to Susanna. Evidence & citing: The first check was Susanna getting settled within the hospital, and the second being a time Susanna was inside her room with her boyfriend who visited her to ultimately get her to flee to Canada with him, as he tried to convince her that she wasn’t crazy, where she then replied “I tried to kill myself,” and made the decision to stay at the hospital, which is potentially a small turning point in her character as she is starting to sense a problem within herself that needs to be fixed, oppose to denying it.

Is it right for society to have put Susanna in an institution without proper diagnoses? Who’s to say, but what we do know is that while in the institution Susanna learned values that she didn’t have in the beginning of the film, and she was able to learn self-worth and direct herself away from the emptiness life that stood before her. Her suicide attempt may have not earned her the label of multiple personality disorder, but it brought an attempt to moralize a instance of obscurity for viewers, that was intriguing, and uncomfortable at some points, but very real in modern day society.

Conclusion paragraph: Given the struggle of Susanne and her perseverance to find herself, we are ended in the film with a strong and positive recovery by Susanne ready to re-enter the world as a new and confident woman. This film shows a relatable struggle to woman youth today, emphasizing hardships, friendships, and constant pressure by society. It touches all subject matter presented in todays generation such as depression, reckless use of drugs and alcohol, and even promiscuity. So whether Susanna was really crazy or not, it is promising to know that often everyone feels this way at one time or another, and whether there is a label put to ones feeling by society or not, through rendering hardships there is always a light at the end of the tunnel…Or in this case, end of the film.

Works Cited

• Cross, Alice. “Girl, Interrupted.” Cineaste, vol. 25, no. 3, June 2000, p. 48. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=f6h&AN=3394478&site=ehost-live.
• Grob, Gerald N. “The Attack of Psychiatric Legitimacy in the 1960s: Rhetoric and Reality.” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, vol. 47, no. 4, Fall 2011, pp. 398–416. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1002/jhbs.20518.
• Mangold, James, director. Girl, Interrupted. Columbia Pictures, 1999.
• Porter, Roy. “Madness-A Brief History.” Oxford university press. (2002), p.10