Girl, Interrupted Film Analysis: Girl, Term Paper

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Thus, even Valerie singles out the protagonist as special from her insane peers. Susanna's conflicts are seen as more, rather than less compelling than the other women's struggles because Susanna is 'really' sane, and able to take the advice of good people like Valerie. In contrast, the problems of people such as Daisy, who has a flip hairdo and an enmeshed relationship with her sexually abusive father, are used more as shock value (like Daisy's fondness for chicken) rather than as evidence that the less mentally stable girls are worthy and compelling subjects.

Susanna's worthiness of subjectivity is further underlined by her constantly reiterated desire to writer, and her parent's inability to appreciate her ambitions and creativity. Of course, many young people have artistic aims and defy their parent's expectations that they go to college and fulfill conventional aspirations of success. This does not make them crazy; the film rightly says (and pats itself on the back for saying). This reinforces once again the idea that Susanna is like the normal audience member, in contrast to the other women. Her clever reply that she took aspirin because she had a headache shows her wit, not her insanity in contrast to the cruder insults of Lisa. Lisa ultimately uses her intelligence to manipulate Daisy into committing suicide, rather than to free herself like Susanna. This underscores Valerie's caution to Susanna that Susanna must try to hold herself aloof from the other girls and get out, before she catches the madness of the other inmates. The repression of society makes sane people mad, but that does not mean that some people are not mad, rather it means that special people like Susanna must be treated with greater care, as precious and fragile objects deserving of better aid than they receive by the mental health establishment. Treatment makes the sane crazy, but the viewer is meant to feel uncomfortable at the prospect that Daisy is released onto 'the outside.

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Over the course of the film, true to many female prison films as well as madhouse films, the girls seem to spend most of the day, bored, smoking, talking, insulting one another -- and occasionally having sex with visiting boyfriends and orderlies. Such boredom seems affected, beautiful, and nostalgic; as the girls lounge around in brightly colored fashions of the 1960s.The girls, like the film's depiction of madness, look beautiful and exotic in such scenes. At times, the film almost seems like a 'chick flick' or a girl bonding movie, such as when the girls go out on an outing to an ice cream shop together, giggling about being asked if they want nuts. These types of images do make the girls as a collective whole seem more normal, but one of the 'crazier' girls always makes a comment to remind the viewer that Susanna is trapped in a ward with 'really' crazy people, in contrast to herself.

The message of "Girl, Interrupted" is really that Susanna is an innocent unjustly accused, not that the way society treats the mentally disturbed is fundamentally cruel or inhumane. The more stereotypical the representation of woman and madness, the more poignant Susanna's plight seems, the less her psychiatrists understand her and the more stifling and dull the psychiatric hospital setting may be the more heroic Susanna becomes in contrast. This representative may make the film popular and exciting to see, from the point-of-view of an adolescent audience member who feels that she is misunderstood by her families and peers. The 1960s setting, where even accepted behaviors for adolescents today are seen as shocking, makes the authority figures seem even more foolish. But this is not really a fundamentally insightful representation as to how 'sanity' and 'insanity' is viewed, and the static craziness of the beautiful girls ultimately seems false, as does Susanna's soulful journaling.

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