Girl Interrupted was a movie about a female who was forced to spend time in a private mental institution. The psychiatrist she seen considered taking aspirin and drinking alcohol as a suicide attempt and decided Susanna needed to spend time there. The storyline follows Susanna and all the people she meets at Claymoore. She meets people with many different disorders and problems, from family abuse to sociopaths and even pathological liars. Throughout the film Susanna becomes more comfortable with her institutionalized female friends and that begins to make her family nervous who are on the outside looking in. Eventually, after an 18 month stay at the institution, Susanna returns home and has a better knowledge of herself.
Girl Interrupted deals, almost exclusively, with women. Obviously in this film women are not being represented at their best. The main women in the film have mental disorders so it doesn’t really show them being empowered either. The women are represented as being mentally ill, since they are in a hospital and cannot control whether or not they leave it hurts the image of women. Suicides, pathological liars, and abused women are the types of people that are associated with the film. I would not consider Girl Interrupted a feminist film at all. The movie does represent women almost exclusively, but they are not represented in a positive or negative fashion.
I really enjoyed the film. The way that the writers incorporated all different kinds of illnesses into all the different women’s personalities was very interesting to watch. The women played their roles very well, it was very believable the way they acted out their illnesses and sicknesses. The storyline also played out well, throughout Susanna’s experience of finding herself and making friends in a place where she never thought either of those things could happen. Seeing as how the film played out in a mental institution and that is was primarily all women the movie doesn’t really relate to my personal experiences at all.
Some Sources I used:
http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/1800022026/details
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0172493/plotsummary
http://movies.go.com/girl-interrupted/d790992/drama
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This movie takes place in 1960s. When that did not fit the typical role of a women were usually labeled ill or mental. It shows how things were back then. It was the era where women just had begun to challenge gender norms.
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