Boy, Interrupted.

I suppose I should mark my return from the wasteland with a note on tonight’s film-that-everybody-in-the-world-has-seen-except-me. I’ve been wanting to watch Girl, Interrupted ever since a variation on the phrase came to have great personal significance to me about five years ago, so tonight I did.

Did I enjoy it? Not really. There are too many things in it to which I’m allergic, like institutions and a culture obsessed with the question ‘What do you plan to do?’ Did I respect it? Sort of, but only so far. What disturbed me was the implicit presumption that anybody who steps outside the tram lines might not be crazy in the ‘clinical’ sense of the term, but they still need to be cured. So, Susanna found her capacity for self control and all was right with the world again. But did that actually mean she was cured, or that she had simply learned to act normal when it mattered? (I can personally vouch for the method.) I prefer to take the clue from the last line, spoken in voice-over by Susanna:

‘They say I’m a recovered Borderline Personality, and I still don’t know what it means.’

Note 1

I decided that Angelina Jolie can act after all.

Note 2

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Whoopi Goldberg character I didn’t like.

Note 3
I ate far too many cashew nuts while watching it. Nerves, I expect. 

Note4

The characters in the film encouraged my suspicion that women are probably better equipped to be psychiatrists than men – speaking generally, of course.

Note5

A Finnish woman told me today that I’m ‘very sweet’ and said ‘thank you.’ Admittedly only on YouTube, so it doesn’t really count, but it does vindicate my claim that I’m so good at acting normal when it matters that the occasional normal person has been known to like me.