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Essay on An Example Of Abnormal Behavior From The Media
The movie Girl, Interrupted focuses on a Susanna (Winona Ryder) who is labeled with "borderline personality disorder," a diagnosis as ambiguous as her own emotions. Susanna begins a journal, a book of her own to lose herself in. She is not crazy. At least, not yet. What is crazy? That is the "big question" that Girl, Interrupted explores. In her journal Susanna comes up with a tempting insight: being crazy is an amplification of certain traits we all have. For example, everybody at some times tells lies. But if you tell lies all the time, that is crazy (her roommate is in Claymoore for being a pathological liar). Now, if the point of Girl, Interrupted is to explore the question, "What is real craziness?" then Susanna's theory of amplification is only a starting point. (Mangold, 2000)
Girl, Interrupted does not explicitly answer what craziness really is. It seems to leave the question open. (After all, open-endedness, or to put it more bluntly, fear of commitment, is endemic to our modern culture.) But implicitly the film tells us that as long as you can work the system, you're basically OK. Thing is, there are two systems: the one outside Claymoore and the one within. If you can work either one, you're not crazy--even though you may be "diag-nonsensed" as such by psychiatric authorities.
Of the main characters, it is Daisy Randone (Brittany Murphey) who is really crazy. She obviously cannot cope being in Claymoore. She's friendless. She keeps herself shut up in her room, a No Tresspassing sign on the door. She refuses to eat with the other women. She lives only on chicken that comes to her room from her father's deli. We do not learn about Daisy's mother; she does not seem to figure at all....
