A GIRL-AND-A-BOY-INTERRUPTED
Girl, Interrupted is a 1999 American drama film, and an adaptation of Susanna Kaysen's 1993 memoir of the same name. The film was released just as I was settling into an early retirement and a sea-change at the age of 55 in Australia's spring season, and just as I was beginning to take my own memoiristic literary activity seriously.
The film chronicles Kaysen's 18-month stay at a mental institution in the late 1960s in North America. Directed by James Mangold, the film stars Winona Ryder as Kaysen, with a supporting cast that includes Angelina Jolie, Brittany Murphy, Whoopi Goldberg and Vanessa Redgrave. I saw the film last night,1 sixteen years after its release and as I was settling into the last decade of my late adulthood, the years from 70 to 80 according to one model of human development used by psychologists.-Ron Price with thanks to 1Channel11 TV, 24/25 March 2015, 9:30 p.m.-12:15 a.m.
I had my stay, too, in a mental
institution at the same time as
was the setting for this film in
the late 1960s....My stay only
had six months, but it clearly
was enough to give me points
of comparison & contrast with
what I saw in this period-piece.
I, too, got on with my life as the
1970s unfolded, and I learned to
deal with the problems of bipolar
disorder for I was a young adult,
a boy interrupted for a time back
then in the decade after that other
film of fame1 gave its audiences a
set of ideas about what it was like
inside mental hospitals for those
who had gone beyond life's edge
of normality & coping capacity.
Both films conveniently distract us in
some ways from the inaccuracy of the
reality of both institutional life & the
life of the mentally-ill. The picture of
life in such an institution1 where shock
treatments were dispensed like aspirins
and lobotomies were prescribed as if all
those frontal lobes of patients were just
troublesome wisdom teeth was a picture
that has been improved-upon in this film,
this filmic-period-piece some 25 years later
as I was on my way to an early retirement,
and a sea change, after a fifty year student-
and-paid employment life from 1949 to '99.
1 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was written in 1959, the year I joined the Baha'i Faith, and published in 1962, the year I began my travelling-and-pioneering for the Canadian Baha'i community. In the midst of the civil rights movement and deep changes to the way psychology and psychiatry were being approached in America these two films came out. The 1960s began the controversial movement towards deinstitutionalization, an act that would have affected the characters in Kesey's novel, and Kaysen's memoirs. The Kesey novel is a direct product of his time working the graveyard shift as an orderly at a mental health facility in Menlo Park, California.
Ron Price
25/3/'15
Girl, Interrupted is a 1999 American drama film, and an adaptation of Susanna Kaysen's 1993 memoir of the same name. The film was released just as I was settling into an early retirement and a sea-change at the age of 55 in Australia's spring season, and just as I was beginning to take my own memoiristic literary activity seriously.
The film chronicles Kaysen's 18-month stay at a mental institution in the late 1960s in North America. Directed by James Mangold, the film stars Winona Ryder as Kaysen, with a supporting cast that includes Angelina Jolie, Brittany Murphy, Whoopi Goldberg and Vanessa Redgrave. I saw the film last night,1 sixteen years after its release and as I was settling into the last decade of my late adulthood, the years from 70 to 80 according to one model of human development used by psychologists.-Ron Price with thanks to 1Channel11 TV, 24/25 March 2015, 9:30 p.m.-12:15 a.m.
I had my stay, too, in a mental
institution at the same time as
was the setting for this film in
the late 1960s....My stay only
had six months, but it clearly
was enough to give me points
of comparison & contrast with
what I saw in this period-piece.
I, too, got on with my life as the
1970s unfolded, and I learned to
deal with the problems of bipolar
disorder for I was a young adult,
a boy interrupted for a time back
then in the decade after that other
film of fame1 gave its audiences a
set of ideas about what it was like
inside mental hospitals for those
who had gone beyond life's edge
of normality & coping capacity.
Both films conveniently distract us in
some ways from the inaccuracy of the
reality of both institutional life & the
life of the mentally-ill. The picture of
life in such an institution1 where shock
treatments were dispensed like aspirins
and lobotomies were prescribed as if all
those frontal lobes of patients were just
troublesome wisdom teeth was a picture
that has been improved-upon in this film,
this filmic-period-piece some 25 years later
as I was on my way to an early retirement,
and a sea change, after a fifty year student-
and-paid employment life from 1949 to '99.
1 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was written in 1959, the year I joined the Baha'i Faith, and published in 1962, the year I began my travelling-and-pioneering for the Canadian Baha'i community. In the midst of the civil rights movement and deep changes to the way psychology and psychiatry were being approached in America these two films came out. The 1960s began the controversial movement towards deinstitutionalization, an act that would have affected the characters in Kesey's novel, and Kaysen's memoirs. The Kesey novel is a direct product of his time working the graveyard shift as an orderly at a mental health facility in Menlo Park, California.
Ron Price
25/3/'15