Bonus Sample: Swan Song Series 7 | Girl, Interrupted (pt 1)
Julian and Matthew take a long look at the 1999 film Teal Swan was reportedly obsessed with as a teen. Girl, Interrupted is a bold adaptation of a 1993 memoir by the writer Susanna Kaysen about the 18 months she spent undergoing treatment for Borderline Personality Disorder in a Massachusetts psychiatric facility in the late 1960s.This study is provoked by a memory recounted by Swan's childhood friend, Diana Hansen Ribera, that Swan identified with the character of Lisa Rowe in the film. Angelina Jolie won an Oscar for her searing performance of Rowe, a sociopath. Show NotesGirl, Interrupted — Susanna Kaysen1607: Growing up with Teal Swan - Diana Hansen RiberaMad, Bad, and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors by Lisa AppignanesiBrittany Murphy: Inside Her Sudden Death at 32 That Still Confounds Hollywood
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Thank you.
So, here's the rub, though.
We are looking at this film because we heard one comment in an amazing interview given by Diana Hanson-Ribera, who describes the following memory.
There's these two neighbor girls.
They're both engaging in self-harm.
They're both engaging in eating disorders.
What happened to these girls?
Why are they doing this?
And really, everyone was trying to understand.
Like, I think her mom, even, when we watched the movie Girl Interrupted with her, which is a very dark movie.
Like, even to this day, I can't watch it without feeling horribly triggered.
She wanted us to watch that with her to kind of see I kind of see mental illness and I think she thought we would really relate to it and I don't know if the idea was it would be inspiring or maybe make us feel not as alone in some of these struggles but
And Teal and I really had some parallels with that movie.
I was the Winona Ryder character and she was the Angelina Jolie character.
The one that... She was a sociopath.
And Teal loved the parallels between her and Angelina Jolie's character.
It wasn't something... I would have... I struggled being the Winona Ryder character because of my borderline personality.
That's horrible.
I don't want a borderline personality.
And where she kind of...
She didn't see some of those things as a negative, where I saw them as a negative.
She saw it as like a prideful thing, like sociopaths are one of the more hardcore illnesses.
She's like seeing herself in the character, it sounds like.
And kind of taking pride in seeing herself as the character, which stands out to me now.
We are few.
Yeah, what stands out there for you?
Well, right away makes me think of later on, which we'll get to, Angelina Jolie saying we are few and we are mostly male.
Right.
You know, that she does take pride in her diagnosis as a sociopath.
And, you know, you hear Diana here kind of grappling with the power imbalance is not only there in the relationship with Teal, it's there in how the movie gets Okay, you're going to be the one who has this super vulnerable, confusing, intensely emotional kind of quote-unquote disorder, and I'll be the one who totally flat on the surface of things appears to have more power.
Yeah, and who will dominate and who will, as we'll see, as we'll get into, I think we're going to take two episodes to do this, as we'll get into, takes pride in pushing people's buttons, as she says.
Yeah, yeah.
And provokes the most abject and horrible scene in the film.
And who also, however, is exposed at the end as being somebody who cannot actually exist outside of the confines of the hospital.
Yeah.
And so it flips.
There's something very tender about Teal Swan identifying with the person who in the end is not free because they can't or is not released because they can't actually gain a meta-view.
Enough to be able to rejoin the world, but then there's also this ambivalence about well, do you want to rejoin the world?
Anyway, it doesn't don't things make more sense in here.
So yeah, really really interesting I just wanted to add that that there's also a way In hearing this quote that it all feels like a bit of a mess.
I mean You've got this sort of implication that Teal's mom is Thought the film would somehow be helpful to these two girls who apparently are starting to have these symptoms, right?
Self-harm and eating disordered behavior.
Who knows to what extent that was the case.
Maybe Teal's mom thinks this is going to be inspiring to them or maybe it's a cautionary tale.
We don't know.
But here's this film in which there actually is a young woman who kills herself.
There's some really awful cruelty in the film.
There's this roleplay game that we're then imagining of Teal and Diana.
Seeing themselves as these two main characters, one of whom almost certainly, I would say, doesn't belong in a psychiatric institution, the other who's a really nasty sociopath of the kind we should hope never to meet.
It also plays, to some extent, as I reflect on, because we've talked about this before, like how do we imagine Teal's parents relating to all of this, and to me, It plays into a trope I've mentioned before in the spiritual subculture that often sees emotional instability as indicating some kind of really spiritual sensitivity and then it goes further and perhaps sees mental illness as perhaps being in touch with a spiritual reality that the normies can't see.
In this case, maybe being unbound by restrictive norms of society.
And we talked in a previous episode about the counter-transference, perhaps we could frame it as, of the relationship that Teal's parents seem to be caught in with her, in which she's this powerful and gifted golden child who is only troubled to the extent that the world doesn't know how to understand and support her specialness.
Right.
So, it seems to me like it could be part of that.
I mean, on the one hand, it's kind of sweet that her mom thought, wow, you girls might take some comfort in a film like this that starts to get into these difficult and highly charged issues that I don't know how else to communicate with you about.
But on the other hand, it's like, okay, it's a little twisted.
Well, I think I understand the gesture and the impetus, and I think that it might have been possibly generative and educational and maybe even salutary for girls in this situation to watch this film, but there would have had to be a lot of space and time and conversation and guardrails and And also, the ability to compare it to other pieces of literature, perhaps pointing them towards the actual book because reading the book is a completely different experience.
So, I'm going to talk a little bit about that later.
But I just want to say that in terms of the intensity of their engagement with the film, by email, Diana kindly responded to a bunch of questions that I had, and she told me that she recalled watching this a few times at least with Teal, and only once with her mom present, which was the first time that she saw it.
She says that she's pretty sure that they owned the VHS and that it wasn't rented a bunch of times.
So, she says, quote, I believe Mrs. Bosworth, a.k.a.
Bobby, had good intentions by watching the movie with us.
She discussed the beauty and depth of some of the characters despite their mental challenges.
There was some sort of discussion around the brutal treatments in the old psych wards and the ineffectiveness mixed with trauma from those treatments.
There were some discussions about shock treatment and lobotomy.
I also think the movie was upsetting for Teal's mother, I can imagine.
And the treatment options in our small town weren't great.
So, yeah, thanks Diana for the clarifications.
Yeah, I feel like just as a very quick aside, we should mention for anyone under 30, there used to be these buildings where there were all of what were called videotapes, and you could go into these buildings, you would leave your house, and you would go into these buildings, and then you would select videotapes of films that you wanted to watch, and you'd pay at the counter, and then you'd take them home, you'd put them into this thing called a VCR, or a video cassette recorder that would then play them on your television.
