Bonus Sample: Swan Song Series 8 | Girl, Interrupted (pt 2)
The second part of Julian and Matthew's long look at the 1999 film Teal Swan was reportedly obsessed with as a teen. Girl, Interrupted is a freewheeling adaptation of a 1993 memoir by 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. In this second episode, we explore several characters that Swan may have (and may yet) identify with, discuss the awkwardness of portraying mental health narratives on the big screen, and what it would really take for such an intense film to be digestible for typical teenagers. Matthew ends with a meditation on immersive/claustrophobic media—which Swan goes on to master—compared with the relief of developing a meta-view capable of inhabiting many stories, as opposed to imitating one.Show NotesSENECA THE YOUNGER, HERCULES FURENS - Theoi Classical Texts Library Hercules (Seneca)Girl, 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
-- -- --Support us on PatreonPre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | JulianOriginal music by EarthRise SoundSystem
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Thank you.
I want to pull back in closing to look a little bit, or think a little bit more about how Teal and Diana are interacting with this media from like a media studies perspective.
And I want to do this because I think that when we're talking about Teal Swan, we're talking about a particularly intimate kind of influence, parasocial by definition.
And when we're talking about parasocial influence, We're also talking about a world of mirroring of imitation and mimicry.
We're talking about heated, charged, intimate relationships, or at least relationships that feel that way, even though the parasocial sort of boundaries and limitations distort that a little bit.
And, you know, in media terms, we're talking about an extremely heated medium, if we want to use McLuhan's terms, because the parasocial relationship really has no space.
It enters right into your psyche, and I think in some cases it returns the consumer to a kind of naive state of media engagement.
And This is a state that doesn't really allow for stepping back and adopting a meta-view of themes and archetypes and characters and their arcs and where they go.
So, you know, just in my own house, in developmental terms, I can see You know, a couple of ways of relating to media in this sense, a distinction between engagement styles between our six-year-old and our nine-year-old.
So, for instance, our six-year-old can engage with a gaming world like Zelda Breath of the Wild, or they can watch episodes with me from The Mandalorian, Or they can watch some of the first trilogy films in the Star Wars series with me.
And for the six-year-old, the characters and the actors are extremely close and present.
And that experience can be intense at times to the point of absolute immersion.
And as a parent, I think, you know, you're always kind of monitoring that, like wondering whether or not it's too much, whether the child can gain some distance, whether they can extract themselves, whether they're being pulled in.
And I have to say that even at this point, with a six-year-old and a nine-year-old, I look at media from this perspective of just how immersive and totalizing it can be.
Because I see a relationship between the way in which a particular medium can impact a person and the way in which, for instance, a cult can indoctrinate a person, how close and claustrophobic that power structure can be.
And with a six-year-old, you know, we can see that the experience is immersive and, you know, And totalizing, because it provokes imitation and mimicry.
And that resonates out into the post-media play.
So after playing Zelda for a while, the six-year-old will often spend a rich imagination time outside in the backyard, waving sticks, swords around, and putting himself right into that environment.
Or building linol crushers or lightning blades out of cardboard.
But with the nine-year-old, a threshold has been crossed where we can talk about stories as stories.
We can talk about how they're constructed.
We can talk about how a writer or a filmmaker is choosing to do the messages that can be communicated, and how those messages Could be communicated otherwise.
What choice did the writer make here?
So there's a capacity to step back from something like The Lord of the Rings and listen to historians talk about how Tolkien was profoundly influenced by industrial creep taking over rural England, and then he had these terrible experiences in the First World War.
And, you know, the nine-year-old is able to discuss that the ring is symbolic, that it represents like the apex of a terrible human ingenuity, and that there's this great debate between characters about whether or not the ring should exist at all, whether it can be used in profitable ways, whether it can be used without ruining other people's lives, or whether, as Gandalf insists, it must be destroyed by returning it to its origin place.
And this is all reflective of the conversations that Tolkien is having with his own
son during the Second World War about what the Allied forces should be doing with nuclear
technology.
I was just stunned seeing, we talked about it on the episode, Giorgia Maloney becoming
you know the newly minted Italian Prime Minister and of course heir to the party of Mussolini,
finding out that she's obsessed with Tolkien and that she suggests that Lord of the Rings
is a sacred text, in addition of course to her being a conservative Christian.
She's been quoted as saying that she believes Tolkien expresses better than conservatives
are able.
What their worldview is all about.
Have you come across this particular sort of angle?
There's a big article in the New York Times about her devotion to Tolkien, and I would put that media absorption into the six-year-old category of being really, really inspired to the point of, you know, cosplay, and without being able to step back and say, okay, Tolkien was actually a very complex political figure.
He's reactionary in some ways.
Quite progressive than others, you know.
Of course, you know, he wouldn't have had a problem with, you know, interracial marriage in the middle world or whatever.
All of this stuff.
You know, Maloney is reading Lord of the Rings like a six-year-old and waving a sword around in the yard.
Yeah, I mean, she talks about going to the sleepaway camp as a child, and there's apparently a white nationalist kind of song that would be sung in identification as we're all hobbits, but the hobbits are really like the You know, the heroic white nationalists, it's ill-destroyed.
Yeah, yeah, and so marching up and down and not realizing that you're part of something bigger, you're part of a historical process.
And I think, like, the nine-year-old is precocious, and so I think this is happening fairly early, but, like, to be able to step back and make observations about how stories are constructed is, like, Fundamental, I think, to reading and self-awareness and just media literacy.
There's this point, like we're watching Andor together, it was one of the Star Wars spinoffs, and we're able to stop at various points and say, oh, do you see how this particular character You know, uh, machine or interaction is now being mirrored by the opposite side in the following scene.
The writer's doing something interesting there, right?
And it's like, I have to own that I'm influencing that conversation for sure, but I mean, maybe a little, but I mean, but, but he, but sometimes he'll stop it and he'll say, and he'll say, oh, I remember that they did the same, they used the same device in this.
And so, Yeah.
And so where I'm going with all this, I have a little bit more to get to, but where I'm going with all of this is that to be immersed in Girl, Interrupted as a Hollywood film, in which you identify with the characters, That's really difficult if you don't have a meta-view.
