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 episode 8 of the Swan Song Series.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 LibraryHercules (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
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Hello Conspiratuality listeners, it's Matthew here.
This is a special, unlocked episode from our Patreon Early Access Swan Song series.
We'll be dropping these periodically into our main feed.
Thanks so much for your support.
Welcome to an episode of a Conspiratuality Podcast bonus collection, the Swan Song series, a tour through the paradoxes of Teal Swan, an influencer who embodies the tangled history and whiplash contradictions of our beat.
This collection will be accessible first through our Patreon feed, but we will release each episode to the public over time in our regular feed in addition to our Thursday episodes.
Topics will revolve around the method, the myth, the impacts and implications of one of the most unsettling conspirituality figures alive.
Content warnings always apply for this material.
Themes include suicide and child sexual abuse.
To our Patreon subscribers, thank you for helping keep our platform ad-free and editorially independent.
And to everyone else, thanks for listening, including followers of Teal Swan.
We hope this is all useful to you as you consider your relationship to Teal's story and influence.
Hello, dear Patreon subscribers.
Welcome to this episode number eight of the Swan Song series.
This is the second part of our study of Girl Interrupted.
Julian, how are things?
Things are good.
I feel like my voice is almost completely back.
So that's a relief.
You know, I feel like anytime there's some kind of illness, it becomes sort of this new reality bubble for a temporary period.
And there's a longing to get back to how things used to be, which perhaps is an analogy for how we've all felt for like the last six or seven years.
But at least my voice is almost back to what it used to be.
Yeah, and you used it to advantage in our big reveal episode of Charlotte Ward has a double identity by doing a few rounds of a fairly plummy accent.
I did.
I did my best.
The longer the quotes got, the more I was like, I'm not going to stay in character this whole time, because if I do, I'll get in my own head about it.
Am I saying each word completely correctly?
Right, right, exactly.
Yeah, well in honor of Charlotte Ward and Jackie Farmer, I have yet more tea, red rose in fact, with more condensed milk because I'm sure there was a lot of condensed milk going on as those websites were being populated.
It's interesting, you know, I grew up with Five Roses Tea, which is, you know, it's so interesting in South Africa there were all of these different brands that purported to be either American or English and then you find out later, like, I don't know if Five Roses Tea is a good example, but There are things that were sold with a kind of gloss of some other aspirational culture, and it's like, no, actually, this is just a local thing.
But one thing that has become a big deal, or a bigger deal than it was at the time in the rest of the world, is rooibos tea.
Oh, right.
That's from your part of the world.
That's an Afrikaans word.
It means red bush.
Alright, so we've got tea, I've got more chocolate.
Let's first of all, let's just get some clarity.
We made some statements last time about Brittany Murphy, and we should just note that her husband wasn't that much older than her.
This is the woman, the actor who plays Daisy Ranzone.
She, Brittany, died at 32 and then he died several months later at the age of 40.
But there was lots of confusion around their deaths with regard to drug use and illness and possible mold in their apartment or something like that.
Yeah, you're very kind to say we made some statements.
I was the one who was slinging around some of those allegations.
I just was remembering, and I went and looked it up, some reporting on their relationship and a kind of Svengali power that a lot of people close to her felt that he had over her, especially because it seemed like he had cut her off from a lot of her important Relationships, and had taken control of her finances, he became her manager, you know, he was very dominant.
Which kind of makes sense because he was a bit of a loser as a director.
Isn't that right?
Wasn't he sued several times?
He just wasn't doing very well.
Yeah, and he does also appear to have had a criminal history, and he had married women and then abandoned them when they were pregnant, and seems to have found ways to take money from people.
Yeah, there's a history there.
They were only eight years apart, but if you look at any of the pictures of them, he seems older than he actually was, and she seems younger than she actually was, and quite vulnerable.
So there's maybe an echo there.
Whatever the truth is in that story, there's an echo here of some of the themes we're talking about in this movie.
You know, I was talking about it with my partner and we got into a longer conversation about all of these entertainment industry tragedies that have just sort of punctuated our media landscape for decades, especially impacting young women Yeah.
And we also, at the same time, we've both listened to one of the last Maintenance Phase podcast episodes about Goop and Gwyneth Paltrow.
And Alex said something quite striking, which was that, you know, for all of the tragedy that has befallen her generation of actors, It is notable that Paltrow has actually promoted something, Flaws and All, that is based upon a kind of personal agency.
She has left an industry that chews people, and especially women, up mercilessly, and she's gone on to do something quite Different with all of the problems that we've acknowledged, but I just I guess I had never thought of goop that way, that it's also a response to, you know, the Hollywood environment that she's coming from.
Yeah, yeah, that's that's an interesting one to to to think about because there's some layers there, right?
We we are very critical of goop and everything that it represents.
And yet at the same time for her as you're saying it represents kind of agency and of course as we've talked about many times.
An attempt to find well-being, an attempt to offer products and services that are a way towards greater empowerment or health or self-love.
The intentions are undeniably good.
Yeah, and the politics and the economy might be shite.
And yet, what she's also saying is, I'm going to define the terms.
And I'm going to say how my body should appear or what it should enjoy or, you know, how I should be represented.
Now, of course, that is all layered with the complexity of however it is she's, you know, whatever conditioning she carries with her.
Nobody is going to escape any of that.
But it is a career change.
And she definitely is presenting her own picture to the world.
Yeah, we didn't talk about this particular thing ahead of time, so I'm not remembering.
I believe it was Brad Pitt.
Who she was dating early on when she became famous.
And there is a quite famous anecdote about him standing up to Harvey Weinstein on her behalf and saying, you do not ever harass her again.
So it appears that she's part of that group of young actresses who suffered at his hands, but minimally so because someone intervened.
Yeah.
Okay, well, let's get back to Girl Interrupted.
We've left at a kind of amazing point at which the main characters have gathered in the office of Dr. Wick and are reading each other's stolen files to each other.
We've met all of them.
Yeah, go ahead.
Yeah, yeah.
So I wanted to just say, because we're diving right in.
To refresh your memory, welcome back to Girl Interrupted.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Let's do that.
So far, what have we done?
We've met the main characters.
We have our vulnerable protagonist, Susanna.
We have the charismatically scary foil, Lisa.
The female residents of the hospital, including Brittany Murphy playing Daisy, who've been pushed aside by society.
They're struggling with their psyches in the hospital in various ways.
We have eating disorders.
We have a couple people who appear to maybe be catatonic.
We have various maladies, some of which may be legitimate and some of which may be kind of socially constructed, as we've been discussing.
We've met Whoopi Goldberg, who plays the head nurse Valerie, and now, yes, where did we leave off?
Well, you know, there's not a lot of space between them stealing into Dr. Wick's office and then Susanna winding up in her office, where they have this incredible encounter which says so much.
Melvin says you have some very interesting theories about your illness.
You believe there is a mystical undertow in life?
Quicksands of shadows.
Yeah, and another one of my theories is that you people don't know what you're doing.
Still, you acknowledge there is a problem coping with this quicksand.
You know, I have a problem coping with this hospital.
I want to leave.
I can't do that.
I signed myself in.
I should be able to sign myself out.
You signed yourself into our care.
We decide when you leave.
You're not ready for it, Susanna.
Your progress has plateaued.
Does that disappoint you?
I'm ambivalent.
In fact, that's my new favorite word.
Do you know what that means, ambivalence?
I don't care.
If it's your favorite word, I would have thought you would.
It means I don't care.
That's what it means.
On the contrary, Susanna.
Ambivalence suggests strong feelings.
In opposition, the prefix, as in ambidextrous, means both.
The rest of it, in Latin, means vigor.
The word suggests that you are torn between two opposing courses of action.
Will I stay or will I go?
Am I sane or am I crazy?
Those aren't courses of action.
They can be, dear.
For some.
Well, then, it's the wrong word.
No.
I think it's perfect.
Quis hic locus quae regiae.
Quae mundis plaga.
What world is this?
you What kingdom?
What shores of what worlds?
It's a very big question you're faced with, Susanna.
The choice of your life.
How much will you indulge in your flaws?
What are your flaws?
Are they flaws?
If you embrace them, will you commit yourself to hospital for life?
Big questions.
Big decisions.
Not surprising you profess carelessness about them.
Is that it?
For now.
Oh my goodness.
It's chills, eh?
Yeah, it's such good writing.
Such great writing.
And both performances, I mean, the way they're able to maintain The tension between those two affects, right?
And just stay true to what's happening in that interaction.
You know, I have to say, though, I almost started laughing a little bit because when she switches to the Latin, like given everything we've been covering, like, oh God, here comes the satanic incantation or the reference back to some kind of ancient mystery.
We should say, of course, that this is The splendid Vanessa Redgrave opposite Winona Ryder in all of her Shakespearean stage glory.
And yeah, what an incredibly wonderful encounter.
And we have to once again shout out to the screenwriters here because none of this is in Susanna Kaysen's memoir.
So, screenwriters again, Lisa Loomer and Anne Hamilton Phelan.
There's no discussion of the term ambivalence, which is like so crucial.
There's no regal manner that she has.
There's none of this like towering Freudian distance, but also insight.
There's no kind of like ironic detachment.
There's no Latin.
So, just to give you a sense of what the screenwriters did, this is Susanna Kaysen describing Wick.
Dr. Wick was the head of our ward, South Belknap II.
The wards had boarding school names like East House and South Belknap, and Dr. Wick would have been a good boarding school matron.
She came from Rhodesia, and she looked like the ghost of a horse.
When she talked, she sounded somewhat like a horse as well.
She had a low, burbly voice, and her colonial English accent gave her sentences a neighing cadence.
So what do you think, Julian?
Do you think that Redgrave picked up the script here, and some of these aspects were in there, and she said, no fucking way.
You're going to write me something better than that.
Anyway.
Maybe she said, I know you think I look like the ghost of a horse, but let's do some work here on the text.
Right, so Kaysen goes on, Dr. Wick seemed utterly innocent about American culture, which made her an odd choice to head an adolescent girl's ward, and she was easily shocked about sexual matters.
The word fuck made her pale, horse-face flesh.
It flushed a lot when she was around us.
A representative conversation with Dr. Wick.
Good morning.
It has been decided that you were compulsively promiscuous.
Would you like to tell me about that?
No.
This is the best of several bad responses, I've decided.
For instance, the attachment to your high school English teacher.
Dr. Wick always uses words like attachment.
She's just describing a very kind of stilted and ineffective therapeutic encounter.
Nothing with the kind of intensity that we're seeing here.
And also at the end of this passage, you know, she says this was called therapy.
Luckily, Dr. Wick had a lot of girls to take care of, so therapy with her was brief, maybe five minutes a day.
Well, as the film progresses, Susanna in the movie commits to three times a week seeing Dr. Wick in her office, and it's a very generative, actually creative time.
In the clip that we played, I always struggle a little bit with representations of both mental illness And, or more specifically, psychiatric diagnoses and therapy in movies.
Because I feel like there's often a kind of, there's a smushing together of some of what sounds like self-help, some of what sounds like, you know, personal introspection of the kind that anyone would do in therapy.
But it's in the context of like, we're in a, we're in a psychiatric institution, you know, we're in this hospital where you can't sign yourself out.
And we're going to be, you know, sort of quoting poetry in Latin and talking about... It's very accelerated.
It's very intensified with regard to what typical therapy would typically... Yeah, that's right.
...how it carries out.
And I think that's what Susanna Kaysen actually in the memoir is referring to.
She's describing something that's fairly mundane.
But I think this is characteristic of all therapeutic encounters that are filmed, like I'm thinking about in The Sopranos.
The Sopranos is amazing because they play out all of it.
It's almost like the person who wrote The Sopranos read a textbook about transference and countertransference and then said, I'm going to put this into a few short episodes at the beginning of the show about a mob boss.
Right, but I'm also going to intensify the sessions so that there are only really peak moments that are being uncovered.
Yeah, because filming a real therapy session would mostly be boring like nine-tenths of the time.
Right.
Yeah, yeah.
And so, but it's just like getting to this place of like, okay, It's a very vague question you're faced with, Susannah.
The choice of your life.
How much will you indulge in your flaws?
Some of this is sort of like...
We could say in our critique, it's sort of like life coaching language, that you're going to make these choices.
So you have this condition that means you're signed into a hospital and you can't sign yourself out, but it's really about internal choices you're going to make about how you relate to your flaws.
I guess the framework is we're going to decide when you're ready, and then we're going to interpret when your internal orientation is ready to be let go.
Yeah, so it's kind of a double mind that way.
But I think you can see in the intensification between the stepping up of intensity between the memoir and the film, something else that I think will catch Teal Swan's eye, which is that that encounter is super intense.
Yeah.
Well, I'm going to say something about that later, because I don't think it's entirely accurate to think of her as identifying herself only with Lisa Roe.
I think there's a bunch of characters in this film that actually fill out Teal Swan's imaginarium, or it seems to be anyway.
Yeah, and let me just say too in the second passage, the passage that you read, which
is from the book before it goes through the transformation that the screenwriters are
very deftly and intelligently creatively able to make happen, one of the things you're seeing
in that passage is the resistance, the sort of dismissive attitude toward the therapist,
the double text, right, where it's like she's telling you her version of what happened in
the interaction and then what's actually going on inside of her, or what she's leaving out,
or what she's framing a certain way to just sort of keep batting away the attentions of
Of the therapist.
So I think that's very interesting.
And in that, Susanna Kaysen is showing how she actually has insight into her own inner workings in terms of how she talks about what is clearly an inappropriate and abusive relationship with her teacher.
Right, yeah.
And just so we know, in the film, Kaysen is clearly sexually abused by her high school English teacher.
In the memoir, it's not framed as abuse.
This is a major precipitating event in her suicidality.
But it also provides the background for what follows shortly after this encounter with Dr. Wick, which is one of the most bonding experiences of the Claymore team.
Claymore is the name of the hospital, by the way, so I've corrected that.
They all go out on an ice cream trip in the early spring, and while they're at the 1950s parlor-style soda fountain, Susanna is confronted by the wife and the daughter of the man who exploited her, as though, of course, she were the problem.
And Susanna's fellow patients all out for the afternoon for ice cream, they all stand up to this woman, especially Lisa, who really bears her teeth and stares her down and says things like, don't mess with crazy people.
And this precipitates, you know, this entire A group of women to bark and howl at these very middle class and now outraged people who have tried to confront the person that they want to frame as a kind of slut, right?
Yeah, who seduced the husband.
Yeah, yeah.
Homewrecker.
Yeah, so just to reflect on this for a moment.
In the book, there's a kind of prudish misogyny on display in which Susannah Kaysen being exploited by her teacher boils down to a kind of pathologization of her sexuality through the charge of her being promiscuous.
And that feels like a pretty standard middle-class and maybe Christian take for the time.
But in the film, Vanessa Redgrave, as Dr. Wick, is a lot more shifty about the label.
She uses the notion of promiscuity in a more Freudian, just-asking-questions kind of way.
Like, what does this mean?
And I think that both of these approaches to Kaysen's behavior are red meat to the argument for personal reclamation and agency that Teal Swan will go on to mobilize in her approach to the agency of her followers.
So they both, you're saying that they represent something to fight back against in terms of... Yeah.
And kind of a spectrum.
We have something that's simple, to simply demonize quote-unquote promiscuity is pretty run-of-the-mill.
But then for this Freudian interpretation of, well, what are you really trying to express through these encounters?
That also is something that I think the psychology of Teal Swan will go on to reject.
Almost sort of influenced by a sex positive strain of feminism that says what you choose to do with your own body is up to you and this is like a patronizing kind of prudishness.
Exactly, right.
Okay, so turning now to the Latin.
Which is kind of extraordinary.
Again, this is not in the book.
So, quis hic locus, quae regio, quae mundi plaga. It goes on, ubi sum, sub urtu, urtu solis,
an sub cardine glacialis ursae. So this is from, I found it, Hercules' Furins, which is a play by
Seneca, first century, the fifth act, and it's spoken by Hercules. The translation is, what
What region?
What shores of the world?
Where am I?
Under the rising sun or beneath the wheeling course of the frozen bear?
These are lines that Hercules utters after he awakens from his return from hell.
Let me just say here that I always feel that Anytime you're in someone's presence and they say, oh, this reminds me of a quote, and then they do it in the original language, if it's not English first, it's, it's, it is a power move.
It is a way of saying, I have, I have this very sort of elite background.
Totally.
So that is interesting because her demeanor is not that at all.
Her demeanor is obviously someone who is, Who is deeply immersed in a kind of very contained, but nonetheless passionate relationship to literature and to meaning.
And yet, there is this thing of like, when you do that with someone, you're saying, I have access to the liturgy that you are not schooled in.
Now do you think that is historically contingent as well though?
Because I'm wondering whether that just might have been more common to hear from an authority figure in their 60s in 1968.
Then it would be now.
I mean, it might have been.
But also, she's from Rhodesia, where I was born, which is a tiny little podunk place.
I was born in the second largest city in Rhodesia, or now Zimbabwe, which is called Bulawayo.
And I have met people, oddly, expatriates around the world who are from there.
They'll always say, well, if you're from Bulawayo, which hospital were you born in?
Because there's only two.
In the second largest city in the country.
So the fact that this woman comes from a colonial English background and is schooled in Latin in a way that a tiny, tiny percentage of that population would have been, I don't know.
To me, maybe it's less uncommon than it would be today, but I still think there's something there.
Yeah.
I mean, to be fair, we don't know that she's from Rhodesia in the film.
Well, that's true, yes.
And so not only have we introduced the Latin, but we've maybe, her origin story is not as closely tied to the book.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah, but I do, I mean, when you say this is a power move.
It makes me, like, I know you're right, and yet it's not something that I think I have good radar for.
Because when she starts up, I immediately relax into, oh, somebody knows something.
Yes.
Yeah, well, that also speaks to your, you know, unconscious privilege and the fact that you come from that kind of academic You come from a world that is comfortable with that kind of academic reference point.
Yeah, I wonder if it's comfortable or it's just sort of illuminated by positive memories.
Because the guy who taught Latin in my high school, the school itself was filled with lower and middle class kids.
It wasn't an expensive private school.
It was semi-private.
It was at St.
Michael's Choir School.
It's run by the Toronto Catholic School Board, which is free to attend, and the tuition was something like $600 a year because you paid extra for music lessons.
So I was not surrounded by rich kids, and taking Latin was more about the anachronism of the school than it was about being posh, certainly.
So the guy who taught us Seneca just did not have that sense about him.
But it was like he was digging back into something that was full of treasure, you know?
So it's a little bit of a different feeling.
But in Redgrave's mouth, it certainly carries a kind of Yeah, so there's that, and then there's also, there's sort of a translation across into different domains, and it's the only reason I sort of reflect on it, is like, you know, the yoga teacher who insists on using all of the Sanskrit terms, right?
And on the one hand, you can see that and say, oh, well, they're very invested in the tradition and they're wanting to pay their respects to it, but it also is a way of saying, I am initiated into this Language that you know nothing about and you're gonna be confused, but that's okay because I'm I'm I'm teaching you these things and and you don't know and these these words that sound strange to you are Evidence of my authority when actually they're just evidence that you've learned a few new words they're not evidence that you that you have access to all of these kind of mysterious truths and
So I've always been uneasy with that.
It's like if we were in a conversation and I said, oh gosh, it reminds me of a line from Rumi, and if I could share that line from Rumi, I might be sort of impressing you, or trying to impress you, but it also would be shared with a certain kind of joy.
But if I first recited it in Farsi, A whole different level of me saying, I really am the fucking expert here, listen up.
Because you would just be like sitting there going, I don't know what those Farsi words mean, right?
Anyway, it's a big digression, but it's something I'm interested in generally.
It is pretty interesting, but I'm going to argue that the writers are actually inserting, that Redgrave's choice, however she dealt with the script, does put the Latin up front in this way that might be a power move.
I think that the writers are actually inserting it because it's empowering to the conversation because in the play, these lines come after Juno has imposed 12 destructive tasks on Hercules, her hated stepson.
But, you know, even the last and the worst of them, which is to bring Cerberus to the upper world, he has triumphed over.
Now, Juno abandons her plan of crushing him through these tasks, but she's going to turn his hand against himself and therefore accomplish his destruction.
So when he returns from hell, she casts a madness over him.
And this precipitates the tragedy that forms the action of the play.
So, these writers dug in and they found something, and it is resonant and echoey on about eight different levels, and what I think it ends up doing Is that they are letting Wick here position Susanna Kaysen as Hercules waking up on the shore of life, returned from the underworld.
You know, she might be a doctor who's cold and avoidant and ironic, but she is also providing this mythic and non-pathologizing frame for Kaysen to understand her travails.
Yeah, as a kind of heroic figure who has future possibilities as she understands her dilemma.
We could have gone to Eros and Psyche here.
I think it would have been even more resonant.
But yeah, that's amazing.
Good discovery.
So, it was when I got to this dialogue, and I thought again about how Thiel says to Diana, or Diana reports that this was one of their favorite films when they were teenagers, and how Thiel identifies with Lisa Roe.
I have some more thoughts about that.
I begin to wonder just how many of these characters she might actually meld with.
Because it turns out, I think that Dr. Wick and Swan have a lot in common as well.
The way Redgrave plays her, there's this kind of dead-eye certainty.
There's a Mona Lisa smirk.
There's this imperious knowledge.
There's a meta view.
So I can totally imagine Teal graduating into that kind of role, maybe even sort of fantasizing herself as being in her 60s and being able to conduct an intervention like that.
Or, you know, or at least that's the effect that she would hold if she had gotten some kind of real education.
Well, this is really interesting because, you know, like you, I've done a fair amount of digging through Teal's, you know, pretty extensive YouTube catalog and I think that what we see is a person over time, perhaps moving through some of these characters with the aspiration of becoming like Wick.
I mean, for the last few years, she has videos where she's like, now I'm going to tell you about attachment theory.
Here's how attachment theory like, like she basically reads up on various aspects of, Psychology, and positions herself as the expert who is able to then help you apply this in your quest for New Age empowerment and awakening.
You know, there's another famous reference to this line that is employed by T.S.
Eliot, and I'm going to put the poem in the show notes, but it's called Marina, and it just opens with What seas, what shores, what gray rocks and what islands, what water lapping the bough and scent of pine and the wood thrush singing through the fog, what images return, oh my daughter.
The whole poem is addressed to the poet's daughter, so that's a kind of Uh, you know, interesting switch, but I don't know.
I just really love the writers of this film, uh, and admire them greatly because they've put some amazing things into here.
Um, yeah, but I mean, in addition to identification with Dr. Wick, um, I can also see Aswan identifying with Kacen herself, because after all, Kacen is keeping the journals.
You know, identifying everyone's vulnerabilities, getting found out for that as well, right?
But then there's this question of whether, you know, Kacen is ever going to return to the real world.
And then kind of the character climax of the film in many ways is about how Kacen will actually be released, but Ro perhaps not.
Yeah, she has a line in there about how, you know, there are all of these different types of people here and then there's types like me who, you know, we're never getting out.
This is where we live forever.
And then in her most When she is having one of her intense episodes where she's needing to be restrained, or so the hospital staff believe, Lisa will yell things like, you're all slaves, I'm the only one who's free, you're all weak, you're pathetic, which is well done in terms of the characteristic of that type.
I think returning to the original reporting that Teal's identification is with Lisa in this film.
I think the ultimate sort of extreme endpoint of this identification comes really at the tragic climax of the film, which is not really that close to the end, actually.
This is the death by suicide of Daisy Randone.
And we're not going to do the clips here.
It's so abject.
It's awful.
It's so difficult to get through, yeah.
But just a brief description.
So, Polly, played by Elizabeth Moss, something happens.
I can't quite remember what, but she has to go into seclusion.
Now, Lisa and Susanna together decide that they're going to try to cheer her up, and so they drug the night nurse, Miss McWinnie, who's the kind of Irish battle-axe on the floor who controls all the medications.
Are we going to have a problem?
That's right.
And then they pinch a guitar from the art room, and they sing Downtown by Petula Clark to Polly through the door.
And of course, Polly starts singing along as well.
But then there's also, there's been this subplot with this super normie orderly guy who has a crush on Susanna and he shows up, he's trying to get them to shut up, but actually she winds up flirting with him.
We're not quite sure how they spend the night together, but they wake up in the morning and all hell breaks loose.
Well, they are in each other's arms.
It's not, it's not, you know, we don't know the extent to which they fooled around, but they've definitely gotten somewhat intimate.
Yeah, now, what this precipitates is that Lisa and Susanna, who are probably no more closely bonded...
Than during this scene when they're actually trying to sing this beautiful song to their fellow, you know, their fellow patient.
Which again is a callback to the opening scene, right?
Because it's the song that is playing in the taxi cab as Susanna is getting driven to the hospital.
And, you know, you said Polly has to go into seclusion, which is a very sort of gentle way of saying she's sort of locked into solitary, right?
Yeah, locked into solitary and probably medicated.
And so, they are separated.
Lisa is sent off to another ward, and Susanna really decompensates from there, having lost this very vibrant, very confusing, very volatile friend.
And in the middle of this, Valerie confronts her and tosses her into a cold bath and tells her that she really just has to get herself together.
Then Lisa and Susanna escape from Claymore.
Lisa escapes pretty much every month, but this time she takes Susanna with her.
They hitchhike, they wind up at a hippie party, Lisa steals some guy's wallet, they find Daisy's apartment.
But not before Susannah has told the guy who's hitting on her that she's thinking of becoming a Hare Krishna.
No, that's early, that's in the first party of the film, actually.
That's actually before her suicide attempt.
That's right. That's the first party of the film actually, right?
Where that's actually before her suicide attempt.
Oh, okay. Got it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So it's kind of in a montage of her general social alienation.
She's dancing with a guy and he says, I'm going to MIT for some sort of engineering and she says, oh cool, I'm going to be a Hare Krishna and she walks off and she just can't connect with anybody.
And it's sort of, it's rhyming with the pressure she's feeling from her parents and her teachers about what are you going to do with your life?
So it's not enough that Daisy lets them stay at her apartment that her father has rented for her and kitted out with a cat and, you know, a record player and, you know, certain comforts.
Lisa Provokes her and really kind of airs her laundry and shames Daisy with what has been sort of implicit throughout the film, which is that Daisy is being kept by her father as a subject of abuse.
And that's why she's in the apartment.
And she says just the most wretched things about not only what the situation is, but how Daisy is actually some sort of willing victim in it.
It's a really just sort of disgusting and humiliating just offense that she mounts.
And you know, it's so interesting that It reminded me of several encounters in spiritual organizations that I've been in, in which somebody who is a little bit higher up on the ladder was willing to
Call the person out for whatever sort of psychological or spiritual weakness or insufficiency they imagine they have.
Yeah, and it's the naming of what you know about the other person that they don't know or are unconscious of or are pretending is not there, which is a very aggressive thing to do to anyone.
There's kind of a peak cruelty here, and for a 15-year-old watching this to identify with this character, and maybe she would have expressed misgivings at the time, well I wouldn't have done that.
But I mean, I think it's a very intense thing to accept this character as somebody that Could be, you know, looked up to, or that one could model oneself after, or one felt, you know, an identification with.
It reminds me of how, after all of the controversy was swirling around Casby's series for Hulu, that he, those little videos surfaced of he and members of his crew, were uniformly, as they were sort of singing Teal's praises and being sort of deferential to her, The thing that they all would say is, she speaks the truth.
She says the things that other people are afraid to say because she's so brave and she's doing such important work in the world because she tells the truth.
Well, what is Lisa doing here?
She's just telling the truth.
It's utterly brutal and harmful.
And that's her defense, actually.
After taking her money, Daisy's money, out of her bathrobe while she's hanging in the bathroom, Susannah says, you press her buttons and then you take her money.
And Lisa's response is, I didn't press shit.
She was waiting for an excuse.
Which is also something that sounds very familiar to me.
Yeah, there's this widespread kind of trope that no one else can ever make you feel anything.
Right.
You're not responsible for your feelings, like you're the only one.
And so if someone else said something, well, that's it's on you, how you chose to be affected by it, or what it revealed about your deep sort of inadequacies.
This, however, turns out to be a turning point, because it's at this point that Kaysen rejects Lisa's cruelty.
There's this really generative scene where once Kacen returns to Claymore, that we see her with Valerie again, after Valerie has confronted her and said, you really have to get things together.
And what she confesses to Valerie is that a decent person would have done something.
A decent person would have stood up to Lisa.
And Valerie says, well, what would you have told her?
And Susanna says, I would have told her I was sorry.
I didn't know what it was like to be her.
But I did know what it was like to want to die.
And then the music starts up and there's this dream monologue montage in which Cason describes a kind of recovery process by which she is journaling, she's doing art, she's doing well in therapy.
And this all happens before the last act, and actually the montage ends with a really sort of beautiful denouement of watching the Wizard of Oz, especially the last scene, Dorothy clicking her heels, ready to go home, and that's playing in the psych ward TV room.
So this is interesting, right, because what is being depicted here Is that it is her ability to feel both remorse and empathy that are the doorway into this sort of last stage of her healing or her journey there sort of coming to some sort of completion and both remorse and empathy are things that are unavailable to Lisa essentially.
Right.
So, for the last act, Lisa returns.
She's brought back by the cops again.
She's on her last legs again.
She goes into seclusion.
At a certain point, she escapes.
And we have this scene in which all of the principals, well, not all of them actually, I think Georgina and Polly are the other two women who are there.
are led down into the same basement that they had that first bonding experience with, you know, during the bowling party.
And what has happened is that Lisa has actually snagged Cason's journal, which of course is, I think, a sign of what might turn into the memoir, perhaps?
That ends up getting published, so I think there's a little bit of a postmodern loop in there.
And what happens is that Lisa actually begins to turn Susanna's writing against her.
She's kept these private thoughts in her journal, and then Lisa confronts her.
So nice of you to pass judgment on us and have us cure it.
What the fuck are you doing, Lisa?
I'm playing the villain, baby, just like you want.
Try to give you everything you want.
Now you know.
You wanted your file?
I found you your file.
You wanted out?
I got you out.
You needed money?
I found you some!
I'm fucking consistent.
I told you the truth.
I didn't write it down in a fucking book.
I told you to your face.
And I told Daisy to her face what everybody knew and wouldn't say, and she killed herself.
And I played the fucking villain, just like you wanted.
Why would I want...
Because it makes you a good guy, Sweet Pea.
Makes you a good guy.
And you come back here, all sweetness and light, sad and contrite, and everybody sits, wringing their hands, congratulating you and all your bravery.
And meanwhile, I'm blowing through guys at the bus station for the money that was in her fucking robe!
Stop it, Lisa!
She's too strong!
And then there's some physical action and a climactic chase and then a kind of resolution that winds everybody up in the hospital for a bit.
Well, what's wild about this is that you said it's the same basement.
It's like in the movie, they've constructed an underworld.
Yeah, they have.
They really have.
There are fire escapes that go nowhere.
There are doors that don't open.
There's just like this weird, dreamlike, kind of nightmarish underworld.
Yeah, as referred to by Seneca, actually.
That's amazing.
So, there's so much going on there, and really what's at stake is Lisa's claim that she's the honest one.
That her observations about everybody else's mental health, because what she's revealed is that Susanna has actually said some kind of Cruel and biting things about how Polly presents herself to the world.
She's talked about how Georgina uses lying as a kind of defense, but she might not need to.
She's giving some layperson's reflections that would be very natural to come upon and then, of course, become Part of the basis of the memoir.
And there might be something in this exchange too where the writers are implying that there are consequences for somebody publishing a memoir like this, right?
Like there are privacy issues involved.
Sure, and I mean Lisa's definitely saying how dare you have a private inner life in which you reflect on all of the rest of us, which actually is a natural and even a healthy thing to do in a situation I like that, but your joke about the post-modern sort of self-referential thing, on a totally
A whimsical side note, it makes me think of reading bedtime stories to my daughter and how one of my favorite moments in her bedtime stories will be when one of the characters in the bedtime story actually has a copy of the book with the cover that we're reading and she'll say, look, look, they're reading this book too!
And I'm like, yeah, isn't that interesting?
And that's what's happening here.
We're seeing Lisa reading the book that she's in that the movie is based upon.
I think the strongest irony of Lisa's statements at the end here really have to do with whether or not she's going to know more than everybody can know about everybody around her.
But because she says it out loud, that will condemn her to being in the hospital forever because she obviously has no filters.
She's going to push everybody's buttons.
She's not going to stop doing that.
She's not going to stop attacking people.
Yeah, and there's a literal mindedness about relational and emotional truth which is fixated on the idea that certain types of empathy and consideration are dishonest.
Right?
And most of us, I think, when we're young teenagers kind of have that perception because we haven't developed, we haven't matured yet into those relational and emotional kind of nuances.
And so there is a sense of like, Oh God, adults are so full of shit.
Like they say all these things they don't really mean.
And of course some of that is true, but some of it is like, that's actually part of existing in a, in a relational space.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, what I get from so much of Teal Swan's affect is a kind of adolescent rebellion against relational modesty or continence, right?
And I imagine she's extremely attractive to people because she has really kind of frozen something into a 16 or 15-year-old affect that says, you know, I'm going to tell you exactly what I think and if I don't I'm a liar.
If I don't, then the truth will somehow suffer.
It will never be available to us.
And with someone like Teal, you also see how she is explicitly linking not telling the truth in those ways with the most horrific, fantastical, abject abuse.
It's because the adults in my community were not awakened in the way that I'm encouraging you to be, and in the way that I am, that satanic ritual abuse that sacrifices babies is possible.
So the stakes are incredibly high on this kind of resolute truth-telling.
I think one of the best lines of the film comes right at the end of this chase through the underworld and a physical conflict that doesn't really go anywhere, but it leaves them both wounded.
And it's, well, let's just listen to it.
You know, there are too many buttons in the world.
No, no, no, no, no.
There's way too many just begging to be pressed.
They're just begging to be pressed.
You know, they're just begging to be pressed.
It makes me wonder.
No, it really makes me fucking wonder.
Why doesn't anybody ever press mine?
Why am I so neglected?
Why doesn't anybody reach in and rip out the truth and tell me that I'm a fucking whore?
Or that my parents wish I were dead?
Because you're dead already, Lisa!
No one cares if you die, Lisa.
you Because you're dead already.
Your heart is cold.
That's why you keep coming back here.
You're not free.
You need this place.
You need it to feel alive.
So many buttons to push.
So many buttons to push.
And why doesn't anybody ever push mine?
Why doesn't anybody reach into me and pull out the truth about me?
It's incredible stuff!
There's something just emotionally on the nose about this that's really impactful.
And yeah, you're right, I think that's the defining line and I think they were very, very aware of it in the writing of this, that it would culminate in this confrontation, this insight, this actual Truth-telling, even though of course it's metaphorical because she's not really dead.
So there's a reconciliation at the end of the film with Lisa and Susanna as Susanna visits her before she's discharged.
Before Susanna is discharged.
Before Susanna is discharged, Susanna comes and paints Lisa's toenails, There's two things that are super poignant about that moment.
One is that as she's painting her fingernails, her wrists are restrained on the side of the bed, right?
And the other is that that act of care and connection is very clearly moving to Lisa.
Right.
And then we have the final monologue.
Declared healthy.
And sent back into the world.
My final diagnosis?
A recovered borderline.
What that means, I still don't know.
Was I ever crazy?
Maybe.
Or maybe life is.
Hey.
I remember you.
Hey.
Where you going?
17, Burlingame.
All right.
That's our cabbie.
Crazy isn't being broken or swallowing a dark secret.
It's you or me amplified.
If you ever told a lie and enjoyed it.
If you ever wished you could be a child forever, They were not perfect.
But they were my friends.
And by the 70s, most of them were out, living lives.
Some I've seen.
Some, never again.
But there isn't a day my heart doesn't find them.
There we have it.
Yeah, this is, I mean, I hinted before at a kind of critique that was forming in my mind.
This goes back to what I said earlier about having some discomfort with the way mental illness is treated in films.
Because I think that what you have so often with the narrative of a film, you have a kind of journey that needs resolution or in which all turns out well in the end
or all of the travails ultimately were worth it or something like that makes me think of a
beautiful mind where it's almost like the schizophrenia that is being experienced is sort of
cured by the love of a good woman.
You know, it's like, really?
You think that's the answer to schizophrenia?
Like somehow he's able to come out the other side of that?
And similar with this, on the one hand we're being shown a psychiatric hospital where You know, there's a lot that can be critiqued.
There's a lot that we see as having sort of cultural, psychological, gendered issues, and yet, by the 70s, which is what, just a few years later, she's saying most of the people, most of the women she was in there with are out and are living good, productive lives, however she frames it, right?
And it's like, well wait, some of these people had, they had really serious diagnoses.
Are you saying that staying in this, You know, not particularly effective or humane institutions somehow just cured them.
And then the other part of my critique is that, okay, again, it's inherent to storytelling through the medium of film, which is that you have this main character and what happens in the lives of the other characters is in a way in service of her personal growth of her story. So one of them is gonna die.
The other one is going to, um, is going to, you know, be in restraints and having their
nails painted, but she's the one who's sailing out of the door, having learned the lessons
that she got, grateful to the, the, um, supporting cast, you know? Um, it's, it's tricky stuff.
Yeah. You know, I wanna pull back, uh, in closing to look a little bit or think a little bit more
about how Wow.
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 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, we can see that the experience is immersive 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 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 and others, you know, of course, you know, he wouldn't have had a problem with 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.
I mean, she talks about going to sleepaway camp as a child and there's apparently a white nationalist kind of song that would be sung and identification as we're all hobbits, but that the hobbits are really like the You know, the heroic white nationalist, 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 on 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.
If you can't sit back, as we do, in a way, not to say that we're excellent viewers of the film or anything like that, but I mean, I think it's really hard to be 15 years old and watch this film with any kind of cultural detachment.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, there's something that I feel you're pointing out here in terms of a developmental A kind of developmental ability to do some of this thinking through of layers of meaning and juxtapositions and what is happening within a piece.
And it makes me think of how You know, with some of these perhaps somewhat controversial designations of personality disorders, it's part of what is often discussed, right, as that they potentially come from certain developmental complications around regulating emotions and impulses, differentiating self and other, caregiver dynamics where, you know, there may have been a lack of age-appropriate mirroring, or there may have been invasive trauma or abandoning kind of neglect.
And all of that can then dovetail with fantasy play and what can seem to others like melodramatic emotional behavior to try to sort of deal with some of those I think that for people who have these disorders, which I think the writers accurately represent as being amplifications of what everyone experiences, but they're amplified in a way that's less common and more difficult to navigate through the world with.
There's a way that the world becomes a stage for playing out this almost primordial maelstrom of relational identity, power, love, revenge, sorts of dynamics.
And I think we can see that in certain kinds of dysfunctional or really wounded relational interpersonal dynamics, but I think we can also see it Politically, you know.
In my own therapy, I know that one of the insights I came to was that certain topics or certain dynamics that were highly charged for me, that the more I worked through what that charge was about, the more my life in the real world as an adult could just be what it was instead of being symbolic of something unconscious that I was like, Raging against.
So yeah, I just think it's interesting stuff that you're getting at.
I feel that one of the things that happens with media experiences, and I looked at this in my examination of Slender Man and then my interview with Kathleen Hale, and I think it comes up here again with Girl Interrupted, is that there really has to be a kind of real-life context in which readerly distance can be gained.
uh in which the young person can step back and understand that being that they're being shown something that is symbolic but that relates to a real world instead of being roped into something that is actually a world without symbols at all so you know this is a bit of a tangent but but this also puts me in mind of the notion of uh the third space There's an amazing summary of this idea that's been circulating over the past weeks on Twitter.
It's produced by Nathan Alibach, and I'll link to that in the show notes.
But basically, the idea of the third space comes from urban planning, and it's that we have places that we live in and we have places where we work, but then we all seek and we need third spaces.
So, the cafe, the library, the bar, the athletic field.
Spaces where we can have chance encounters, where we can meet strangers, where we can accommodate the unexpected, where we can have conversations that we can't necessarily control, where we are neither taking care of ourselves nor taking care of the professional world, but we're actually acting in a horizontal manner where You know, we're reaching out to other community members, and we have to negotiate the politics of difference according to the luck of the draw, like who's standing in front of us.
It's learning how to negotiate the casual.
And there's nothing casual about the intense media engagement that I'm referring to above, nor in the parasocial relationships that are so crucial to influencers like Teal Swan.
So, one thing that a lot of theorists of the third space have noticed is that, you know, as North American cities become more suburbanized, and as young people become more and more disconnected from their meeting places and playgrounds and athletic fields, they require more car-faring around, as neighborhoods become less walkable, and as major highways split up residential areas from commercial areas.
Um, but I think what's happened is that it's the online world that has swelled to take up that third space.
And, you know, we can be alarmist about that.
We can shake our hands and say, you know, woe is me.
We can blame all kinds of alienation and isolation on the internet, but the issue is bigger than that, I think, because the internet and the constant availability of media and movies and streaming content has actually emerged to fill a gap in the material world.
And it's that gap that also has to be addressed.
And so, one of the things that I think about when I think about Teal and Diana watching this movie in relative isolation, in their suburban setting, is that I think about how they might be enclosed, not necessarily part of a wider extended community of people who they're going to be able to talk with about books and films.
And so, there's an additional kind of claustrophobia there that I think just gets in the way of being able to have the kind of step away observational distance.
So, I'm just thinking about how this third space is often the place in which we find the distance from our internal lives at home and the obsessions that they can foster.
It would be a place where media could be discussed, where literature could be discussed, and where that representational distance could be fostered.
You know, because the thing that strikes me most about Teal's media and the endless gazing portrait of her videos is that it is absolutely claustrophobic.
It's really just you and her.
Yeah, with her specifically, and then there's a broader thing that you're talking about, which is that more and more we are saturated with… Things that we are engaging with, being distracted by, that are kind of bathing us in particular waves of experience.
I thought about this last night.
I came home last night and walked the dog.
And as I was walking the dog, I clicked on a YouTube video, and I was listening to the YouTube video as I was crossing the street, and there was another person coming down the street walking their dog, and they also were listening.
And I thought, this is, you know, not to be Luddite or like, oh, the good old days, but I was like, there was a time in the not-too-distant past when two people walking their dogs out on the neighborhood street at night would be doing so in silence.
And would be having a different experience of the neighborhood and perhaps of one another and perhaps a self-reflective and naturally arising self-reflective moment in perhaps what you're describing as a third space that, you know, given the option, it's like, oh no, we don't need to do that.
What does this particular political YouTube channel have to say right now that I haven't listened to yet today out of the 12 others that I've checked out?
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's, um, it's disturbing to me as well.
I mean, I mean, there's so much to consume and be immersed in and so many people doing such good work that it's impossible to take it all in.
I saw a tweet where someone said, you know, um, I prepared to go to bed tonight, uh, knowing that I have consumed more information today than my grandparents had access to their entire lives.
Yeah, today, right.
Yeah.
Well, okay, so when that third space shuts off and we have Teal's YouTube channel on, it's just you and her.
And that's characteristic not only of just the general generic YouTube experience that you're describing, but it's characteristic of the claustrophobia that I think we see in many of the other environments that we study.
So if you're in QAnon, it's just you and maybe a few other bakers.
In MAGA, it's you and Trump and everyone else who becomes allied with you but also abstract to you because everybody has the same devotional allegiance.
With the influencers that we follow, There are fire hoses of content that you're trying to drink from, or their followers are.
And it's not just that they are logorrheic, it's not just that they're in perpetual trance states that they can't bear to break, it's also that they're inhabiting a world that is incredibly interconnected, but pathologically dyadic.
It's the media and the person.
And I don't think we've paid enough attention to this.
I think we've realized for a while that the viral spread of QAnon and conspirituality into the monetization of these same movements has been intensified online, of course, and we've covered the fact that online isolation makes people vulnerable to online movements, but then there's this additional piece, which is that there's a tightness and claustrophobia to these spaces that really resists or discourages people from finding broader, more ambivalent perspectives.
And so, back to Girl Interrupted, all of this is to say that we spoke quite a bit about the difference between the memoir and the film.
So the memoir is written in this very breathy, episodic format.
A lot of the sections are probably no more than 600 words.
And you could really just place this book on your bedtime table.
You could read three or four pages at a time, and you get these elliptical, poetic glimpses into Kaysen's 18 months of hospitalization.
She has not written a driving and dramatic and obsessional story.
It's a series of vignettes, and those vignettes are best digested in small pieces And surrounded by a lot of contemplation, and perhaps discussion, or just daydreaming.
So, there's something about the shift from the page to the film that exacerbates the heat and, I would say, the claustrophobia of the media.
It's like going from a sunny spring day to a sauna, in a way, and so the experience of the heat is that much more intense.
Yeah, and so then we have the shift from a novel to a movie, and then the shift in our time, which is into social media and platforms like YouTube, and in fact, platforms like the very one that are hosting me being able to talk into our listeners' earbuds right now.
Right, exactly.
It's, I've been thinking about this recently too, that the rise of social media, the rise of independent internet sources of information and commentary has coincided with or has, it's sort of inevitably given rise to contrarianism, right?
It's given rise to, well we can get the kind of mainstream perspective from other sources of media, right?
Well, when we go to YouTube, or we go to blogs, or we go to a variety of different podcasts, we're looking for a novel take.
We're looking for something else.
We don't want the boring, normie stuff.
And for the types of people that we cover, And perhaps in terms of our empathy for people who are taken in by conspiritualists, we're looking for an immersive grand narrative in which we get to identify with one another and be heroes because we're exposing the truth that no one else wants to talk about that you're not going to see on CNN and MSNBC, right?
Yeah, I mean, I guess what I'm left with is the sort of haunting image that Mary Bosworth thought that, or Bobby rather, thought that this would be a really rich film to share.
And I think she's right, but everything, for that to be true, everything would have to slow down.
Like, there'd have to be so much more space in which that film could be spoken about and compared to other films.
And, you know, are we going to figure out what the Latin is that Vanessa Redgrave is reciting?
Yeah, and oh, can we go back to the book?
And what did Cason write back in 1991, and how did the film change that?
I think it could have worked.
I think it could have worked to be illuminating for these kids' internal lives, because the resonances are so magnetic.
So, yeah, this is what I hope for everybody, actually, is that there's the time to take in media in a way that allows you to discuss it in real life.
I mean, perhaps with people who are able to provide you comparative perspective so that you're not in a kind of claustrophobic funnel.
With a particular dramatic influence in terms of a film, but then later a kind of influencer influence in terms of becoming obsessed over Teal Swan's YouTube channel.
Yeah, that's exactly it.
I mean, if I think about my daughter, I mean, I love I love films, I love literature, I can't wait to share with her all of these different sort of rich banquets.
But I feel like if I was going to show her as a teenager, Girl Interrupted, then I would also show her the French Lieutenant's Woman, then I would also show her One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and there would be a discussion.
Eventually I'd show her some of the things like the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and just like really, this is a rich territory.
of people who are exploring these psychological themes.
Let's look at how they do it in different ways and let's talk critically about what
we think maybe they get wrong or where they have a particular bias as opposed to like,
well, there is this film and this is the final word that you can identify with on this topic.
And on the micro level, there is this character who you can identify with and feel yourself
mimicking and reflecting.
Because the thing about, obviously, we watch films because we will identify with the characters, but there has to come a time where you recognize that your identification tells you something about you.
Not that you have discovered yourself somewhere, but that the fact that you were attracted to this particular character is something that can be held in relation to the fact that you will be attracted to other characters in other films, and that nobody's really writing your story for you.
That you are looking at different parts of human experience, but that your own is quite unique, actually.
Yeah, there's a slightly tangential sort of overlap there with skepticism, right?
That there's an initial Awakening to like, oh my God, a lot of things are not what I thought they were or how they've been represented to me, so now I'm going to be skeptical about the world.
And then there's actually what happens over time as one engages a truly skeptical type of curiosity about everything, about ideas, about beliefs, about art, about religion, about people's ideologies and intentions.
That it actually brings you into a place of having more tolerance for uncertainty, rather than saying, Oh, well, now that I'm a skeptic, I have this, this absolutely, I've awoken now to the truth.
And so I'm just going to apply it in, you know, I'm going to see everything as a nail with my new hammer.
And that's what I think you get into with a lot of the conspiracy thinkers.
But to what you were saying before, yes, I too would hope that in this media-saturated time, we can engage with media that we find interesting or meaningful.
Stimulating, etc., with enough space and enough room for real interpersonal sort of discussion and self-reflection so that it's not claustrophobic in the way that you're describing.
And I think that you're describing something that is really characteristic of the time we're living in, the time we've accelerated into that we weren't really prepared for.
And we need that space and we need that relational reflection in order for it to somehow be metabolized.
Because if it's not being metabolized, then it's just endlessly piling in, right?
If it's not metabolized, it's stimulating is what it is.
And the person gets addicted to the stimulation instead of whatever the content is.
And I think that's what happens in these very intense parasocial relationships that people develop with people like T.L.
Swann.
It's a non-stop relationship, because there are no answers that are actually given.
There's an affect of certainty, and that provides some kind of relief to the viewer.
But the primary goal of the content producer is to keep the viewer locked into that world as closely as possible so that a kind of
critical distance and comparative distance isn't actually possible because when people have
critical and observational distance, it's harder to monetize them.
Yes.
And I just want to say here, not really a spoiler, but just to sort of look behind the
curtain, we've been discussing some things back and forth about the closing paragraph
of our book, and I wonder if some of what we've discussed in the last few minutes is
sort of rich material for what that closing paragraph might be.
Yeah, maybe.
I think so, because to end on a reflection of this entire discipline has emerged out of an online fever dream, and what we find really helpful is to think about how, you know, the fever might come down outside a little bit or after logging the fuck off.
When you're alone and life is making you lonely, you can always go.
Downtown, when you've got worries, all the noise and the hurry seems to help, I know.
Downtown, just listen to the music of the traffic in the city.
Linger on the sidewalk where the neon signs are pretty.
How can you lose?
The lights are much brighter there.
You can forget all your troubles.
Forget all your cares.
So go downtown.
Things will be great when you're downtown.
No final place for sure.
Downtown.
Everything's waiting for you Downtown
Don't hang around and let your problems surround you There are movie shows downtown.
