Anecdotal Evidenz, Anecdote 3: A medical publisher tries to push someone off the unemployment rolls (1996)

[If you’re waiting for Part 2 of Anecdote 2, it is on its way. Anecdotes 2 and 3 are about business practices from 15 or more years ago; but as time goes on, and as I add entries to this blog, their relevance to current business practices will become clearer. Interestingly, I met someone very recently who had worked at a medical-advertising firm that had been a predecessor to a division of a current larger firm I am familiar with; and his seemingly wistful recollection of his old connection to the earlier firm suggests how, now more than usual, in this country there is a "troubled marriage" between the dual principles of (1) personal growth and being true to your own principles and (2) the evolution of business practices with respect to macroeconomic conditions. See editorial note at end.]

One important attitude to have when addressing the complex bear of the problems of the health-insurance industry is not to be naïve. A lot of workplace horror stories I have to tell involve medical-media firms (usually medical-advertising agencies). You say, Wouldn’t a firm that deals with medical matters be fair about an employee’s medical issues? I say, Any medical-media firm is a media firm first, and medical in any sense second. And being a media firm means sleazy management, more often than we would care to think. What are some examples? There are some broad types that become familiar after you’ve been in the industry a while, but let’s see a few unusual examples in this anecdote, and these don’t so much have to do with an employee’s medical issues as with a certain standard, state-administered benefit program.

Anecdote 3: Something I overheard at Montage Media in 1996

This was a matter that involved a third party, and I never knew who that person was. In 1996 I was working at Montage Media, which was relatively small (with maybe 30 employees) and located in Ramsey, N.J., at the time. My working there was in the depressed aftermath of my busy five-plus-month spell at Reed Reference Publishing, which ended in March 1996, and before I started working more regularly, first at North Jersey Newspapers in November 1996, then at several other, not-always-simultaneous gigs in 1997, 1998, and about the first half of 1999 (which comprised one of my busiest and most successful mainly-freelance editing periods). Montage Media, in 1996 at least, produced mainly dental publications.

My gig with Montage comprised very sporadic dates within the latter half of 1996, and yet it was nice for my having respectable work. But of course it was insufficient in terms of needed income; and incidentally it is an example of temporary work at a place that you glimpsed enough of to know you wouldn’t want to work there full-time. It was run by a man who, in informal terms and from only-selective views I got of him, was something of a manic entrepreneur, as evidenced by (not the only examples): (1) one woman I worked with at Peoples Publishing in 2000 said she had been at Montage briefly and found she didn’t like the atmosphere (tense) because of how it was run; and (2) a man I worked with at Troll Communications in 1998 said he’d interviewed with that same owner of Montage and said he (the Troll coworker) had liked him because he’d (the owner) had tried to get a career going as a football player earlier in life. Why does this support my assessment of Montage’s owner?

Not only did I find this latter assessment (by the Troll coworker) bizarre (of a media-business owner!), or at least not one I could agree with on its face, but the Montage owner’s acting (as I witnessed in at least one instance) as if he was, with uncompromising manner, coaching a football team was exactly one of the things I thought was wrong with how he was running the company. Once I heard him all but bellowing at some young woman for something that had gone wrong, or such, and I thought he sounded for all the world as if he was a coach berating an oaf of a football player. In fact, she found herself able to say in a kind of appalled response, “Goddamn animals!”—as if she was summing up the place, and managed not quite to curse or otherwise indignantly respond to the man directly to his face.

Anyway, Anecdote 3 involves the company officer who was called the “controller”—this was that company’s alternative spelling (per magazine mastheads) for comptroller, but in this man’s case the spelling was rather apt—though he seemed tasked with being more of a Mafia enforcer at times. I overheard him call up the unemployment office and try to get someone removed from their rolls, someone who apparently had been an employee there and had been fired or laid off. The unemployment office, in the end, told him they couldn’t do that. Which of course it was its perfect right to do—and maybe its legal obligation.

Consequences of an employer’s monkeying around with unemployment

In general, when an employer ends up handling employees in such a way that a large number from that employer end up on the unemployment rolls—which in Montage’s case was quite a plausible and even a likely situation given the way this type of small publisher could operate—what is called the “experience rating” of a company in the eyes of the unemployment office changes. What this means in detail, or in more explicit general terms, I’m not sure, but I’m pretty sure it reflects that the company may receive a red flag of sorts in the unemployment office’s eyes.

A more practical—and certainly a suitable—possible result is that the unemployment office may require the employer to pay out more money in unemployment contributions per time period, or the like, to cover the multitude of former employees the company is causing to enter its system. It would seem unfair to require employees to pay a larger percentage in unemployment tax out of their checks for this; thus it seems to make more sense that only some kind of employer contribution to the unemployment fund would go up. But I really don’t know how the specific practical consequences of an employer’s “change in experience rating” work, or even if a mechanism works at all as I just described.

Anyway, overhearing the Montage controller try to get someone knocked off the unemployment rolls said enough. With all I knew that was relevant, I found it a little appalling (and yet another new anecdote to add to my list of publisher rogue behaviors) that the company owner, as the likely one ultimately responsible, had his “controller” try to get a former employee—regardless of the merits of why the employee had been discharged—booted from the unemployment rolls.

This may seem a pretty minor story from a small (in more ways than one) business in another decade. But it may prove to be an interesting prelude to a later blog entry that touches on practices more typical of today, and at larger medical-media companies.

For now, the Montage Media anecdote has the advantage of being easy to understand, insofar as the company’s attempt at stiffing an employee in some sense was so crude and direct (and rather lacking in imagination). It turns out that the company thereby also did not comply with the law.

###

[Editorial note, 4/28/12: Only on the day I prepared this entry for publication--and not in the weeks this entry was in draft form--did I find some online evidence of the apparent collapse of Montage Media, with a lawsuit suggesting tough problems for its main principal, Steven [sp?] Sweeney. This court-information-related Web site seems to say that his business was sued in 2010, by a printer (and others?), for lots of money owed; the plaintiffs (the number of 37 is noted!) filed for summary judgment and received it in 2011. This situation doesn't entirely surprise me, not to kick Mr. Sweeney when he's down.]

Repaying Social Security survivors’ benefits in 1984 [BETA]

[This is a version—roughly done, and needing work—of what probably will be one of several “extras” to accompany some version of the novel The Folder Hunt, which still is on track (despite circumstances) to be somehow available for purchase within a couple months or so.]

This is more a retrospect meditation than a means to make a political point tailored to today’s issues.

This is a story I don’t think I’ve had cause to write down except (possibly) as part of one of the long autobiographical manuscripts I wrote (specifically, the one on my post–high school years, not any first-book-type or intended-high-profile work of mine); and then this episode was a minor one. But today, it might be of interest.

It involved my repaying part of my Social Security survivors’ benefits, received in 1983, and paid back in 1984. (Today, my mother responds to this story as if it’s pretty awful, though it has never struck me this way. That reflects how she forgets some of what constituted our family’s typical lot in the 1970s and early 1980s.) With today’s news stories and people’s individual stories of dealing with the various and several-year results of the 2008 financial crisis, this episode is an example (to me) of how “If the federal government suddenly is no longer the provident father you thought it was, and you feel as if it breaks with tradition and somehow shakes you down, consider this, which was no great shakes 25+ years ago, though it wasn’t much of a help, either.”

Through the late 1970s and early 1980s (starting in the earliest years of Social Security?), you could get Social Security survivors’ benefits until age 22, or whenever you finished with college. Survivors’ benefits were what you could get if a breadwinning parent died. (Funny, but I’ve met only one other coworker in my entire work life, of the many hundreds of people I’ve worked with over 30+ years, who would talk about her stake in this program.) After my father died, the way the system had it, at first my mother received all the benefits that were supposed to be for the three of us. Then, when we kids (myself and my sister) turned 18, we received our own benefits directly, and my mother got only her share.

The amount I got was not big—I recall the highest I got might have been a little over $200 a month (though maybe it wasn’t even over $200). I know for some time it was one hundred and something a month. I think, but am not sure, each of us three—when we each got ours separately—got the same amount. I do recall more distinctly that when I was in college, of the various sources of money by which I paid for college and paid for daily living expenses (sources including financial aid, money from work, Social Security, and whatever else), the Social Security was among the more piddling.

(If that $200 amount seems crazily small, my father got a monthly disability stipend from the Army after he finished his tour in it in 1956; he got it for starting to get type 1 diabetes [as an apparent result of witnessing a fellow soldier commit suicide] near the end of his tour, which was all within this country. I think he got it from 1956 to the year he died, 1970. You know what he got per month? I think my mother said $25.)

Of course, Social Security has long had a rule where, if you make more money than a certain limit, you get some portion of your benefits denied. So, if your income limit for the year was $6,000, and you made $1,000 over the limit, you would have that much deducted from your Social Security benefits. If you foresaw making that much over the limit, you told your Social Security office, and I think they could adjust the benefits accordingly. (I don’t remember if they precisely would deduct prospectively within a year.) This same general sort of set of rules is in place today, from what I’ve heard in connection with talk and other information connected to Social Security Disability. To me, there’s nothing unreasonable about this policy in general.

In the early 1980s, of course, the Reagan Administration, setting up its policies following its “…government is the problem” philosophy, started reducing how much Social Security could do for people. One target was survivors’ benefits: no longer could young people college up to age 22 or when they graduated from college. This benefit was phased out so you could only collect up through age 18. And this cutoff was phased in over a few years to about 1985, with benefit amounts reducing as you approached age 22. I remember my benefit checks getting smaller with each year of my last two or so years in college.

Another rule of the system was, if you reached the limit age, your benefits were then given to a sibling who was younger. I remember my sister, who was in college another year after I was, did not turn 22 before she graduated from college, so she would get survivors’ benefits through the end of college; but I had mine cut off before college was finished, because I turned 22 during senior year—I still had the second semester of my last year to go after my benefits were ended. But my work situation being what it was, I could absorb the cutoff well enough.

I don’t remember if my mother’s benefits were turned off for her, and the money divided between my sister and myself after we each turned 18, but it’s possible that happened. (As you can see, this was a fairly fancy system, despite what seem small amounts of money. I wish I could remember some of the details more.)

So, as long as you collected benefits until age 22 or graduating from college, the system sounds as if it was pretty generous—helping you with college expenses…. Of course, as I implied earlier, the amount of money per month was so small that it was inevitable I got a job during college; and, practically speaking, it was essential I worked almost nonstop through nearly all of college. And there were plenty of months I made more in work income than I got in Social Security, when the amount was $100+. But I never ran into a problem where I made more, for the year, in paid work than Social Security allowed me as a benefits collector.

Until, that is, 1983.

1983 was my first year living in Washington, D.C., and it’s a bit of a long story why. Two big reasons were that (1) summer work had become less of a good prospect starting in 1982, which was my worst year for working at what had been a Playboy Hotel in my hometown. Plus, (2) though I had owned a car in 1982, it had been a disaster—requiring many repairs (some of them hugely expensive), and basically being untrustworthy for transportation by about early 1983. So, I opted to spend my summer in Washington, D.C., living in a part of the dorm system for students who were staying there in the summer (for summer school or whatever else). And not only did I work at the place at which I had college-years work almost my entire time in college—the Marvin Center, the student union at my school—but I got a second job helping the maintenance crew at a set of office buildings in a part of Arlington, Virginia, called Crystal City, which crew was employed by one of the largest real estate and building management firms in the Washington, D.C., area—Charles E. Smith and Company (I forget if this was the exact, official name of the firm).

So I had two pretty demanding jobs in summer 1983, and that was the only summer in which I had two work weeks of the type you heard of a peer’s pulling off, which you sometimes wished you could for your own practical reasons (the type you could do when you were that young, at relatively menial jobs)—about 80 hours a week. I brought in money, no small help for college, as I never had before.

I don’t think I realized at first that this windfall of income that year put me over the limit for Social Security.

By the start of 1984, my Social Security was duly turned off permanently—I turned 22 in December 1983. Meanwhile, as I said, my sister got my benefit money—her monthly amount doubled.

I don’t recall whether I had to fill out a form stating my income for 1983 to Social Security—there probably was something like that. Anyway, by sometime in early 1984 (by the spring), I found I had gone over the limit.

Social Security notified me it would require the overage paid back.

I recall going to an office in D.C. to take care of this. I recall something like there was a longish wait to get seen; there was a meeting of some substance/length. They came up with a payment plan, for $800 I had to pay back. We settled on $100 a month, which I found a bit daunting, given my overall expenses—but I wanted to pay it off as soon as possible, in this case eight months.

$800 may not sound like much, but to me in my college years with all my money issues—in good times and not-so-good, this was substantial enough. And while repayment of my student loans was deferred about six months from the time I graduated, and I thus felt I had a respite from needing to make money to pay for college expenses or the like—and could make more hourly at my first post-college job (which was, again, at the Marvin Center)—here I had the burden to pay off $800 in federal benefits.

I knew what the system was about—I didn’t argue with the government’s logic in requiring the overage be paid back. I just felt that I couldn’t enjoy the simple fruits of my labor enough, with my working and no longer doing the demanding work of college; I had to shovel out $100 per month for most of a year. I couldn’t make any substantial new purchase (beyond everyday necessities)—and the biggest purchases I made in the two years or so after college, as small as they may seem today, were an electric guitar (a used Fender Stratocaster) in fall 1984, and an item that would prove far more useful for much longer, a new IBM Personal Typewriter in about June 1985. In late spring 1984, this sort of thing would wait; repaying Social Security had to come first.

I ended up repaying the $800 faster than the original eight-month plan. My income allowed it, and I just wanted to get the debt out of the way. I think I repaid it in five months.

That would be a super-easy debt to dispatch compared to my student loans, which wouldn’t be finally paid off until 1993 (and the nine years of this had its quite trying times, but in retrospect I had it fairly easy compared to what college grads saddled with loans today so often face).

But the way Social Security survivors’ benefits were turned off for me, with my subsequently paying back some, occasioned a lesson for me courtesy of the Reagan Administration. I didn’t become a convert to Reagan’s “trickle-down” economic policy—not by a long shot. But I did feel from then on, “Try not to rely on the government for anything.”

This didn’t mean I became a successful entrepreneur, though I would end up becoming adept at being a solo businessman as a freelancer by about 1997. But I would become so wary of looking to the government for social-program help that I would even be slow, repeatedly so and as was sensible for me, to apply for unemployment benefits, as I did several times from about 1992 on. (As it happened, in the 1990s, I didn’t always apply for unemployment every single time I was not working much or at all. The reason why I rarely applied for unemployment wasn’t simply a matter of philosophy, but often involved the facts of my situation and certain technical aspects of the system—but that discussion isn’t for here.)

But I never liked the idea of unemployment benefits. This wasn’t a reflection of being a conservative—I wasn’t that. I had so appreciated what benefits like Social Security’s were about in the 1970s, when I could and did take the Johnson Administration’s Great Society philosophy more or less for granted. I’ve considered myself a “Johnson Democrat” in the sense that it used to be you could assume, without shame, that you could accept a federal helping hand that you needed until you could help yourself, which was one way Johnson himself described what some benefit his administration set up was about.

But I think, partly as a lesson from my 1984 benefits-repayment experience, that I came to feel that, the less I looked for government help for myself, the better. This made for straitened times for me over the years, but I didn’t blame others who needed them for getting benefits. But in a sense I learned that if the government could hand out one year (per something so decent as survivors’ benefits, to help support you when an essential breadwinner was deceased) and then could take back another, stop trusting it.

Shop talk: A brief explanation from “the man behind the Wizard’s curtain”

This is to those who value or otherwise have reason to pore over my blog entries, because I know they’re not written as blog entries often are. Some readers may have wondered, why when these entries seem to be sophisticated or well enough done in some respects, are there sudden glaring errors? (Which may or may not be fixed in a timely fashion.)

Let me explain my working method, which is both cruder than you might think and yet a good “regimen” for inciting me to do good work.

Complex editorial preparation is done

I do not roll out of bed, go on the computer, and puke out the copy directly into Blogger. Except for the very first entry in this series (which I did blindly groping, writing live in the Blogger window for receiving copy, to see how the system worked), I draft my entries in Word files first. This could go through stages of editing, usually both on paper and done directly on the computer. Then, the Word file is available to me at a public location where I can get good Internet hookups (my home computer hookup does not me allow to do much at all with Blogger). There are steps here I’m purposely not explaining fully—involving a Flash drive and other means of conveying a Word file to a place I can access it at a public Internet hookup (heck, I’ve got to maintain some trade secrets). Then, after additional editing on the Word file at the public location, I copy and paste the Word copy into the Blogger window, and may edit a bit more there. Then the file is published. (Sometimes there is an intermediary step where I “save” a draft [which is copied from a Word file] onto Blogger, and fix it up and publish it later.)

This all may seem cumbersome, but through much of my life, my editorial and writing work has been done under relatively cumbersome technical circumstances. But as I’ve long found, going back to my first assembling a novel in 1984-85: despite the clumsiness and patience-trying of the process, it does allow you to think twice as you have additional hurdles to get over, from the point of a first blog idea to actually publishing it. These several steps mean taking care so you just don’t spill brain puke onto a Blogger page. By the same token, the cumbersome aspects of the process, and occasional interfering factors at the public locations in which I put material on Blogger, sometimes facilitate errors’ getting in.

Formatting oddities—due to Word versus Blogger language; simplicity sought

One of the odd things that sometimes happen is how Blogger’s Internet language (whatever it is) interacts not-too-well with certain things I do with Word material (either a whole entry or a small part brought in later as a “patch”). I don’t fully understand the causes for problems here, but my take on it helps you understand why weird things happen like my apparent inability to put spaces (or the right-sized spaces) between paragraphs in one or blog entries, or sections of a blog entry getting accidentally reordered. With my old Web site, which was in Linux, I encountered different problems in terms of formatting an entry based on what browser I used (either Explorer, which I liked better, or Firefox, which I liked less); I think importing “patches” was not a problem. Apparently Linux interacts differently with Explorer versus Firefox, so I had different problems related to that.

With Blogger, there doesn’t seem to be a problem with the type of browser I use; but apparently the best way for me to minimize problems arising from my editing Word copy is to place the whole entry in at once from the original Word doc, and then do minor edits within the Blogger entry. If you put in a Word-doc-derived entry first, then put in patches (of large amounts of words) later, you run into weird formatting problems. (It seems you can adjust your entry for what it does with HTML versus other formats, but I don’t know much about Internet languages, and try to deal along this parameter as little as possible.) The solution (which I rarely have cause to use) when I run into formatting problems that seem resistant to fixes is to start a whole new entry, and put copy into it in the simplest way possible. This helps you understand some of the weird problems I can run into with my entries. Word I know well; Internet programming I don’t know well at all, and I try to get as little versed in it as possible.

Proofreading is aimed for, but I try not to be fanatical; and my limiting comments

Often, when I publish a blog entry, I print it out, and basically aim to proofread it later, but don’t always do this right away. Hence, some corrections turn up days after the post was first published. I try not to be too fanatical about getting everything perfect; after all, this is a blog, not a scientific or big-time trade-publication affair; we are operating in weekend clothes here, so to speak (even during the work week).

I also try not to allow others’ comments to my blog entries. This is mainly to avoid such mischief as occurred with my commenting on the Writer Beware blog on September 5, 2006 (so long ago, yes, but there is still a certain antipathy toward me out there related to the SFWA et al. legal mess of 2007-10—you might know which mess I mean).

Readership stats become more worthy of heeding

Some of my blog entries are more popular than others, as I see from the pieced-out “page views” reported on my Blogger dashboard. I keep this in mind as I plan or prepare future entries. 

Incidentally, my readership has grown, usually steadily, and in recent weeks more quickly than before; the number, I think, reflects unique viewers, not total pages viewed, but I could be wrong. Anyway, I appreciate the interest, and if anyone has something constructive to convey to me and would ordinarily like to do it via blog comments, he or she can do it to me by e-mail: bootstrp@warwick.net (“bootstrap” without the “a”). If you seek a response, I can’t guarantee one, or at least not an immediate one.

Movie break: Winona Ryder as “power waif”: Heathers (1989) and Girl, Interrupted (1999), Part 2 of 2

[This continues a two-movie look at Winona Ryder. The following intro, in part, repeats some observations about her made at the end of Part 1.]

I didn’t expect to delve into information about Winona Ryder as much as I do here, but after realizing I gave her short shift in my review of Black Swan, and since I’ve been aware of her anyway since 1989, it actually was rewarding to do enough to work up this review, which happens to fit other current themes and projects of mine anyway.

It’s funny: it seems she has been around “forever,” yet I’m surprised she’s only about 40; but in her early days as with Heathers, she was in her teens. Somehow, she has always seemed like a young, somewhat solitary, not strikingly beautiful but still potently appealing woman. I thought a good phrase to describe her is “power waif.”

She doesn’t seem weak or playing for sympathy, either; she seems to have moxie to go with her seeming vulnerability, with her big, dark, somewhat widely-spaced eyes that seem like important reference points to “relating to her” on screen. When pointed, they hold you as if they say you better pay attention. She seems as if not meaning to stand for a huge number of peers or “America at large” but holding herself out as with an affecting and accessible story to offer, which isn’t just about herself.

Girl, Interrupted: A high-water mark for Ryder and her prestige?

Perhaps it is because of all of this that she somehow seems a good choice to play Susanna Kaysen in Girl, Interrupted, based on Kaysen’s memoir of herself as a young woman who enters a mental institution in 1967 Boston. Kaysen (in the story) ends up being (as the videotape promotional copy has it) mishandled to some extent by the professionals involved (misdiagnosed in a more-serious direction than is warranted), yet she grows from her involvement with fellow patients who are worse off than she.

The movie shows that her diagnosis is maintained through her year’s stay at the hospital, to the extent that at her discharge, she is diagnosed, as her narrated voice tells it, as a “recovered borderline.”

I didn’t read the memoir, though I have vague information in my memory related to it, as if I might have read reviews of it many years ago, and/or saw info on it tied to reviews of this movie. In any event, not having read the book, I will look at the movie as if, for all practical purposes, its assertions about Kaysen’s life are true, and that the movie reflects the memoir accurately enough (though I understand from the Wikipedia article on the film that Kaysen objected to the movie's depicting an incident that didn’t happen). The question is then how well the movie conveys the type of story it aims to tell, and in particular how Ryder handles her role in it.

Not trivially, the mental hospital Kaysen went to, as I understand, was McLean, which was (and is) no dump; it is among cutting-edge facilities in terms of ties to high-level psychiatric researchers. From a psychiatric perspective (if not also otherwise), Harvard Medical School, McLean Hospital, and Massachusetts General Hospital have been (and I think still are) associated in a psychiatric-research capacity (and in a related clinical capacity, where psychiatric patients involved in research are thereby getting treatment meant to help them). For example, Ross J. Baldessarini, M.D., with whom I’ve been in touch several times in the past and numerous of whose professional articles I have seen, is listed in the credentials part of a 2000 article he authored, in the journal Bipolar Disorders, as affiliated with, among other things, the “Consolidated Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, and Bipolar and Psychotic Disorders Program, McLean/Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston….” The point is that, by this measure at least, McLean has been among highly prestigious research-and-treatment facilities in psychiatry. Also, Massachusetts General Hospital is associated with the well-known New England Journal of Medicine.

So, Claymoore, as McLean is called in the movie (and book?), may well have given Ms. Kaysen some kind of short shrift in 1967. More generally, many a hospitalized psychiatric patient, whether an inpatient at McLean or some other facility of whatever quality, has been within his or her rights to be bitter about some mistreatment (maybe a subset of the patient’s total treatment at the place) received from professionals, who may have been well intentioned but not competent enough in the cases of these patients.

In short, it may be that Kaysen’s memoir, as such psych-patient memoirs can often be, reflects an idiosyncratic experience, but does not necessarily indict the hospital the patient was at (as apt to fail all patients who go there). Nevertheless, this aspect does not necessarily detract from the quality of the memoir, as there can be more truth about hope for patients (and more “poetry about life”) in such “case study”-type memoirs—while hopefully the memoir is fair enough to the hospital—than in the summary statistical spreadsheets churned out by a hospital’s more bureaucratic operatives.

Was Kaysen’s diagnosis wrong? Whether or not it was, such a diagnosis as “borderline personality disorder” certainly was being used with validity at cutting-edge facilities by 1967. (See the “appendix” at end of this blog entry.)

A different breath of air from Heathers

A few initial general notes. Having viewed Girl, Interrupted several times over the years—including, I am pretty sure, in the theater when it first came out—I am surprised to say that my overall impression of it hasn’t changed much (and it’s generally positive). This is different from my experience with Heathers, where a decade’s more time and Heathers’ being a different type of work have made getting reacquainted with that movie and assessing it more of an adventure. I think that while Girl, Interrupted handles some issues of psychological trouble among young people (here, young adults) very roughly similarly to Heathers, it couldn’t be more different (1) in terms of being putatively nonfictional; (2) in terms of tone and competence in crafting a story (on the parts of several parties involved); and (3) in terms of its apparent significance. Notably, Ryder seems to have been about as passionate about this story as that of Heathers (at least, she was enthusiastic about both; what her specific feelings were to each, I don’t know); she worked to become a producer of it even after someone else had optioned the film rights to it; and, to judge from the Wikipedia article on the film, the movie took some time to produce.

Interestingly, several years after her work in Heathers and after several high-profile films, this movie seems to work best insofar as Ryder conveys a sympathetic character—not without flaws and going through dramatic bends—and this character again seems to be something of a “power waif.”

As much as Heathers was jagged with new-writer adventurousness, inconsistencies, MTV production values, and other “edgy” or excitement-germane features, Girl is smoothly and sophisticatedly made: big-studio style, the photography and editing are tasteful; performances and a directorial eye (e.g., with blocking, scene composition) are good; and overall there is a sensitivity to the material to be as realistic as possible. This is a movie that aims to convey what might strike some (in 1999, or today) as a hair shirt of a story: young women in an inpatient unit of a mental hospital, some there for years, all arrayed with their respective long-term problems and occasional outbursts; yet it presents this with some gloss and friendliness to make it go down as easily as possible.

Amusingly, there are one or two apparent allusions to Heathers; mostly notably is the song “Qué Sera Sera” wafting at one point in the background in Girl, not apparently meant to be ironic; this song is used more prominently, repeatedly, and ironically, in Heathers. (If this song seems like a self-parody, it was so insipid that even Doris Day, who made it famous, didn’t like it much when it was first composed for the Hitchcock remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much [1956]; but then later it became her signature song. This according to the DVD for that latter movie, or to another credible Hitchcock-related source.)

Girl’s parallels to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

I’ve thought every time I’ve seen this movie that it has many allusions, mainly visual, to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (though my earlier reference in my February 17 blog entry to Girl as a “girlie” Cuckoo’s Nest was glib—actually, among other things, Girl allows you to appreciate how much Cuckoo’s Nest seems as if you can smell the B.O. there). In fact, now I’d say a lot of these allusions were in deliberate tribute, and/or done as a sort of reference point, to the earlier film. All echoing the 1975 film are a scene with pills ritually gotten from an officious nurse; eyeing who’s coming in a mirror; an outing by patients (authorized or not) to stretch wings in the outer world for a while; and a free spirit of a patient (in Girl, this is Lisa, played by Angelina Jolie in her first major role, though she is not the central focus here as was Jack Nicholson’s McMurphy in Cuckoo’s Nest).

In both films, there is even a patient who ends up committing suicide amid his or her history of abnormal sexually oriented relations with his or her parent. Near the end of Cuckoo’s Nest, Billy Bibbitt, still an inpatient, commits suicide after being baited by Nurse Ratched with references to what she may tell his mother about his recent sexual relations with a prostitute. But in Girl, the suicide is Daisy Randone, played by Brittany Murphy (also a film newcomer; here, decrepitly sad-eyed). (Murphy does a good job in making a vivid impression with a character who has limited screen time: her Daisy can be abruptly defensive, peremptory, anxiety-charged, and shrill, yet somehow still attracts our sympathy.) She has already been released when, living in an apartment home, she hangs herself after being ruthlessly taunted by Lisa, with Ryder’s Susanna in tow (the latter is innocent of the taunting; this is a situation that is less ambiguous for Ryder’s character than is a similar pair of situations in which Ryder’s Veronica is implicated in deaths caused by J.D.).

Girl thus both echoes Cuckoo’s Nest as to some details, and occasionally rearranges details of some “allusive” episodes or vignette. Here, too, Girl seems to “right” a detail of Cuckoo’s Nest that was one thing that could have been considered racist in the earlier film: while the white-suited orderlies in Cuckoo’s Nest were all Black men who could be called on by Nurse Ratched to do thug work in keeping the patients in line, in Girl what orderlies we see are white (and one even likes our heroine Susanna), and the only Black of note is Whoopi Goldberg playing (in admirably understated fashion) a placid, seasoned, big-afro’d managerial nurse, eminently professional as she keeps a steady hand on the tiller of Susanna’s involvements at the hospital, as well as tending to other patients’ needs.

Aside from the fact that several details of the movie’s story may not merely be fashioned with reference to Cuckoo’s Nest because they are based on real-life facts, several features of this movie that echo the earlier one—consistent with this one’s overall tone—may suggest that this film goes to lengths to be politically correct, and (maybe in the view of some) in the process, inadvertently, ends up at times insipid and pandering-to-the-audience. I think at times, especially toward the end, it risks being sentimental; but this partly depends on your state of mind, and how deeply sympathetic you happen to be with the characters. I think, overall, the movie is pretty good, even allowing for occasional pandering to a genteel audience, because so much of it feels right in terms of its telling details; we’ll look at a few of these shortly.

A sort of insider knowledge and a feel for psych patients are needed

Two other concerns I have, before looking at this movie’s details, include one issue I can be sympathetic with, and another I can’t.

“Normal” people not quite getting it. One problem in representing any story of psychiatric disorder—aside from the fact that, as I feel, such a story should also be about something else too—is that people of a more healthy frame of mind can’t quite get what these characters are going through. Sure, the patients are in a hospital because they’re that sick; they can’t get out until they get better. These girls in general seem a bit “disenfranchised,” some looking as if they don’t quite care for themselves enough (one, of course, has obvious severe-burn scars on her face). But the “normal” audience member can’t feel the despair, the grind of depression states plus medication side effects, that these women would typically be feeling. How can the audience pick up the boredom, the alienation felt in being there? Of course, Ryder’s Susanna Kaysen, who ends up wanting to become a writer, is eloquent in describing some of the issues she faces for herself and witnesses in others; but, movie scripts being usually elegant, elegiac, or otherwise summary anyway, make it all seem like poetry, if not melodrama. So “normal” people watching this wouldn’t be expected to get all the depth; they see a story of a small community of troubled women, and may find it edifying in some way based on that; but the underlying emotional trouble that would be ongoing for such people is missing from their purview, like the soundtrack that is important to a Hitchcock or Spielberg movie, or like one of the primary colors being missing from an elaborate film, or the laugh track missing from a highly rated TV sitcom.

Another aspect to this type of problem is that a movie can only say so much, especially if it can’t dwell on deeply felt feelings of a despairing weekend night and has to cover a lot of ground in terms of incidents the various characters are involved in. A novel, on the other hand, can articulate all the feelings—and then the question is whether a reader would have the patience for it.

Psychiatric illness as an absolute. Another dimension along which one can assess this movie’s trueness to the world of psychiatric illness and its treatment is simply whatever experience and framework of judgment you have of them yourself, in relation to your actually having submitted to them (if you have, as an outpatient or otherwise) and in relation to what you’ve seen in others’ experience of them. I think in this regard, psychiatric illness is a sort of electric shock: there is something absolute about it, so that though some connotations surrounding it, conventions of talk about it, and such may vary over time (which decade it is), but the absolute aspect of pain, of evil, of deep difficulty about it is the same in all eras, so if you know about it (as not everybody does), you have some solid grounds to be on the same page with others in discussing it, to whatever purpose. In this regard, we can say this movie is brave to address what it does, and it seems pretty true to many features of this experience, and where it falls short is simply in being summary and in some ways a bit glib. Also, for each of us, we may feel different ways about some details the film relates at different times, depending on what mood we’re in; for example, sometimes we may be a little scornful of a character in the film more than at other times, but overall we don’t condemn the movie for its allowing us time to consider the lives and virtues of these patients.

Critics being philistines. What I am distinctly less sympathetic to is a critic, as quoted in the Wikipedia article on this film, showing a patent thick-headedness toward the film. From the article: “Stephen Holden in the [New York Times] wrote[:] ‘Girl, Interrupted is a small, intense period piece with a hardheaded tough-love attitude toward lazy, self-indulgent little girls flirting with madness: You can drive yourself crazy, or you can get over it. The choice is yours.’” What is ironic about this quote—assuming it’s accurately quoted—is that it echoes a statement that Whoopi Goldberg’s nurse character, Valerie Owens, makes to Susanna in a way that is not meant to be a “sane” person’s properly upbraiding Susanna as if she’s not really sick; the nurse knows she is sick. Owens’ statement is a sort of emotional expression, a way the nurse tries to (figuratively speaking) slap some sense into Susanna, after having been patient with her for some time; she is being ironic in her seeming to pooh-pooh Susanna’s claim to being ill, and tries to jump-start a little sense or self-starting into her with a comment that seems tarter and less appreciative than she might normally be. For the critic Holden to then (apparently) take this comment and make it seem as if the movie is about outing these sick women as “lazy, self-indulgent little girls flirting with madness” is stupid. It misses the point that in Susanna’s case, perhaps the most illustrative one, it is not fully clear how sick, or normal, she really is. In fact, people with borderline personality disorder can show both types of qualities. They can “swing” between such qualities, roughly speaking. That still doesn’t mean they aren’t sick. Bottom line: if a critic can’t get the ambiguity and subtlety and heart of such a movie, he should go review something else.

From a slightly different perspective, many of the actresses in Girl may make their characters seem spoiled to the onlooker who is unversed in what psych patients are like; and of course, maybe these actresses don’t fully get the details or the flavor of a psych patient down right. But from the middle distance, a young actress can look not simply ill but in frumpy clothes and a “spoiled brat” for being a denizen of a psych ward who is apt to engage in occasional “acting out” or a more general trend of what the Freudians call “regression.” But if you saw such an array of real patients, with their surface appearances similar to these actresses, you would not merely see spoiled young women in frumpy clothes, but often you would see depressed eyes: you would see women that may be pretty, or not, but what would clearly not be pretty is the eyes—the eyes showing dysphoria, dystonia, a general melancholy; and shadows around the eyes. And such effects are posed not just by the underlying depression and the like but also by the untoward side-effect action of their medication. If you see that, plus feel the “abnormal affect” (an emotional impression on you) radiated by women depressed enough to be in a psych hospital, then you know these are not mere “spoiled brats”—unless you are a thick-headed sort who is impervious to being convinced about what mental illness is: then I can’t help you.

Ryder as the focused-on young woman in need

To her credit, and as a big help to the movie, Ryder’s character is handled well. Ryder looks like a denuded young bird, or a fuzzy duckling, with her hair cut short—and giving her almost the “shaven waif” appearance of Mia Farrow’s short-haired Rosemary Woodhouse, where the haircut suggests that sheer nakedness of all but brute emotion is assured. Or she’s like John Lennon in 1970, his year of Primal Scream therapy and then his recording his first solo album, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, which is a landmark in rawly emotional and disabused-of-illusions pop music: he had cut his hair off short, too.

Ryder’s black hair, big dark eyes, and dark brows contrast with her pale skin, to make her look like a gamine reduced to the minimum of her sad, trying-hard personhood. A little shadowing about her eyes gives her a rather sickly-depressed look.

Ryder as Kaysen is admitted to the hospital after a suicide attempt, involving a bottle of aspirin and alcohol; she remarks on having had a headache. She denies a suicide attempt. Much later in the story, when given the opportunity to flee the hospital with her former boyfriend, she protests she wants to stay, not simply because she’s developed emotional ties with fellow patients, but because, she admits, she had made a suicide attempt (what she had denied on admission). She does find out that she was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD), which is usually a long-term affair (and involves much more dysfunction than just suicide attempts), yet can go through remissions and periodic deterioration (American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition [DSM-IV], pp. 650-53).

The movie gives hints in doctor–patient encounters with Susanna as to what else in her behavior sets the basis for the diagnosis, though the reference to sexually licentious behavior (as described in the film) doesn’t seem very remarkable by today’s (or 1999) standards (the DSM-IV, pp. 651 and 654, gives no quantitative measure of how much, or what kind, of sex in BPD patients is unhealthy). Susanna’s sexual behavior also might not have been much out of place in 1967 either, with the birth of the sexual revolution—though maybe there was an ambiguity about the facts of this in Kaysen’s book that made this a more complex and subtle issue.

Interestingly, Susanna’s having banged her wrist enough to have bruised it considerably, as seen at the start of the movie, may be (I’m guessing) consistent with a tendency to cutting behavior (“self-mutilating behavior,” in the DSM-IV’s terms); and about midway through the film, when she is shying from running away from the hospital with her boyfriend, she looks at an apparent result of cutting on her palm as if it is a sign of her illness. (Incidentally, this may be an allusion to Heathers, too; the earlier film has a scene where Veronica suddenly stubs a lit cigarette into her palm, which the movie makes grotesque humor out of by having J.D. light his cigarette from whatever is glowing on her palm).

In general, we’re led to feel Susanna was first brought to be checked into the hospital on the basis of a diagnosis that may be in error; various symptoms she shows are consistent with BPD (e.g., her suicidality; her self-mutilation; her early trouble with insight into her condition; her trouble making the transition to an adult career, along with semi-mystically seeking a new framework of values, which may be behind why she “bonds” with Lisa as she does). But after she stays for some time, she appears to get better, enough to be discharged—though being “permanently better” is often not the case for people with BPD, who not atypically revolve through many visits to a hospital, in a (sometimes rigid) pattern of remission and recurrence. “The impairment from the disorder and the risk of suicide are greatest in the young-adult years and gradually wane with advancing age” (DSM-IV, pp. 652-53).

Hospital minutiae

I think some of what this movie depicts of hospital life is up to the audience to assess. I have experienced psychiatric inpatient units only a couple, widely spaced times: once, in a brief visit to the famous old hospital St. Elizabeth’s in Washington, D.C., as part of a psychology-class trip in 1981; and a few visits to a small unit in Newton, N.J., in 2002 in helping two friends in a support group, and to a hospital called Princeton House in 2003 in further helping one of those friends. (Of course, I was never a patient at such a place myself; thus I am limited in how I can criticize them.) This, plus comparing the Girl hospital features to those of Cuckoo’s Nest, suggests there isn’t a whole lot of variation in how these hospitals are to be depicted. They are definitely not places for a vacation; if people are there as inpatients, they are about the most serious kind of sick you can be psychiatrically.

One true enough type of situation shown here is that, while Kaysen appears to admit herself voluntarily to the inpatient unit—or is led to admit herself, in some state of depressively not quite knowing what she’s doing, she then is told she can’t leave until she is better. This may seem like a bit of a Catch-22 situation, but I have personally witnessed a version of it, involving a young borderline woman also (in 2002). In the instance I saw, what the hospital used as a criterion for deciding whether the patient would be discharged was its asking her whether she still felt she could kill herself (it’s possible not merely this “self-report” was used, but it was one important component method used that was conspicuous to the patient).

Another true enough phenomenon is patients’ engaging in (so to speak) “black market” handling of medications: hoarding medications (that patients have been dispensed, and have then not taken) and then trading them with others. I’ve seen a minor version of this. In the movie’s case, Kaysen herself collects some laxative pills, and offers to trade them to a fellow patient who has some kind of eating-related disorder. There is also trading or offering of collected Valium pills; the patient Lisa seems to like getting these. (What I’d seen in real life is two friends, whom I’d met in a support group, after getting out of an inpatient unit and while on their way to some social engagement in the outside world, trading what was probably benzodiazepine pills for purposes of how they felt that evening—benzos are one prescription psychiatric medication that seems most apt to be used unofficially “PRN”—“as needed”—whether prescribed to a patient that way or not, in a sort of “recreational-drug” way.)

One feature of hospital life that seems strangely soft-pedaled in Girl, or referred to erroneously, is the highly controversial one of ECT (electroconvulsive therapy). As we know, Cuckoo’s Nest seems most criticized by laypeople—and some professionals—for its depiction of ECT, as what seems a sort of barbaric punishment. Maybe as a result of this “making ECT notorious,” Girl never depicts Lisa getting ECT, though Lisa does say something like, “They gave me shocks again!”—though “shocks” seems a strange way to refer to it, and if this is a way to make ECT seem downright evil or like mere punishment, it seems a wan way to do it. More helpfully, Lisa uses the wrong name (“Jamie”) for Susanna, which Susanna picks up on immediately as being the film’s way of casting a “spooky, isn’t it?” light on ECT. When it comes to ECT’s potential to cause memory problems for some patients, I don’t think this is entirely out of line. (My mother’s mother showed some transient [I believe] memory problems in the wake of ECT treatment sometime within the period 1958-66.)

I won’t convey too much more of the story; it’s a movie to be checked out by those interested in such things, for them to assess for themselves, and the movie seems to have mixed reviews, to judge from the Rotten Tomatoes and other such derived measures of aggregated reviews that are ascertainable online. You could definitely do worse than this movie, I think; and if Heathers is too wildly undisciplined a treatment of youthful suicidality for you, Girl, I think, is distinctly more responsible and “clinical.”

The film’s take on female fellowship—of different kinds

As I’ve said before, when a film that looks so closely at psychological issues, it should also be about something else, and I think the main non-psych theme that this film embodies is simply female fellowship: the way it comes up within crisis, and how. Susanna’s character seems to embody this most concertedly, notably in her narrated remarks at the end of the film. I think no one should have a problem with that this theme is embodied, or how it is. It is not merely a sentimental component of the story, it is the decent “spine and white underbelly” of the story.

The aspect of the film that would seem to raise the most questions is Susanna’s relationship with Lisa.

What about the “lesbian”-like kiss? Let me first address what may seem a rallying point for prurient, crass remarks: When Susanna and Lisa flee the hospital together, on their way to meet up with Daisy, and Susanna kisses Lisa in the VW bus, this does not mean, I think, that they are lesbians in any long-term sense. I could have said in my review of Black Swan that Nina’s female–female sexual fling with Lily did not mean Nina was a lesbian: on some illicit drug, amid a slow-crushing nervous breakdown as she aims to excel in a coming performance of Swan Lake, Nina shows what sometimes can happen with women under severe (if temporary) psychiatric decline: a seeming transient tilt toward bisexuality, a way in which, if an identity crisis is underway, as theorist Erik Erikson might have said, then a sexual identity crisis is a component of this. This can happen for men as well as women. I think Susanna’s kissing Lisa is merely a way she shows her warmth of female–female fellowship amid her long-term experiencing the more neutral trial of BPD, where sexual-identity issues can also bubble up. In fact, if Susanna’s problem is seen less like a matter of onset of long-term BPD and more a particularly strong case of transient identity confusion, the bisexual aspect may make more sense.

For a few suggestive references on sexual-identity quirks turning up amid BPD-type crisis: the way the DSM-IV addresses this seems to run a little contrary to my contention here: “The pattern of behavior seen in [BPD] has been identified in many settings around the world. Adolescents and young adults with identity problems…may transiently display behaviors that misleadingly give the impression of [BPD]. Such situations are characterized by…conflicts about sexual orientation…” (p. 652; italics added).

Erik Erikson offers remarks in a rather dense book that can shed light here: First, on borderline personality as a “phase” one can go through: “...where role confusion joins a hopelessness of long standing, delinquent and ‘borderline’ psychotic episodes are not uncommon.” (Erik H. Erikson, Identity: Youth and Crisis [New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1968], pp. 131-32). Such a point is highlighted: “What under prejudiced scrutiny may appear to be the onset of a neurosis often is only an aggravated crisis which might prove to be self-liquidating and even, in fact, contributive to the process of identity formation.” (Ibid., p. 163)

Most to the point regarding sexuality: “…[B]isexual confusion…in adolescence joins identity-consciousness in the establishment of an excessive preoccupation with the question of what kind of man or woman, or what kind of intermediate or deviate, one might become.” [italics in original] “…[T]he sexual mores of cultures and classes make for immense differences in the psychosocial differentiation of masculine and feminine and in the age, kind, and ubiquity of genital activity [sic; i.e., presumably, sex-role activity rooted in one’s biological sexual identity]. These differences can obscure the common fact…that the development of psychosocial intimacy is not possible without a firm sense of identity.” (Ibid., p. 186)  This runs a little afield of my point about uncertainty about sexual identity tying to a case of BPD in crisis, but it’s close enough.

***

In any event, Angelina Jolie’s character Lisa is, in the world of this movie, the "free spirit to end all free spirits" in this hospital. Jolie gives a good performance (for which she won an Oscar for best supporting actress); in fact, she equals the demands of what would be a hard part for anyone. To me today, it is maybe less brilliant than it first seemed in 1999; while it may have seemed consensually an A+ performance then, today I myself would give it an A-, which is still no small achievement.

Ryder’s Susanna, from early on seeming to herself (while frightened) too normal as to belong in the hospital (and thus as something of a Veronica among degraded Heathers), eventually bonds with Lisa, as if she sees Lisa knowing some secrets to life she wants to pick up on for herself. The way they run away from the hospital (Lisa’s initial idea is to run away to Florida) has some genuine aspects, as they hitch a ride on a VW bus (so very ’60s, isn’t it?), end up at a party where The Doors’ “Roadhouse Blues” blares away (OK, that’s a bit hokey), and end up at Daisy’s house, with results I mentioned above. All this, I think, is what the real Susanna Kaysen objected to as not having happened. But interestingly, its setting up a scene where Susanna witnesses a tragic suicide, and sees how cold Lisa can be, in turn sets up a point of epiphany that Susanna reveals to Whoopi Goldberg’s nurse Valerie in an exchange that, for all its contrivance, still seems pretty touching.

Prior to her talk with the nurse Valerie (some of these quotes will be paraphrases), “I know what it means to want to die,” Susanna writes in her journal, “but when you see it happen, dreaming of it is...ridiculous.” With the nurse: “How can I get better when I don’t understand my illness?” … Susanna: “Lisa thinks it’s a gift—that it lets you see the truth.” The nurse, with dry realism: “Lisa’s been here eight years.” Susanna, in what may seem a bit sentimental a move, apologizes to the nurse heartily for her long-time previously engaging in racist baiting remarks to her. “I was a pig!” Susanna says. The nurse in response: “Don’t drop anchor here.” This is only the beginning of a process Susanna must arduously pursue, as the movie shows in a montage of scenes of her consulting with therapists, etc.

Later, when her day to leave is at hand, Susanna finds that her ward mates have all congregated in the weird cellar of the hospital, where Lisa is reading from Susanna’s journal to the others, exposing Susanna’s frank thoughts about them. Susanna is mortified. Lisa: “I’m playing the villain. Like you wanted.”

How this scene rounds out, I won’t say, but Susanna confronts Lisa in what seems a suited way to both.

How does Lisa compare to J.D. in relation to Susanna as a rigorously updated Veronica? While Heathers is a wacky fantasy, Girl is (or aims to be) about psychopathology as realistically depicted. J.D. was a sick male fellow to Veronica, whom Veronica had to extricate herself from (but with fantastically weapon-wielding means); Lisa is a female fellow whom Susanna must part from, but—amid the staunch taking of a stand—with appropriately mixed emotions. Both these women knew they were sick, and that is why they bonded—their hospitalization defined what they were about, in part. But Susanna could realize she had to shore up her personal resources and rejoin the outside world, something Lisa has a much harder time doing. One could be a power waif, but also realize that no one was immune to the undertow of occasional personality breakdown, to the fate of radical vulnerability.

On what may seem an idiotic gossip level: It’s interesting to consider that this movie may be taken to represent the start of Ryder’s descending status as a major movie star and the beginning of Angelina Jolie’s,  though when Girl was released, any idea this was apt to happen would have been pure speculation, and in fact this change in status, I think, could hardly be attributed to this film. (The eclipsing of Ryder’s image by Jolie’s is suggested in the Wikipedia bio of Ryder, related to Girl.) I have never been a fan of Jolie (whom I used to think of, when she was first of note, as Jon Voight’s daughter, and now Jon Voight seems at large to be merely thought of as her father—and “Who is he?” say the young Turks). The one other movie Jolie was in that I saw was the second or third installment of the Lara Croft series (whatever number was in 2003), and I saw that in days when I saw all kinds of movies newly released in theaters; and this had to be the most boring movie I ever saw in a theater. Ubiquitous on star-oriented magazines’ covers for years, Jolie has long seemed to me more about beauty and glamour than about articulate brilliance as an interpretive actress. She’s today’s Elizabeth Taylor, more of a star than an actress, though at times she can do good acting work (as Taylor did in, say, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?).

Self-mastery is the fundamental point

If Girl, Interrupted symbolizes the new direction apt to be taken (by fate, or whatever else) by two actresses who can portray two “waifs” depicted therein—a “power waif” as Ryder can portray, or an exotic, licentious “mystic” as Jolie can—with, accordingly, Ryder’s star falling while Jolie’s has risen, this doesn’t seem entirely to the good. In any event, I see this movie as more Ryder’s than Jolie’s, because it is about the “education into self-mastery” that Ryder makes a game attempt at illustrating.

Appendix

“Borderline personality” may have been a puzzling diagnosis to Kaysen, and it was relatively new category in 1967, but its general development in the psychiatric scheme of diagnosis was gradual and, I would think, careful enough. It was a category that more or less took over the role of the 1950s-era category of “pseudoneurotic schizophrenia,” according to Jerome Kroll, M.D. (The Challenge of the Borderline Patient: Competency in Diagnosis and Treatment [New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1988]). Kroll notes that in the late 1960s to the early 1970s, it was pointed out by European researchers that “American psychiatry held an overexpanded notion of schizophrenia” (p. 15)—which fomented the use of the concept of “pseudoneurotic schizophrenia.” A new concept—“borderline” personality, a shortening of "borderline schizophrenia" (p. 15)—would group these patients without making such a direct connection, on a general level, with schizophrenia. Kroll remarks on the new subtlety of this admittedly difficult category for a notoriously difficult kind of patient:

            Although the term borderline would seem to carry the same theoretical baggage as pseudoneurotic schizophrenia and therefore be open to the same objections regarding the concept of a continuum of psychiatric conditions, ... there were nevertheless additional reasons why borderline endured and flourished and pseudoneurotic schizophrenia died. As the dominant forces in American psychiatry shifted away from a psychoanalytic orientation in the late 1960s, pseudoneurotic schizophrenia, which was closely identified with psychoanalytic theory, became superfluous and unacceptable. Borderline, although carrying the same implications within psychoanalytic circles, had nevertheless been established relatively independently of psychoanalytic theory...[by an empirical study published in 1968].

This 1968 study, which Kroll duly references, was “broad enough” to sidestep temporarily the question of what was on the border of borderlines. This question, in fact, wouldn't be answered satisfactorily until a study surveying doctors for their practices with the category of borderline was published in 1979. But the concept of borderline recommended by the 1968 study “was acceptable both because of the methodology employed in the study and the scope of the concept, which contained a core borderline group as well as subgroups related to schizophrenia and depression. The core group of borderlines was a stable entity in its own right. The term borderline no longer necessarily implied a spectrum concept any more than neurosis implied a disease of the nerves” (pp. 15-16).

[Appendix adapted from A College Try that Courted Trouble, unpublished manuscript by Gregory Ludwig.]

Movie break: Transcending grief with a beat, bridging worlds in a walkup: The Visitor (2008)

Not to seem like a raving Tom McCarthy fanatic, but his film The Visitor deserves a little more comment than I gave it in my entry on The Station Agent (February 2).

This is the quietest of his three films, about a widowed economics professor, Walter Vale, who teaches at a Connecticut college, heading to New York City to present a paper on behalf of a colleague, at NYU. He has had an apartment in the East Village, where he goes for, apparently, the first time since his wife died. He finds the apartment has been fraudulently leased to two young people, with whom he at first has an encounter that shocks them all: a young Syrian man named Tariq Kalil, played by Haaz Sleiman (who, unlike his accented character, sounds very American in DVD commentary), and a young woman from Senegal, Zenab, played by Danai Gurira, a recent NYU graduate. (These characters’ grounds for bonding, aside from “blind” love, are that both are Muslim; and, as it happens, both speak French as well as English.)

At first, after this unmarried couple packs their things and leaves on the ordinary assumption they had to go, Walter, usually reserved and showing his most Dionysian side in a glass of red wine he so often nurses, is moved enough to allow the couple to stay at his apartment with him, until they find somewhere else to live. This leads to a rapid thawing of relations, especially between Walter and Tariq, who plays the djembe, a West African drum that today seems more popular than the congas among those (amateurs and others) who opt to play such instruments. Tariq’s livelihood stems from playing the djembe in local clubs with other musicians.

Walter, who has struggled to learn classical piano (his wife was an accomplished pianist), is offered to be taught the more viscerally approached djembe by the enthusiastic Tariq. While Zenab is at first consistently reserved and even leery about Walter, Tariq and Walter develop a strong fellowship in teacher–student relations over learning the djembe, even participating in a Central Park drum circle session on a sunny autumn day (a rousing, fun scene). Their friendship is solid enough that Walter is suitably shocked (when the story lurches into a graver mode) when Tariq is arrested by New York police in the subway after they mistakenly think he has jumped the turnstile, and find he doesn’t have proper proof of citizenship.

Zenab, who has earned her living by selling homemade jewelry as a streetside vendor, is appalled to learn of the arrest, and in a revelation that heralds her own bonding with Walter, avers that she and Tariq are illegal aliens. Zenab fears Tariq will be deported. Walter, apparently readily enough based on warmth within his grown friendship with these two, pays for an attorney to help rescue Tariq from possible deportation. Much of the rest of the story includes scenes with Walter checking in with Tariq (on either side of a glass wall) in a prison-like holding center for possible deportation cases. I won’t spoil by revealing much more of what follows.

Though this story may seem (at its start)  to be implausible in certain minor respects if not simply novel, its most credible—and creditable—side is the emotional level on which all these people make common cause. An additional plotline starts when Tariq’s mother, played by Hiam Abbass (who also appeared in Spielberg’s Munich [2005]), appears in New York after her son has not been in touch for days. She and Walter then bond, initially over the predicament concerning Tariq, and then on a more visceral level. All this emotional connectedness among ostensibly foreign-to-each-other people follows a certain trademark Tom McCarthy pattern: a study of how emotional ties sprout and develop due to an initial accidental association, nurtured by the ordinary will to help out that the predicament inspires, so that the emotional ties end up defining the relationships more validly than anything else, and shape the plot as time goes on.

Jenkins shines the most with a subtle performance

Most notably, Walter is played by Richard Jenkins, a 60-ish veteran of TV and movies who, with his receding hair, longish jaw, and pockmarked skin, looks like nothing so much as a favorite high school social studies teacher. Jenkins has played supporting roles for years—this was his first lead role in a movie. (He has enough actorly resources to have appeared in a number of Coen brothers movies.) He received an Oscar nomination for best actor as a result of his role in The Visitor. This was enough for Leonard Maltin’s evaluation of the movie to change noticeably between editions of his compendium that appeared before and after the 2009 Oscars: his initial rating wasn’t too high, but bumped up after Jenkins’ Oscar nomination.

And perhaps the biggest surprise is that this nomination wasn’t due to any flashy acting: Jenkins plays what would definitely not attract a very young, commotion-eager audience: a quiet, bereft man who has grown unchallenged and alienated in his work, and goes through his reserved motions at his college, but “comes out of his shell” with his helping Tariq and Zenab, and later making common cause with Tariq’s mother. So when Walter takes an uncharacteristic emotional stand near the movie’s end, we might conclude that the real “visitor” in this movie is the emotional growth of a mature, quiet man who has been “visited” by the occasional shocks that life presents, amid new friends with whom he has healthily built bridges.

We know this is a movie written before the 2008 financial shocks, but in the wake of the social stress and exhaustion resulting from the Iraq war: this story is about quiet decency as it can show its face among accidental neighbors, when the only cost to helping out people with whom we ordinarily wouldn’t have been much involved is losing our blockages (grown out of self-absorption) to being moved by fellows’ plights.