In 1967 Susanna Kaysen, instead of heading for a prestigious American university, checked into a mental hospital. The 18-year-old had taken a bottle of aspirin chased with a bottle of vodka, and there were bad bruises on her wrists. She signed herself into McLean hospital outside Boston and spent the next two years on a ward for teenage girls. Actually, make that rich, privileged, teenage girls. These are no crazed low-lifes; they are the nice but troubled daughters of even nicer (and probably more troubled) parents.
From that stay came first Kaysen’s best-selling memoir, Girl, Interrupted, and now the screen version starring Winona Ryder and Angelina Jolie. This is not One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in cashmere twinsets. It is a pitch-perfect take on a very American conceit: that going crazy in a controlled, socially acceptable, relatively well-dressed way is, well, kind of romantic.
The story begins at a pivotal point in Susanna’s life. She is on the brink of graduation from high school and without direction. We know hers is a good school: not only is she the only member of her class not going on to college, but she is the first person in the history of the place not to go on to higher education. Susanna’s pals belong on campuses that make up the east coast’s fabled Seven Sisters, such as Wellesley, Radcliffe, and Vassar. Susanna’s path is decidedly less social. She “plans to write”. And write she does, through her endless hours on the ward. There is certainly no shortage of material.
The girls of Claymoore (as the hospital is renamed) – Daisy, Georgina, Polly, Lisa and Susanna – are an awkward yet vivid bunch. They are the moneyed miserable, the cared-for neglected, the loved unwanted. The movie and the book ask you to root for them. It’s a tough sell. Not because the characters don’t deserve our compassion, they do. Georgina is a pathological liar; Polly once doused herself with gasoline and then tossed the match; Daisy has a pitiful eating disorder, the tip of a large iceberg; Lisa is a sociopath. These young women are clinging to wire-mesh windows instead of going on dates or learning to live on their own. But the very idea of them seems to beg for some championship eye-rolling. Kaysen’s assessment of her situation is tart and clear-eyed, “Angst of these dimensions is a luxury item. You need to be well-fed, clothed, and housed to have time for this much self-pity.”
For all its prep-school winsomeness, the film is deftly cast. Winona may have sworn off “teen angst bullshit” some time after Heathers, but this is her story to tell (she was co-producer) and no one treads the line between pissed off and repentant better. Her Susanna’s ennui is of the finest porcelain. Ryder herself skipped college and put herself briefly into a facility where she could take time out from her rampaging early fame, as well as get a good night’s sleep. Jolie’s depiction of Lisa has earned her an Oscar nomination.
The girls’ link between the solipsism of mental illness and the world beyond the ward is a nurse called Valerie, played with typical stoicism by Whoopi Goldberg. Her diagnosis of Susanna’s condition is more Sister Act than Sigmund Freud: “You are a lazy, self-indulgent little girl who’s driving herself crazy.” The viewer can’t help but agree. It’s hard to tell whether Susanna is truly sick or not. In the late Sixties, depression, homosexuality and resistance to marrying appliance salesmen could all be deemed signs of clinical mental instability.
For the audience, though, there is something else going on, something far more relevant to our lives than the shaky constitution of a well-read, sensitive girl. A doctor advises Susanna: “You need a genuine rest,” and in the dark of the cinema, we’ll all be sighing, “Doctor, who doesn’t?” Watching 1967 from 2000, we don’t see a tough road back to health, we see a vacation. Ryder shuffles around in darling Peter Pan collars and natty black pants, her pixie-ish haircut sweeping stylishly off her glowing face. When not tricked out in the dream student wardrobe – cardigans, sneakers, pea coats – Ryder curls up in cute pyjamas. Smoking, pyjamas, all-day television: this is a spot-on description of the residents of my college dorm most days.
Even Kaysen says in her book, “For many of us, the hospital was as much a refuge as it was a prison. Though we were all cut off from the world, we were also cut off from the demands and expectations that had driven us crazy … As long as we were willing to be upset, we didn’t have to get jobs or go to school. We could weasel out of anything except eating and taking our medication.”
Substitute cruise ship or religious retreat for hospital and you’re getting closer to the real allure of checking out, or rather checking in. Imagine the comfy white clothes, courtesy of Donna Karan’s new Pure line, minimalist decor, and low sodium cuisine. Valerie lays out the set-up and neatly voices the audience’s sentiments: “I worked in a state-run hospital. This is a five-star hotel.” And let’s face it, aren’t five-star hotels and spas actually low-security asylums? Where does group therapy end and Club Med begin?
But Susanna is on a different trip. “It’s so nice to go insane, no one asks you to explain,” sang Helen Reddy in her creepy 1974 hit, Angie Baby. Susanna could hardly have chosen a better site than McLean’s for her tutelage. Other former clients include musicians James Taylor and Ray Charles and poets Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath. (Taylor’s classic Fire and Rain was written about a girl he met while in McLean.) Susanna’s goals are simple and reasonable. She intends to make a life out of boyfriends and literature and she exposes her romantic predilections early. In getting to know her new roommate, Georgina (Clea Duvall), Susanna explains that her brand of cigarettes is Gauloises: “The French Resistance smoked them, I think.” She keeps a diary, develops a worshipful crush on crazier-than-thou Lisa, and mourns a boyfriend whose draft number is due up any time.
F Scott Fitzgerald’s novel Tender is the Night, about his unstable wife Zelda, portrays the beauty of the half-mad heroine. And sure enough, Scotty and Zelda’s breakdowns became a profound influence on his work, not to mention his literary legend. From southern gothic to Northern Exposure, kookiness is how we get our kicks. America can, after all, be an inauthentic place and craziness is one way to get real. Rather than be repelled by the harpy in the attic, we long to be the first Mrs Rochester. Not for us the centred, resolute Jane, forever doing right and never pitching a fit. In the 1970 movie Diary of a Mad Housewife, for example, there was only one character in the whole business worth knowing – the one having the meltdown. Dorothy Parker’s depression, William Burroughs’s drug habit and Kurt Cobain’s alienation all bear witness to an emotional life not encouraged in the scrubbed suburbs. How else can we explain Depeche Mode’s unflagging popularity in the Los Angeles basin?
The most significant graduate of McLean’s psychological finishing school was Sylvia Plath. It has been said, cruelly, that suicide was her smartest career move. It is probably just a coincidence that both Ryder’s Kaysen and Plath travelled with matched white Samsonite luggage. As a symbol of middle-class normalcy and order, there are few neater. Emotional baggage indeed.
There is something downright literary about the girls’ school experience in a country where such adventures are rare. If the defining run at rebellion can’t be unleashed at boarding school (if you are super-rich), it can be a sorority house – author Joan Didion was a Tri Delt at Berkeley – or it can wait until that first job in publishing. Or, a clean mental hospital where you can have your own room. Setting yourself against even the puny establishment of an all-girl’s dorm may be as close as some girls ever get to challenging their status quo. Defiance, yes, but also a comforting togetherness.
Next up on the angst front is Sofia Coppola’s directorial debut, The Virgin Suicides, about a family of beautiful, mysterious suicidal sisters. With a soundtrack by Air and a story filtered through the hip gauze of Coppola’s retro-savvy, this adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides’s novel set in the Seventies American suburban Elysium should add a dark new spin to the form.