Intro: “Maybe I was just crazy, or maybe it was the '60s, or maybe I was Girl, Interrupted,” is one of the opening lines of the beautifully directed film Girl, Interrupted, by James Mangold in 1999. This film follows Susanna, a directionless, careless and depressed teenager, who is admitted to Claymore Hospital for a failed suicide attempt in the mid-1960s. Hoping to return a young soul, we are taken to the women's ward of Claymore Hospital, where we are faced with numerous characters living in a parallel universe of mental illness, ultimately hindered by society. In a time when modesty consisted of hiding one's anger, the women in this film feel no shame in smoking, swearing and harassing each other as they sneak into the ward at night breaking the rules. Mangold so perfectly portrayed the darkness of this film using repeating motifs, music, and flashbacks, while capturing the true difficulty of femininity given societal standards. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Context: To begin and understand the overall meaning of this film, we must understand the 1960s and how society itself viewed mental illness. In a time when mental illness had barely earned the title of label, it was a stark distortion between deviance and true illness, leaving treatments and diagnoses to be made improperly, scholar Thomas J. Scheff stated: “Psychiatric diagnoses were simply convenient labels attached to individuals.” who violated conventional behavioral norms." Susanna, who appeared to be a normal girl, was diagnosed with multiple personality disorder, when in reality she appeared to be depressed, even stating that "the line between normal and crazy is so wavy that our insistence on making it is really blurry." Thesis Statement: The legitimacy of mental illness in the 1960s was a fine line between social control and conduct rather than true medical diagnosis. Topic Sentence: It seems like each girl in the movie wasn't a person at all, but instead a the label of their illness and the story behind why they are there. Evidence and citations: In the 1960s, labeling prominently “the hierarchical structure of the hospital facilitated depersonalization, and labeling led to stigmatization, which was impossible to distinguish from the sane and the insane in psychiatric hospitals (Rosenhan 1973 ). Society's tainted view of mental illness is greatly represented in Mangold's film when all the girls are taken to an ice cream shop and a woman, who Susanna knows, shows up and wishes for Susanna to be locked away forever, within this scene. all the girls start acting outrageous and crazy on purpose to get the woman to leave, alienating them all from the normal viewers. While the scene may not have been a real-life example, it shows viewers the mental illness behavior that society expects and labels. Topic sentence: Could it also be that society's labeling of this era has prompted such outrageous behavior? Evidence and quotes: For example, Lisa, the queen bee of the ward, didn't necessarily seem to have any mental illness, but rather a taste for irritating everyone, including the doctors, just for show. Lisa seemed to like more than anything the idea of ​​being crazy, as opposed to actually being crazy, doing things that were ultimately expected of someone with a mental illness, but seemedeven shamelessly staged. Without proper diagnoses of this era, who was really labeling these girls as crazy? Comment: The labeling of this period ultimately created an outlet for people to create a deviant self-image to reflect each individual's expected outcome, although there may not have been an actual cause. The mental illness was in return cured with institutionalization, which brings us to Claymore Hospital, where Susanna spent a year for a suicide attempt. In this film we are first introduced to an opening scene centered on a window and it seems to be dark outside, the camera is then directed downwards towards the protagonist, Susanna, whose internal emotion suggests the emotion of the weather outside the window. The camera then pans down to show Lisa, another girl from the hospital ward lying in Susanna's lap, still and sad. Evidence and quotes: Director James Mangold perfectly describes the atmosphere of the rest of the film, presenting a sort of darkness and concern for the viewers. In this context he also uses a soundtrack that reflects the girls' emotions, melancholic, even if no words have been said, we are able to feel the emotion rather than tell it. Also implying the implications, we see later in the film the repressed emotion that each girl holds with the labels of their mental illness, but is unable to talk about it directly. In the opening scene Mangold also cuts a cat to reinforce the atmosphere, also foreshadowing the meaning of the cat later in the film. The cat returns towards the end of the film, when a friend of Susanna's from the Daisy ward commits suicide, the cat belonged to Daisy and then Susanna took it, so the opening scene may also suggest a sadness over Daisy's death. Then, at the end of the film, we see Susanna giving the cat to another patient as she is ready to be discharged from the hospital, so actually that cat is also a symbolism of the disease. Mangold also uses cigarettes as a motif throughout the film whenever dark humor is presented. Evidence and quotes: Whenever Susanna feels reckless throughout the film with her humor, we will inevitably, each time, see her represent that humor by lighting a cigarette. This is especially funny in the film on Mangold's part, because it depicts the true nature of Susanna's carelessness with her life and well-being. In one scene she inhales smoke from her cigarette and blows it into another patient's face as evidence, where in return the woman turns and scorns “asshole,” and Susanna reacts by apologizing and leaving the scene. The most interesting thing is that during the course of the film Susanna "decides what kind of woman she will be, and in this area there are really contradictory and exasperating messages, even if more for the spectator than for the character" (Cross, Alice. "Girl, Interrupted"). Suanna, once altruistic, showed sympathy for his actions. Throughout the film we also see Susanna experience flashbacks, or time jumps that go back to the times before her hospitalization. Evidence and Quotes: Most of these flashbacks show things she regrets or things she did that weren't modest to her image of herself, such as a specific flashback between a conversation she had with a married professor she went to Bed. Within these time jumps, Mangold seems to use them as a transition from one scene to another. At one point he even abruptly changed scenes to the sound of a dog barking to establish the next scene. Mangold also very carefully uses costumes to identify with the characters, Susanna often wears dark blue, brown and gray as she is depicted internally, while on the other hand Lisa tends?.