TITLE:

Girl Interrupted

SETTINGS: Claymoore Hospital and daisy s Apartment

Characters Susanna Kaysen - The author and narrator. A doctor diagnoses Kaysen with borderline personality disorder in 1967, when she is 17. The previous year, Kaysen attempted suicide by swallowing fifty aspirin. She voluntarily commits herself to McLean Hospital, a psychiatric facility in Belmont, Massachusetts. Over the next two years, Kaysen confronts her illness, experiences profound unhappiness, as well as the treachery and kindness of peers and authority figures, and finally meets the future that awaits her outside the confining but protective walls of the ward. Lisa - Kaysen's fellow patient and the effective leader of the girls on the ward. Lisa is proud of her diagnosis as a sociopath, a personality driven by self-interest. Lisa is wildly unpredictable. She throws tantrums and plans escapes for others when she isn't making her own attempts to escape. Kaysen is initially in awe of Lisa's apparent confidence. Over time, though, she learns that Lisa cares little for the consequences of her actions and can be willfully cruel. Georgina - Kaysen s roommate at McLean Hospital. Georgina suffers from depression and is a kind and constant companion to Kaysen. Georgina has a romantic relationship with Wade, a violent and unpredictable patient on another ward. Polly - A disfigured patient. Before entering McLean, Polly poured gasoline over her face and upper body and set herself aflame. Polly appears to be at peace, even cheerful, during her first year at the hospital. One day, Polly suddenly becomes aware of the awful extent of her injuries. She is inconsolable. Kaysen notes that although everyone at McLean is affected by sickness, Polly is the only patient trapped forever by the consequences of her illness. Daisy - A patient who spends the period from Thanksgiving to Christmas at the hospital each year. Daisy lets no one into her room, emerging only for laxatives and the whole roast chickens her father brings twice weekly. Lisa discovers that Daisy s room is filled with the picked-over carcasses of the chickens. Daisy leaves the hospital to live in an apartment her father has purchased for her. The girls later learn that Daisy committed suicide on her birthday. Cynthia - A severe depressive on Kaysen s ward. Cynthia undergoes months of electroshock therapy. The effects of the shock treatments change Cynthia s personality, leaving her totally unable to assert herself. Cynthia is close to Polly. Wade - Georgina s boyfriend and a patient at McLean hospital. Wade is prone to violent outbursts, requiring several orderlies to subdue him. Wade fascinates the girls with stories of his father s exploits

as a CIA agent, including his associations with notorious figures from the Watergate scandal. Wade s fits of uncontrollable rage ultimately land him in the maximum-security ward. Lisa Cody - A patient who becomes fast friends with Lisa, only to be cruelly rejected. Diagnosed, like Lisa, as a sociopath, Lisa Cody emulates Lisa s behavior. Feeling that her position among the girls is threatened, Lisa turns against her, and Lisa Cody leaves the hospital. Returning from an escape to Boston one day, Lisa tells the other girls that Lisa Cody has become a real junkie. Torrey - A methamphetamine-addicted patient from Mexico. Torrey s parents, embarrassed by their daughter s condition, arrive to retrieve her after a short time. Lisa plans to help Torrey escape, but Valerie halts Lisa s plan. Alice Calais - A troubled patient who pronounces her last name callous. Alice s mental breakdown results in her transfer to the maximum-security ward. Alice s appearance and the frightening atmosphere of the ward appall the girls when they visit. Valerie - The head nurse on Kaysen s ward. The girls like and respect Valerie for her fairness and willingness to speak up on their behalf. Melvin - Kaysen s therapist. Impressed by Kaysen s intelligence, Melvin begins an advanced program of analysis with her. Kaysen finds the experience unconvincing and discovers that she was Melvin s first analysis patient. Mrs. McWeeney - The evening nurse on Kaysen s ward. Mrs. McWeeney hails from the old school. Her old-fashioned uniform and values alienate the girls. Dr. Wick - An older female psychiatrist on the hospital staff. Dr. Wick is from Africa and is entirely unfamiliar with the American youth culture of her patients. Vulgarity and frank discussion of sex embarrass Dr. Wick, whose efforts at treatment are not necessarily effective. James Watson - Nobel Prize winning friend of Kaysen s family. Beloved by Kaysen for his unpredictable behavior, he visits Kaysen and offers to help her escape. She turns him down in the belief that she should continue treatment. Kaysen s Husband - Introduced to Kaysen prior to her hospitalization, he stays in touch with her throughout her time at McLean. His marriage proposal allows Kaysen to leave the hospital. They are married only a short time. The English Teacher - Kaysen s high school teacher and lover. He takes her to the Frick Museum in New York, where she first sees the Vermeer painting titled Girl, Interrupted at Her Music. Their affair is short-lived. The Diagnosing Doctor - The psychiatrist who encourages Kaysen to enter McLean Hospital. He diagnoses her in a mere twenty minutes. Kaysen believes that his swift diagnosis expresses the psychiatrist s misguided effort to save her from the wayward youth culture he disdains and cannot understand.

SUMMARY: Susanna (Winona Ryder) is a young woman of eighteen, and her life isn't exactly what a "normal' eighteen-year-old's is supposed to be like. To her, any kind of sex is casual, and it doesn't matter who she does it with or when, as long as she gets it. At graduation she falls asleep, proving she has little interest for the norms of prize-givings or anything to do with what's accepted by society. At her father's birthday party she is underdressed and is of course moaned at by her hypocritical mother. Here we learn that her parent's friends are just as false as what is accepted by everyone. And then it becomes clear that Susanna has been sleeping with her mother's friend's husband. This drives her to try to commit suicide with aspirin and a bottle of vodka to get it all down. At the E.R. she claims that she doesn't have bones in her wrists anymore, and tells the psychiatrist at home that the bones grew back by the time she got to the hospital. So she is shipped off to a local mental institution and put in the ward for women only. Here she meets a multitude of people who really do have problems: an anorexic, a girl who was burned as a child, a lesbian, a bulimic, and her roommate, a compulsive liar, to top it all off. The ward is run by Nurse Valerie Owens (Whoopi Goldberg), who is very clever, but is unable to become a doctor due to her race. All the nursing staff and the patients are kept marginally sane by Valerie, and she and Susanna have a complex relationship. Susanna is questionably diagnosed with having a Borderline Personality Disorder. Things really get started when the sociopathic run away patient, Lisa (Angelina Jolie), returns to the ward and turns Susanna's world upside down and inside out. She is a force to be reckoned with---she is magnetic, rebellious, doesn't take her meds and is unhealthy for the other patients as she breaks down their self-esteem regularly. Due to the fact that her last best friend, Jamie, couldn't hack it when she ran away, Lisa befriends Susanna and together they start a world of trouble. Susanna keeps a diary of all her thoughts and feelings, illustrating in it too, and telling the tale of her stay through her daily entries. Her ex fling, Toby (Jared Leto), comes to visit her and she very nearly tries to have sex with him in her room. He tells her he wants them to run away to Canada together so that he doesn't have to go to Vietnam. He tells her she isn't crazy and that the girls in the asylum aren't really her friends. But she refuses to go with him, subconsciously beginning to rely on Lisa. Then she meets the head psychiatrist, Dr. Sonia Wick (Vanessa Redgrave), and claims she is ambivalent, saying it means she doesn't care. But Dr. Wick sees through this mask and decides to have Susanna see her from now on. Afterwards Lisa is taken in to see the doc, but doesn't return and Susanna falls into a depression. Nurse Valerie has had enough and throws her into an ice cold bath to wake her. She tells Susanna,

after Susanna attacks her verbally and says that she doesn't know what she doing, that she is a spoiled, lazy little girl who is driving herself crazy! And that if Susanna isn't careful she'll throw her life away on some stupid rebellion. That night Lisa breaks into the ward, wild eyed and crazy, and Susanna runs away with her so they can get to Disney Land. There they hook up with hippies and eventually crash at the bulimic, Daisy's (Brittani Murphy), house after bribing her with promises of meds. But all turns bad when Lisa tells Daisy that she is a freak herself and that this apartment is all a mask to hide what's really happening. She breaks Daisy down, finally saying that Daisy probably likes her father molesting her and that it's probably all she's ever known. The next morning Susanna wakes up and goes for a walk, to escape the sound of Lisa's voice and returns to find Daisy playing a record over and over again and Lisa in the kitchen. She goes up the stairs and finds Daisy has hung herself in the bathroom. Susanna goes back to the asylum without Lisa, (who runs away again) and starts anew with Dr. Wick and her diary. When she is due to leave, Lisa breaks out of her padded cell and steals Susanna's diary. Beneath the ward in the maze of corridors, Lisa reads the diary aloud and tells the other girls what Susanna thinks of them. Susanna runs away from Lisa when she begins to chase her with a needle filled with a toxic-looking chemical. Susanna breaks her hand while trying to close a sliding metal door on Lisa and then they finally confront each other. Susanna tells Lisa finally that no one cares if she dies because she already is dead and her heart is cold, and that she will start her life again out of this hospital without Lisa and the others. In the morning she is about to leave, but first visits Lisa and talks to her again. Lisa says that she isn't really cold and that she didn't mean to hurt Susanna. When she leaves she says goodbye to all her friends, and gets into the cab saying that being crazy isn't about keeping a secret, it's just about everyone being personified. And by the seventies most of her friends were out of the clinic and leading lives. The girl who was just interrupted by herself and everyone else, is finally recovered from being a supposed "borderline".

REACTION: Susana was sent to the psychiatric ward by her parent s choice not hers. Susana became friends with Lza, she made a choice. She became, she made a choice. After Daisy s death she decided to go back to the Claymoore, she made a choice. Life is full of choices. From the time we wake up until to the time that we lie at our beds, we make choices. Everything we do is a choice, and these choices we make today is what we will be tomorrow. We choose to do the right thing, we became better tomorrow. We choose to do the wrong thing, we ll expect hell in our lives. Yes we have futures, we have what we call destiny but these words are broad. And these broad words are defined by simple things we do and these simple things we do are made by what we call CHOICE .

TITLE: The title Girl Interrupted had fitted much to the story. From the title itself, we can easily portray their meaning and understood the whole movie. It somehow resembles or summarizes the whole story----- the story of a girl who is interrupted, psychologically. The title is somehow suspense that creates curiousity and mystery among viewers as to why the movie is entitled Girl Interrupted.

SETTINGS: ( Claymoore Hospital and Daisys Apartment) Claymoore, a Psychiatric Hospital of the town was the perfect place for the movie. It is where the movie runs its story. The place was neat, complete of facilities, convenient for healing for interrupted patients (mentally ill patients). Another significant place was Daisys apartment. This is where Susana had her realization.

Characters Susanna Kaysen - The author and narrator. A doctor diagnoses Kaysen with borderline personality disorder in 1967, when she is 17. The previous year, Kaysen attempted suicide by swallowing fifty aspirin. She voluntarily commits herself to McLean Hospital, a psychiatric facility in Belmont, Massachusetts. Over the next two years, Kaysen confronts her illness, experiences profound unhappiness, as well as the treachery and kindness of peers and authority figures, and finally meets the future that awaits her outside the confining but protective walls of the ward.

Lisa - Kaysen's fellow patient and the effective leader of the girls on the ward. Lisa is proud of her diagnosis as a sociopath, a personality driven by self-interest. Lisa is wildly unpredictable. She throws tantrums and plans escapes for others when she isn't making her own attempts to escape. Kaysen is initially in awe of Lisa's apparent confidence. Over time, though, she learns that Lisa cares little for the consequences of her actions and can be willfully cruel. Georgina - Kaysens roommate at McLean Hospital. Georgina suffers from depression and is a kind and constant companion to Kaysen. Georgina has a romantic relationship with Wade, a violent and unpredictable patient on another ward. Polly - A disfigured patient. Before entering McLean, Polly poured gasoline over her face and upper body and set herself aflame. Polly appears to be at peace, even cheerful, during her first year at the hospital. One day, Polly suddenly becomes aware of the awful extent of her injuries. She is inconsolable. Kaysen notes that although everyone at McLean is affected by sickness, Polly is the only patient trapped forever by the consequences of her illness. Daisy - A patient who spends the period from Thanksgiving to Christmas at the hospital each year. Daisy lets no one into her room, emerging only for laxatives and the whole roast chickens her father brings twice weekly. Lisa discovers that Daisys room is filled with the picked-over carcasses of the chickens. Daisy leaves the hospital to live in an apartment her father has purchased for her. The girls later learn that Daisy committed suicide on her birthday. Cynthia - A severe depressive on Kaysens ward. Cynthia undergoes months of electroshock therapy. The effects of the shock treatments change Cynthias personality, leaving her totally unable to assert herself. Cynthia is close to Polly. Wade - Georginas boyfriend and a patient at McLean hospital. Wade is prone to violent outbursts, requiring several orderlies to subdue him. Wade fascinates the girls with stories of his fathers exploits as a CIA agent, including his associations with notorious figures from the Watergate scandal. Wades fits of uncontrollable rage ultimately land him in the maximumsecurity ward. Lisa Cody - A patient who becomes fast friends with Lisa, only to be cruelly rejected. Diagnosed, like Lisa, as a sociopath, Lisa Cody emulates Lisas behavior. Feeling that her

position among the girls is threatened, Lisa turns against her, and Lisa Cody leaves the hospital. Returning from an escape to Boston one day, Lisa tells the other girls that Lisa Cody has become a real junkie. Torrey - A methamphetamine-addicted patient from Mexico. Torreys parents, embarrassed by their daughters condition, arrive to retrieve her after a short time. Lisa plans to help Torrey escape, but Valerie halts Lisas plan. Alice Calais - A troubled patient who pronounces her last name callous. Alices mental breakdown results in her transfer to the maximum-security ward. Alices appearance and the frightening atmosphere of the ward appall the girls when they visit. Valerie - The head nurse on Kaysens ward. The girls like and respect Valerie for her fairness and willingness to speak up on their behalf. Melvin - Kaysens therapist. Impressed by Kaysens intelligence, Melvin begins an advanced program of analysis with her. Kaysen finds the experience unconvincing and discovers that she was Melvins first analysis patient. Mrs. McWeeney - The evening nurse on Kaysens ward. Mrs. McWeeney hails from the old school. Her old-fashioned uniform and values alienate the girls. Dr. Wick - An older female psychiatrist on the hospital staff. Dr. Wick is from Africa and is entirely unfamiliar with the American youth culture of her patients. Vulgarity and frank discussion of sex embarrass Dr. Wick, whose efforts at treatment are not necessarily effective. James Watson - Nobel Prizewinning friend of Kaysens family. Beloved by Kaysen for his unpredictable behavior, he visits Kaysen and offers to help her escape. She turns him down in the belief that she should continue treatment. Kaysens Husband - Introduced to Kaysen prior to her hospitalization, he stays in touch with her throughout her time at McLean. His marriage proposal allows Kaysen to leave the hospital. They are married only a short time. The English Teacher - Kaysens high school teacher and lover. He takes her to the Frick Museum in New York, where she first sees the Vermeer painting titled Girl, Interrupted at Her Music. Their affair is short-lived.

The Diagnosing Doctor - The psychiatrist who encourages Kaysen to enter McLean Hospital. He diagnoses her in a mere twenty minutes. Kaysen believes that his swift diagnosis expresses the psychiatrists misguided effort to save her from the wayward youth culture he disdains and cannot understand.

SUMMARY: Susanna (Winona Ryder) is a young woman of eighteen, and her life isn't exactly what a "normal' eighteen-year-old's is supposed to be like. To her, any kind of sex is casual, and it doesn't matter who she does it with or when, as long as she gets it. At graduation she falls asleep, proving she has little interest for the norms of prizegivings or anything to do with what's accepted by society. At her father's birthday party she is underdressed and is of course moaned at by her hypocritical mother. Here we learn that her parent's friends are just as false as what is accepted by everyone. And then it becomes clear that Susanna has been sleeping with her mother's friend's husband. This drives her to try to commit suicide with aspirin and a bottle of vodka to get it all down. At the E.R. she claims that she doesn't have bones in her wrists anymore, and tells the psychiatrist at home that the bones grew back by the time she got to the hospital. So she is shipped off to a local mental institution and put in the ward for women only. Here she meets a multitude of people who really do have problems: an anorexic, a girl who was burned as a child, a lesbian, a bulimic, and her roommate, a compulsive liar, to top it all off. The ward is run by Nurse Valerie Owens (Whoopi Goldberg), who is very clever, but is unable to become a doctor due to her race. All the nursing staff and the patients are kept marginally sane by Valerie, and she and Susanna have a complex relationship. Susanna is questionably diagnosed with having a Borderline Personality Disorder. Things really get started when the sociopathic run away patient, Lisa (Angelina Jolie), returns to the ward and turns Susanna's world upside down and inside out. She is a force to be reckoned with---she is magnetic, rebellious, doesn't take her meds and is unhealthy for the other patients as she breaks down their self-esteem regularly. Due to the

fact that her last best friend, Jamie, couldn't hack it when she ran away, Lisa befriends Susanna and together they start a world of trouble. Susanna keeps a diary of all her thoughts and feelings, illustrating in it too, and telling the tale of her stay through her daily entries. Her ex fling, Toby (Jared Leto), comes to visit her and she very nearly tries to have sex with him in her room. He tells her he wants them to run away to Canada together so that he doesn't have to go to Vietnam. He tells her she isn't crazy and that the girls in the asylum aren't really her friends. But she refuses to go with him, subconsciously beginning to rely on Lisa. Then she meets the head psychiatrist, Dr. Sonia Wick (Vanessa Redgrave), and claims she is ambivalent, saying it means she doesn't care. But Dr. Wick sees through this mask and decides to have Susanna see her from now on. Afterwards Lisa is taken in to see the doc, but doesn't return and Susanna falls into a depression. Nurse Valerie has had enough and throws her into an ice cold bath to wake her. She tells Susanna, after Susanna attacks her verbally and says that she doesn't know what she doing, that she is a spoiled, lazy little girl who is driving herself crazy! And that if Susanna isn't careful she'll throw her life away on some stupid rebellion. That night Lisa breaks into the ward, wild eyed and crazy, and Susanna runs away with her so they can get to Disney Land. There they hook up with hippies and eventually crash at the bulimic, Daisy's (Brittani Murphy), house after bribing her with promises of meds. But all turns bad when Lisa tells Daisy that she is a freak herself and that this apartment is all a mask to hide what's really happening. She breaks Daisy down, finally saying that Daisy probably likes her father molesting her and that it's probably all she's ever known. The next morning Susanna wakes up and goes for a walk, to escape the sound of Lisa's voice and returns to find Daisy playing a record over and over again and Lisa in the kitchen. She goes up the stairs and finds Daisy has hung herself in the bathroom. Susanna goes back to the asylum without Lisa, (who runs away again) and starts anew with Dr. Wick and her diary. When she is due to leave, Lisa breaks out of her padded cell and steals Susanna's diary. Beneath the ward in the maze of corridors, Lisa reads the diary aloud and tells the

other girls what Susanna thinks of them. Susanna runs away from Lisa when she begins to chase her with a needle filled with a toxic-looking chemical. Susanna breaks her hand while trying to close a sliding metal door on Lisa and then they finally confront each other. Susanna tells Lisa finally that no one cares if she dies because she already is dead and her heart is cold, and that she will start her life again out of this hospital without Lisa and the others. In the morning she is about to leave, but first visits Lisa and talks to her again. Lisa says that she isn't really cold and that she didn't mean to hurt Susanna. When she leaves she says goodbye to all her friends, and gets into the cab saying that being crazy isn't about keeping a secret, it's just about everyone being personified. And by the seventies most of her friends were out of the clinic and leading lives. The girl who was just interrupted by herself and everyone else, is finally recovered from being a supposed "borderline".

REACTION: Susana was sent to Claymoore by her parents choice not hers. This choice depressed her so much. She was unable to stand on her choice. Life is full of choices, we must choose what is best for, and lived what we chose. Moreover, as the story goes, Susana founds her friends inside the ward. Those friends made her stay easy and worthwhile. However, her friends had not have been a good influenced to her. Life is lonely without friends and it is but for sure that friends would influenced us. Let us let them influence us for our betterment and not to make us worst. Another insight Ive learned was that sometimes, we professsionals focused too much on theory but not on reality. And lastly, Ive also realized that psychiatric ward is not only for crazy or mentally ill persons but also for those who are well but still unable to see lifes worth. It is also a place where lifes direction is achieve.

Eastern Samar State University

College of Nursing

Requirement in NCM105

Movie Analysis
(Girl Interrupted)

Submitted by: Engo, Justin John P.

Submitted to: Mrs. Maria Lynne C. Parambita, RN, MAN

Eastern Samar State University

College of Nursing

Requirement in NCM105

Movie Analysis
(Girl Interrupted)

Submitted by: Salazar, Gianel Graze

Submitted to: Mrs. Maria Lynne C. Parambita, RN, MAN

Eastern Samar State University

College of Nursing

Requirement in NCM105

Movie Analysis
(Girl Interrupted)

Submitted by: Cocal, Robertson

Submitted to: Mrs. Maria Lynne C. Parambita, RN, MAN