Have you ever told a lie and enjoyed it? Have you consciously tried to harm yourself knowing well what the after-effects would be? Have you created a make believe world to keep yourself from the insane reality?
Forgive my memory, I am trying to replicate a few questions Susanna (Winona Ryder) asks as the film, Girl Interrupted, opens. Through the film, you travel with Susanna into the asylum, feeling like a misfit. And soon enough, along with Susanna you start thinking that these girls are normal. They have their quirks but what’s wrong with that?
She has Lisa (Angelina Jolie) to keep her cosy in the walls of the asylum, far far away from the world. Just as you begin to realise Lisa’s game, you begin to realise that we’re always surrounded by numerous Lisa’s in our own lives. We resist change, criticise it, only to get cosy in its shadow. We deny ourselves another change, we deny knowing that it is not right to get comfortable. Few of us recognise Lisa’s game and still consciously make a change and confront the Lisa.
The truth is all of us are insane. But we’re hypocrites. This hypocrisy protects us from being labelled ‘unstable’. We unleash our insanities in the safety of solitude. We lean obsessively, eat compulsively, exercise compulsively, get abusive on ourselves and out in the open world, we are just normal, smiling as if there’s not a spot of worry in our lives.
But then there are those innocent victims of the society, who accept and live with their insanity, they aren’t scared of being insane to the outside world. They do what they want, and live how they want and we, we hypocrites label them ‘unstable’, segregate them and send them away. Their minds are highly receptive and they can sense that they’re unwanted for being truthful and they further degenerate. They lose control of their sensibility and become a magnified version of themselves. And to us, they are just MAD, mental, insane, crazy…
I am almost comfortable with my madness, but are you?
PS: This post is an after effect of intense conversations with the brother, 100 repeats of Comfortably Numb on iTunes, some walks along five gardens and a late night viewing of the movie, Girl Interrupted. Excuse the lows of the compulsivewriter!
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