Convergences and divergences between the narrative, cinematographic, pictorial and clinical languages in Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen and James Mangold

Abstract

Las memorias de Susanna Kaysen y la película de James Mangold, Girl, Interrupted, dialogan y discrepan entre sí en el uso de lenguajes narrativos, pictóricos, clínicos y cinematográficos, que dibujan desde la intimidad psíquica de una joven hasta la universalidad del colectivo femenino en el marco estadounidense de los míticos años sesenta bajo la mirada retrospectiva de los noventa. Mediante la experiencia coral y sororal de la mujer como texto escrito y audiovisual, capturarán el daguerrotipo de una chica burguesa, pero marginada, cuyo desarrollo es interrumpido por la psiquiatría y la familia: instituciones patriarcales que le diagnostican un trastorno nervioso y encierran en un sanatorio para corregir conductas contraculturales: pulsiones suicidas y sexualesSusanna Kaysen’s memoirs and James Mangold’s film, Girl, Interrupted, converge and diverge from each other, due to their different use of narrative, pictorial, clinical and cinematographic languages to retrospectively depict from the intimacy of a girl’s psyche to the universality of women’s situation in the United States during the mythical 1960’s. Understanding the female experience as a polyphonic, sororal text —both written and audiovisual, they capture the daguerreotype of a bourgeois girl, yet an outcast, whose physical and psychological development is interrupted by patriarchal institutions: family and psychiatry, which (mis)diagnose her insanity, and lock her up in an asylum, in order to correct countercultural behaviors: her suicidal and sexual pulse