Girl Interrupted, Society Protected

The Postmodern movement criticizes the liberal search for absolute truth and homogeneous society. Bataille's “Heterology” concludes that most societies distinguish between qualities that are beneficial to the society and qualities that are not, favoring the former. Foucalt’s “Discipline and Punish” proposes that power is enforced throughout society by means of coercion and also by means of civil institutions such as schools, hospitals, churches, and even families. Derrida's “Differance” argues that because all things contain traces of all that they are not, there is no absolute. All these essays cause us to question social norms and authority. Together, they can be used to analyze a scene from a movie that may be telling much more than the story of a misguided teenage girl.

In Girl, Interrupted, Susana Kaysen is sent to Claymoore Mental Institution after having an affair with the husband of a family friend, although she seems completely in control her behaviors. Nonetheless, after a brief interview, her doctor sentences her to two years in the institution where she meets various different personalities that undermine social norms and authority. This scene from the movie demonstrates the way that hospitals function to protect and enforce social norms regardless of its effects on its subjects.




First, it is important that Susan Kaysen is a sane person who has been mislabeled as insane. Through her eyes, viewers are shown that the system of judging patients is fallible, perhaps reflecting that authority itself is fallible. We can deconstruct authority using Derrida’s “Differance” to show that authority is not authority and is not infallible. Furthermore, we can take the actions of both Susan and Lisa to support what Foucalt argues in “Discipline and Punish,” which is the idea that “power and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations” (550). All of the patients in the hospital are aware of their living conditions and their unjust treatment. Lisa and Susan, however, are unwilling to succumb to their submissive positions and refuse to take their medication despite supervision. Lisa seems to be the most powerful patient in the ward, and she states to the other girls, “You weak people, you’re all weak fucking people, you’re victims, you people are fucking sick.” She is a strong woman and she fights sedation and submission as often as possible, which is why she escapes the asylum frequently. Lisa is a heterological thinker and she questions the role of the hospital as an enforcer of homogeneous society.