The Silken Tent
My Letter to the World
July 2000

 
July 20, 2000
Thursday

A few nights ago we rented Girl, Interrupted, the Winona Ryder movie made from Susanna Kaysen’s memoir of her eighteen months in a mental hospital when she was in her late teens. What she thought was a weekend of rest and retreat after a half-hearted suicide attempt turned into a long-term involuntary commitment at a private psychiatric facility in
Massachusetts.

I’d read the book several years ago, although I can’t find it among my current holdings. It was very popular with my female students, and very likely it’s still making the rounds. I liked the book, in the sense that I found it absorbing, and I liked Kaysen’s way with words. But it’s not the kind of tale one finds entertaining. And I might not have been very interested in the movie version if it hadn’t been filmed almost entirely in the town I live in.

The production company’s stay in Harrisburg had been chronicled in the paper with a mixture of excitement and disdain. They were here four months, living at a hotel which rents furnished executive suites and using the grounds and buildings of the Harrisburg State Hospital for much of their work. Built in the 1890s as part of the state system of facilities for the insane and feeble-minded (to use the argot of the time), it has the look the
film makers wanted to replicate the private institution (McLean Hospital in Massachusetts) where Kaysen actually stayed.

So part of the sport of watching this movie is looking for familiar places in the backgrounds. The scene where Whoopi Goldberg waits beside a portico for Winona Ryder to be driven up in a taxi is instantly recognizable, as is the arched bridge beside the river where Ryder has a moment of reflection, and a night-time drive toward the lighted capitol dome. The house where the character Daisy goes to live after she is released is in the neighborhood I grew up in, exactly like the one my best friend lived in, so its interior layout was very familiar.

The soda fountain where Ryder and the other patients go for an outing is in a suburb of the city. The film was shot during a glorious fall and mild winter. For this scene they trucked in fake snow and used cotton batting rolled out on the streets and tacked on to the roofs. The sequence took four days to set up and shoot, during which the street and the business were closed. In the movie it takes only a few minutes.

Winona Ryder was reported by the locals to be difficult to work with. (Mostly by one local, an acid-tongued newspaper columnist who looks down her nose at almost everything, especially people she thinks have more money and privilege than she, which is almost everybody on earth.) I wonder how much of the difficulty was due to Ryder’s actual personality and how much might be attributed to her efforts to stay in character.

The character, after all, is in the midst of a major depression. She is “sad” -- confused about who she is and what her life means. She lacks direction and purpose, despite being a child of privilege with seemingly limitless possibilities.

I saw the movie only a few days after I spent some time revisiting a similar period in my own life. A friend doing work for the alumni organization of the school where I taught needed information about the yearbook staff for 1973 and 1974. One might assume that the information would be readily available in the yearbook, but it wasn’t, but the person thought I might know it, since I was advisor to the yearbook during those years.

And that’s why it’s not there. Like Susanna Kaysen, I was in a major depression for much of that time. Although I appear to have functioned better than she, I know that I was that disconnected, that lost to myself. The gaps in the yearbook are emblematic of the emptiness I felt then, of the lostness I still feel when I turn the pages.

A few days ago a magazine at the checkout caught my eye. It’s got John Travolta on the cover and is titled Celebrating the 70s!! It’s put out by the people who put out People, so I know they wouldn’t have done this if they were not certain that there were hordes of people who remember the seventies so fondly they want to celebrate them.

I don’t even want to leaf through it while I wait.

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