If "Girl, Interrupted" was a film meant to offer some kind of comfort or answer to those struggling and going through a lost time of mental illness or personal distress, then I think the project failed miserably, and was not the kind of thing I'd recommend to anyone. I'd sooner take my distressed child or relative to a dog-fight then subject them to what was essentially a two-hour "Nine Inch Nails" record that feels like the sound of womanly claws being screeched over a chalkboard because it had no ability to stand back and look at itself with any kind of irony or distance, which is the ultimate empowerment in my book.

Here was a movie that took itself entirely too seriously, that set out to make "all the right moves" and "to please all the right people" with what they thought mental illness seen through the lens of tumult in the 1960's should be, with an eye on winning an Academy Award, but in the end could not muster "the ooomph" to be anything more than a squiggling pile of late '90s movie-making darkness, like black shards of broken glass.

Some people out there equate seriousness with significance, but that means nothing when your overall credibility is stretched thin because the product is stilted and geeky. Winona Ryder looks nothing like the authoress, Susana Kaysen who herself looks like puke swirled around in a blender and vomited out onto the printed page with her slim, vague memoir. Just because you put on a solemn pose and question "who is insane, me or the system?" does not mean that you're not seriously troubled and need to be put away because your very appearance discredits you.

It's the same kind of thinking that would put Patti Smith or Robert Mapplethorpe up on the altar of secular-humanism as the ultimate counterculture existential authority because you're too dumb to realize that life grows toward the sun, not twisted and inverted upon itself like a blackened tree stump that defies the life instinct. It may be part of the ecosystem, but you have the sense "to leave it alone" like a dead skunk. . . . .

The problem with the so-called "patients" in the movie was that they weren't credible enough; they looked more like well-scrubbed, attractive young Hollywood actresses than the types you actually see washed up in the sluice gates of "the system" with the sorrow and blood of human misery.

In the movie, every moment was stuffed with dialogue of significance but so much of that world is the total abundance of time, the empty spaces between speech, when patients are smoking or vegetating or pop off with outrageous things or get stressed out at each other. Not every moment is an opportunity for a dramatic soliloquy when they lash out like leopards and throw meal trays.

You would behold their unusual appearance, an unnatural tension in the air with the energy they give off, the strangeness in their eyes that are either glazed or glittery, and what you will notice is that the level of perception and intelligence is low-- deadened by medicine as they cease to take care of themselves. What you will understand also, is that there is nothing at all glamorous or delightful or romantic about this woeful, misbegotten, unfortunate slime of humanity and how there is essentially no transference between "the normal world" and their world because the gulf between the strata is too large.

Personally, I have never checked into one of these places. . . . . voluntarily or involuntarily. I think back, in my childhood, if I did suffer from bad anxiety and depression I was more afraid of the stigma of "getting help" and what that would say about me than the bleak wasteland I was suffering through, that seemed to go on forever and ever.

Growing up, you never wanted to be associated with "the weird kids"-- those with Attention Deficit Disorder, or learning disabilities, or those who were always called out of the room to go down to "Special Ed" to work on their reading and writing skills with big, fat pencils. Or those who had to leave class to go to the nurse's office "to take their medicine", or stared on dull and heavy-lidded with the faint smell of urine. Dulled senses, dulled perceptions-- dark, secret problems all of us were afraid were contagious.

There were always those kids we didn't want to sit next to on the bus, or the girl we'd cringe at if anyone remotely insinuated that we were romantically involved, the fear of their warm, moist hand that probably had snot in it. We wanted to be around the sharp, popular kids who didn't have these problems, who never had these problems.

Who knows what happened to these boys and girls, the bottom rung of the social chain? I don't want to speculate, but one time I visited an acquaintance in a mental ward at a hospital, and had one of the most jarring experiences of my life.

The patients sensed activity at the gate, where they were locked in, and all started walking in our direction-- even retarded people waddling our way like a goose, all wanting a ticket to the normal world where they would never go. They were hopeless, helpless, damned to their fate, those who had never made an effort because they were incapable of making an effort-- invalids, cripples, the lost and defeated carrying on like "The Three Stooges" without a plot or a happy ending, falling into deeper and deeper levels of degradation each and every day.

But life on the outside isn't much better, collecting a check so my medicine can be paid for. . . . . someone who is too distressed to join normal society but too high-functioning to make his home amongst the rest of them who had long since given up.

In the neighborhood you had crack dealers, welfare chiselers, the hobbled elderly, a mute Russian immigrant with a long gray beard we called "Rasputin" who simply walked around in overalls without a shirt on underneath-- his bony arms protruding at his sides in malnourishment. A sign was nailed up right across from my friend's door-- "GET CRABS HERE", a white silhouette of a crustacean waving a claw.

One time there was a scorched mattress laying out on the sidewalk, amid a litter of broken glass and some used condoms. Negro children lit firecrackers and danced like imps.

It was the weeping heaviness of life, as the heavyset Balkan landladies ran their south St. Louis apartment buildings and scraped the bottom tiers of society in pursuit of the American dream. Houses, cars, better schools, importing "Uncle Pavel" from war-torn lands. Whatever the scrimping virtues of the Bosnian-American spirit, my buddy had to get out with darting eyes as a brick went through his neighbors' window over a game of cards on the patio.

If "the natives" were bad, his friends were worse.

They kept "sponging" on him, you see. The needy-- borrowing money or looking for cigarettes drawn individually like a bony finger from his shrinking pack like the withered, grasping, outstretched hands of Indian beggars in the streets of Calcutta. The chief moocher in all of this was Raṃn, who sat in his cramped, filthy apartment with a shameless Mexican grin and his Anglo wife, 15 years older, who stank of piss in her adult diapers on the floral-print couch as Pat Robertson on "The 700 Club" promised miracles with a twinkling eye. This character called constantly and came by like a pest until my friend put his foot down and incurred gibbering death-threats, about to be cooked up into a cannibalistic stew before he slammed the door.

The south-side was dying. The "brain drain", the "money drain", bleeding out to other places in a sickly trickle until all that was left was a coagulated crust of marginal souls, if not the perenially unsophisticated shuffling around the streets like zombies from "Night of the Living Dead" with little or no brain matter as they scrounged through slime.

Feminine beauty was all but stamped out by bad breeding-- unless it was imported from a foreign land and working in an immigrant-run grocery store, selling liquor and lotto tickets to the old and spastic and toothless slapping at the counter like the walking undead. All attempts at "enlightenment" would fall flat with the indigenous population because their brains had fused shut and it was all about getting jolts of caffeine-- like rats with electrodes clipped to their pulsing gray matter pulling a lever for a reward as smoke rose from their skulls. The aggregate of human accomplishment down here didn't amount to much. Just the swishing of dirty water on the riverbank, a tin can rolling back and forth in the ebbing tides as a hobo baited an empty hook and fished, silently calling on the name of "Lady Luck".

Life seemed right simplified. . . . . for a couple years before, I was a skittery young adolescent who felt mighty insecure about things-- about the nature of "hip", and the secret language of "irony", and the poise of the banal-- the carefree, bored, and contemptuous that made me feel so neurotic and inferior. You would look at a girl like Winona on the right and be absolutely terrified because she had such a searing gaze, because she was young, pissed off, and angry about something, like this was somebody on to "the cosmic truth" I should follow. As a kid, I would follow her and her friends from a distance like an Indian scout, listen to them speak with haughty, dismissive irony, watch them light a cigarette as they leaned against the wall, looking for "hint or sign" of higher meaning like a hunter on the trail of rabbit spoor.

But it would appear hopelessly elusive, and grotesquely petty. Gradually, you'd have a huge collection of this rabbit spoor, towering taller than you are, until you were led to conclude that it was just a big pile of SHIT and that you had been "had".

Here was this actress who was in love with "the pose"-- such a worthless pose, a meaningless pose, a futile pose, that in the end proves to be absolutely worthless next to what goes on in my life each and every day. It's like the UFC brawler, Kimbo Slice rising up from homelessness in the streets-- a man so bad, he'll beat your ass and fuck yo' momma. When what you feel is the scrape of your bare knuckles on the pavement on a cold, rainy night and the hunger in your belly as it all comes down in sheets. Let those eat shit who don't know any better, who will never know any better, milling around with the undifferentiated slime of humanity. Let suckers fall for "pyramid schemes" that play on man's common greed before the whole thing collapses like a pile of tin cans.

Let the spoiled waste away with abundance while you stay lean and strong.

In this boxing ring of life, skulls made pulpy with liberalism don't last. . . . . they "splorch" in like rotten pumpkins. It's the same kind of reasoning that thinks you can get away with shoplifting $5600 of pricey designer goods from Saks Fifth Avenue and be found carrying eight different types of painkillers in your purse. And then never admit that what you did was wrong, too ashamed to admit that what you did was even a mistake, running away from the press and the public that demands an answer. You don't need sympathy, you need your ass kicked. You need to come down here to St. Louis and see what life really is, where those who trade honor for comfort ultimately get neither.

And the truth is, you're never really "ruined" so long as you have the will to "make a comeback" and leave those whose fate you cannot benefit from sharing to their own. You can give advice, you can tell them what to do, but if they don't follow the narrow, rocky road than that's their own damn fault. You can't save everybody. . . . . only the best.

"You want a-nuther song? Well I ain't plain' one mutherfuckin' note until someone comes up here and puts sum money in my god-damned tip-jar! You know I only came here for one purpose. . . . . to take yor fuckin' cash! Why, I could make more profit puttin' out my meth-head neighbor's asshole and ringin' a bell, hollerin' 'Man for sale! Man for sale!'

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

(Rheeee of Crickets)

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("I heard that, Missy!")