Girl Interrupted

Typically in a movie the title has something to do with the main character. Girl Interrupted does not stand out to have one apparent and single meaning. This title does relate to Susanna, but in more ways than one. Her suicide attempt seems to be the main interruption in her life. It forces her to stop what she is doing and recover. Then, every person she meets within the ward causes an interruption in her life. Suddenly she has a woman watching her shaving. She now has girl friends instead of her usual provocative boy friends. She is forced to admit things to herself that she had previously been hiding and keeping away from the surface. I also think that the title Girl Interrupted pertains to Lisa. Until the very end of the movie, she was set in her ways. She runs away, but always comes back. She has blocked emotion from her life because numerous times she has witnessed the girls around her fail to recover. This is when Susanna goes from being the Girl Interrupted to the interrupter. She causes Lisa to think about an outside world and want to get better. In this way, I think that every girl at the ward has been impacted and Susanna has successfully interrupted everyone's lives.
My first thought after watching this movie was to try to relate it to other things we have been going over in class. Of course it could relate to feminism and how women have the power to do recover and do not always have to follow a man in life. But on a less obvious level, the concept of time in both Girl Interrupted and The Yellow Wallpaper seem to be skewed. In the short story, it is never actually clear if the narrator is writing as things are happening or after they have already occurred. Things seem to go back and forth and from the present to the past. Images like the wallpaper already being ripped up question if that was her or if it had been like that already. You are never sure which point in time you are experiencing. In the movie, Susanna has flashbacks of memories which were either important or memorable for some reason. They do not seem controlled, because she usually looks scared when she recovers back to the present state. This back and forth sequence of events in Girl Interrupted reminded me of the writing style of The Yellow Wallpaper, and the lack of a grasp on time.