Girl, Interrupted (1999)

directed by James Mangold

Jackie Domenus

I bought Girl, Interrupted on DVD when I was eighteen. I had made a list of films I had never seen—movies that came out during my youth that I was too young to watch or understand at the time. I was commuting back and forth to my college classes every day. Bored and depressed, I had yet to lift the veil of my repression to identify my queerness. Like any good emo, closeted lesbian would, I took weekly trips to Tunes, a record store in my hometown with an extensive collection of used CDs and DVDs. Browsing the rows of plastic cases, I’d consult my list, find four or five of the titles, each marked down to $2 or $3, and take them home. When I handed my money to the cashier and walked out of the store with Girl, Interrupted, I didn’t know how dangerously close it would bring me to confronting my sexuality, while simultaneously warning me against it.

When Angelina Jolie first appears in Girl, Interrupted as Lisa, it’s impossible to look away. Her hair—thin and stringy—is dyed blonde with short, choppy bangs. Her lips are puckered and full as she blows fake kisses, greeting everyone at Claymoore Psychiatric Hospital upon her return. She’s all curse words and smirks, wild-eyed and emaciated. She’s “batshit crazy,” and extremely, extremely hot.

Susanna Kaysen, played by a young Winona Ryder, seems to develop the same intrigue within this first moment as well. She watches Lisa intently over her journal. She, too, finds it impossible to look away.

Susanna falls quickly for Lisa’s antics; it’s hard not to. Alongside her hard-ass demeanor, Lisa showcases a genuine sense of care over the rest of the women. One moment she’s poking at their insecurities the way an older sister would, the next she’s leading them through the abandoned halls of the facility to an old-fashioned, one lane bowling alley so they can experience some semblance of fun. On a group trip to the ice cream parlor, Lisa sticks up for Susanna when she’s approached by judgy family friends. The two bond over these moments, becoming close friends, loyal confidants. But more than that, Susanna seems to develop an infatuation for Lisa, one that grows more and more difficult to distinguish from romantic love.

*

While young adult me identified with Susanna because of our shared depression and cynical views of the world, it’s easier now to pinpoint deeper similarities. I, too, became infatuated with new friends. I cared deeply about any girl I considered a “best friend.” I would do anything for them—buy them thoughtful gifts, get them home safely when they drank at parties, write them notes about how much they meant to me. I was loyal to a fault sometimes, allowing them to step all over me like a trusty old doormat. It was laughably obvious I treated my friendships more like relationships, but I didn’t realize it at the time.

*

The catch, in a tale that almost sets itself up to be a “looney-bin” lesbian love story, is that Lisa is a classic example of a sociopath. Just as often as she bands the women together in the first half of the film, she disbands them in the second. It just so happens that the moment in the movie where Lisa turns from protagonist to antagonist, is directly aligned with the moment she and Susanna share a deeper intimacy than ever before.

When the two get caught drugging a nurse so they can stay up all night singing “Downtown” and flirting with a guard, Lisa gets moved to a different ward. Susanna begins acting out wildly, as if Lisa has been her drug and she is facing withdrawal symptoms. She shifts from manic to depressed and back again screaming “Where’s Lisa?!” like she can’t breathe, won’t survive without her. Whether or not she’s under a sociopathic spell, Susanna’s obsession for Lisa is palpable.

So when Lisa returns in the middle of the night to sneak them both out, Susanna, out of loyalty and passion, recklessly follows.

They hitchhike on the side of the road and catch a ride from a van full of hippies, initiating the film’s three-second sapphic wet dream. In the backseat of the van, the two lock eyes with each other and smirk. Susanna holds Lisa’s gaze for a moment, before leaning in to kiss her on the lips. She lingers there briefly, their lips touching, before pulling away and smiling bashfully. Lisa maintains her coy grin.

When I first watched the scene, I knew something inside me had secretly been hoping for it to happen. The bond they shared, the loyalty they were building, it all reminded me of my own closest friendships. But if I wanted these two women to kiss, what did that say about me, about my desires? I hadn’t yet confronted the possibility I might be anything other than “straight.” Any time the thought arose, I quickly shook it free before it could attach itself to my brain. I hadn’t kissed any girls outside of drunken truth or dare, and I certainly hadn’t dated any. But as I watched Susanna kiss Lisa in the van, I identified a feeling—a fluttering in my stomach, slowly moving downward—that I had, on several similar occasions, found myself trying to ignore.

But just as soon as we’re baited into the possibility of a queer relationship between Susanna and Lisa, the darkest parts of Lisa are revealed. After the moment of affection, Lisa spirals out of control and an evil version of her prevails. They visit ex-Claymoore patient, Daisy (Brittany Murphy), in her new apartment and Lisa berates her, relentlessly jabbing at Daisy’s insecurities and deepest secrets. Susanna screams at her to stop, before locking herself alone in another room to sleep. The following morning, Susanna discovers Daisy’s body, hanging from the upstairs bathroom with slit wrists. She falls to the floor screaming and crying.

“Oh what an idiot!” Lisa jokes, upon seeing the body. She then searches Daisy’s pockets for cash.

Susanna quickly realizes the woman she has been infatuated with is too mean for her, “too crazy.” She flees.

The kiss, which two scenes ago seemed to stem from genuine love and attraction, becomes nothing more than a turning point from “good” to “evil.” When this shift in Lisa occurs, the movie asks us to accept the kiss not as intimacy, but as a result of mental illness. Susanna must only be kissing Lisa because of her “promiscuity,” a marker for borderline personality disorder as detailed in her therapy file. Lisa must only be kissing her back because she’s an evil, manipulative sociopath. We are forced to see the sapphic relationship as a side effect of the characters’ disorders, leaving no room for the queerness I was subconsciously projecting.

*

The concept of lesbian hookup as plot climax is present in other movies that turned me on in my late teens. In 2010’s Black Swan, the stupidly hot sex scene between main character Nina (Natalie Portman) and Lily (Mila Kunis) is the impetus for Nina’s downfall. The morning after Lily goes down on her, Nina realizes she has hallucinated the whole hookup, thus beginning her spiral into “becoming” the Black Swan. Her hallucinations worsen, growing violent and disturbing. She watches in the mirror as her eyes turn blood red, her skin becomes goose flesh, feathers begin to prickle out of the scratches on her back, her legs break unnaturally, mirroring the legs of a swan. Her climax during the lesbian hookup is meant to represent the climax of the film. We are meant to reason, after the fact, that such sex can’t happen, it can only be fantasized by a person with severe psychological issues.

The 2009 horror cult classic Jennifer’s Body hints at a sapphic relationship between high school cheerleader Jennifer (Megan Fox) and her timid, “good girl” best friend Needy (Amanda Seyfried). Their sexual tension comes to a head in the midst of Jennifer’s killing spree, when Needy goes to sleep one night to find Jennifer already in her bed. The two best friends proceed to have what can only be described as the sexiest lesbian makeout scene in all of film history, until Needy pulls away demanding to know what’s going on. Jennifer tells her the truth about the night she was demonically possessed in a virgin sacrifice gone wrong. We come to find the hookup is nothing but a result of Jennifer’s transformation into a succubus and as per the classic “bury your gays” trope, Needy must find a way to kill Jennifer in order to stop her evil.

“Watch these lesbian sex scenes and be turned on,” these films communicated to a younger me. “Then, recognize their danger.”

*

Even as Girl, Interrupted comes to its problematic close, as an adult, I continue to find ways my eighteen-year-old self undoubtedly connected with Susanna. In almost all of my closest friendships, I seemed to take on a sidekick role, a shadow to much wilder, louder, more outgoing girls—girls who bullied, partied, and put their meltdowns on public display. I was always the level-headed one, suppressing feelings and keeping secrets of course, but never letting them surface, never coming fully “undone.” At the end of Girl, Interrupted, in a problematic representation of mental illness, Susanna “gets better,” and thus is freed from Claymoore. Lisa, it seems, will be there forever.

*

There is a running joke those closest to me often revisit—that I have a tendency to be attracted to the “crazy” girls. Girls who are outspoken, who seek attention wherever they can get it, who have a truckload of baggage. But more interesting to me than the impact of these films on my sexuality, is their impact on my repression of it.

In conversations about sexuality, many of my straight, cis friends and family members approach my past with the assumption that I always knew I was queer and just pretended I wasn’t. But my repression was far deeper than that. Although I knew I felt a bodily reaction at the sight of two girls kissing, I refused to analyze the implications of those feelings. Stigmatized so heavily by society, I completely ruled out the possibility of queerness. I was so quick to deny those feelings to myself, I never had the opportunity to rationalize they might be real. While people tend to automatically assume I was “in the closet,” I was never even able to unlock the closet door and get in it.

What I learned from films like Girl, Interrupted was that to be queer was to be “crazy,” mentally ill, deranged. Or that such queerness could only exist within the confines of those labels, deemed derogatory by society. There is no doubt such implications furthered my repression. Much like my real life, each time a film hinted at two female best friends becoming lovers, it was just as quick to police it, to mark it as dangerous. Had such films’ representation been different, perhaps I could have learned that’s how many queer relationships bloom. Perhaps I wouldn’t have been so terrified to call my feelings what they were: gay.

*

In a perfect ending, Lisa and Susanna would’ve fallen in love and left Claymoore to seek real, valuable help for sociopathy and borderline personality disorder elsewhere. Their love would change the meaning of the title. As it is, the title asks us to consider what happens when we disrupt our notion of what a “girl” is supposed to be: well-behaved, proper, sane. But if the kiss in the van had meant something more, the title would ask us to disrupt our notion of gender as it pertains to sexuality, not in the sense of Susanna’s promiscuity, but in her capability to fall in love with another woman, or at the very least, to find her attractive and intriguing enough to follow her into the darkness of night and kiss her on the mouth. This interruption of “girl” would propose fluidity. It would take the line between friendship and relationship queer women so often walk, and slice it open.

Jackie Domenus (she/they) is a queer writer and a graduate of the 2021 Tin House Winter Workshop. Their essays have appeared in The Normal School, Pidgeonholes, Foglifter Journal, and elsewhere. She serves as a publishing assistant at Guernica Magazine. You can find her on Twitter @jackiedwrites.