PROZAC NATION
YackYack Nation
In a 1902 essay on stagecraft, Freud warned that depicting psychiatric disorders too clinically could destroy aesthetic pleasure: viewers would instead be repelled by the neurotic character's symptoms, or merely long for a cure. Prozac Nation, the latest entry in the Hollywood rehab sweepstakes, is a dispiriting case in point. The film is based on Elizabeth Wurtzel's autobiography of several years ago, which recounted her precipitous decline from promising Harvard student/rock critic for Rolling Stone, to psychological basket case.
Prozac Nation presents Wurtzel (Christina Ricci) as a Kernbergian compost of distasteful borderline symptomatology, affective instability, and substance abuse. According to the usual rehab received truth, Wurzel's messy distress is ascribed to divorced parents whose dysfunctionality rivals the House of Atreus. Her histrionic mother's child rearing practise seems to have been tutored by Gregory Bateson. Jessica Lange has as much business playing the part of a harpy yenta as Sir John Gielgud would impersonating Tevya the Milkman. Ricci's Wurtzel is either petulant or raving. When she's not yacking on about her self-loathing, she's droning on about her scornful contempt for humanity at large. Wurtzel's treatment by a monumentally passive "Dr. Sheridan" (Ann Heche as a weird ice-queen) consists of ominous Freudian silences; dim-witted Rogerian response; bromides one could have gotten over the backyard fence; and Lalaland psychopharmacology -- prozac administered disastrously late in the game, unaccompanied by mood stabilizers. With heavy irony, Wurtzel's voiceover intimates that it's moot whether Sheridan's ministrations significantly helped, or merely wore her down to a dubious semblence of normality.
Sitting through Prozac Nation certainly duplicates the weariness which therapeutic engagement with such patients can induce, sans any sense of the complex causes of their suffering, nor of the substantive gains which skilful treatment can achieve. The terminal crawl notes that Wurtzel went on to write her best seller while physicians were scribbling several hundred thousand prescriptions yearly for prozac. A portentously inferred connection is clear as mud. The point may be that if we handed out fewer scrips, fewer stinkers like this movie would be made.
One can only hope.