Girl Interrupted Music Soundtrack

[Carmel Useted]

Theuse of soundtrack throughout a film is absolutely vital, especially in terms of character development and furthering the plot. The films respective uses of songs as transitions and background music allowed the viewer to notice things they would not normally see. These two movies made brilliant use of their soundtracks and deliberately picked songs and sounds that would help the viewer understand Suzanna and Veronica and how different they were in thought and action from the characters and societies surrounding them.

The lush green summer was dying all around us: air chilled, sky grey, leaves turning. Fall is a time for dying; we are used to this, unfazed by the annual tradition. It is temporary, we tell ourselves as we unpack our SAD lamps. Relief will come. Life will begin again in six months, give or take. I pushed back the knowledge that the only reason we were sitting outside in the cold to begin with was because we have spent the past 20 months swallowed whole by the constant presence of death, treading water with no island to rest in sight.

not substack giving me a rude \u201Cpost too long for email\u201D warning like i don\u2019t know i\u2019m incapable of brevity!!! i\u2019ll just say this: this is a long read about a lot of things but mostly about aimee mann, whose songs are gifts, and her new album. if you are unfamiliar with her work (no judgment but\u2026), there are lots of links. if you are nice to me i will send you the starter kit playlist i made for my mom. :) yes, i should have been working on the book i am contractually obligated to write instead of this. but i sometimes do not get to choose what my brain decides to fixate upon and be moved by and feel compelled to write about, so please read this so i do not regret the detour! if you are my editor or agent please disregard the above everything is great okay thanks sorry love you bye!!!!

Aimee Mann writes sad songs. A wild generalization, of course, a vast, broad strokes oversimplification of work that is far more complex\u2014but I\u2019ll stop short of saying a gross misunderstanding. Because Aimee Mann writes songs about people, and all their complications. Hers is a catalog of songs in the key of the human condition: meditations on the patterns of behavior we\u2019ve inherited; the ways in which we move through life, tactfully or not; the forced limitations of our own stupid brains and bodies; our fuck ups and failures and fumblings.

And the human condition, when looked at honestly, is inherently sad. You are born into this world and forced to endure traumas big and small, rejections and regrets. People will lie, people will leave, people will hurt you. Sometimes you\u2019ll be the one doing the hurting. The moments of beauty come fast and are few and fleeting. Justice often only exists in theory; awful things will happen to good people, and spoils will go to those who don\u2019t deserve them. As you get older, you\u2019ll have to contend with how little is really black and white, how easy it is for it all to fade out frustratingly to grey matter, lines crossed so many times you don\u2019t even know where the lines are anymore. We are all bruised and broken; some of us just more so than others. Put simply, in Mann\u2019s own words: \u201CIt is hard to be a person.\u201D

Late at night I lie in bed on my phone, opening and closing apps and opening them again, Instagram, then Twitter, then TikTok, one after the other, refreshing feeds long after I told myself I was actually going to go to sleep. Scrolling in the dark, I can\u2019t escape mental illness, both as a concept, and, in a way, my own. This is what I get for priming algorithms to feed me a diet of memes about overanalyzing and dissociating, ADHD and anxiety, trauma and spiraling and self-loathing I consume while obliterating my sleep cycle. Some of it is helpful, but most of it is funny, garish and crude in a way that feels suited to reflect the ugly wrinkles of our brains.

When I was 20 years old and starving myself, running nearly 50 miles a week, loading myself up on extracurriculars and trying to keep straight A\u2019s with a double major, I would have been terminally mortified if anyone knew I had near-crippling anxiety or an eating disorder. (Everyone knew.) Something wrong? With me? Thank you, but no. Nothing that a little hyper-achievement couldn\u2019t fix. I thought if I just worked hard enough to be better, make myself perfect\u2014a fool\u2019s endeavor\u2014I\u2019d be fine. If people saw who I really am, I would think, stuck in an unending shame spiral. If they realized I\u2019ve just been fooling them the entire time. If they had any idea how stupid and pathetic and gross I really am. I\u2019d just melt out of my skin. Ten years later, I crack jokes online about my perpetual anxieties, about being in therapy, about, well, how hard it is to be a person. Dinners with friends inevitably become roundtable discussions on trauma by the second round of drinks. I write something like this for strangers to read and judge. I am, more or less, a bit more skillful at handling\u2014and far more interested in\u2014the vulnerable, less than perfect parts of reality than I once was. I like to think this growth is a reflection of a lot of work. But if I\u2019m being honest, a lot of it is probably because of the internet.

For those of us who are extremely online, the subject of mental health has moved out from behind closed doors\u2014way out, fodder for casual conversation with friends and strangers alike. I mean, it\u2019s 2021. Is there anyone out there not going through each day with a constant low level hum of anxiety? While many good things can be said about the internet\u2019s role in breaking down stigmas and opening up conversations, there are downsides to flattening a personal and multifaceted experience, to conflating an appropriate reaction to the dumpster fire state of the world with genuine mental illness. Mental health struggles shouldn\u2019t be an internet subculture, or something to hang your entire personality upon, like your astrological sign or Myers-Briggs type. And critics are fair to point out that the rise of #TherapyTikTok essentially makes unregulated social platforms WebMD 2.0, an easy but perhaps inaccurate resource to self-diagnose an affliction we hope will serve as a concrete explanation\u2014or excuse\u2014for our every behavior. But where does the line fall between how much blame can be placed on social media and how much is the fault of society\u2019s long history of silence? After all, when you keep a lid on a conversation for so long, it\u2019s inevitable that it will boil over.

Much has been said about Aimee Mann as an uncompromising and brave musical trailblazer, one who flipped a defiant middle finger to major label mistreatment and went independent at the dawn of the mp3 era. But what goes somewhat unspoken is her artistic prescience. Mann has been writing fearlessly honest, wry songs that don\u2019t just skim the surface of human dysfunction, but dive headfirst into it far longer than it\u2019s been popular enough to be appreciated in meme form. For decades, women like Mann were more turned into punchlines by the proverbial \u201Csad songs\u201D label than made cool girls of the internet. In an era where women reclaimed the label and leaned in to the point that it\u2019s now almost a tired trope, it can be easily forgotten that Mann, and many other women\u2014not just a small select few\u2014had to walk before Mitski or Phoebe or Lucy could run.

There\u2019s a classic meme that resurfaces every so often that, at its core, is about deflecting\u2014or relieving, depending on how you want to look at it\u2014despair with humor. \u201CMe w/ tears in my eyes: Time to make a joke,\u201D a letterboard reads. It\u2019s all too relatable, all too real. Whomst among us has not nearly touched the third rail of our emotions and immediately searched for a funny story to tell about it? Laughter isn\u2019t always joy; it\u2019s very often discomfort. Good humor is based in truth; a lot of humor is used as a denial of it.

Aimee Mann often writes sad songs, but they are not maudlin or self-serious. In the span of three minutes, she examines her characters with the insight of a veteran therapist and the studied, yet playful, craft of an adept songwriter who can kick the wind out of you with just the turn of a few carefully composed words. Her songs are unsparing regarding the brutality of life, but never without the sense that she or her characters have made it out to the other side. With scars, maybe, but still intact. There are songs that are sad and songs that are about sad subjects, but they are not always same thing. Most people are not morose all the time, and humor is one hell of a coping mechanism. You know this, I\u2019m sure. I think Aimee Mann knows this, too.1

Life can be sad and hard and messy, but all that inevitably makes it funny sometimes. I mean, it has to be funny. How else would we survive it if it wasn\u2019t? Mann\u2019s oeuvre has its fair share of sad songs that are just plain sad: songs that are bleak (has anyone ever written a better depiction of crippling anxiety and hopelessness than \u201CIt\u2019s Not\u201D?), songs that are achingly lonely, songs that are full of shame spirals, self-loathing, and self-destruction. But she has just as many of the about-something-sad-but-not-sad-themselves variety, biting and sardonic, the \u201Cme with tears in my eyes: time to make a joke\u201D of sad songs. They are songs about our hapless codependency in toxic relationships, songs about our directionless flailing failing to meet the high expectations we set for ourselves, songs about situations that are just so astonishingly bad that the only thing you can do is wittily twist the knife into those who put you in them.2 \u201CWhat\u2019s more fun,\u201D she sings on Charmer\u2019s3 intervention banger \u201CSoon Enough,\u201D tongue firmly in cheek, \u201Cthan other people\u2019s hell?\u201D

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