Prozac Nation Book Free Pdf
Gualberto Estrada
Prozac Nation is a 2001 psychological drama film directed by Erik Skjoldbjrg, starring Christina Ricci, Jason Biggs, Anne Heche, Michelle Williams, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, and Jessica Lange. It is based on Elizabeth Wurtzel's 1994 memoir of the same name, which describes Wurtzel's experiences with atypical depression.[3] The title is a reference to Prozac, the brand name of an antidepressant she was prescribed.
Elizabeth "Lizzie" Wurtzel is a 19-year-old accepted into Harvard with a scholarship in journalism. She has been raised by her divorced mother since she was two years old and has not seen her father at all in the last four years. Despite his lack of interest and involvement, Lizzie still misses her father, a contributing factor to her depression. Through a series of flashbacks, it is clear that there was a total communication breakdown between Lizzie's parents, which is soon reflected in Lizzie's own relationship with her mother.
Soon after arriving at Harvard, Lizzie decides to lose her virginity to an older student, Noah. Lizzie proceeds to alienate Noah by throwing a loss-of-virginity party immediately afterwards with the help of her roommate Ruby. Although she and Lizzie begin as best friends, Ruby soon becomes another casualty of Lizzie's instability. Although Lizzie's article for the local music column in The Harvard Crimson is presented an award by Rolling Stone early into the semester, Lizzie soon finds herself unable to write, stuck in a vicious cycle with substance abuse. She begins a relationship with another student, Rafe, and visits his home in Texas. Upon discovering that his sister is severely autistic, Lizzie accuses Rafe of being 'a creepy voyeur' who gets off on witnessing the pain of others. Rafe breaks up with her.
Lizzie's promising literary career is at risk, as is her mental and physical health. Her mother sends her to expensive psychiatric sessions towards which her father, pleading poverty, implacably refuses to contribute anything at all. After a long period of treatment under medication and a suicidal gesture, Lizzie stabilizes and begins to adjust to her life.
Prozac Nation had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 8, 2001 (three days before the September 11 attacks); distribution rights were acquired by Miramax Films with the intent of giving the film a wider theatrical release. Months of subsequent test screenings and re-edits of the film never led to a broad commercial release.[1] It was released in Norway, Skjoldbjrg's native country, on August 22, 2003. The film was never given a theatrical release in the United States, where it instead premiered on the Starz! channel on March 19, 2005,[4][5] and was released on DVD on July 5, 2005.[6]
It's a truthful depiction of depression. And I think the reason Miramax has struggled is the fact that it doesn't have a traditional dramatic structure, in terms of a clear, unqualified ending. Look at the book: Elizabeth is very clear that Prozac has helped her, but you're left with a dilemma, because perhaps she no longer knows who she is. We didn't want to come down heavily on one side or the other. People who've experienced depression like that aspect of the film, but a lot of people don't like it. Miramax certainly don't seem to like it.[7]
I probably discovered the movie adaptation of Elizabeth Wurtzel's autobiography, Prozac Nation, in a lethargic haze. I was depressed at the time, and likely just googled "good movies about depression." There are too many movies about depression that aren't really about depression. Instead, it's put down as a quirky side effect, a "trait" designed to make the character more pitiful or abject. Prozac Nation is not one of those movies.
The film is a hell ride. It's a lethal combination of beauty, brains, and narcissism masquerading as a human grenade. Based on Wurtzel's Generation X best seller, it describes depression with unparalleled accuracy and prose sharper than a razor blade. While this is unfortunately one of those annoying cases in which the book is better than its adaptation, don't let that stop you from watching. Five minutes in, you'll realize you can't look away. It's like witnessing the most bewitching car crash you can fathom.
Jessica Lange is in it, as the official mascot for bad, chain-smoking moms everywhere. Christina Ricci is in it, in the role of reckless Harvard-journalism student Lizzie. She gets into the college on a full-ride scholarship, after writing a tell-all account of her parent's divorce for Seventeen magazine. She fabricates an imagined relationship with her deadbeat dad to please its readership. Then she becomes a self-described "beautiful literary freak." What follows is sex, drugs, and Lou Reed concert reviews for her school paper, the Harvard Crimson. However, Lizzie is one of those death-or-glory people, one whose efforts end up Pyrrhic at best. Predictably, all her relationships implode because she's an angry person suffering from a very real mental illness. She yanks her hair, screams at friends. Her face is streaked with tears when her peers aren't accommodating enough or try to offer unwanted help or simply exist near her. When they don't succumb to her outbursts, her eruptions only intensify. She's asking for help but rebuffs its advances.
Ricci narrates the film in her seductive vocal fry, and while most voiceovers can be grating, this is her character's salvation. It's like Wednesday Addams 2.0. Paired with Wurtzel's potent words, the effect is intoxicating: "Hemingway has his classic moment in The Sun Also Rises when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt. All he can say is, 'Gradually, then suddenly.' That's how depression hits. You wake up one morning, afraid that you're gonna live." Everything she says could be a tattoo, but it's her sarcastic aphorisms that make her so relatable.
The only likely reason Ricci lost out on an Oscar nomination that year for her lung-stabbing performance is because the film was never released in the States. Due to some executive-level bullshit, the distributor (Miramax) pawned it off on the premium cable channel Starz four years later. It was released in the director's home country of Norway to an audience of tens. That brought about the ironic New York Times headline, "For Author of 'Prozac Nation,' Delayed Film Is a Downer."
In comparison to the multitude of depressing films out there, Prozac Nation is wildly entertaining, but only if you get off on watching people self-destruct. (See also: Sarah Silverman's I Smile Back). When she claims her best friend Ruby (young Michelle Williams) doesn't know what it's like to truly love someone, Lizzie finally gets what's coming to her. A verbal bitch slap. Ruby, choking back tears, retorts with one of the best on-screen truth servings of all time, saying, "I'm not crying because you're mean. I'm crying because I can't imagine how incredibly painful it must be to be you."
At this point in the movie, it's impossible not to hate Lizzie. She's the devil incarnate, catering only to her own whims and edging her friends and lovers out. It forces you to consider the worst: that people might eventually give up on you. Maybe not now, but getting out of bed in the morning is something only you can do for yourself. It's sobering. The other thing I noticed was how high-functioning her character was. If the process of watching and re-watching this movie was some fucked-up journey of self-diagnosis, if I really were depressed, then I had found what I was looking for. It was time to get help before I became a human sinkhole.
One day after I'd inhaled the movie and it left me gasping for air, I found myself standing in my university library, thumbing through titles like How to Think Straight About Psychology. I chuckled at the idea of the school relegating a popular work of fiction like Prozac Nation to a library pregnant with ancient, academic textbooks. I checked it out, huffed and sobbed through the chapters. I re-watched the film, drinking in the dialogue. I made a decision to call my parents and told them that I wasn't happy.
I was, like, totally depressed. Then I got totally wasted. Then I called this boy, and I was like, "I'm so depressed. Wanna fuck?" Then I hung out in Adams House with the other cool, depressed Lit majors. Then I OD'd and my friends had to take me to Stillman. Then I started taking Prozac and things were OK.
That's Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America, A Memoir in a nutshell--a better place for it, in fact, than in the bookstores or on your shelf. Marketed as an object lesson in depression among the young, privileged, and talented, this book by '89 grad Elizabeth Wurtzel is more useful as an object lesson in how much the New York publishing industry sucks. How did this chick get a book contract in the first place? Why was she allowed to write such crap? (For example: "When I was with Abel, I felt like ice cream in a bowl.") Why have the forces of marketing aimed this jeremiad straight at us (the young, privileged, and talented), apparently thinking it's just the tonic we need?
In Prozac Nation's press packet we encounter the following description of the author: "Witty, intelligent, and hip (nose ring, tatoo [sic]), Elizabeth Wurtzel is definitely not a Gen-X slacker." Beyond the silly assertion of nose rings and tattoos as indexes of hipness, this statement reveals what is meant as the book's selling point: that it's not just losers without jobs who are depressed, that the world is such a tough place that it would depress anyone, even a cool Harvard student. Hey, I buy it. I've been depressed too, and with many of the same symptoms as Wurtzel's (though I certainly haven't capitalized on it as effectively as she has). However, that doesn't mean I want to listen to her self-indulgent whining, or that it will help me come to terms with my own life.
Although the title suggests that the book is a sociological study of a culture of depression among America's non-slacker youth, it is simply the tedious and poorly written story of Wurtzel's melodramatic life, warts and all (actually, all warts). At one point she tells us that her mouth has become tired and chapped from giving too many blow jobs; we learn all about her dysfunctional family; and we hear about her Bacchanalian exploits in the Adams House of yore. The book is written as a straight narrative, interspersed with italicized, stream-of-consciousness peeks into Wurtzel's head ("Why hasn't Rafe called he's disappearing he's leaving me like everyone else he promised he wouldn't but he is I know it oh my God I want to die right here right now..."). All of the chapters, with their catchy, rock 'n' roll titles like "Drinking in Dallas" and "Woke up this Morning Afraid I Was Gonna Live," begin with epigraphs from cultural figures from Edie Brickell to Sylvia Plath to Einstein.
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