channeling Winona Ryder

Within the last week we've watched Reality Bites and Girl, Interrupted, the latter viewing having occurred last night and left us sighing in disappointment, myself moreso considering my intimate involvement with Kaysen's original text and the subject matter charging it. One of my three final papers was spent dissecting my own close reading of this memoir. My only purpose it now seems was to identify the voice(s) of madwomen and declare whether or not they can be heard, if they are translatable and how closely their speech resonates as beastly or monstrous. All conclusions led back to the author herself, a feminine body and writing so utterly transformed by the regulatory and violent nature of diagnosis; and I found that if any hard-fast answers were to be had that they were elusive and beyond the scope of this one essay. I would be leaving out more than what I could include. The space allowed for a cataloguing of voices but necessarily blocked a discussion of their timbre, significance beyond the singular event of embodiment and individual use, their weakness or strength in numbers, or what any of this might mean for my own burgeoning theories about eating disorders and women and literature and writing and desire and Benjamin, Foucault, Butler, Beauvoir, Derrida, maybe even Caruth, absolutely Rushdie.

But after all I'm still sitting here thinking of Winona Ryder and just how fucking cute she is when she slouches or when she's in a striped sailor's tee with longsleeves and pink lips all pouty and suggestive. Winona's one of those women born to wear a boy cut and exude a sex that only seems innocent or accessible. I look at her and forget her semi-horrible performances because, well, her lips. Because her lips, because her doe-eyes. Coz. Even when her portrayal of a woman with borderline and suicidal and eating-disordered tendencies falls so short of the mark that I cringe to think how it only perpetuates the long held stock-character that is the frail, unknowing Madwoman - sick, crazy, inconsequential - even then I do not judge her as harshly as I should for misrepresenting me and for not doing something greater, more revolutionary, with that role. I do and I don't.

Maybe I'm just content with knowing that I'll be the one to succeed where she and so many others have foundered.

we are the walrus or something like that