Borderline Personality Disorder - Movie Review Example

Borderline Personality Disorder al Affiliation) Single white female This is a movie produced by Columbia pictures in 1992 and the starring was Bridget Fonda and one Jennifer Jason Leigh. The movie shows the flow of events that took place after a woman took in a roommate who showed indicators of a disorder; borderline personality disorder as well as dependent personality disorder. There were also signs of mirroring, fear of abandonment and impulsivity. This roommate had lost a twin sister when she was nine years of age and it seems she was finding it hard to move on from the fact that her sister was dead. She lied to her new roommate, Allison that her twin was born still. In the movie, Hedra is the character that displays signs of borderline personality disorder. It is rather confusing because the signs she displays also are similar the ones one would display due to trauma. This is because she had lost her twin sister and had barely moved on from it. Her behaviors can possibly be due to the trauma but strong indications point towards Borderline Personality Disorder. In the very first scene of the movie, the twins are shown while playing (0:00). When Hedra meets Allison, she tells her that her twin was born still (0:19) but Allison soon realizes that it was a lie because she finds a photo of Hedra and her twin sister then later on she discovers a clipping from the newspaper that reports that one of the twins drowned at the age of 9 (0:53). This is the first indication that Hedra had something to hide from Allison but unfortunately for her, Allison discovered the truth sooner than she had hoped. The first real indications that Hedra might be having a mental illness are showed when her pills are revealed (0:18) and (1:35). Another scene that shows that Hedra has a mental disorder is the point where she talks to her father on the phone and he talks about a doctor (1:07). This gives the audience an idea of what to expect of her as the movie progresses. Looking at the Borderline Personality Disorder criteria; Hedra is indeed involved in a number of physical fights but they do not appear to originate from her showing her temper before. The question that would be lingering in the mind if any professional is if the attempt by Hedra to dress like Allison or even have similar looks are caused by any kind of disturbance she has or if they are because she needed to copy Allison’s style of dressing (0:25, 0:44 & 0:52) to be able to replace her twin sister who died while she was still young and was struggling to get off her mind. This was probably an attempt to undo the death of her sister as the evidence of her keeping the newspaper clippings and photos of them together. When she is face with the prospects of losing her roommate, she reacts with anger and gets into sullen behavior (0:31) that does her no favors with her roommate. The question here however is if this should be equated to her fear of being abandoned by her roommate (Krawitz & Jackson, 2008). It is however important to note that in the Borderline Personality criteria, Hedra showed no signs of chronic feelings of emptiness or even cases of dissociation or paranoia. Her behaviors are more calculated and not impulsive as most people would describe a person with her condition. A perfect example is when she drops the little puppy and lets it die (0:41). It seems a little harsh to describe Hedra’s efforts to maintain her good relationship with Allison as frantic as she does not to that extreme length to keep Allison as her friend. Her behaviors also do not show any signs that it is alternating from extreme ideas in devaluation and idealization even when she interacts with Allison. In the movie, she occasionally criticizes Allison that she is weak and cannot handle much (1:06). There is no instance in which Hedra makes an attempt at taking her own life or even mutilating her body. The instance where she composes a suicide note while taking her pills at the same time. Allison is shown while typing the suicide note into the computer, keen note to miss a single word (1:35). Hedra made the impression that she wanted to kill Allison but wanted to make it look like Allison committed suicide. This does not show that she is mentally unwell because only a person who is mentally sound would think in that manner. One would describe the commission that Hedra had of murders and assaults as a way in which she responded when she felt abandoned but as a matter of fact, she makes an assault on Graham (1:02) even though she had no noticeable intention of killing him and only attacked him after he approached her for killing Sam. This creates some kind of similarity in the two circumstances as he dies (1:13) accidentally when struck by the heel of her stiletto shoes. She obviously does not have the skill to be able to kill someone on purpose. It requires some kind of skill and braveness for someone to set out to kill another person and succeed. There is no indicator that shows that she wanted to kill him as there was no motive from her side at all. However, she kills Allison’s client even though she had no reason to be afraid of him taking Allison from her and locking her out. She might have assaulted him because she felt that he was a threat to Allison and ended up killing him so that she could get him out of her way as she felt threatened by the man. The next question that should be going through one’s mind is whether there is a link between borderline personality disorder and childhood trauma. One should also try to approximate how many times borderline personality disorder occurs in twins. Hedra expressed hostility and jealousy (1:37) towards her roommate Allison and one would wonder if that was her attempting to reduce the pain that she had or if those kinds of feeling are the ones that could have made her to push her twin sister into the water and drown. Killing her sister would have made her to suffer from post traumatic stress disorder or even survivor guilt as her parents told Allison that Hedra never got to forgive herself for what happened to her sister as she survived (1:44). Here again the criteria do not show enough proof that she was having a borderline personality disorder. There is no indication that she had such an experience again, or increased arousal or even avoidance. However, she seems to have displaced all the envy she had for her twin onto her roommate Allison (0:33). The above analysis of the person with borderline personality disorder shows that one should consider that the ability they have on understanding the behavior of another person and their emotions in terms of psychology might not always point towards a mental disorder/ illness. This movie therefore serves as a timely reminder to people on how easy it can be for a person to be vilified through diagnosis. In many occasions, professionals have described patients with this condition as patients they do not like but it is clear now that it is the providers of the treatment and not the recipients who should own this particular problem. The patient here should have had better professional treatment at an early stage of her life because there is too much evidence that points out her illness from an early age (Krawitz & Jackson, 2008). References Krawitz, R., & Jackson, W. (2008). Borderline personality disorder. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Read More