"Grey Gardens"--first a documentary, now an HBO movie--profiles Big and Little Edith Bouvier Beale, mother-and-daughter shut-ins, eccentrics, and Jackie O. cousins. Both a good/hard watch. Lots of strange behaviors. But what, you might ask, are the "diagnostic considerations"? One reasonable-sounding answer re Little Edie:

[A]though it's been written that The New York Times refused to print Edie's rebuttal to a scathing review of Grey Gardens because she was "schizophrenic", one would be hard-pressed to find phenomenology in the film to definitively support this diagnosis. Granted, Edie's odd beliefs, behaviour and appearance are suggestive of schizotypal personality traits. Ultimately, however, the etiology behind Grey Gardens very strange state of affairs remains a mystery.

April 20, 2009
Categories : 
  video