Essay on Movies about Eating Disorders

In movies, we just usually watch for entertainment. We don’t usually dissect a movie to figure out what the meaning behind everything is. But for this assignment, we had to depict two characters and diagnose them with a mental disorder. The first movie I have chosen is Cruel Intentions where two step-siblings make a bet that ends badly, and I have diagnosed the stepsister Kathryn with antisocial personality disorder. And my second film is To the Bone where Ellen struggles with her eating disorder. While not everyone may recognize or know someone with A mental disorder, it is probable to detect and diagnose these through movie characters who have these symptoms.

The first film I will be talking about is Cruel Intentions the plot of the movie is this girl Annette will be an unsuspecting pawn in Sebastian's and Kathryn's diabolical bet. I have diagnosed Kathryn with antisocial personality disorder. Kathryn likes to take and has no regard for herself or others. This will lead to her downfall in the end. The bet Kathryn and Sebastian make is about Annette and how Sebastian had to seduce Annette and if he successfully doses, he gets to sleep with his stepsister. This was going to be kind of hard for Sebastian because he had a bad reputation for sleeping around with girls and Annette knew it. That was going to be a problem for Sebastian if he could not seduce Annette, he was going to have to give up his fancy car. At his part of the movie, it showed me how little Kathryn cared about others she was willing to risk the virtue of someone else at her own expense and she just did not care.

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Another symptom she shows is being deceitful and gaining pleasure from being mean or just plain awful. This is a reoccurring symptom for her. A scene in the movie where she’s being deceitful is when she uses a girl to hurt them. Kathryn befriended a girl named Cecile. Cecile had taken Kathryn’s boyfriend away and Cecile didn’t know she had stolen her boyfriend. So, Kathryn has to get revenge on Cecile, so she befriends her to gain information to use against her. At one point, Kathryn convinced Cecile that for her to keep her current boyfriend she had to be more sexually experienced for him to keep liking her. So, Kathryn had an idea to ask her stepbrother for help. He then convinced Cecile to do sexual things with him. Cecile was not very smart because now she can hold that over her head.

Kathryn loved to manipulate people. She wanted to manipulate Sebastian into breaking up with Annette after he won the bet and ended up falling in love with Annette. He wanted to date Annette, but Kathryn was not going to let that happen. Kathryn was mad that he was not obsessed with her anymore and that he would not sleep with her now. Kathryn then told Sebastian he had to break up with Annette or she was going to call the headmaster at their school all about his reputation. The headmaster was conveniently Annette’s father. Overall Kathryn was not going to let Sebastian do what he wanted he had to do what she said, and Sebastian loved Annette, but Kathryn was manipulating him to stay away from her.

Kathryn also was good at violating the rights of others and would lack remorse after hurting them. In Cruel Intentions, Cecile had another love interest and Kathryn had to go and ruin it. Cecile was taking music lessons from a guy named Ronald. Cecile and Ronald were hitting it off and writing each other love letters. This was a secret love affair Cecile’s mother could never find out or she would get in trouble. One day Kathryn was asking about Ronald and if Cecile liked him and she was telling her all about how they like each other and how they write each other secret love notes. Cecile thinks she can trust Kathryn and Kathryn then asks if she needs help writing letters back to Ronald and asks for copies of the letters Cecile then tells her where she keeps all the letters hidden from her mother. Kathryn being a great person goes and tells Cecile’s mother where all the letters are and forbids Cecile from seeing Ronald ever again. Kathryn does not feel bad for hurting those two by keeping them apart she has no remorse for telling Cecile’s mother and for violating Cecile’s rights to read the love letters of Ronald and Cecile.

Symptoms of antisocial personality disorder can consist of lying and using people as pawns in life. One way Kathryn used a person as a pawn was when she called Ronald and told him that Sebastian slept with Cecile which was true but then she started to make up lies that Sebastian was hitting her and that just pushed Ronald over the edge. He went out to look for Sebastian to beat him up. This is a game she is playing when things don’t go her way, she is manipulating people into thinking more things have happened that have not happened.

The treatment I have come up with for antisocial personality disorder for Kathryn would be psychotherapy or talk therapy. I would use this treatment because she needs to change her behavior not hurt people and have remorse when she does things to people but manipulates others. The talk therapy will help her talk about all her problems like how she has been to have a different mindset on how she treats others and have respect for herself and others.

The second film I have selected is To the Bone. The movie is about a young girl battling anorexia. Anorexia is an eating disorder and you have a very low weight and fear of gaining weight so you try to do anything to lose any pounds you might have on your body. The plot of the movie is that a young girl Ellen has been through many different recovery programs that never seem to help. Her dysfunctional family tries to help and finds a group home to send her to try and find a solution for her battle. There are so many different symptoms of having anorexia one of the symptoms of having anorexia is from having a low weight and having hair growth on the back, upper body, and forearms. In the movie when the new Psychologist was checking her out, he noticed that she had hair grown on her forearms he was saying how her body is trying to grow hair on her body to try and keep herself warm.

Another symptom many anorexic people do is exercise excessively. They do not like the way they look they can not stand to eat. They will never think they are thin enough no matter how sick they get. Watching the movie, I noticed that people would do sit-ups, run, and walk excessively. When the psychologist was checking her out in the movie, he noticed that she had all kinds of bruises all down her spinal cord that were from doing an excessive amount of sit-ups. In the movie, I think she was filled doing sit-ups at least three times. Ellen was invited to go on an outing with Luke from the house and he wanted to go to dinner, and she was asking if they could run to the restaurant and back. She felt the need to exercise to go somewhere where she was not even going to eat.

Ellen throughout the movie she was covered in clothes that are a symptom of anorexia. By wearing lots of clothes they are trying to hide the fact they have lost so much weight. They often complain of being cold. When you have nobody heat to keep you warm you must bundle up. In the movie, her mom lived in Phoenix which is out in the desert and she still had tonnes of clothes on to keep her warm I thought that was weird how she wore lots of clothes but it was to protect herself from not showing how little she weighed and to keep herself warm.

The night Luke and she went to dinner they walked to the restaurant. When they went to order Ellen said she just wanted soup and Luke told her no, that she had to get food. Luke told her that she could just chew it and spit it out. This is a symptom of her Adopting a rigid meal or eating rituals, like how she is spitting food out after she is chewing it. The waitress comes around and asks her if she does not like it and she just laughs. The reason they just chew, and spit is because they may enjoy the way the food tastes, they just don’t wasn’t to absorb the calories. Ellen did not usually chew and spit just never ate.

It is thought to be a trigger by a combination of biological, environmental, and genetic factors that trigger anorexia. Ellen had a different family growing up. She had an annoying stepmom her dad was barely in the picture. Her mom became a lesbian and moved away from her. Ellen had a Tumbler account where she would draw what she knew so she was drawing pictures of anorexia because she knew what that was like. The pictures were out for everyone to see and some girl killed herself over the pictures of what Ellen was drawing. The parents of the girl who killed herself sent the pictures of her cutting herself to death to Ellen and that was upsetting to her and she thought the girl that killed herself was all her fault.

In the movie, they tried many different therapies. The first one was a group therapy with her whole family that did not work everyone ended up yelling at each other. Another therapy Ellen had had group therapy when she was at the home for people struggling was eating disorders. In that therapy, you had to share a struggle and an accomplishment she was very negative about the whole group therapy. Then another was a one-on-one talk therapy with her psychologist where they just talked about life and what was going on in it. But in the end, she discovered the way out. She was walking in Phoenix in the desert when she passed out and had a self-accusation that if she did not try and help herself, she would never get better and die and that would hurt everyone she loves.

As shown mental disorders can come in many different forms like eating disorders or personality disorders. However, both characters in these films got what was coming to them. Like Kathryn, she had antisocial PD and she was a cruel person, and, in the end, she was all by herself getting caught by everyone for what she did. Unlike Ellen where she had finally lets her annoying stepmom in and lets the people around her, love her help her in the healing process of getting over her eating disorder.