Boy Interrupted

As you'd expect from any documentary about a 15 year-old that commits suicide as filmed by his mother, this was brutally depressing. The only part that someone like myself can see as "business as usual" would be the very end, when his older step-brother goes down the laundry list of the kid's suicide note and points out that's how every 15 year-old feels at one time or another, but most don't kill themselves.

Everything else is a complete mystery to me. Obviously I know nothing about being bi-polar, like this kid was. But I do think it's odd that at such a young age (4 or 5) the kid knew so many details about his uncle's suicide. And if a kid at age 9 is strumming his guitar to songs he's written that talk about depression and suicide and death, maybe I take a cue from the ol "why doesn't Sally Struthers put down the camera and give those kids a sandwich?" line and put down my video camera and ask what the hell's he going on about. And if a kid has repeatedly talked about killing himself, so much that school counselors et al are calling the parents about it, maybe I don't let him as a 10 year-old write and direct a play for school that the kids put on wherein a 10 year-old boy kills himself and then is glorified at his funeral via all his friends talking about how much they miss him.

I don't wanna make this a clichéd "his parents blew it" screed because I have no idea. I only watched a 90 minute documentary on these people.  I've heard of teenagers suddenly killing themselves, but I've never known of one whose seemingly coming out of the womb obsessed with killing himself is accompanied along the way by his parents' somewhat bemused detachment. Kid tries to hang himself at age 8? Well, take some pictures of it, of course. Kid from Day 1 is repeating patterns from the uncle, who killed himself at 22? Hey, he's never been held accountable for his actions, whaddya gonna do? (shrug shoulders.) Hey, he's a perfectionist, he has to have things his way  - as a baby on the beach it took them almost an hour to pack up and leave because he was insisting on the towels being folded a certain way, and if they weren't he'd throw therm in the sand and say "again." Yes, that's very normal.

Obviously money plays a part, and they seem to be the typical "Dads away a lot/they go on expensive vacations all the time/they have a family farm upstate that has turned into a mauseleum where the matriarch plays her Rose Kennedy role very well" stoic, old money family. Kid gets on the roof of the school and insists he's gonna jump? Obviously, take him to the most expensive "your kid learns how to water plants and be nice to pets" retreat in the country. My parents, if called and told I was pulling  a stunt like that and had to leave work to come over to the school would've relayed a message to me to jump, since my chances of survival would be greater.

One thing in the end that again highlights the parents' odd detachment is that if my kid was obsessed with suicide and had pulled an "I'm gonna jump off the roof" stunt, I don't think I'd move to a high-rise on the Upper West Side. Sure he can find another way to kill himself, but, as they did throughout the film, the parents act with complete oblivion - apparently when moving the family to the building it didn't cross the father's mind, and yet paradoxically the second he walked into the kid's room and saw he wasn't there the very first thing he thought was "I bet he jumped out the window." There is no shock when he finally kills himself, there's no questioning at all from the parents if they could've done something else, why did it happen etc. The mother was tired, he had the same sickness the uncle did, whaddya gonna do? The lack of self-awareness is pretty stunning. The only thing the mother wonders is what was going through the kid's mind the very moment he decided to actually jump out the window, and there's a small part of your brain that you try to bury very deep that wonders if she's a bit miffed she didn't get those thoughts on film before he jumped (yes I know I'm going to hell for thinking such a thing, even for a moment.)

The final strange detachment of these people in the film is that a year afterwards, they donate some timber to a barn being built at the place that the kid had stayed after his threatening to jump off the roof incident. Cause, you know, they wanna give something back to the place. And of course then they make a big deal about how proud they are after the father burns the kid's name along with 1990-2005 into one of the beams. Very thoughtful on their part. Cause if my kid's bipolar and is at a place with other kids dealing with suicidal depression, I think it'd be awesome if they see this kid's name and asks who he is, and someone can go "oh, he was here. Then he killed himself, and they made a movie about him and named this barn after him."

I'm not saying I think they're bad people, or bad parents, or didn't love the kid. And having a kid who from such an early age obsesses about death and killing himself must wear on a parent something unbelievable. But the repeated, odd, distanced viewing of the kid as if he was simply a character they were filming is strange to see, and you can almost hear them think "that's a wrap, let's go to editing!" after the kid jumps. I don't mean to pile on them too badly; they've gone through something 10x worse that I will ever possibly go through in my life. And if there ever was a "if we can save one person's life" film it might be this one, re: parents responding to depressed children, or those seemingly obsessed with death.

A spellbindingly dark film. About a kid who seemingly had it all  - he was rich, he was charasmatic, everyone liked him, he could've chosen to make films about his own socks for the rest of his life if he wanted, and he was incredibly good-looking. And he killed himself. On a selfish note, it reminds me that as crappy as my life is, for some reason I have the burden/gift of always thinking that somehow, someway, I am always a single moment from turning everything around.