“One of the things that you do, I think, or what I do, I think, to avoid things that are really too painful to confront, is to block them out.” Beatrice Perry, perfectly appointed and speaking carefully, is talking about suicide, specifically, the suicide of her son Scott. She poses what seems an unanswerable question: “What happened to make your son so miserable that he doesn’t want to be there anymore?”
Beatrice appears a couple of times in Boy Interrupted. Made by Scott’s older brother, Hart, and his wife Dana, the documentary doesn’t press Beatrice or anyone else to confront that pain. But it doesn’t exactly avoid the subject either, which affects the family in a complicated way. Not only did Scott kill himself in 1971, but so did his nephew, Evan Scott Perry, in 2005. As Hart and Dana sort through their feelings about these devastating losses, they also use the film to memorialize Evan, presenting him as a good, decent, if troubled kid, always loved and still baffling.
“You have to take that intense sweetness and sensitivity,” Dana says, “And just completely upend it into the darkest, scariest… scary, scary is all I can say. Scary person, scary soul, the darkest of souls.” The film offers visual correlatives for Dana’s memories, juxtaposing snapshots of the sweet child on the beach, smiling and kissing his parents, with those of the scary one.
Perhaps the most frightening of these shows Evan acting out his suicide-by-hanging fantasy for his mother. “I always felt so guilty about taking those pictures,” she says now, “But I was so tired of explaining to people that my son wanted to kill himself. I just needed some kind of proof that this was really happening, because it was so impossible to believe.”
This was, Boy Interrupted insists, Evan’s unsolvable puzzle, that a boy so young could suffer depression so profound. It presents his short history – he was just 15 when he jumped out of his bedroom window in New York City – through home movies and snapshots, as well as interviews with teachers, friends, and his half-brother Nicholas Kopple-Perry, which recount the boy’s warmth and intelligence, as well as “episodes”.
“The best way I can put it is he lacked emotional shock absorbers,” Nick says, “And because of that, [he] would react to situations you and I would see as insignificant in a really, really big way.” Karen Riposo, who worked with Evan in a performing arts school, remembers that he was “obsessed with dying”. She says he told her, “I’d feel bad for you and my parents, but I wouldn’t mind because I won’t feel anything.” She remembers responding, “Evan, that’s just weird talk.”
Such talk led to visits with psychiatrist Ladd Spiegel, who diagnosed the five-year-old as bipolar and put him on Prozac. For Boy Interrupted, Spiegel reads from his notes while Hart and Dana listen: “Strong family history of depression on both sides,” he says (though no one mentions Dana’s background again). “Should I say this part? Should I skip this?” Encouraged from off-screen, he continues, “Parental uncle committed suicide at age 21.”
As the film has already revealed Scott’s end, the point here is not the information itself but the relationships among the parents and their son’s doctor. Spiegel remains in frame, his fragmented, hesitant version of Evan’s story illustrating just how hard it was to fathom him: “He was such a baby,” Spiegel says, “such a kind of pink, kind of baby kid, that kind of visual contrast between the demons inside him and that kind of sweet look.”
This contrast shapes the film, which tends to juxtapose shots of the nice, childlike Evan with shots of the dark Evan. “When Evan went through a mood change,” Dana says over illustrative photos, “His whole body changed, his attitude changed, his ability to communicate changed, and you literally saw it in his face. He became unreachable.” She adds, “He definitely acted like a teenager at a very young age,” as you see a sullen seven-year-old dismissing a recent event with “It sucked” as he walks away from the camera.
Still, Dana says, he expressed himself in “lots of songs” that were “very sophisticated”. She goes on, “He did not have a Britney Spears phase.” Instead, “He went straight to Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and Nirvana.” Here again, Boy Interrupted offers an alarming contrast: while nine-year-old Evan plays guitar and sings about cutting himself in the neck (“I’m depressed, nothing less, curious, furious, / So somebody kill me please”), his younger brother Michael (who is not interviewed fro the film), plays on the floor beside him.
The little boy rolls around with a bucket, tipping in and out of the scene. Finally, he walks into the frame, standing directly in front of Evan, and leans his body into him. Evan completes his song, barely acknowledging Michael’s presence.
This image suggests what the Perrys were up against, that no matter how they tried to distract, intervene or communicate with Evan, he was set on a course that had nothing to do with them. Though this course is briefly altered – Evan is successfully treated at a Connecticut facility with lithium and therapy, develops friendships, attracts girls (“Though,” Dana says, “He’s never really interested in them”), and appears in footage smiling and joking – Boy Interrupted makes the case that it is, in the end, apparently inevitable.
To underscore this idea, the film turns again to Scott’s story. While his girlfriend Martine remembers he described his condition as “being in a hole”, Beatrice insists again on the inscrutable surface he presented: “Scott didn’t seem like an unhappy person.” For her, the lesson learned is simple and enduringly painful: “All it tells you is, there’s so much more to know about people, you know, than you can ever uncover.”
Indeed, she embodies precisely that unknown. Reminded by her son that she was the one who found his body, she looks surprised. “I don’t remember doing that,” she says slowly, “What’s more, I think I can get along without memory. I don’t remember it all.”
Even as Boy Interrupted documents her forgetting, it works against the very process, at least to an extent. Even as it laments what can’t be seen or understood, it also exposes the trouble that comes from forgetting, repressing, and failing to see. If its memories of Evan are selective, its point is resonant: no matter our own fears, “scary souls” must be confronted, and in some profound way, embraced.