Like Lisa

I was watching “Girl, Interrupted” when I realized the resemblance was striking.  I shuddered at the discovery.  I had to look away from the movie to contemplate the significance of this insight.  I stared at nothing as I counted similarity after similarity until I shook my head to shake out those braindrops.  She was Angelina Jolie’s Lisa. 

As far as I know, the resemblance wasn’t physical.  I have never seen her face.  I know her, but we’ve never met.  We’ve had conversations, but I’ve never heard her voice.  Our knowledge of each other developed over time and wires, not over handshakes and cocktails.  If she is anything as she seems, our paths would never cross in real life.   This girl woman wouldn’t be welcome or even tolerated in any of the social or professional circles I inhabit.

But she had that incredible use of the English language that pulled so many others into her vacuum.  That way of putting words together that impresses writers and would make her English Lit professor nod his head in satisfaction.  She used them like a tool.  Like a weapon.  Vomiting language to control and cajole and harm, maim, or even send the most vulnerable flying over the edge of a dangerously tall precipice.  When the authorities arrived to question her, she would acknowledge absolutely no responsibility.  “We were just talking and over she went.  I did nothing.”

Lisa.  Lisa with her sense of adventure and larger than life ability to seek, garner, and claim more notice than anyone else in the room.  With her sociopathic switch back and forth and back again from your best friend to your most frightening enemy.  With her control over the room, a room full of fellow lunatics, and which seems to give her such enormous pride, and yet they’re just fellow lunatics.   With her ability to make those weak, weak girls obey or fear or laugh or cry depending solely on her malicious intent to get her whatever she wants from moment to moment.  With her dexterity at identifying in a split second what buttons to push, then pushing them over and over and over until. 

The girl woman I knew may not have been a clinical sociopath.  But then, we don’t know if Lisa really was either.  We do suppose that Lisa is highly damaged.  We might consider her upbringing and conclude that she was violently abused.  Or drugged.  Or both. 

But mostly, we don’t think that much about her.  We just laugh at her language.  We appreciate her choice of words.  We watch her with awe at her ability to wield such control over this contained and emotional and unstable environment and breathe a sigh of relief that she is not of the world we inhabit.