Not Prozac Nation—Harvard Nation!
Last night I watched the long-delayed film "Prozac Nation" on Starz (how I hate to write those five letters), and this morning I read Dana Steven's
review of it in
Slate. I liked the movie less than Stevens did, but I agree with her that the movie's fundamental problem is that protagonist Elizabeth Wurtzel is wholly unlikeable.
(Full disclosure: I know Elizabeth and don't find her wholly unlikeable at all. Yes, she has a penchant for saying things that get her in trouble, but she's also a very talented writer; I published an excerpt from her book,
Bitch, in
George because it was the most insightful essay about Hillary Clinton I'd ever read.)
Part of the movie's problem is that the impact of Wurtzel's collegiate environment is absent. There's no sense of why being at Harvard was such an important part of her story. (There are some shots of the campus in the film, but most of it is set at some other bucolic university.)
An important element of
Prozac Nation was the contrast of feeling like a train wreck at a place filled with overachievers....a feeling that many Harvard students can still understand.
