1669507383401596

"All the Bright Places" is a book turned film that tells the story of two teenagers, Finch and Violet, who are struggling mentally. Finch has bipolar disorder and Violet is grieving the death of her sister. The film discusses their disabilities but fails to show the importance of professional help and portrays therapy in a negative light. Finch ultimately commits suicide while Violet is portrayed as being cured. The movie sends harmful messages about mental health and suicide. The book does a better job depicting disability and showing the lack of control Finch has over his mental illness. It is important for authors and directors to be mindful of the impact their portrayal of mental health can have, especially on young audiences. I would like to review All the Bright Places through a critical lens analyzing how this ability is portrayed. All the Bright Places was originally written as a book by Jennifer Niven, but later it was produced as a film that was directed by Brett Haley. I will leave in evaluations from both the book and the film to portray the full picture. All the Bright Places tells the story of two teenagers named Finch and Violet who are struggling mentally. The two teenagers meet each other while Violet is standing on a bridge contemplating jumping. Finch calms her down and we find out that Violet is grieving the death of her sister and she is standing on a bridge where her sister died in a car accident. Finch has bipolar disorder. He goes on a lot of spontaneous runs and trips during his manic episodes, but his depressive episodes are very low. That is when he has extreme suicidal thoughts. Finch has a chemical imbalance that results in an invisible disability, but Violet is grieving the death of her sister, which is an external factor. So she does not have a chemical imbalance, but she is very unhappy for a big portion of this piece. But Finch has had to live with his disability for his entire life. Jay Dolmich created a disability test in his book called The Disability Rhetoric and the main goal of the test is to evaluate how disability is portrayed in media. His test tries to evaluate if the only important element about a character is their disability and is that character with a disability stereotyped. The first question is, is there a character with a disability in the film? All the Bright Places has two characters with invisible disabilities, which is awesome. It is a lot for a film. Except the characters only discuss their disabilities. The main portion of the movie, the characters are trying to fix each other without getting any professional help. Finch meets with his guidance counselor once a week and he mocks his guidance counselor and fights off any aid that guidance counselor could provide. At a point, Finch goes to group therapy and the book describes the members as so drugged up they can't function properly. It leads to the idea that therapy is only for people with severe mental illnesses and being medicated means someone is going to be delusional and cannot live happily. This is a harmful idea because the audience of the book and the movie are teenagers who are impressionable to these ideas and it might lead for them not to reach out for mental health issues. At least, that's what I got from the movie. All the Bright Places also encourages the idea that depending on other people for mental health, health is okay. It is not. It is incredibly dangerous. It puts pressure on people to help you and it puts people in a position where they live in constant fear that if something happens, they're the ones to be blamed. Also the movie involves teenagers who do not know what to say to help someone who is mentally ill. They could give poor advice which can further harm mental health problems. I will group the second and third questions together because they're related. The second question is, is the character still alive at the end of the film? The third question is, if the character is alive, is she or he still disabled in the same way as the beginning of the film? Or has the character been cured? Has her condition been ameliorated or overcome, deteriorated significantly? I will talk about Finch first, then Violet. Finch commits suicide in both the book and the movie. The ending of the movie broke my heart and I wish it portrayed an alternative to show that suicide was not the only option Finch had as someone who has bipolar disorder. While watching the movie, it seemed like there was no way for Finch to stay alive with his mental illness, but there was. There is an alternative where Finch gets professional help and finds a way to manage his mental illness and stays alive. Also, the book and the movie are advertised as uplifting to teenagers, but the ending is tragic. There should have been some sort of trigger warning for the audience because it can lead people who are struggling mentally to relapse into old habits. Violet stayed alive throughout the film, but she was cured. Although she grieved her friend and her romantic partner, Finch, committing suicide, she got a happy ending. Almost too happy of an ending. The movie did not portray the suicide of her friend to really upset her. Instead, they made it seem like Finch left a puzzle for her to piece together. And once she pieced the puzzle together, she was perfectly fine. This led me to the impression of believing that suicide does not impact the people who love you. The only way the director could have portrayed the effect of suicide was through Violet, because Finch did not have a family that really cared about him. Again, the idea that suicide does not affect people is detrimental. When I originally watched the movie and read the books, I thought they were really sad, but I never reflected on the message of the movie and how the movie was portrayed through a lens of disability studies. I think the book did a better job depicting disability because it showed how little control Finch had over his mental illness. Also, the book was written both from the point of view of Finch and Violet, so I was able to see the invisible disabilities of both characters. The movie focused on Violet more than Finch, which is, in my personal opinion, something I did not like. Especially because the movie depicted Finch as an angry teenager and did not portray his invisible disability properly. I think it's important for the directors and the authors to be conscious about what they're putting in the media because it can impact other people's perception of mental health, and especially because the audience is so young, it can really harm them.