Feelings on Nell

David Guptill

Apr 28, 2000 02:47 AM

Terry Converse

I have watched Nell before, but this is the first time that I have analyzed what I had watched. After watching Nell for the second tim, I have noticed many similarities to other plays such as The Golden Age, Ik, M. Butterfly, etc. This movie uses a lot of symbolism. In the beginning, you see Nell standing by herself in the middle of a lake in the middle of the night. Her standing alone in the middle of the lake symbolizes her feelings of being alone. It is night and she takes off her clothes. Being naked symbolizes that she has no other people around her and that she has never learned the humility that you learn when you are in society. Since she was born in the woods and raised by her mother, she was never able to see another person who has had different views other than what Nell had learned from her mother or her twin sister. Nell is most associated witht he play called the Golden Age. The Golden Age is about a family that is found living out in the wild in Australia that had not been subjected yet to civilization. Nell is a movie that is directly associated with this play because Nell had never been subjected to society also. Another way that the Golden Age is related to Nell is that when the people are first found, the doctors believe that the people are not able to take care of themselves even though they had previously lived by themselves in the wild for many years prior. Also, the doctors believe that the subjects are all mentally disturbed when they notice that the wild people speak in a different language when compared to any other culture that they know of. In The Golden Age, the lone survivor of their previous family happens to be a woman named Bethsheb. Bethsheb speaks her own language and acts out in her own way. The way that they act is not socially acceptable in the civilization that they now live in. Naturally, everyone in the new civilization believes that she is mentally disturbed so she is then locked up in an insane asylem. There, she is left alone in her ways to collect her own thoughts instead of being involved with people that actually care about her well being. Nell is very similar to the character of Bethsheb because she is also the lone survivor of her family that had grown up outside of society. She did have a twin sister that died and her mother died after multiple strokes. Bethsheb became alone after all of her relatives died of natural causes and of mental diseases. Nell was also associated with Bethsheb's family because doctors in civilization thought that they knew what the best thing for Nell was because they thought that Nell did not know herself what was best for her. Nell was also sent to a mental ward where she was supposed to stay. The reason that she was forced to stay in the mental ward was because the doctors thought that she would not be able to handle herself in the wild alone. One of the differences between the two stories was that Nell was forced out of where she wanted to be because of the media attention that she was getting and the doctors did not want to see her turned into some kind of circus attraction. When in the mental ward, she behaved in similar ways to Bethsheb, though she was more secluded into herself. When she entered the ward, she was totally frightened of her new surroundings and she didn't know how to react to all of it at once. Bethsheb became more animated in her wild like ways, while Nell just kept to herself and didn't react to anyone. Nell and The Golden Age did have another similarity involved. In both stories, each person had a doctor that fought for their ways because they believed that what the fellow doctors were doing to the patients was wrong. In the Golden Age, the father of Peter was the doctor. He tried desparately to end what was happening to the people who were greatly neglected of their needs while in their insane wards. Unfortunately, all the pain that William felt for the people caused him to become an alcoholic and eventually resulted in him commiting suicide. In Nell, the character played by Liam Neilson was a doctor that was fighting to keep Nell from becoming a circus attraction for the media and from being locked up in an insane ward. In Nell, Nielson was the first person to understand what Nell was trying to tell him, and he was also the person who tried desparately to keep Nell safe. Liam didn't commit suicide at the end of the story, but after the trial that decided that Nell was a competant person, he did feel sorry for all the the trouble that came their way that he was trying to avoid. There are so many similarities between the Golden Age and Nell, but their are also similarities between Nell and M. Butterfly. The similarity is that in M. Butterfly, Galimard sees Song and immediately believes that he knows everything about Song. This is associated with Nell because in Nell, the doctors took one look at a wild girl that acted differently when compared to anything that they had previously seen and they suddenly decided that they knew everything about Nell and what was the best for her. Galimard thought he knew everything about Song, but in reality he did not understand many of the the aspects of Song that he thought he did. Galimard thought that he knew what was best for Song, but the whole time, Song knew what was going on and that Galimard just had a preconceived idea about Song that as totally wrong. The doctors had a preconceived idea about a wild woman and immediatly thought that they knew what Nell was all about. This preconceived idea that the doctors had of Nell was probably the reason that they took such quick action in trying to get Nell into the mental ward to properly take care of her best interests, such as trying to teach her to talk english instead of jibberish and to find out wha mental problem she must have had in order for Nell not to be able to speak proper english. Not once did it seem like the doctors tried to understand that the reason that she talked different was because she was taught to talk by a woman who was paralyzed on the left side of her face. This resulted in some consenants being dropped and only certain newly slurred words being used to describe the what the world was like around them. The Ik is associated with Nell because of the fact that it was a group of people named the Ik that people could not understand. Nell was a person that people could not understand. Both of their ways of life seemed very odd to people living in civilization. Master Harold and the Boys is associated with Nell because in the play, Harold is in his own world when he treats Willie as somewhat of an equal and a father figure, but when he has the final confrontation with Willie, Harold is then immediatly brought back to the world that was around him. That world was a world where the white man was better than the black man. In Nell, she was forced into a world that she was not accustomed to. She did not really fully understand what was happening in the world outside of where she grew up. Dream on Monkey Mountain is associated with Nell by the fact that Makak was living in a dream world the whole time that he was in reality inside of a jail cell. At the end of the play, Makak wakes up from his dream state and he is still present in the jail cell. In a couple of ways, this play is related to the movie Nell. In the movie, Nell begins the story by being in her home surroundings of the forest, and after she has been deemed to be able to live by herself and competant by the courts, she ends the movie by once again being in the forest that she grew up in. Also, in Dream on Monkey Mountain, most of the play is about a man who is in a dream state where he sees life the way that he wants to see it. In Nell, she constantly sees her dead twin sister. In many areas of the movie, she believes in her mind that her day dream of seeing her twin sister is real. She sees her sister in the forest, in her mirror, and even in the mental facility. I think she sees the twin sister in the mental facility as a way of crying out to the supernatural for a way to offer comfort to her surroundings so she imagines that she sees her twin sitting inside the mental facility with her. There are many similarities between the movie Nell and certain aspects seen in other plays. True, the movie Nell is probably the most related to the play The Golden Age, but similarities found in Nell are also present in Dream on Monkey Mountain, M. Butterfly, Ik, and even Harold and the Boys. I believe that if you look hard enough, you can see anything.