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HBO: What is "Thin" about?
Lauren Greenfield: Well, "Thin" is kind of a cinema-vérité look at
the treatment of eating disorders; at life inside
a residential treatment center in Florida.
HBO: In the Thin book, you have an essay along
with your photographs. The essay begins,
"Every girl wants to be thin." Is that really
true?
Lauren Greenfield: I think for almost every girl and woman, in the
United States anyway, that it is an issue. I
think having an eating disorder is a very
extreme pathological form of that. But I think
it's something that's crossed every woman's
mind about whether they have the right body,
whether they need to be thinner. I think that
one of the reasons I was interested in doing
this film is this extreme pathology, and yet it's
something that mainstream women, and
mainstream men, I think can relate to
because it's related to something that's so
prevalent in our culture, which is the
obsession to have the perfect body, which, in
our culture, is defined as thin.
HBO: Who is the 14 year old girl who talks about
"creating a masterpiece"?
Lauren Greenfield: That's Stephanie. She was amazing. She was
very young - 14 - which is the youngest you
can be at Renfrew. And she was a ballet
dancer. She just had this kind of youth and
beauty that's very appealing, and yet she is
so, so sad. She wasn't ready to get better.
And I think that that's a really important
thing that you see in treatment, is that you
can get better, and some people do get better;
one doctor told me "around 50 percent." But
you do have to want to get better.
HBO: Her ballet teacher told her she needed to lose
weight?
Lauren Greenfield: Yes. And I think sometimes these coaches
and teachers and parents don't know what
they are triggering in these women's minds,
these comments kind of stay there forever.
HBO: Is it true there are "pro-anorexia Web sites"?
Lauren Greenfield: Yes. And some of these women say they have
been there to learn tips. They get shut down
periodically because they are obviously really
unhealthy. Even in treatment - like prison -
people can learn other tips. And so, it is
something that people learn from their
friends, learn from the community.
HBO: I am surprised at the number of pictures of
women who have cut themselves.
Lauren Greenfield: There seems to be a big overlap between
women who self-harm by cutting themselves,
and women who self-harm by starving
themselves. And, to me, it was an example of
the kind of primal place of the body...and the
way girls were using their body to express
their pain. They both function in similar ways
in that they are both coping mechanisms, and
they both kind of "numb out their pain," and
make them "not feel," or "feel in a different
way." But I was really struck by that overlap,
and kind of what that says about how girls
use their bodies.
HBO: How did you manage to get these women to let
you into their lives?
Lauren Greenfield: Being accepted by these women at Renfrew
was a continual process, and something that
we were constantly working on the whole time
we were there. When I made the film, I had a
very small crew - all female. And we all had to
get to know these women, and gain their
trust. And it was a constant process.
HBO: You have been carefully observing women and
the way they think about their bodies, and the
way they present themselves for a long time in
your work. Has this film changed the way you
look at people? When you see women now
who are thin, do you notice how thin they are?
Lauren Greenfield: Mm-hmm. I definitely do notice. It definitely
does change the way I look at people on the
street, in the sense that I now look for signs of
eating disorders. I mean, for me, when I
heard that "one in seven women under 25
have had an eating disorder," that was a
shocking statistic for me.
HBO: And that's higher than the incidents of breast
cancer.
Lauren Greenfield: It's the deadliest of all psychiatric disorders.
And it definitely made me think, when I see
someone who was really thin. Before I might
have thought maybe that was just their
genetic nature. Now, it makes me question
whether they are like that naturally or
whether they are suffering from an eating
disorder. I also know a little bit more some of
the signs.
The other thing that I learned from being at
Renfrew is that eating disorders come in all
shapes and sizes. That a lot of these women
are not painfully thin; that they have perfectly
normal looking bodies; and yet they might be
suffering from bulimia, or they might be
throwing up 10, 12 times a day...and at risk
of a heart attack at any moment. And so I
think when people see that, they realize how
eating disorders are really so much more in
our midst and we just don't realize it.
The eating disorder can also help stop their
bodies from developing and stop them from
growing up in a way that they are afraid of.
But it also allows them to have some control
over their body, after they have lost control.
And for a lot of them, it's all they have. So
there is a real fear - if they got better, if they
got recovery - what would they have? Who
would they be? All they have had for so long
was the eating disorder.
HBO: One of the most sympathetic persons in the
film is Alisa, a mother who graduates from
Renfrew, and you are with her on that day.
You are there in the moment when she begins
to fall apart. She goes home and purges; she
forces herself to throw up the dinner that she
had eaten. And you documented that...but as
a person, you must have wanted to stop and
say, "Don't do this."
Lauren Greenfield: When I was at Renfrew, there were a lot of
times where you see women maybe doing
something they're not supposed to do, like
when Polly purges, or when Alisa purges. And
as a person, you do want to stop that, or you
don't want them to do it. And yet, I had to
respect where I was, and the professionals
that were there; that they are in a place where
there is a whole team of professionals who are
working on helping them stop these
behaviors.
My job was really to show what this illness is
all about. And so, when I am filming a scene
like that, I don't feel torn between intervening
and saying, you know, "Stop that right now,"
or calling a member of the staff and "telling on
them." I feel like they are in the support
structure that is made for helping them. And
that what I really need to do is show
something that hasn't been seen a lot before,
because it is something that's very hard to
film.
HBO: You said there's something "unfathomable"
about eating disorders. What did you mean by
that?
Lauren Greenfield: I feel like one of the things about an eating
disorder that makes it hard to understand by
family members and friends and by the
culture is that it looks so similar to what we
see every day, which is this kind of obsessive
dieting that many, many people participate in.
And I think sometimes it gets trivialized as an
illness. And that's what I hope people really
get out of the film and the book is how serious
it is. And the reason I say it's "unfathomable"
is because it makes no sense. I mean, within
the framework of the values of our culture, it
makes sense to want to have a better body, or
want to be in a smaller size.
But what you see with the women at Renfrew,
and the women who are suffering with a true
eating disorder, is that they are committing a
form of suicide. And that for many, it has
nothing to do with the way their body looks or
vanity; it really has to do with control, and it's
really a coping mechanism for whatever they
are going through. And that people may come
to an eating disorder for a lot of different
reasons, and may have it because of many
different things in their lives. But for all of
them, it functions as a kind of coping
mechanism; allowing them to numb out to
their feelings and to the things that they don't
want to think about.
It's really impossible to understand unless
you are inside the illness. And that's why I
really wanted to spend a long time at Renfrew,
and film it cinema-vérité style, so that you
really could kind of understand what is so
hard to understand.
As a photographer, one of the reasons I was
interested in making the film was, it's a kind
of unique situation where the mental illness
has a physical manifestation, and recovery
has a physical manifestation, because as they
recover, they gain weight if their illness is
anorexia. If it's bulimia, maybe it expresses
itself in different ways. But you do see the
body shape change as recovery happens. And
so for me, that was a really unique
opportunity, and one of the things that
intrigued me about making a film about this.
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