“The Adderall Diaries”: Victims and Villains - Grant Hiskes

Picture from the New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/15/movies/the-adderall-diaries-review.html

The only two words it seems Stephen Elliott could describe his childhood with one point were “Fucked up”. After seeing his mother die while he was still a little kid, Stephen went through a world of hurt, sniffin’ paint, shootin’ up, and some encounters with his father that Stephen would consider abusive. His father did not want to care for him, shook him around, turned him upside down, and drove him down a yearslong drug-laced rampage. His father was responsible for the scars up and down his wrists left behind from shards of class. His father was the ‘villain’ to Stephen’s victim in the story Stephen ONCE told himself.

But - there was no abuse, the neglect was a misunderstanding, and the premise of Stephen’s soon-to-be-released memoir has vanished. Neil Elliott calls his son out publicly for telling a phony narrative (the abuse and neglect did not actually happen), and puts a chink in the armor Stephen has built around himself through his past author experience. The young, edgy author is left humiliated, but Stephen then does the unpredictable and uses it as a basis for his next story.

It’s weird to tell a story about yourself that essentially says, ‘I couldn’t accurately tell ya what was really goin’ on for half my life’, so there must be a deeper meaning that the film’s’ director, Pamela Romanowsky, is trying to get at. 

Let’s look at the anomaly in the characters’ relationships. The only character Stephen (James Franco) seems to gravitate towards is Lana Edmond (Amber Heard). So, I think we should look towards Lana to help understand what changed Stephen and allows him to make amends with his father by the end of the movie. Like Stephen, Lana seems to have a bit of a past herself. She tells of what seems to be an abusive, alcoholic stepfather. While bathing together, Lana lifts her leg from the bubbly bathtub, the soap sticks to scar tissues, indicating past self-mutilation. However, the two see their pasts in very different lights. Lana says her scars aren’t reminders of suffering but “souvenirs”, and insists that she is her own person now and is in no way, shape, or form a result of what has happened to her in the past. Unlike Stephen, Lana refuses to lay down the ‘victim’ card. This romantic relationship takes a turn in the sexually erotic scene where Stephen demands Lana chokes him, and she almost kills him

That scene is arguably the climax of the movie. Stephen almost left Lana with blood on her hands and a lifetime of guilt, making Lana a ‘victim’. Stephen has transcended from being the ‘victim’, as he sees himself in his relationship with the other characters, to being the ‘villain’. And we know that is what made Lana so upset as she awakens Stephen to the idea that the ‘victim’ mindset is “selfish”. Lana gives Stephen a ‘third eye’ and the way Stephen perceives everything about the past and present completely changes.

Stephen then starts to see his father as less of a demon, understanding that he was plagued by grief too as he lost his wife. In the Hans Reiser murder trial that Stephen follows, his view on Hans changes from an asshole dad that selifishly killed his wife and children’s mother, too resonant of his father, to a heartbroken man making desperate attempt to keep his family together. 

As a quote from Stephen Elliott kicks off the film, scrawled on the screen reads “We understand the world by how we retrieve memories. Re-order information into stories to justify how we feel”.

Stephen found the ‘villains’ responsible for his suffering because he associated those people with a painful time in his life sparked by the death of his mother. But Elliott realizes that progress ceases to exist when you play the blame game, seek pity, or are blind to see that others can be suffering too.

Stephen Elliott tells his story in a way that encourages the audience to not see their emotions as the result of a villain. We are all a victim of someone else if we choose to see it that way. Instead, we can choose to see the pain and suffering is a universal truth. In Stephen Elliott’s story, the suffering was ultimately fomented by the death of his sick mother, something no human is responsible for. Those who play the villain roles in our head are not really villains but other humans enduring pain and suffering, acting out of the void left behind in them. We will all go through it. When we play our ‘victim’ cards though, we cut off our ability to empathize with our ‘villain’. And eventually, our capacity to empathize with anyone fades away. This is what Lana warns about during the turning point conversation with Stephen, playing the victim card is selfish. When our capacity to empathize fades away, we hurt, abuse, and maybe even kill others because we have completely cut off ourselves from understanding the reality that everyone is enduring something.

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“If we can forgive what’s been done to us … If we can forgive what we’ve done to others … If we can leave all of our stories behind. Our being villains or victims. Only then can we maybe rescue the world” - Chuck Palahniuk