“Secret Cutting”
Tonight at 9 p.m. on USA Network
I invited six people over to watch “Secret Cutting,” because, well, because what do I know about teenage girls who cut, burn and otherwise scratch themselves up in disfiguring ways to lessen feelings of self-loathing? (FYI: 85 percent of people who cut themselves up are females 11-40 years old.)
After watching the movie, I know a lot more.
But to tell you the truth, I wouldn’t have watched it at all if my boss didn’t threaten me, and Sean Young, one of the really underrated actresses of our time, wasn’t in it.
I watch anything she’s in, which unfortunately these days are too many reruns and not enough new stuff.
Hey-idiot producers wake up! I mean, really, who cares if she’s been a troublemaker from time to time? So was Bette Davis. (I made that up.)
I now also know something else: Men who will watch 60 straight hours of Bruce Willis blowing up other people and Arnold Schwarzenegger pulling people’s legs off, won’t watch a girl cut her skin.
“Horrible!” screamed one man in my living room.
“Why would I watch something so depressing,” said another who went to get a beer and then went home.
Meantime, this same guy could watch the opening, bloody-battle scene in “Saving Private Ryan” everyday.
This movie is about a condition, which affects one in every 200 teens (mostly girls) or approximately two million Americans. And it’s tough to watch, but hey – so was “Trainspotting.”
“Secret Cutting” is the story of Dawn (Kimberlee Peterson, “Get Real”), a miserable kid without many friends and a family of self-absorbed automatons. Young as her mother has the right edge of self-absorption without going over the edge into Joan Crawford.
Robert Wisden is also quite good as Dawn’s father who is so crippled by his discomfort in his own skin that he’s useless to his daughter.
Rhea Perlman as the shrink who finally gets involved is good enough that she makes you feel like she is really there for the kid in real life.
What makes this TV movie especially compelling for me, anyway, is that somehow the producers restrained themselves from making everything and everybody adorable and fashionable.
What doesn’t work – at all – is the over-the-top bitchiness of the teen girls in school.
When are writers and producers going to stop this stupid sexist cliched teen, pretty-girl garbage? It’s too easy, too pat, and too fake.
You’d think by watching TV these days that no teenage girl in America was anything but homicidally cruel.
Speaking of garbage, interestingly, the lead singer of the group Garbage admitted just a few days ago that she’s been a “secret cutter,” and that, even to this day, she can be paralyzed by urge to purge her blood by cutting herself before she goes on stage.
So, yes, the movie does in fact have an important message.
Not to be petty (OK, to be petty) one thing I couldn’t figure out is what the heck the movie’s hairdresser was thinking of.
Young’s got The Andrews Sisters’ hairdo and Wisden’s hair makes him looks like he escaped from a troop transport in the ’40s.
It was so disconcerting that, at the beginning, we thought maybe it was a period piece.
Oh and one word about the beginning: get past it.
Most of the know-it-alls sitting in my house groaned through the first 20 minutes like it was slower than a Yugo with no second gear.
One more word: Kimberlee Petersen is someone to watch.
Man, she could be the next Sean Young.