Film Journal 2024: Turtles All The Way Down

Film Journal 2024: Turtles All The Way Down
Directed by Hannah Marks

I feel seen.

Although I differ somewhat in my own experiences and struggles, I found so much overlap in the central character’s journey. She struggles with a mental disorder driven by severe anxiety and OCD. This disorder results in her getting lost inside her own head and thoughts. This also leads to a heightened interest in philosophy, driven particularly by struggles with seeing the workings of this world, and indeed herself, as true and real. Things like meaning and worth feel constructed and irrational and false and unreliable when measured against reality. One could describe this as a persistent wrestling with existential crisis.

All of these things feel very much true to my own experience of life. Where she has a particular obsession with bacteria, I have Orthorexia Nervosa, a disorder that revolves around an uncontrollable obsession with healthy eating. One of the outcomes of this is researching illnesses. At my worst point I had hundreds of articles taped to my wall, hidden in books and tucked into different places in my room on every possible illness and every possible cause. I spent my days stuck inside my own head without a way out.

I really liked the way the film doesn’t offer easy answers. For someone like me the common approach of forcing yourself to confront your own fears by exposing yourself to it doesn’t work. It only makes it worse, because doing so leads me to a point of collapse, to where I can no longer function. Part of this is because my obsessions are rooted in some level of reality. This point of crisis tends to keep it locked in, because my mind understands percieved solutions or answers to come from convictions that are, at their heart, irrational. My obsessions, on the other hand, are rooted in reality, fueled by philosophy and science and reason.

I also very much relate to one of the very real outcomes of my personal struggle- being unable to truly express or show concern for the things around you, even though this concern is very much a part of what drives you. You turn every conversation into a discussion of philosophy and reason and the ensuing existential crisis because this is only way you know to engage the things that surround you. You can’t just be in a moment, because every moment becomes a question or a crisis. And you know this isolates you from everyone else, all those who are able to be in a moment without thinking dwelling on these questions and these points of crisis.

All of these things are things I feel and think and know deeply, because they are my experiences. And this film tapped into these experiences in an extremely visceral and emotive fashion. So much so that I might even call this traumatic as well as cathartic. I feel seen, but I also feel exposed.

On another note, I also really enjoyed how they wove in the whole Nancy Drew type subplot. Added some fun to an otherwise heavy film.