If there is one word that sums it up, I’d say what’s missing is context. Overmedication, the tip of an iceberg, is treated as the iceberg instead of being brought up as one issue in the context of an overall systemic issue in development.
Apparently now the larger scale things can be separated from the day-to-day despite the networks and webs and ripples. And the message from Barlow seems to be to take your focus off of the larger scale when it looks ugly and when it comforts you to do so. But didn’t we just learn earlier that if you don’t pay attention to the outside world, you’re indifferent and unempathetic, possibly due to psychiatric medication?
Even in part 1, the film is a bit scattered and contradictory. But later, it becomes far more so.
A good example is the huge contradiction between two overriding philosophies both expressed at different points in the film. One tells us that it is “important to focus on the larger world beyond ourselves,” and that not doing so is a sign of dysfunction and one of the most concerning side effects of antidepressants, while the other claims that we should “focus on the day-to-day and not worry too much about the larger scale.”
Most troubling, though, is the film’s seeming inability to make up its mind and take a stand. Is the problem psychopaths? Parenting? Medication? Are we all responsible or are most of us victims? It would be permissible if the film’s message was that all of these are part of the problem. But it fails to even explain in a coherent fashion how they each play their roles in an interconnected system.
I think that the reason the film turned out this way is that the filmmakers lacked an overall systemic framework, like that we can draw from ponerology, with which to help organize understanding of what is a very complex ponerogenic process.
