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Psychology: Movie Paper - Mary And Max. The Movie Mary

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Psychology: Movie Paper - Mary and Max The movie Mary and Max is the story of an eight year old girl, named Mary, from Australia who doesn’t have any friends, and lives with her father and alcoholic mother. Max is a forty-four year old man from New York City, who is obese, has a disorder later revealed to be Aspergers, and also has no friends. They develop an unlikely friendship when Mary picks his name out of a phone book and decides to write him a letter asking him where babies come from. They become penpals and friends through many ups and downs in their lives, returning to each other for support and advice. This movie would make a wonderful study on Asperger 's Syndrome alone, however it touches on many other psychological principles…show more content…
Towards the end of the movie Mary finds herself stuck in a major depression. Max has stopped writing to her, effectively ending their friendship, both of her parents have died in a short span of time, and her husband left her. It is no surprise that with all of those negative events and losses that she experienced happening so close together that she would be depressed. Mary is also drinking alcohol heavily during this time. Alcohol is the most commonly used depressant and would only increase any negative emotions that a person is having. Mary’s depression could also be exasperated by her previous experiences with sadness and loss, leading her to have a form of learned helplessness, where she feels nothing she has done has gone right, so why should she try now. Damien, Mary’s husband, writes Mary a “Dear John” letter to leave her. In the letter he confesses that he has left her for his pen pal, a man in New Zealand. In this letter, Damien also professes his love and concern for Mary. This hints at Damien possibly being bisexual, meaning that he is attracted to both sexes. As Alfred Kinsey believed sexuality was fluid and your sexual orientation didn’t always coincide with the particular notions of heterosexuality and homosexuality. It is also possible that Damien is a homosexual, meaning he is attracted to the same sex, but was hiding it and using Mary as his “beard”. It was shown in earlier scenes of the movie that Damien cared
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