In The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry writes, “To have great pain is to have certainty; to hear that another person has pain is to have doubt.” Much of the point of John Green’s 2017 YA novel Turtles All the Way Down is to make the pain of feeling—and living with—mental illness intelligible to readers. It all takes place in Indianapolis high schooler (and hypochondriac) Aza Holmes’ head, her panic attacks mingling with narration as she fails to live up to her literary namesake.
Aza is the wrong kind of sick. She’s obsessive about her own death in a way that obscures reality, not enhances it. Her teen mystery thriller and first love romance story are constantly derailed by her panic attacks, in a subversion of the mental illness tropes pervading the same pop culture that director Hanna Marks’ film adaptation now inhabits. Marks has to pull this movie off while shifting the audience out of Aza’s head through the fourth wall. As a viewer, I’m left again simply spectating Aza’s sickness. Doubting.
Aza (Isabela Merced) is pulled through the typical narrative beats of high school by her best friend, accomplice and platonic soulmate Daisy (Cree Cicchino). Turtles All the Way Down takes a turn towards mystery when the girls learn that a local billionaire is missing, and Aza happens to have once befriended his son at a camp for children with a deceased parent. Their investigation immediately thwarted, the scion Davis Pickett (Felix Mallard) enters Aza’s story as a crush. Caught between the two, she breaks.
Spirals are the central image of Green’s book, and unpacking how we use metaphors like that are central to Aza’s growth. She contends with both philosophy and medication as matters of survival in her psychiatry. Now more explicitly labeled as obsessive–compulsive disorder (Turtles All the Way Down is partnered with a number of mental health organizations, including the International OCD Foundation), Aza’s frequent panic attacks manifest as dissociative spirals that convince her that she is dying of a rare disease.
She’s lived like this for years, but as the future of her story forks with college looming and new relationships blooming, Aza’s caught battling against the tide of narrative being projected onto her. Daisy’s empathy and patience are strained; Davis’ courtship pushes too far towards a normalcy she cannot manifest; Aza’s dissociation reaches levels of self-harm. Bereft of her first-person voice, Aza’s panic attacks are portrayed through sonic and visual cuts to microscopic footage of cells and Aza’s spiraling inner monologue, accompanied by an ambient hiss. But while Aza imagining herself wheeled into a hospital—a sheet placed over her corpse—could invoke horror, the editing and soundtrack (“Bad Guy” thumps along six years too late) strive to keep the tone light.