There comes a moment when we have to fight for justice to protect someone that’s unable to do so on their own. In the film ‘Nell’, directed by Michael Apted, Jerome, a doctor from a small town in North Carolina, strives to protect a girl that live in deep woods and thus had never meet anybody from the outside world. When Jerome and Paula, a psychology student, tries to communicate with the girl and unveil the psychology disorders she suffers, this ‘wild’ girl also undergoes changes and embraces the two ‘strangers’, who intruded her seclusion life.
Nell is a girl who is raised in the isolated, remote backwoods of North Carolina along with her young-died sister and her mother, who had a stroke and lost the ability to speak. They live in a cottage without electricity, running water, and light—any traces of our modern world. Nobody has ever meet Nell. Not until her mother was found dead had she been found by Jerome, a local doctor, came alongside the police officer. Jerome was fascinated by Nell, because she speaks a wild language, which developed as she lived with her sister. Meantime, Paula and her heartless boss Alexander wants her to be studied in laboratory. The judge decided that they would have three months to study her before the final decision would be decided. In those three months, Jerome started from repeating Nell’s mangle language and finally learn from her, to introduce Paula to her and take her to the town, to finally save her from the reporters and the psychology institute. The longer they’ve met Nell, the urge of protection was stronger in Jerome, and Paula’s mind has been changing. And when the day of trial comes, they helped Nell justified herself and won the lawsuit. In psychological view, since being isolated in the deep woods since she was born, Nell has feral child syndrome. And due to the special environment Nell has been brought up—the only person she ever tried to communicated with was only her died sister—she has severe level of autism.
First of all, let’s talk about Nell’s feral child syndrome. In psychological definition, a feral child (wild, or undomesticated) is a human child who has lived isolated from human contact from a very young age, and has no (or little) human care, loving or social behavior, and crucially, human language. In the film, Nell born and lives in the cottage that’s completely isolated from the outside world. Also, she neither received caress or education from her mother, who had a stroke and couldn’t move any parts of her body. However, as Jerome tried to talk to Nell, he found out that she does have a certain degree of language possession: in her own language, or the ‘twin language’, there are different words and even grammas. She knew very little English as well, like “You Ok?” and English names. Therefore, we can see that although Nell is born and raised isolated, she has low level of human language; thus, she is not 100% a feral child.
Secondly, about Nell’s autism syndrome. In psychology, autism is a developmental disorder characterized by difficulties with social interaction, and communication and by restricted and repetitive behavior. At the beginning of the film, when Jerome first found Nell on a closet and tries to talk to her, she freaks out, spank the door, and walks around in the house, keeps murmuring her mangle language anxiously. As Jerome and Paula start their longitudinal study on Nell’s behavior, or specifically, her mangle language, they came to realize that her autism is not nature, or genetically inherited. Instead, it was developed gradually as she invented the twin language with her sister, and later loses everyone that can talk to her. A scene in the end of the film also reviews her autism. That is when Nell was taken to the psycho hospital and tested in the laboratory, as Paula reads to her, she did nothing but to knock her forehead on the glass wall repetitively. She had no sign of understanding a complete human language sentence and therefore impossible to communicate with common people.
Although life was a tragedy for Nell, just like most of us, the god finally cared for her. Her feral child syndrome and autism has received treatments by the kind local doctor. Psychologically, there are many ways to treat autism, mainly, applied behavior analysis, which includes discrete trail training and many others. Utilizing this method, Jerome uses a series of trials (a bag of delicious popcorns) to encourage Nell’s step-by-step learning: to step out of the house in days. Later, in order to treat her feral child syndrome, Jerome and Paula ride Nell to the town and introduce the outer world to her. In the very end of the film, Nell has completely opened her heart to Jerome’s family and doesn’t feel lonely anymore. This reflect the fact that her autism has been cured in a large extend, and her barrier of communicating with people has been melt by the love of the family.