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Companion Guide for A Season in Hell

A Season in Hell is 59 minutes long. It is intended for high school, college, and adult audiences. It is probably not appropriate for middle school or junior high students.

This film is composed of interwoven personal narratives, recounted in five years of interviews. The principal character is Regina ("Gina") Hatfield, a young woman from Eastern Kentucky who suffers from anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa. The other people are her father (Bob), her mother (Grace), her sister (Robin) a professor who is Gina's confidante and support group leader (Mary Jo), and Gina's fiance (Mike). 

Regina's eight-year battle with weight, dieting, food preoccupation, bingeing, and purging has taken her through high school and college. Despite being hospitalized twice, and despite the searing loneliness of a life filled with compulsion and lies, she continues to accept her disorder as the price she must pay for being slender. As emphasized in the final frames of this film, this is also a story of innocence lost and youth squandered. 

A Season in Hell illustrates many of the basic features of the "eating disorders." But more important is the fact that this film raises the tough and, as yet, only partially answered, questions which now confront professionals, parents, eating disorder patients, and the people who care about them:

- What role does our society play in the cause of eating disorders?

- Why is a slender appearance so important for many girls and boys?

- What role, if any, does the family plan in the creation of eating disorders?

- What can parents, friends, and concerned others (e.g., teachers) do to help?

- If bright people are hurting themselves, why don't they stop?

There are two dangers inherent in any classroom discussion of eating disorders. The first is the glorification of the disorder, either as an identify for those in search of notoriety or as a means of attaining a desirable weight loss. Regina is the "star" of this video and she has been a featured speaker at assemblies and on radio programs. Moreover, she has achieved a low body weight and a slender (gaunt?) appearance that many women, young and old alike, would "die for." Nonetheless, this film avoids glorification by portraying in a nonjudgemental fashion the bitter ironies of that distorted drive for thinness (see pp. 8-9). Without preaching, this film leaves no doubt that physically, socially, and spiritually, Regina Hatfield is indeed "dying for" her slenderness. Although the audience at the assemblies, and we as viewers, may be focused on her, the value of that attention is completely diluted by the stark pain of her alienation, her secrecy, and her life as a desperate "actress."

The second danger is voyeurism. While watching a film about a disorder it is all too easy for students and teachers alike to sit back and marvel at the bizarre things some people do to themselves and to others. The result is often a certain smugness, or at the very least a sense that the disorder in question is the province solely of powerless victims, afflicted families, and omniscient professionals. A Season in Hell does not attack this distance. Rather, it chips away at it by building the story around family relationships, the struggle to be accepted by peers, and the power of the media to focus our attention on appearance. Teachers should find this film provocative, not only because its subject is a disorder afflicting a significant number of young people, but because it speaks to themes which confront all adolescents and young adults.