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This article has a small summary of the characters in the movie. It gives an insight as to what the plot of the movie is as well.

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Contra Costa Community College District - Portal Login

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Author writes a review of the movie that summarizes the movie. It talks about Charlie's trauma and friendships.

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Contra Costa Community College District - Portal Login

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The different themes that are used in the movie. Talks about mental health, sexuality, and drug usage.

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The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012 Film) Themes

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The The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012 Film) Community Note includes chapter-by-chapter summary and analysis, character list, theme list, historical context, author biography and quizzes written by community members like you.

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Breaks down the different themes that are involved with the movie, including sexuality and drug use.

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The Perks of Being a Wallflower study guide contains a biography of Stephen Chbosky, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

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The article talks about the queer sexuality and relationships that the characters have. This is a good article to discuss about the media representation of sexuality, specifically homosexuality, in films. Author deconstructs the sexuality in the movie.

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The Perks of Thinking Queer: Exploring Sexual Identities in Young Adult Literature

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This paper, for a 3rd year undergraduate children and young adults' literature course, was my first attempt dabbling with queer theory -- not a theoretically sound piece by any standard, but a candid personal reminder of my burgeoning interests

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Author critically analysis the two characters about their sexuality. It talks about their representation and the harshness stereotypes against gay characters in films.

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Critically Queer: A Collection of Queer Media Critiques and Character Analyses: Vol II

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The media text I chose to analyze is the film Perks of Being A Wallflower and specifically the characters Patrick and Brad. This movie was released in 2012 and is based on a book by Stephen Chbosky. Not only is he the author of the book but Chbosky is also the director of the movie and the screenplay writer. The distributor is Summit Entertainment, LLC and produced by a production company called Mr. Mudd. My reason for choosing this media text is because of these two characters. They both represent the farthest ends on the queer spectrum and have a very complicated homosexual relationship.
First you meet Patrick who is the stepbrother of Sam and friend to the main character Charlie. Patrick is characterized as being openly gay, feminine and accepted among the school. He is generally flamboyant but very comfortable in his skin, even comfortable enough to play the transgender character Frank 'N Furter in the community presentation of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. His clearly queer characterization is beloved in the film and is even more defined by his closeted boyfriend, his opposite Brad.
Brad is the popular jock, one of the best players on the football team. He is a white, privileged male who is so overpowered by his hegemonic masculinity he is afraid to come out as a gay male. He is so afraid to actually be known as a homosexual he needed to be inebriated in order to be with Patrick. Brad is also apart of a religious family, this adds to his fear of coming out. He fears that his father would disown him and possibly even hurt him. This all becomes a reality when Brad's father catches Brad and Patrick making love and ends up beating him up out of disappointment and anger. When Patrick tried to stop his father from killing him, Brad just told him to leave and never to talk to him again. What made it even worse was that when Patrick and Brad were back in school after winter break, Brad made up the story that he was jumped in a park by some rival football team.
This whole situation comes to a peak during a confrontation in the cafeteria. One of Brad's football teammates trips Patrick in front of Brad and he doesn't do anything. When Patrick asks him why he won't do something, Brad says why would I "nothing" which was Patrick's nickname around school after the first day of wood shop. When Patrick replies with "you know why" and Brad gets upset when Patrick implies that they are more than just acquaintances. Brad then calls Patrick a "faggot", which is a derogatory word aimed at gay individuals and Patrick then punches Brad. This leads to a group beating from Brad's football team against Patrick that is stopped by their friend Charlie.
The representation of these characters and their relationship displays harsh gay stereotypes that are commonly seen in films. The overarching hegemonic masculinity that is present in the relationship is seen in a character afraid to come out as homosexual. The feminine gay stereotype is also represented in Patrick and this is usually how gay men are displayed. The consumption of this text is then problematic because the target audience of this film is high school students ages 13-19. This is teens are still developing and if an individual knows that he's gay, he could think that if they come out their parents will hate them and maybe even beat them. Or they hate themselves for being who they are and have to be under an influence in order to be with their significant other.
The significance of my analysis is that it affects the viewers of the text by making them fear themselves and others if they want to come out as gay. It also continues to exemplify bullying amongst the gay community, especially among teens and young adults. The fragile state of our society's overwhelming hegemonic masculinity continues to present itself and in return makes the gay individual and the community as a whole the "other," and makes them feel inferior to the heterosexual individuals.

References
"The Perks of Being a Wallflower / Characters." TV Tropes. N.p., n.d. Web. 17 Apr. 2017.

Ross, Karen. The Handbook of Gender, Sex, and Media. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2014. Print.

Wickens, Corrine M. "Codes, Silences, and Homophobia: Challenging Normative Assumptions About Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary LGBTQ Young Adult Literature." Children's Literature in Education 42.2 (2011): 148-64. Web.

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Critically Queer: A Collection of Queer Media Critiques and Character Analyses: A Queer Critical Analysis of Patrick and Brad in the Perks of Being a Wallflower

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The media text I chose to analyze is the film Perks of Being A Wallflower and specifically the characters Patrick and Brad. This movie was released in 2012 and is based on a book by Stephen Chbosky. Not only is he the author of the book but Chbosky is also the director of the movie and the screenplay writer.

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The author talks about Charlies PTSD symptoms and explains how its accurate.

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Kari Bowman, PharmD Candidate
Lipscomb University College of Pharmacy
Nashville, TN

J. Michael McGuire, PharmD, BCPP
Assistant Professor of Pharmacy Practice
Belmont University College of Pharmacy
Nashville, TN

Clinical Pharmacist
Rolling Hills Hospital
Franklin, TN

After being hospitalized for the summer after his best friend commits suicide, Charlie who suffers from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), is about to embark on his first year of high school. He fears being known as the weird kid who was hospitalized for the summer and not having any friends. Charlie's anxiety goes back to the first traumatic event in his life, the death of his Aunt Helen. Charlie's Aunt was killed in a car accident when he was a young boy. She was on her way to get him a surprise and he has always felt it was his fault that she was in the car. He idolized his Aunt and wishes she were there to comfort him as he struggles with starting high school. On his first day of school, he meets Mr. Anderson, an English teacher, who becomes his mentor and gives him books to read. Many of his old acquaintances act as if he doesn't exist and he eats lunch alone every day until he goes to a football game where he meets Patrick and Sam, two seniors. Charlie is instantly attracted to Sam.

Patrick and Sam introduce Charlie to their group of friends and he starts to feel like he belongs. His new group of friends introduce him to drugs and alcohol. He eventually starts dating Mary Elizabeth, a friend of Sam and Patrick's, after she asked him to the Sadie Hawkins dance. One night, while playing truth or dare, Charlie is dared to kiss the prettiest girl in the room. Instead of kissing Mary Elizabeth, he kisses Sam, which results in Charlie being ostracized by the entire group.

Throughout the movie, Charlie has flashbacks of his Aunt when something upsetting happens such as his sister getting hit by her boyfriend. Charlie's flashbacks more closely resembled dissociations rather than what one would consider a true flashback. After being shunned by the group, he begins to have more flashbacks of his Aunt and his mental health begins to deteriorate rapidly. While sitting at lunch one day, Patrick gets in a fight and Charlie steps in to help. Since he protected Patrick from being beaten by a member of the football team, the group forgave him for kissing Sam and they all become friends again.

Charlie feels better after being reunited with his friends and the flashbacks of his Aunt Helen stop. It isn't until Sam leaves for college after they have sex together that the flashbacks come back and Charlie has a breakdown. He calls his sister rambling about how his Aunt's death is his fault and he has a blackout. This episode results in him being readmitted to the psychiatric hospital where he meets Dr. Burton. With the help of Dr. Burton, Charlie is able to revisit the memories he has been suppressing about how his Aunt sexually abused him when he was a small boy. Charlie doesn't go in to detail about being hospitalized but he says the worse day is when the doctor told his parents what Aunt Helen did to him. He returns home to his family and continues to see Dr. Burton in outpatient care. Sam and Patrick visit Charlie and Sam tells Charlie that it gets better.

Throughout the movie, we see Charlie develop friendships. It is when his support group is the strongest that his symptoms subside. When his support group leaves him, we seehim struggle the most with flashbacks. Charlie felt closest to Sam because it appears that she was sexually abused as a young girl. Thus, the sexual relationship with Sam most likely triggered the memory of what his Aunt did to him that resulted in his blackout and hospitalization.

The DSM-5 diagnostic criteria for PTSD requires that an individual personally experience or witness a traumatic event. Diagnosis requires the presence of the following clusters of symptoms: intrusive symptoms (i.e., dissociative reactions), avoidance symptoms, negative alterations in cognition and mood (i.e., difficulty remembering aspects of the trauma) and marked alterations in arousal and reactivity associated with the trauma. Charlie experienced intrusive symptoms associated with the trauma that he experienced as a child including distressing memories, dissociative reactions (e.g., flashbacks), distress at exposure to cues that resemble his trauma, and physiological reactions. Charlie also displayed avoidance of stimuli associated with the event. He avoided situations in which he had to discuss the trauma. He experienced alterations in cognition and mood including an inability to remember aspects of the trauma and negative beliefs about himself related to his aunt's death and feelings of detachment from others. Lastly, Charlie displayed alterations in arousal and reactivity including anger outbursts and exaggerated startle response. PTSD is a chronic and debilitating disorder which may be associated with substance use disorders. Throughout the movie, we see Charlie experiment with a variety of drugs. Charlie is treated with psychotherapy at the end of the movie leading him to regain control over his life.

Overall, Perks of Being a Wallflower accurately portrays the symptoms of PTSD in an adolescent who experienced the trauma of sexual abuse as a child. It also provides a positive image of psychiatry and a psychiatric hospital which is rare in Hollywood. Films providing this kind of insight into psychiatric conditions help eliminate the stigmas we still see today. Overall, the movie was well done and touching.

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Movies in the Classroom: A Review of Perks of Being a Wallflower

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Kari Bowman, PharmD Candidate Lipscomb University College of Pharmacy Nashville, TN J. Michael McGuire, PharmD, BCPP Assistant Professor of Pharmacy Practice Belmont University College of Pharmacy Nashville, TN Clinical Pharmacist Rolling Hills Hospital Franklin, TN After being hospitalized for ...

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The author talks about Charlie's mental health in the film and how it affected the author.

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Charlie from "Perks" will open your eyes to the struggles of dealing with mental illness.

Charlie from "Perks" will open your eyes to the struggles of dealing with mental illness.

By Joanne Paquin, Emerson College

The first time I saw the "Perks of Being a Wallflower," I was a senior in high school.

I was sitting in an empty movie theater with two close friends on a weekday night, expecting an uplifting, coming-of-age story about friendship and high school struggles starring our hero Emma Watson-a judgment based solely on the trailer for the film since none of us had read the book.

One hour and forty-two minutes later, the three of us sat in absolute silence blankly staring at the rolling credits. We weren't silent because we didn't have anything to say about the film, but because we were physically unable to speak. Our throats had closed up, our cheeks wet with tears. We stared at the rows of chairs before us because we couldn't make eye contact with each other.

I felt violated. Exposed. Vulnerable. But it wasn't necessarily in a bad way. It was the first time I had seen a movie that had actually gotten it. That understood me. That conveyed emotions and thoughts that I experienced. And though my friends weren't saying it, I could sense they felt the same way.

The film made me feel both recognized and invisible, and I didn't know what to make of it.

"The Perks of Being a Wallflower" came out in September 2012. It follows the story of Charlie ( Logan Lerman), a socially awkward teen who lives life on the sidelines. But he starts to come out of his shell when he meets Sam ( Emma Watson) and Patrick ( Ezra Miller), two charismatic siblings that bring Charlie into their social group composed of misfit high school seniors.

Throughout the course of the movie-and the novel, which I read shortly after seeing the film-Charlie's confidence grows. He experiences new music, friendship, first love and his desire to become a writer. He watches his friends grow and fall and empathizes with them along the way. But when his friends graduate and then prepare to leave for college, his confidence starts to shatter. The pain comes back to him. He sits at his desk and smacks his face, mumbling to himself, "Stop crying. Stop crying." He calls his sister and blames his aunt's death on himself. He wanders around the house, banging his head against walls trying to make the pain stop. Then we see the knife. And then we see that Charlie sees the knife.

It was the most gripping and unnerving scene in the movie, and to somebody who understood and deeply empathized with Charlie, it was traumatic to watch.

It helped to talk about it with my friends once we were able to compose ourselves. Later that evening over milkshakes and French fries, one of my friends discussed how she saw Charlie's suicide attempt coming.

"There were so many signs," she said. He delivered heartfelt goodbyes to each of his friends and then his sister. He expressed how he felt like a burden. He took risks. Abused drugs. He gave away items of importance to him.

She was knowledgeable about suicide and depression and felt this movie did a good job at portraying it. After going home and conducting my own research, I agreed.

To both of us, Charlie represented mental illness. He represented depression, social anxiety and isolation. He put into words thoughts and feelings that a lot of people struggle to understand, including myself.

For example, toward the end of the film, Charlie talks to his doctor played by Joan Cusack:

Charlie: There is so much pain. And I-I-I don't know how to not notice it.

Dr. Burton: What's hurting you?

Charlie: No, not...not me. It's them! It's...it's everyone. It never stops. Do you understand?

I understood, I wanted to tell him. It's your close friends stressing out over bad grades and home problems. It's your parents' financial crises and the death of your cat. It's knowing that there is so, so much unnecessary and misplaced hate in the world. Not only are you bearing the weight of your own problems, but you're carrying everyone else's pain as well. And at a certain point it becomes too much.

But despite all the bad, there is still good, and it leads to moments of confusion. Should I be laughing when children are being bombed in Syria? My friend's dad just killed himself, but somehow we're finding this art assignment amusing? "...I am both happy and sad, and I'm still trying to figure out how could that be," Charlie says during the film, and I nod in agreement.

Prior to the film, I had never understood how to explain those feelings. Suddenly I had the words-Charlie's words-and with those words I could not only explain the sentiments to others, but most importantly, I could explain them to myself.

Watching the movie again as a senior in college, four years after the movie came out and maybe three years since my last viewing, I found that I still related heavily, if not more so, to the situations and emotions the characters experience. But this time I found myself emotional during the closing tunnel scene, when Charlie delivers his last letter.

He says, "I can see it. This one moment when you know you're not a sad story. You are alive. And you stand up and see the lights on the buildings and everything that makes you wonder. And you're listening to that song and that drive with the people who you love most in this world. And in this moment, I swear, we are infinite."

Upon his last word they burst out of the tunnel and David Bowie's " Heroes " engulfs them. It's a complete shift in tone, as if bursting from that tunnel, Charlie is suddenly light again. The burdens he carried were gone. The self-hatred, gone. Maybe it was only a temporary fix, but it was enough. It was enough to know you could feel this way.

I loved the way the transition made me feel. I downloaded the audio to Charlie's last letter as well as to David Bowie's song so that whenever I needed a pick-me-up, I could play the two MP3 files side-by-side. That transition, that tonal-shift, it made me feel good. It made me feel light.

"The Perks of Being a Wallflower" not only helped me understand mental illness, but it helped me better understand myself.

And for that I owe Charlie a whole lot.

*If feeling suicidal, it's important to seek help: https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/

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How "The Perks of Being a Wallflower" Helped Me Understand Mental Illness

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Charlie from "Perks" will open your eyes to the struggles of dealing with mental illness. By Joanne Paquin, Emerson College The first time I saw the "Perks of Being a Wallflower," I was a senior in high school.

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This article talks about Charlies experiences with drugs in the book

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Drug Use and Abuse in Young Adult Literature

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This is a compelling novel about a 15 year old boy Charlie and his two best friends (Sam and Patrick) dealing with the trials and temptations of High School. Charlie is really struggling to find...

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This article explains the role of masculinity in the film. Charlie's parents defined the role of masculinity to him and his family. Also mentions violence which is a theme of masculinty.

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As he matures throughout his first year of high school, Charlie struggles to reconcile himself to others' conceptions of what it means to be a man. He learns this mainly by seeing and imitating the behaviors of the men around him-social norms that instruct him in which characteristics are considered masculine. While some of the men in his life are kind, confident, and emotionally perceptive, others embody another type of masculinity-one characterized by aggression, sexual prowess, social dominance, homophobia, and a general lack of emotional connection and expression. This latter type of masculinity is harmful to Charlie and the men and women around him, which makes him realize that he doesn't have to be-or want to be-that kind of man.

From an early age, Charlie's family strictly defined which characteristics or activities were masculine or feminine, and encouraged Charlie and his siblings to align themselves with traditional gender roles. Charlie's dad and brother, for example, are homophobic and refuse to talk about feelings or show emotion. They stick to conversing about traditionally masculine things: sports, objectifying women, and making money. The social pressure for men to repress emotions is clearest when Charlie cries after his friend Michael's suicide and his brother puts an arm around him and tells him to "get it out of his system before Dad came home." Instead of comforting his son in the face of tragedy, this moment shows that Charlie's father would likely punish him for showing completely natural emotions. By contrast, the women in Charlie's life are allowed to show emotions: after the final episode of M*A*S*H, Charlie's mother and sister cry openly, while his father cries alone in the kitchen to hide his emotions. For Charlie-a sensitive and passionate person who has been through significant trauma-his family's insistence that emotions are for women encourages him to stifle his natural characteristics in order to align himself to his family's masculine ideals.

In addition to emotionlessness, Chbosky shows that violence is one of the primary ways the book's characters conceive of and perform their masculinity. For generations, Charlie's family has passed down the norm that men should be violent, while women should love and respect violent men. Charlie's grandfather admits to beating his daughters (Charlie's mother and Aunt Helen) when they were children for getting poor grades. He believed it was his way of demonstrating care and motivating them to have a better life than he did, but his behavior likely did far more damage than good, as it conditioned them to accept abuse from the men in their lives. Nevertheless, Charlie's family sees masculine aggression not only as acceptable, but as a way of expressing care and concern, which makes accepting violence a shared value across generations. Chbosky clearly shows the effects of this norm on Charlie's sister. Charlie's dad refers to her boyfriend as "soft" because he is respectful and makes mixtapes decorated with artwork, but when Charlie sees his sister yelling at her boyfriend for not asserting himself more, her boyfriend hits her. Instead of staying away from him after this incident, Charlie's sister begins officially dating him, perhaps because she's been taught that aggressive, physically abusive men are desirable, and she believes that she was at fault for prodding him. Charlie himself only internalizes these lessons to a certain extent. He successfully defends himself against a bully named Sean, for example, and while his fighting skills earn him respect, he cries immediately afterwards. He fights again to protect Patrick when Brad's friends team up on him, and again, Charlie experiences shame for having hurt other people, even in self-defense. This shows that Charlie doubts whether striving to embody the masculine norms he learned at home will really make him his best self.

Since the men in Charlie's family fail to give him a positive example of masculinity, he must find role models in people who have a different understanding of gender and sexuality. Patrick, for example, who is Charlie's only openly gay friend, is one of Charlie's favorite people in the world. Patrick shows Charlie that being a man doesn't have to mean being heterosexual. He tells Charlie that many women are socialized to want to "fix" men, seeing abusive or difficult men as a challenge and finding purpose in working to make them better. After their conversation, Charlie sees girls wearing their boyfriends' jackets and he "thinks about the idea of property," which shows that Charlie is becoming simultaneously aware of the experiences of the women around him, and of the role men play in oppressing them. Charlie's English teacher Bill also becomes a role model who broadens Charlie's ideas of masculinity. While Charlie's family taught him that violence was the only acceptable expression of emotion for men, Bill encourages Charlie's sensitivity, fuels his passion for reading and writing, and even at one point goes out of his way to tell Charlie how special he thinks Charlie is. In doing so, Bill teaches Charlie that a man can be gentle, introspective, communicative, and understanding.

Charlie's relationships with men who don't fit the image of masculinity held forth by his family show Charlie that being a man doesn't mean that he needs to change what makes him Charlie: his natural kindness, sensitivity, and creativity. Moreover, he learns that he can be a man while also fully loving, respecting, and communicating his feelings to the women around him. Through Charlie's wrestling with the narrow and prescribed forms of masculinity that the men in his family represent, Chbosky shows that men must choose break free of these expectations or else be consumed by them.

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As he matures throughout his first year of high school, Charlie struggles to reconcile himself to others' conceptions of what it means to be a man. He learns this mainly by seeing and imitating the behaviors of the men around him-social norms that instruct him in which characteristics are considered masculine.

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Author analyzes the film in great detail and talks a lot about Charlie's character and his role in the movie.

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The Perks of Being a Wallflower: Existential Analysis

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There are Christ figures in the movie as well, an example being when Charlie and his family go to church. This could have served as foreshadowing about his realization that he is infinite and alive at the end of the film. It can be argued that he thinks God is truth, because at

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Author talks about depression and analyzes the symptoms of depression Charlie shows in the film

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Gives a psychological perspective of the characters

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AP Psychology: The Perks of Being A Wallflower

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Talks about what disorders Charlie suffers from and a reason why he has it

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Charlie: The Perks of Being A Wallflower

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It's Charlie's first year of High School and he's scared. He is an introvert and he doesn't have many friends. As school goes on, Charlie meets Seniors Patrick and Sam, step-sibilings, and they pretty much take them under their wings. They teach him so much over a coarse of a

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Talks about how the males in the film have more feminine qualities in their portrayal rather than stereotypical masculinity roles