What the documentary record suggests is this: MGM acquired a thirteen-year-old girl who had been performing since the age of two, subjected her to dietary restriction and weight management that reflected the studio’s commercial interests rather than her nutritional needs, administered pharmaceutical stimulants and depressants as a routine management tool, and scheduled her at a pace that made adequate rest and normal adolescent development impossible. These practices, individually and in combination, established patterns of dependency and damage that followed Garland for the rest of her life.
The studio did not intend to destroy her. The people who administered pills were following practices that were normal in their environment. The people who restricted her caloric intake were following aesthetic and commercial standards that their institution had established. The people who scheduled her fourteen-hour days were meeting production demands that their employer had set. None of this exculpates the institution, because the institution is responsible for the practices it normalizes and the standards it sets. But it helps explain how a system could cause serious harm without any of its participants having harm as an objective.
By the time the harm was visible — by the time Garland was hospitalized for psychiatric crisis, by the time her absences were forcing production delays, by the time she was in full crisis by the late 1940s — the studio’s response was commercial rather than remedial. It reduced her workload by removing her from productions. It put her on suspension when she didn’t show up. It terminated her contract when the commercial calculus made continued employment unprofitable. It did not take meaningful responsibility for the conditions it had created.