"Wouldn't it be a little crowded to have 24 souls in a body?"
Regarding the theme of the psychological drama genre of "split personality / multiple personality", it should be taken for the current audience to take it for granted, of course, European and American dramas, Japanese and Korean dramas Needless to say, Taiwan dramas have also adopted related genres. But the genre first entered the eye of popular culture with the science fiction writer Daniel Keyes' 1981 novel The Minds of Billy Milligan. Because of his psychological background, Keith's work often has delicate depictions of deep thinking, such as Flowers for Algernon (1966), which won the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award, or the external causes and subconscious situations of multiple personalities, such as The Fifth Sally (1980).
24 Billy is his first true-life book to detail the felon Billy (pseudonym) who committed multiple consecutive sexual assaults and robberies. It was later revealed that his real name was William Milligan, and although the evidence of the crime was conclusive after his arrest, he insisted that he was innocent and had no memory of the crime, and finally diagnosed by a team of psychologists and experts, he was diagnosed as a very rare patient with multiple personalities and was acquitted (with the condition of compulsory psychiatric treatment).
Official poster for the documentary "24 Billy"
After the novel was released, it caused a sensation, not only occupying the top of the best-seller list, but also being shortlisted for the "Edgar Allan Poe Award" and winning the "Kodlaswitz Award", and the originally unknown multiple personality diseases became a major issue in the mainstream media for a time. In 1994, Kaiz published a sequel, The Milligan Wars, which chronicled Billy's decade-long and arduous treatment at several psychiatric institutions, and also made it to the best-seller list.
Hollywood certainly doesn't let go of such popular genres, and films like "Thriller" (Primal Fear/1996), "Fatal ID" (Identity/2003), "Split", "Split/2016" and "Glass/2019" have all received good responses. Case himself completed the adaptation of the screenplay "The Crowded Room" around 2000, but the film and television process was quite uneventful and slow to take shape; instead, the documentary short story "Monsters Inside: The 24 Faces of Billy Milligan" was funded by Netflix and recently launched.
"24 Belgium" Trailer:
※The following contains spoilers, so please browse with caution
"I have 24 people in my head, like a record at rev 33 on a record player at rev 78, spinning more and more out of tune until it gets out of control..."
The documentary version of 24 Belgium, led by Olivier Megaton, director of Colombiana/2011 and Taken 2&3/2012&2015, began collecting footage and trying to interview Billy himself, but until late 2014, when billy died of cancer in a private nursing home in Ohio, he was unable to complete treatment due to family obstruction.
However, Migarton did not give up, and instead changed from the people around him- the police officers and prosecutors, the trial judges, the members of the evaluation team and the treatment team, and Billy's relatives and friends... And so on, trying to reconstruct Billy's life from a bystander's perspective and his multiple aspects of being both a criminal (although not sentenced) and a patient. The length of four episodes is enough for Migarton to take the audience to the heart of the question: Is Billy a patient suffering from mental illness or a cunning criminal with superb acting skills?
The whole film is mainly based on the documentary images of that year, interspersed with interviews with relevant people, supplemented by the course of events restored by similar drama techniques, interlaced and layered to form a more complete proportion, including the small stories behind the public image that have not appeared in novels and news reports. The interviewees' positions were broadly divided into two factions, one of which included members of the identification team and prominent scholars in the field of psychological identification, who unanimously concluded that Billy was not controlled by the master personality (and the kinder personalities) when he committed those consecutive crimes, and therefore had no memory of the crime.
Compared with the documentary images left by Billy at different times such as interrogation, identification, and treatment, his accent changes from local American dialects, pure British accents, and Middle Eastern accents; he has just finished writing arabic or ancient Latin, but the next moment he can't recognize a word; the index of mind testing is sometimes old, sometimes young, and even gender is different; all this shows that he is indeed a multipersonal patient.
Is Billy a patient trapped in multiple personalities? Or a scheming show criminal? The film is inconclusive.
Conversely, there are also some psychologists and media reporters who disagree, they believe that Billy does not have so many personalities at all, but based on the experience of childhood abuse, he deliberately accepts their guidance in front of the experts responsible for identification, and gradually presents the appearance they want, just like Edward Norton's "Roy" in "Thriller", which can both please the experts and exonerate themselves.
The police officers and prosecutors in charge of the case at that time believed that whether Billy was really multiple personalities or not, they should be treated separately from the crimes he had committed, after all, the perpetrator was indeed him, and the victim's harm had already been caused; even the sisters and nieces who were responsible for Billy's care in his later years tended to let him serve his sentence instead of being treated in the hospital.
What's next for filmmaking?
As mentioned earlier, the original author Case completed the screenplay "Crowded Room", which is currently copyrighted by the director James Cameron, and tentatively scheduled to be produced and starred by Leonardo Dicaprio; originally scheduled to start filming in 2015 and be released in 2019, but due to the force majeure of various subjective and objective environments, it is currently postponed to 2022, that is, "Avatar 2" (Avatar 2) After the release.
Compared with the film version, Apple TV+ is the first to announce the start of filming the expected ten-episode series version, directed by Akiva Goldsman, who directed the series Titans and Doctor Sleep, and Tom Holland as Billy.
Goldsman's 2001 Oscar for Best Screenplay, "A Beautiful Mind," is based on the true story of Schizophrenia mathematician John Nash, who played a military doctor with PTSD in Cherry earlier this year. The two people who have experienced similar themes will join forces and will stimulate some new sparks, which is very worth looking forward to.
The film version of "The Crowded Room" will be starred by Tom Holland, and he is expected to explode again after "Lost Heart".