Hollywood's obsession with taboos is no longer a matter of a day or two, delusional, paranoid, voyeuristic, the more taboo, the more attractive. In the 100 years since the advent of cinematic art, split personality has become one of the most representative themes of these diseases.
For the seventh art, the illness is consumption and the embodiment of the increasing attention of psychoanalysis.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > double and multiple</h1>
The split personality film can be traced back to Universal's 1920 film "Doctor Incarnation".
The ambitious Dr. Jackell, who believes that the human spirit has a completely opposite "two-sidedness", invents a potion that can dissociate the personality, allowing himself to freely switch between the polite "Jackell" doctor and the savage and brutal "Hyde".
[Dr. Incarnation] a
Similar to Freud's iceberg theory, the morally suppressed "consciousness" is only the tip of the iceberg of personality, while the "subconscious" buried under the iceberg—the Hyde who wants to do evil, after being seduced by the patient, turns himself into a brutal criminal.
In the most classic 1931 version, the doctor played by Frederick March first said after the transformation: "Now, I am finally free."
[Dr. Incarnate] 1931 edition
Stevenson, the original author, published the novel of the same name in 1887—only two years after Freud collaborated with Breuer on Hysterical Studies. Stevenson's original purpose was to conduct a thorough study of the theory of dual personality. The original title of the film, "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde", has now become synonymous with "dual personality" in psychology.
Robert Louis Stevenson
In the early years, when the personality schizophrenia patients in literature, film, and reality have not exaggerated from "dual personalities" to 17 or 24 "multiple personalities", the two completely different personalities presented by the same character are usually manifested as the opposition between "good" and "evil". And the key to dissociation from personality is always accompanied by a scientific accident.
In 1924, Robert Wayne's [Hand of Olak] was exactly that.
In a fire, the young pianist who was addicted to the piano lost his hands, and at the behest of his wife, the doctor connected the hands of a murderer who had just been executed.
The pianist who knows the truth can no longer touch the keys and his wife with these hands, and he can't help but fantasize about crime, and struggle fiercely between reason and fantasy.
[Hand of Olak]
"I can feel you. Along the arm, touching your soul, cold, brutal, merciless. These cursed hands! ”
The same pattern was bridged to Bella Lugosi's 1940 role in Black Friday, in which the brain doctor transplanted the brains of the underworld to his colleagues, and the mild-mannered academic school was inspired to be the boss of the underworld.
[Black Friday]
[Three-Faced Eve] in 1957 and "Horror" in 1960 can be seen together as a turning point in psychoanalysis's formal involvement in split personality films.
[Three-Faced Eve] is based on the novel of the same name by Corbett Tigpeng and Hevey Clayley, the former a psychiatrist and the latter a well-known expert in the field of personality disorders and antisocial personality disorders.
Eve, who splits into a triple personality in the book, has a character archetype: deep headaches, forgetfulness, depression plague Chris Costina Sezemore.
While doing their part in a boring family life, while envisioning an unfettered independent life (somewhat similar to [Daydreamer]) – that is, starting with [Eve on Three Sides], multi-personality films are based on realism and involve psychoanalysis for the first time.
A few years later, in the annals of history, screenwriter Joseph Stefano reflected on his relationship with his mother and achieved the unique Norman:
Norman not only oedipal, but also "internalized" his own mother, in the scene where he kills Marianne, the audience can see two personalities in him, that is, at this time, Norman has changed from a "schizophrenic" to a "schizophrenic" patient.
[Horror Story]
It should be clarified here that although schizophrenia and personality split are both "personality disorders", they are completely different things.
What we usually call "fine shards" is not a "schizophrenic" movie, but a "split personality" movie.
Personality is a person's inherent pattern of behavior in daily life, so personality disorder refers to a person's deviation from his normal and deep-rooted behavior.
Schizophrenic Disorder is a state of depersonalization, and patients often have symptoms such as auditory hallucinations, delusions, paranoia, and speech disorders;
Dissociated Personality and Dissociative Identity Disorder refer to the presence of two or more distinct personalities in a patient. Schizophrenia is more common, and people with split personality are rare.
In the state of schizophrenia, the patient's personality is almost disintegrated, and the individual cannot survive independently, but the personality of the patient with schizophrenia will undergo a dramatic transformation, and the individual personality can still survive.
For example, john Nash, a mathematician in "Beautiful Minds", imagines his roommate, a little girl in red, and a soldier who hunts him down, and although three personalities appear here, they are not attached to Nash and are the product of Nash's fantasies, so this behavior is delusional "schizophrenia".
If psychoanalytic films can be divided into "before Hitchcock" and "after Hitchcock", then films about multiple personalities may also be divided into "before [heart demon] robbery] and "after [heart demon robbery]".
In 1973, Flora Rita Schreiber, editor of the psychiatric column at Science Digest, adapted the novel "Siebel" based on the patient Shirley Mason's experience of producing 16 independent personalities (Mason's condition was confirmed to be fabricated many years later).
In 1976, the TV movie "Heart Demon Robbery" starring Sally Field was released, and each of Sybel's personalities had a different name, age, job and hobbies, the youngest being a baby girl.
In addition to the "16 personalities" gimmick, the film analyzes in detail the causes of Sibil's use of multiple personalities to protect himself by abusing his mother in the same year.
In the decades since, split personality films have paid more attention to psychoanalysis, and the number of fission personalities has changed from double and triple personalities to 24, and the highest is even close to 50.
Coincidentally, just a year after the release of "Heart Demon Robbery", the famous "William Mirigan Case" occurred, and William Mirigan, who called himself "Billy", raped and robbed three women at Ohio State University, and was finally acquitted after being diagnosed with multiple personality splits under the joint proclamation of four psychiatrists and a psychologist.
In 1981, Daniel Case's 24 Billys was published, and split personality officially became the subject of countless thrillers and horror films.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > light and dark lines</h1>
"Hollywood's first commodity is not genre but narrative." The multi-personality story that blurs reality and fantasy itself also provides an opportunity for non-linear narratives. In multi-personality films, there are roughly three narrative genres.
In "Deadly ID", [Fight Club], [Confinement Island], [Murder No. 9], [Rose, Red Lotus], the film advances the plot from the beginning in the course of the patient's illness.
The world perceived by the audience is the world perceived by the patient – the creator has more information than the audience.
In the narrative process, the dark line is like a hint to the audience to solve the puzzle game, and the director needs to have appropriate and key hints, reasonable and ambiguous, and cannot directly feed the audience.
For example, in the first few minutes of [Fatal ID], a conversation between the patient and the doctor, the doctor writes the words "split personality" directly on the medical record;
David Finch, who loves easter eggs, let Pete flash five frames in [Fight Club] in a "cigarette brand" way.
When the patient wakes up from the hallucination, the truth and the prompt are connected, and the audience has a sense of "unexpected, reasonable", and the films with this narrative method are often labeled as reasoning or suspense.
In [Crisis Lambs], [Secret Window], [Black Swan], [Mechanic], the real world and the fantasy world coexist, the protagonist is still normal in daily life, but by a certain external stimulus to stimulate potential other personalities, so in such films, the display of abnormal states is usually non-linear and fragmented.
[Black Swan]
In the third narrative type, the audience knows the protagonist's illness from the beginning, and the information the audience has is completely equivalent to that of the people in the film, so most of the film is a linear, bright line narrative.
In the face of a personality of multiple personalities, the innocent victim is the right way to flee for their lives, and [division] belongs to this category.
<h1 class = "pgc-h-arrow-right" > abuser and victim</h1>
In Freud's theory of personality, the formation of personality goes through five stages of development, and the experiences of young children and childhood have an important influence on personality formation.
Personality is further divided into three levels, consisting of three parts: the original self, the ego and the superego, and the original, innate self is the composition of the subconscious.
Emphasizing the important role of childhood experience in "personality development" and the important influence of biological instincts in "personality structure" are the two most important points of personality theory - and they are also important arguments that support multiple personality films.
In [Confinement Island], the event that leads to the protagonist's trauma is that the wife kills the child, and he kills the wife when he loses his mind.
When the event of death cannot be accepted by the spiritual subject, in order to protect his spirit from collapsing, he fantasizes about another new self--dissociated personality for the purpose of protecting himself.
Similarly, in [Rose, Red Lotus], the sister who cannot accept the cause of her sister's death, in addition to forcing herself to split into sisters, has always fantasized that she is the character who protects her sister from the poison of her stepmother, which is the knot that failed to rescue her sister from the cabinet in time many years ago.
In [Heart Demon Robbery], the protagonist Sybel suffers a series of abuses from her delusional mother in her infancy: torture, hanging, enemas, and when she becomes an adult, in addition to the independent "self", the other 15 personalities that exist in her body have their own characteristics, which also represent a series of knots in Sybel's growth:
That mature and motherly personality is the maternal love she will never get; the confident, sophisticated blonde beauty, with her many childhood memories, often appears and reminds the doctor Sybel of his early years, is a protector; the youngest personality is still a sensitive and timid personality, often sucking fingers, afraid of doing something wrong and being punished by her mother, acting as a retracer of her childhood experience.
When the "superego" cannot suppress the "self", all the suppressed pain or passion is expressed through other personalities, so that in most split personality movies, the protagonist is both the abuser and the victim.
When [Split] was first released, it was condemned by a group of psychologists: "demonizing the patient with multiple personalities" and "not making a rational analysis of the protagonist's causes".
Indeed, "disease" has provided 100 years of creative inspiration for the seventh art, and for Hollywood and audiences, the "disease" of shocking, sympathetic, and somewhat curious nature is consumption, but it is also the embodiment of "psychology" that is increasingly valued in movies.
The history of the judicial apparatus, religion, and the treatment of the mentally ill by ordinary people is not very good in the history of human civilization.
The "ring sawing" of the ancient Roman era, the "bloodletting therapy" of the Middle Ages, the "great confinement" of the Renaissance, for thousands of years, the mentally ill were either possessed as demons, or as blind and labor camps, they were exorcized, banished, imprisoned in shelters, and they had to be isolated by the civilized world like the "plague".
However, whether or not they are for the sake of preemptiveness, those serious multi-personality films, at least take advantage of the disease, provide the audience with an entry point to spy on the secret mind in the truth and illusion, and also let the "madness" get a breather in the "civilization" wrapped up.
[Fight Club] ends with a sigh of relief for Foucault. Taylor is dead, but the building opposite the symbol of industrial civilization still collapses in the Pixies soundtrack, which probably confirms the saying: "Perversion is an act that conforms to human nature but violates rationality." ”
What is your favorite personality disorder movie?