Split (2016)
Director M. Night Shyamalan
Just a thought...
Imagine a scenario...
A wage earner puts on a different personality at work, a docile one, bowing to the pressures of hierarchy, not wanting to step the wrong toe and the fan the right ember! At home, he dons a different costume, being the head of the family, can be a dominant sort pushing forward with so much ferocity as he is King in his little kingdom. His child, quite helpless, transfers his displeasures on his faithful dog who just cow into submission for the food he is served daily! Outside the house compound, the dog would morph into such a brutal to guard his territory.
In essence, we have so many personalities all keep under wraps under the hood of our brains, waiting to be unleashed when the time is ripe.
This must be the basis of this movie where a patient of dissociative identity disorder (split personality) with 23 alter egos. His psychiatrist believes that many of his outward manifestation also affects his biological states. In other words, one particular personality can influence another medical condition, i.e. in one form, he actually needs insulin injections! Every personality wants to dominate over the other. The patient tries to maintain a semblance of normalcy by adapting the best personality accepted in society. This balance, however, is tilted when a couple of school girls pray a prank on him. Hence starts the mayhem of the kidnapping the pranksters. In between all these, a ghastly hidden beastly personality with gargantuan might surfaces. I think this part is the one that mental health workers around the world had a bone to pick with this story. They accuse the filmmakers of denigrating mentally ill patients of being cannibalistic! I think the storytellers were trying to suggest perhaps when our guard is down, the suppressed animalistic desires may just re-surface.
This director was cheeky at the end to announce indirectly that this film is actually is a kind of a continuation of his 2000 movie 'Unbreakable'. Cute. The 'Split' does not only refer to the split personality but also a 'tongue-in-cheek-way' to link it to 'Unbreakable' (hint: antonym)!
Director M. Night Shyamalan
Just a thought...
Imagine a scenario...
A wage earner puts on a different personality at work, a docile one, bowing to the pressures of hierarchy, not wanting to step the wrong toe and the fan the right ember! At home, he dons a different costume, being the head of the family, can be a dominant sort pushing forward with so much ferocity as he is King in his little kingdom. His child, quite helpless, transfers his displeasures on his faithful dog who just cow into submission for the food he is served daily! Outside the house compound, the dog would morph into such a brutal to guard his territory.
In essence, we have so many personalities all keep under wraps under the hood of our brains, waiting to be unleashed when the time is ripe.
This must be the basis of this movie where a patient of dissociative identity disorder (split personality) with 23 alter egos. His psychiatrist believes that many of his outward manifestation also affects his biological states. In other words, one particular personality can influence another medical condition, i.e. in one form, he actually needs insulin injections! Every personality wants to dominate over the other. The patient tries to maintain a semblance of normalcy by adapting the best personality accepted in society. This balance, however, is tilted when a couple of school girls pray a prank on him. Hence starts the mayhem of the kidnapping the pranksters. In between all these, a ghastly hidden beastly personality with gargantuan might surfaces. I think this part is the one that mental health workers around the world had a bone to pick with this story. They accuse the filmmakers of denigrating mentally ill patients of being cannibalistic! I think the storytellers were trying to suggest perhaps when our guard is down, the suppressed animalistic desires may just re-surface.
This director was cheeky at the end to announce indirectly that this film is actually is a kind of a continuation of his 2000 movie 'Unbreakable'. Cute. The 'Split' does not only refer to the split personality but also a 'tongue-in-cheek-way' to link it to 'Unbreakable' (hint: antonym)!
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