I watched the United States of Tara on Showtime. In this series, the character of Tara, played by Toni Collete, takes on four personalities. Tara raises her family consisting of two teenage kids, a daughter and son, and a supportive husband. Tara is diagnosed with multiple personality disorder and inhibits the personalities of a sixteen year old, T, a southern trucker, Buck, and a 50’s housewife, Alice. In one particular episode (season 1 episode 11) Tara admits herself into an institution that specializes in patients diagnosed with multiple personality disorder. Tara recounts past memories that reveal partial explanation for acquiring altering personalities. After talking with a therapist, the audience learns that Tara was sexual abused by a man in college and hopes to suppress this horrific memory. Similar to the “true story” of Eve, Tara obtains these personalities following an emotionally shattering event. Eve also experienced hardship as she had a miscarriage prior to the outburst of her three personalities. Also, Eve witnessed the death of her beloved grandmother at the age of six and needed to kiss the dead body according to family customs. In both works, the woman suffering raises a family and struggles to maintain relationships. The viewers see the difficulty in maintaining a relatively balanced life and adequately filling their roles as mothers. The differences in the therapy techniques are evident as Tara’s therapist is much more intelligent in the subject matter, unlike Dr. Luther from Eve. Both works contain similar stories about mothers suffering with DID and attempting to find their “true” personalities. -Laura M
The movie about multiple personalities that I chose to watch was Fight Club. Fight Club differs strongly from The Three Faces of Eve and from the United States of Tara in that it is far from realistic. The unnamed narrator in Fight Club lives a supposedly normal life (aside from suffering from insomnia) but is feels purposeless and dissatisfied with his life. This changes when the narrator meets and eventually starts living with Tyler Durden. The two of them begin an underground “fight club” in which people participate in organized fighting matches in order to get out their rage and intensify their feelings. The fights are sort-of a type of catharsis and the narrator gets really into the whole culture of fight club as more people join and Tyler and the narrator begin to apply the fight club mentality to their daily lives. At the end of the movie, the narrator realizes that Tyler has taken fight club to new extremes by initiating “project mayhem,” organized acts of terrorism that are supposed to make people realize the important things in their life. At this point, the narrator confronts Tyler and realizes that Tyler is actually his other personality and is everything that he wants to be but is not. It is harder to interpret how accurately the narrator’s split personality is portrayed because the backdrop of the movie is so science fiction-like and the story is told from the point of view of one of the personalities. I think, though, that this portrayal is fairly inaccurate. The main problems being that the narrator talks and physically interacts with his other personality as they both exist at the same time, and there seems to be no reason for the narrator to have a split personality nor is there a reason for the personality to come out at a certain time. At times, I thought the character seemed to have more symptoms of schizophrenia and seem more like the portrayal of John Nash in A Beautiful Mind than anything shown in The Three Faces of Eve. To me the type of split personality that is in this movie is really an excuse for a dramatic plot twist. The creators do not seem to be trying to portray split personality in a realistic way, instead they have used split personality as an excuse to make an unrealistic movie seem more plausible. -Zoe
I watched the movie Fight Club to compare to The Three Faces of Eve. The Three faces of Eve followed the life of a woman Eve who had multiple personality disorder and would become three different people through the course of her daily life. In Fight Club the narrator feels trapped by society where he works in a dead end job and suffers from insomnia. He meets a man Tyler Durden who lets him live in his house with him and becomes his friend. Together they begin a fight club where people come to fight and beat up other people to get rid of their anger and hostility. At the end of the movie, the narrator realizes that Tyler is creating a terrorist organization called Project Mayhem and when he goes to confront him about it, he realizes that he is Tyler Durden. He was the one who created fight club and initiated everything he has done himself. Tyler Durden represents the narrators “other side”. Tyler Durden has several jobs and is the narrator’s way to “act out”. Tyler’s character represents the narrator and his dissociative identity disorder. In The Three Faces of Eve, Eve has three personalities, Eve White, Eve Black, and Jane. In both that movie and Fight Club neither of the characters realizes their other personalities. Eve White was the quiet house-wife, Eve Black was the loud, outgoing party girl, and Jane was the stable character. In Fight Club the narrator was depressed and Tyler was the crazy, outgoing personality. It seems that people who suffer from DID have trouble finding a distinct personality and distinguishing between a more reserved and quiet person and those who have a personality of a loud person and someone who acts out. In The Three Faces of Eve, it is shown a real case of DID where this woman is suffering from this disorder and has no idea of her other personalities. In Fight Club, the narrator believes that Tyler is just another person and sees him and talks to him. This may confuse viewers as to what exactly DID is and the consequences of it is. -danielle b
I watched Me, Myself and Irene. This movie is about a man, Charlie Baileygates (Jim Carrey) who is a Police Trooper and has three children and a wife. His life seems to be pretty normal but suddenly his wife cheats on him and leaves him. He puts on an act that he is fine and is not affected by the fact that his wife just left him. Throughout his whole life people have taken advantage of him and now on top of that his wife just left him. After suppressing his true feelings about how he feels about his wife and the other people who have taken advantage of him, he develops multiple personality disorder. This multiple disorder personality is known as Hank, who is very aggressive and violent. Hank and Charlie have complete opposite behaviors. Just like in Me, Myself and Irene, Eve, in The Three Faces of Eve, suffers from DID. Eve suffers from three different personalities, Eve White, Eve Black, and Jane. In both movies the multiple personality disorder develops due to suppressing true feelings. These three personalities of Eve develop because of a life changing event when her grandmother past away. Also the three personalities are all very different, just like how Charlie and Hank are opposites. Eve White is quiet; Eve Black is fun and outgoing, and Jane who is stable. A difference between the two movies is that in Me, Myself and Irene Hank is fully aware that he takes over Charlie but in The Three Faces of Eve none of the three personalities know about each other. -Britt
For my movie, I chose to watch The Two Towers, which is based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s book The Lord of the Rings. The character in the movie, who suffers from DID, is named Gollum. He has two personalities Sméagol and Gollum, one former portrayed as good and the latter portrayed as evil. This portrayal of DID does not involve any sort of amnesia or visible switches of character signaled by headaches, rather the two personalities of Gollum coexist with one another, although not entirely agreeably. In addition, rather than integrating the personalities as in the case of Eve White, Eve Black, and Jane, the two personalities of Gollum fight with one another for control of their body. At one point Sméagol manages to ‘banish’ Gollum, but due to betrayal the personality of Gollum returns. Another difference between the portrayal of DID found in the Lord of the Rings series and The Three Faces of Eve is the fact that some of the personalities in the The Three Faces of Eve are unaware of each other, whereas Gollum and Sméagol interact with one another, sometimes violently. The Two Towers is a fantasy novel, so it attributes the development of the two different personalities of Gollum as a twisting of his soul due to a ring that is evil in nature. The Three Faces of Eve is much more dependable for the causes of DID, attributing the rise of the disorder to trauma. In the case of Eve, she developed DID as a result of being forced to kiss the corpse of her grandmother on the cheek.
On a random note, unrelated to the prompt, I looked up a description of The Three Faces of Eve and the women who the movie was based on, Chris Costner Sizemore. I found it interesting that the movie itself did fictionalize the Sizemore’s actual experiences with DID. She had approximately twenty personalities that manifested themselves in threes, which is vastly different from the movie’s portrayal of her life. I also found a link of Sizemore giving an interview on BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/hardtalk/7961351.stm.
Like Laura, I watched the United States of Tara. It follows the life of a mother of two children who has decided to go off her medication for DID—even though, according to my research, there is no such thing. Unlike “The Three Faces of Eve,” which seeks to dramatize a story of loss and healing, this modern TV show tries to depict how someone with DID can still lead a “normal” life and doesn't need to be treated, necessarily. Whereas Eve's goal throughout her story was to unify into one personality, Tara merely seeks to explore her disorder and live with it, for better or for worse.
I watched the first two episodes of the series, which give more of an overview of Tara's condition and home life than does the one that Laura chose to reflect on. In it, we are introduced to Tara's family and a few of her “alters,” as she refers to them. Like in “The Three Faces of Eve,” DID is treated as a distinct psychological disease rather than a cultural phenomenon. There is a slight voice given to skepticism, but this comes in the form of Charmaine, Tara's sister, who is written as a resentful antagonist rather than giving voice to legitimate concerns regarding DID's classification as a true disorder. Unlike in Eve's story, however, Tara's “alters” claim to have separate pasts from the main personalities. Alice, the proper housewife, claims to have attended Radcliffe, which Tara did not, and Buck is supposedly a Vietnam War veteran. Similarly to Eve's hierarchy of personalities, some of Tara's alters are aware of her thoughts and actions even while she is not aware of theirs. In all, while the portrayal of DID has a different goal in this case, the underlying assumptions are still the same, meaning the pop culture understanding of the disorder has not changed much in the last 40 years.
I watched United States of Tara, which turned out to be very similar to The Three Faces of Eve in their portrayal of Dissociative Identity Disorder. Their similarities lead me to believe that both are overly inflated portrayals of DID. Like amnesia, I think that the form of DID represented in film and television rarely occur in reality. For some reason, the alters in United States of Tara and The Three Faces of Eve include the same character archetypes: The young flirty teen represented by T in U.S.T. and Eve Black in T.F.E. as well as the straitlaced housewife Alice in U.S.T. and Eve White in T.F.E. I can’t find an explanation for why these specific personalities would manifest itself in a real case of DID, so I tend to think that the alters in T.F.E. are loosely based on reality, and that the alter archetypes are chosen because the clashing of two opposite personalities makes for more interesting film and television. The narrator in The Three Faces of Eve claims that the story is complete non-fiction at the beginning of the movie, it is based on the story of Chris Costner Sizemore, whose life is actually quite far removed from the movie representation of Chris. By the end of The Three Faces of Eve, Jane is completely cured and her alters disappear when her childhood trauma is resolved. However, in reality, Sizemore claims she suffered from DID for 18 more years after she was supposedly cured by her doctor. In face, she had to sue 20th Century Fox to get the legal rights to her life story back so she could write her own, accurate version of her experience. Based on all of the inconsistencies and controversies between the Chris Sizemore and the movie, I am very hesitant to accept The Three Faces of Eve as a factual portrayal of DID.
In the NBC show, Heroes, the character of Niki Sanders experiences dissociative identity disorder. Niki’s second personality is Jessica. The show Heroes is a science-fiction like show about people who have “super powers.” In season one, Niki is only able to access her super human powers when she is Jessica. Much like The Three Faces of Eve, before Niki realizes that she has another personality, she would experience blackouts whenever Jessica came out, unable to recollect anything she had done. When Niki would become Jessica and Jessica would walk by a mirror, the reflection shown would be that of Niki stuck inside and banging on the glass to escape. It turns out that Jessica is really Niki’s sister. When Jessica and Niki were younger, their alcoholic father would often abuse and beat them. Eventually, he strangled Jessica and killed her. Later in life, Jessica was somehow able to “come back from the dead” and possess Niki’s body. Niki and Jessica can be compared to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde where Jessica is Niki’s “evil side” who uses her powers for bad. Much like the beginning of The Three Faces of Eve, Niki has no control over when Jessica wants to appear. Jessica often seems much stronger than Niki and later in season one she takes over Niki’s body for days, pretending to be her. At one point when Niki is put in prison for crimes that Jessica has committed, she is given drugs and sedatives which seem to be the only thing that will make Jessica weaker. Whether or not Jessica and Niki accurately portray DID correctly—in the real world—they do not. If you were to take away the super human strength from Jessica, I think that it is possible for Niki to suffer from DID after going through the traumatizing experiences when she was younger and the death of her sister.
I watched Fight Club to compare with The Three Faces of Eve. Fight club is about the story of a man, the narrator, who struggles with insomnia. He is also particularly miserable in his job and visits various support groups weekly. None of these support groups apply to him, but their environment comforts him. The narrator suffers from DID. His second personality is named Tyler Durden (played by Brad Pitt). The narrator thinks of Tyler as his friend and talks to him frequently. Together, they start a fight club called Project Mayhem which plans terrorist events that help people appreciate their life more. No one gets harmed through these attacks, however many buildings are blown up. This club serves as an outlet for built of aggression and anger for men of all types. They fight each other then shake hands after amicably, in order to show no hard feelings. The rule of fight club is that no one talks about it, so every man can go about their daily life. The narrator and Tyler are portrayed as two different people in this film to prove the differences in personality. The narrator is soft spoken and sarcastic, while Tyler is a natural leader. Essentially, Tyler is everything the narrator is not. The audience of this movie does to realize theses characters are the same person until we watch the narrator shoot himself in the head, only to kill Tyler. This is also when he realizes that he had two personalities all the time. It had been him beating up himself when he believed to be fighting Tyler. It was also him who ran and controlled Project Mayhem. The woman the narrator thought Tyler was sleeping with was actually sleeping with the narrator. Unlike in the Three Faces of Eve, this character could not voluntarily turn these personalities on and off. To accurately compare this movie to DID is pretty difficult. It is so extremely unrealistic of a case that it cannot match up exactly. Clearly the narrator of Fight Club had an alter-ego, but it seems odd how he just switched on and off randomly. Zoe said that it is hard to really view both sides of the narrator because the story is told only from his perspective. Also since, he and Tyler can exist together in the same world and communicate with each other they appear to be different people. In The Three Faces of Eve, she has three very distinct personalities that do not interact with each other. They also can be turned on simply by people asking for them. As a person Eve was very up and down due to her frequent changes in character. She could go out dancing one night and sit at home crying the next while the next day she would be efficient and merry. Eve knows she has these other sides when she’s calm, but the narrator does not. He has flashes of memory in which he has no recollection of being Tyler. Another quick critique, when someone shoots themselves in the head, they usually die with their other personalities, as opposed to one being killed and the other surviving. --Hannah
I also watched Fight Club. The narrator is DID, but instead of having multiple personalities come out from him, he is able to interact with his second personality. According to personality 2, the main character imagines himself watching one personality or the other, when there is really only one person there. This is different from the main character in The Three Faces of Eve, whose personalities only appear to have control over Eve’s body one at a time. Because the narrator in Fight club is hallucinating his second personality, he also appears to have symptoms of schizophrenia. Additionally, it is not clear that his illness is DID, since he never seeks medical help. In The Three Faces of Eve, Eve goes to a psychiatrist regularly to try to cure her disorder. However, only at the end of Fight Club does the narrator realize that he has another personality, and it is unclear how much of his life was hallucinations or actual events, and when his alternate personality was able to come out. Because the main character is not ever formally diagnosed with DID, it leaves open the possibility that the character is hallucinating more than being driven by another personality. This would mean that the character does not have DID, but instead a mental illness that causes hallucinations. I disagree with Zoe in that I don’t believe that Fight Club is science fiction; the plot is unrealistic, but there is no impossible science in the movie, just highly improbable event. While the main character’s illness is certainly possible, it is unclear whether the illness is DID, schizophrenia, or something else all together. -Nadya
I also watched the movie Fight Club. I agree with everyone else who has already stated that Fight Club differs from The Three Faces of Eve in many ways. Although they both supposedly display cases DID, the main characters show very different symptoms. In The Three Faces of Eve, the main woman had three personalities, but she was aware of this problem. She knew that sometimes she lapsed into other personalities, and by the end of the movie she was even able to control which personality was “out.” The personalities were very distinct, but they were not opposites and they did not necessarily make up for one another where one may have lacked. In Fight Club, there was a man whose two personalities were “friends” but were definitely not aware that they were a part of the same body. His two personalities were opposites; the formation of his second personality was caused by his thinking that he had many shortcomings in his original personality. So, the second personality was everything that he was not. While in The Three Faces of Eve only one personality could be out at once, in Fight Club the two personalities often communicated. A further difference is in the reason that the characters developed DID. In The Three Faces of Eve, she gets the disease because of memories that she tried to repress of her mother forcing her to do something that she didn’t want to. In Fight Club, the disease appears because the main character is not proud of himself and wishes that he could be more confident.
For a movie to compare to The Three Faces of Eve, I watched Fight Club. The basic premise is that a man (Edward Norton), who remains nameless through the entire movie, is dissatisfied with his current life and work. Suffering from insomnia, he finds the only way to get sleep is to first go to therapy sessions for ill or dying people. On one of his business trips for work he meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt). When he gets back home he finds his house has exploded and is forced move in with Tyler. They, together, create a fight club where members can release their inner anger by fighting with each other. Soon it turns out that Tyler has turned the Fight Club into Project Mayhem, a highly trained organization, which commits increasingly violent acts of anti-materialism. Near the end of the movie the narrator finally realizes that both he and Tyler share that same body and is able to rid himself of Tyler. In contrast to this, The Three Faces of Eve, has some very distinct differences. First of all in The Three Faces of Eve the narrator is the psychologist diagnosing Eve. Therefore it is very easy for the viewer of the movie to see that Eve is staying the same physical person while taking on a different identity. In the Fight Club, however, a twist is thrown in by making the narrator one of the identities. In doing this it makes it much harder for the viewer to understand what is going on in terms of the DID. Another problem with the split personalities shown in Fight Club is that in a real case of DID such as Eve’s, the different personalities do not communicate to each other. However, each personality is generally aware that another resides in the same body. In Fight Club this is reversed as the personalities do talk to each other but have no idea that they are part of the same body. -- Chris
For my comparison to The Three Faces of Eve, I watched an episode of Criminal Minds called Conflicted (season 4, episode 20). In this episode, a man named Adam suffering from DID is responsible for the murder of three different men. However, what is particularly interesting about this case is the fact that Adam’s alter ego was actually of the opposite gender, and calls herself Amanda. In some ways, the two personalities of Adam showed similarities to Eve and her various personalities. For instance, both Adam and Eve (funny how those names worked out) experience headaches as their personalitites change, and both experience bouts of amnesia as a new alter ego was in control. Another interesting similarity between the two cases is that, like with Eve Black and Even White at the beginning of the film, Amanda was aware of Adam, while Adam had no knowledge of Amanda. However, in The Three Faces of Eve, this changes as Eve White eventually learns to have some control over her various alter egos and learns to summon them. Another similar fact to note is that both characters from the movie and the TV episode seem to have developed DID as the result of early childhood trauma. While Eve was traumatized by having to kiss her dead grandmother, Adam’s trauma was marked by a life of child abuse from his step father. Also, as with Jane taking control at the end of The Three Faces of Eve, the episode ends with Amanda existing as the dominant personality. However, it is quiote different, because at the end of the episode Amanda essentially refuses to allow Adam’s existance, and decides to take control. Overall, the episode was very interesting, especially because of the gender difference, and I would suggest watching it if you happen to have the time.
14 comments:
I watched the United States of Tara on Showtime. In this series, the character of Tara, played by Toni Collete, takes on four personalities. Tara raises her family consisting of two teenage kids, a daughter and son, and a supportive husband. Tara is diagnosed with multiple personality disorder and inhibits the personalities of a sixteen year old, T, a southern trucker, Buck, and a 50’s housewife, Alice. In one particular episode (season 1 episode 11) Tara admits herself into an institution that specializes in patients diagnosed with multiple personality disorder. Tara recounts past memories that reveal partial explanation for acquiring altering personalities. After talking with a therapist, the audience learns that Tara was sexual abused by a man in college and hopes to suppress this horrific memory.
Similar to the “true story” of Eve, Tara obtains these personalities following an emotionally shattering event. Eve also experienced hardship as she had a miscarriage prior to the outburst of her three personalities. Also, Eve witnessed the death of her beloved grandmother at the age of six and needed to kiss the dead body according to family customs. In both works, the woman suffering raises a family and struggles to maintain relationships. The viewers see the difficulty in maintaining a relatively balanced life and adequately filling their roles as mothers. The differences in the therapy techniques are evident as Tara’s therapist is much more intelligent in the subject matter, unlike Dr. Luther from Eve. Both works contain similar stories about mothers suffering with DID and attempting to find their “true” personalities.
-Laura M
The movie about multiple personalities that I chose to watch was Fight Club. Fight Club differs strongly from The Three Faces of Eve and from the United States of Tara in that it is far from realistic. The unnamed narrator in Fight Club lives a supposedly normal life (aside from suffering from insomnia) but is feels purposeless and dissatisfied with his life. This changes when the narrator meets and eventually starts living with Tyler Durden. The two of them begin an underground “fight club” in which people participate in organized fighting matches in order to get out their rage and intensify their feelings. The fights are sort-of a type of catharsis and the narrator gets really into the whole culture of fight club as more people join and Tyler and the narrator begin to apply the fight club mentality to their daily lives. At the end of the movie, the narrator realizes that Tyler has taken fight club to new extremes by initiating “project mayhem,” organized acts of terrorism that are supposed to make people realize the important things in their life. At this point, the narrator confronts Tyler and realizes that Tyler is actually his other personality and is everything that he wants to be but is not.
It is harder to interpret how accurately the narrator’s split personality is portrayed because the backdrop of the movie is so science fiction-like and the story is told from the point of view of one of the personalities. I think, though, that this portrayal is fairly inaccurate. The main problems being that the narrator talks and physically interacts with his other personality as they both exist at the same time, and there seems to be no reason for the narrator to have a split personality nor is there a reason for the personality to come out at a certain time. At times, I thought the character seemed to have more symptoms of schizophrenia and seem more like the portrayal of John Nash in A Beautiful Mind than anything shown in The Three Faces of Eve. To me the type of split personality that is in this movie is really an excuse for a dramatic plot twist. The creators do not seem to be trying to portray split personality in a realistic way, instead they have used split personality as an excuse to make an unrealistic movie seem more plausible.
-Zoe
I watched the movie Fight Club to compare to The Three Faces of Eve. The Three faces of Eve followed the life of a woman Eve who had multiple personality disorder and would become three different people through the course of her daily life. In Fight Club the narrator feels trapped by society where he works in a dead end job and suffers from insomnia. He meets a man Tyler Durden who lets him live in his house with him and becomes his friend. Together they begin a fight club where people come to fight and beat up other people to get rid of their anger and hostility. At the end of the movie, the narrator realizes that Tyler is creating a terrorist organization called Project Mayhem and when he goes to confront him about it, he realizes that he is Tyler Durden. He was the one who created fight club and initiated everything he has done himself. Tyler Durden represents the narrators “other side”. Tyler Durden has several jobs and is the narrator’s way to “act out”. Tyler’s character represents the narrator and his dissociative identity disorder. In The Three Faces of Eve, Eve has three personalities, Eve White, Eve Black, and Jane. In both that movie and Fight Club neither of the characters realizes their other personalities. Eve White was the quiet house-wife, Eve Black was the loud, outgoing party girl, and Jane was the stable character. In Fight Club the narrator was depressed and Tyler was the crazy, outgoing personality. It seems that people who suffer from DID have trouble finding a distinct personality and distinguishing between a more reserved and quiet person and those who have a personality of a loud person and someone who acts out. In The Three Faces of Eve, it is shown a real case of DID where this woman is suffering from this disorder and has no idea of her other personalities. In Fight Club, the narrator believes that Tyler is just another person and sees him and talks to him. This may confuse viewers as to what exactly DID is and the consequences of it is.
-danielle b
I watched Me, Myself and Irene. This movie is about a man, Charlie Baileygates (Jim Carrey) who is a Police Trooper and has three children and a wife. His life seems to be pretty normal but suddenly his wife cheats on him and leaves him. He puts on an act that he is fine and is not affected by the fact that his wife just left him. Throughout his whole life people have taken advantage of him and now on top of that his wife just left him. After suppressing his true feelings about how he feels about his wife and the other people who have taken advantage of him, he develops multiple personality disorder. This multiple disorder personality is known as Hank, who is very aggressive and violent. Hank and Charlie have complete opposite behaviors.
Just like in Me, Myself and Irene, Eve, in The Three Faces of Eve, suffers from DID. Eve suffers from three different personalities, Eve White, Eve Black, and Jane. In both movies the multiple personality disorder develops due to suppressing true feelings. These three personalities of Eve develop because of a life changing event when her grandmother past away. Also the three personalities are all very different, just like how Charlie and Hank are opposites. Eve White is quiet; Eve Black is fun and outgoing, and Jane who is stable. A difference between the two movies is that in Me, Myself and Irene Hank is fully aware that he takes over Charlie but in The Three Faces of Eve none of the three personalities know about each other.
-Britt
For my movie, I chose to watch The Two Towers, which is based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s book The Lord of the Rings. The character in the movie, who suffers from DID, is named Gollum. He has two personalities Sméagol and Gollum, one former portrayed as good and the latter portrayed as evil. This portrayal of DID does not involve any sort of amnesia or visible switches of character signaled by headaches, rather the two personalities of Gollum coexist with one another, although not entirely agreeably. In addition, rather than integrating the personalities as in the case of Eve White, Eve Black, and Jane, the two personalities of Gollum fight with one another for control of their body. At one point Sméagol manages to ‘banish’ Gollum, but due to betrayal the personality of Gollum returns.
Another difference between the portrayal of DID found in the Lord of the Rings series and The Three Faces of Eve is the fact that some of the personalities in the The Three Faces of Eve are unaware of each other, whereas Gollum and Sméagol interact with one another, sometimes violently. The Two Towers is a fantasy novel, so it attributes the development of the two different personalities of Gollum as a twisting of his soul due to a ring that is evil in nature. The Three Faces of Eve is much more dependable for the causes of DID, attributing the rise of the disorder to trauma. In the case of Eve, she developed DID as a result of being forced to kiss the corpse of her grandmother on the cheek.
-Stephanie
On a random note, unrelated to the prompt, I looked up a description of The Three Faces of Eve and the women who the movie was based on, Chris Costner Sizemore. I found it interesting that the movie itself did fictionalize the Sizemore’s actual experiences with DID. She had approximately twenty personalities that manifested themselves in threes, which is vastly different from the movie’s portrayal of her life. I also found a link of Sizemore giving an interview on BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/hardtalk/7961351.stm.
-Stephanie
Like Laura, I watched the United States of Tara. It follows the life of a mother of two children who has decided to go off her medication for DID—even though, according to my research, there is no such thing. Unlike “The Three Faces of Eve,” which seeks to dramatize a story of loss and healing, this modern TV show tries to depict how someone with DID can still lead a “normal” life and doesn't need to be treated, necessarily. Whereas Eve's goal throughout her story was to unify into one personality, Tara merely seeks to explore her disorder and live with it, for better or for worse.
I watched the first two episodes of the series, which give more of an overview of Tara's condition and home life than does the one that Laura chose to reflect on. In it, we are introduced to Tara's family and a few of her “alters,” as she refers to them. Like in “The Three Faces of Eve,” DID is treated as a distinct psychological disease rather than a cultural phenomenon. There is a slight voice given to skepticism, but this comes in the form of Charmaine, Tara's sister, who is written as a resentful antagonist rather than giving voice to legitimate concerns regarding DID's classification as a true disorder. Unlike in Eve's story, however, Tara's “alters” claim to have separate pasts from the main personalities. Alice, the proper housewife, claims to have attended Radcliffe, which Tara did not, and Buck is supposedly a Vietnam War veteran. Similarly to Eve's hierarchy of personalities, some of Tara's alters are aware of her thoughts and actions even while she is not aware of theirs. In all, while the portrayal of DID has a different goal in this case, the underlying assumptions are still the same, meaning the pop culture understanding of the disorder has not changed much in the last 40 years.
-Heather
I watched United States of Tara, which turned out to be very similar to The Three Faces of Eve in their portrayal of Dissociative Identity Disorder. Their similarities lead me to believe that both are overly inflated portrayals of DID. Like amnesia, I think that the form of DID represented in film and television rarely occur in reality. For some reason, the alters in United States of Tara and The Three Faces of Eve include the same character archetypes: The young flirty teen represented by T in U.S.T. and Eve Black in T.F.E. as well as the straitlaced housewife Alice in U.S.T. and Eve White in T.F.E. I can’t find an explanation for why these specific personalities would manifest itself in a real case of DID, so I tend to think that the alters in T.F.E. are loosely based on reality, and that the alter archetypes are chosen because the clashing of two opposite personalities makes for more interesting film and television.
The narrator in The Three Faces of Eve claims that the story is complete non-fiction at the beginning of the movie, it is based on the story of Chris Costner Sizemore, whose life is actually quite far removed from the movie representation of Chris. By the end of The Three Faces of Eve, Jane is completely cured and her alters disappear when her childhood trauma is resolved. However, in reality, Sizemore claims she suffered from DID for 18 more years after she was supposedly cured by her doctor. In face, she had to sue 20th Century Fox to get the legal rights to her life story back so she could write her own, accurate version of her experience. Based on all of the inconsistencies and controversies between the Chris Sizemore and the movie, I am very hesitant to accept The Three Faces of Eve as a factual portrayal of DID.
-Noah S
In the NBC show, Heroes, the character of Niki Sanders experiences dissociative identity disorder. Niki’s second personality is Jessica. The show Heroes is a science-fiction like show about people who have “super powers.” In season one, Niki is only able to access her super human powers when she is Jessica. Much like The Three Faces of Eve, before Niki realizes that she has another personality, she would experience blackouts whenever Jessica came out, unable to recollect anything she had done. When Niki would become Jessica and Jessica would walk by a mirror, the reflection shown would be that of Niki stuck inside and banging on the glass to escape. It turns out that Jessica is really Niki’s sister. When Jessica and Niki were younger, their alcoholic father would often abuse and beat them. Eventually, he strangled Jessica and killed her. Later in life, Jessica was somehow able to “come back from the dead” and possess Niki’s body. Niki and Jessica can be compared to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde where Jessica is Niki’s “evil side” who uses her powers for bad. Much like the beginning of The Three Faces of Eve, Niki has no control over when Jessica wants to appear. Jessica often seems much stronger than Niki and later in season one she takes over Niki’s body for days, pretending to be her. At one point when Niki is put in prison for crimes that Jessica has committed, she is given drugs and sedatives which seem to be the only thing that will make Jessica weaker.
Whether or not Jessica and Niki accurately portray DID correctly—in the real world—they do not. If you were to take away the super human strength from Jessica, I think that it is possible for Niki to suffer from DID after going through the traumatizing experiences when she was younger and the death of her sister.
Nell.
I watched Fight Club to compare with The Three Faces of Eve. Fight club is about the story of a man, the narrator, who struggles with insomnia. He is also particularly miserable in his job and visits various support groups weekly. None of these support groups apply to him, but their environment comforts him. The narrator suffers from DID. His second personality is named Tyler Durden (played by Brad Pitt). The narrator thinks of Tyler as his friend and talks to him frequently. Together, they start a fight club called Project Mayhem which plans terrorist events that help people appreciate their life more. No one gets harmed through these attacks, however many buildings are blown up. This club serves as an outlet for built of aggression and anger for men of all types. They fight each other then shake hands after amicably, in order to show no hard feelings. The rule of fight club is that no one talks about it, so every man can go about their daily life. The narrator and Tyler are portrayed as two different people in this film to prove the differences in personality. The narrator is soft spoken and sarcastic, while Tyler is a natural leader. Essentially, Tyler is everything the narrator is not. The audience of this movie does to realize theses characters are the same person until we watch the narrator shoot himself in the head, only to kill Tyler. This is also when he realizes that he had two personalities all the time. It had been him beating up himself when he believed to be fighting Tyler. It was also him who ran and controlled Project Mayhem. The woman the narrator thought Tyler was sleeping with was actually sleeping with the narrator. Unlike in the Three Faces of Eve, this character could not voluntarily turn these personalities on and off.
To accurately compare this movie to DID is pretty difficult. It is so extremely unrealistic of a case that it cannot match up exactly. Clearly the narrator of Fight Club had an alter-ego, but it seems odd how he just switched on and off randomly. Zoe said that it is hard to really view both sides of the narrator because the story is told only from his perspective. Also since, he and Tyler can exist together in the same world and communicate with each other they appear to be different people. In The Three Faces of Eve, she has three very distinct personalities that do not interact with each other. They also can be turned on simply by people asking for them. As a person Eve was very up and down due to her frequent changes in character. She could go out dancing one night and sit at home crying the next while the next day she would be efficient and merry. Eve knows she has these other sides when she’s calm, but the narrator does not. He has flashes of memory in which he has no recollection of being Tyler. Another quick critique, when someone shoots themselves in the head, they usually die with their other personalities, as opposed to one being killed and the other surviving.
--Hannah
I also watched Fight Club. The narrator is DID, but instead of having multiple personalities come out from him, he is able to interact with his second personality. According to personality 2, the main character imagines himself watching one personality or the other, when there is really only one person there. This is different from the main character in The Three Faces of Eve, whose personalities only appear to have control over Eve’s body one at a time. Because the narrator in Fight club is hallucinating his second personality, he also appears to have symptoms of schizophrenia. Additionally, it is not clear that his illness is DID, since he never seeks medical help. In The Three Faces of Eve, Eve goes to a psychiatrist regularly to try to cure her disorder. However, only at the end of Fight Club does the narrator realize that he has another personality, and it is unclear how much of his life was hallucinations or actual events, and when his alternate personality was able to come out. Because the main character is not ever formally diagnosed with DID, it leaves open the possibility that the character is hallucinating more than being driven by another personality. This would mean that the character does not have DID, but instead a mental illness that causes hallucinations. I disagree with Zoe in that I don’t believe that Fight Club is science fiction; the plot is unrealistic, but there is no impossible science in the movie, just highly improbable event. While the main character’s illness is certainly possible, it is unclear whether the illness is DID, schizophrenia, or something else all together.
-Nadya
I also watched the movie Fight Club. I agree with everyone else who has already stated that Fight Club differs from The Three Faces of Eve in many ways. Although they both supposedly display cases DID, the main characters show very different symptoms. In The Three Faces of Eve, the main woman had three personalities, but she was aware of this problem. She knew that sometimes she lapsed into other personalities, and by the end of the movie she was even able to control which personality was “out.” The personalities were very distinct, but they were not opposites and they did not necessarily make up for one another where one may have lacked. In Fight Club, there was a man whose two personalities were “friends” but were definitely not aware that they were a part of the same body. His two personalities were opposites; the formation of his second personality was caused by his thinking that he had many shortcomings in his original personality. So, the second personality was everything that he was not. While in The Three Faces of Eve only one personality could be out at once, in Fight Club the two personalities often communicated. A further difference is in the reason that the characters developed DID. In The Three Faces of Eve, she gets the disease because of memories that she tried to repress of her mother forcing her to do something that she didn’t want to. In Fight Club, the disease appears because the main character is not proud of himself and wishes that he could be more confident.
-Deirdre
For a movie to compare to The Three Faces of Eve, I watched Fight Club. The basic premise is that a man (Edward Norton), who remains nameless through the entire movie, is dissatisfied with his current life and work. Suffering from insomnia, he finds the only way to get sleep is to first go to therapy sessions for ill or dying people. On one of his business trips for work he meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt). When he gets back home he finds his house has exploded and is forced move in with Tyler. They, together, create a fight club where members can release their inner anger by fighting with each other. Soon it turns out that Tyler has turned the Fight Club into Project Mayhem, a highly trained organization, which commits increasingly violent acts of anti-materialism. Near the end of the movie the narrator finally realizes that both he and Tyler share that same body and is able to rid himself of Tyler.
In contrast to this, The Three Faces of Eve, has some very distinct differences. First of all in The Three Faces of Eve the narrator is the psychologist diagnosing Eve. Therefore it is very easy for the viewer of the movie to see that Eve is staying the same physical person while taking on a different identity. In the Fight Club, however, a twist is thrown in by making the narrator one of the identities. In doing this it makes it much harder for the viewer to understand what is going on in terms of the DID. Another problem with the split personalities shown in Fight Club is that in a real case of DID such as Eve’s, the different personalities do not communicate to each other. However, each personality is generally aware that another resides in the same body. In Fight Club this is reversed as the personalities do talk to each other but have no idea that they are part of the same body.
-- Chris
For my comparison to The Three Faces of Eve, I watched an episode of Criminal Minds called Conflicted (season 4, episode 20). In this episode, a man named Adam suffering from DID is responsible for the murder of three different men. However, what is particularly interesting about this case is the fact that Adam’s alter ego was actually of the opposite gender, and calls herself Amanda. In some ways, the two personalities of Adam showed similarities to Eve and her various personalities. For instance, both Adam and Eve (funny how those names worked out) experience headaches as their personalitites change, and both experience bouts of amnesia as a new alter ego was in control. Another interesting similarity between the two cases is that, like with Eve Black and Even White at the beginning of the film, Amanda was aware of Adam, while Adam had no knowledge of Amanda. However, in The Three Faces of Eve, this changes as Eve White eventually learns to have some control over her various alter egos and learns to summon them. Another similar fact to note is that both characters from the movie and the TV episode seem to have developed DID as the result of early childhood trauma. While Eve was traumatized by having to kiss her dead grandmother, Adam’s trauma was marked by a life of child abuse from his step father. Also, as with Jane taking control at the end of The Three Faces of Eve, the episode ends with Amanda existing as the dominant personality. However, it is quiote different, because at the end of the episode Amanda essentially refuses to allow Adam’s existance, and decides to take control. Overall, the episode was very interesting, especially because of the gender difference, and I would suggest watching it if you happen to have the time.
Talia :)
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