Film director M. Night Shymalan has come under fire for his portrayal of mental illness in his new movie, Split, which hit theaters this month and has been doing well at the box office. Split stars James McAvoy as a patient with a multiple personality disorder who kidnaps three young girls. They are forced to deal with his multiple personalities as they attempt to escape.
Despite its success at theaters, some critics on social media are calling the film problematic. The mental illness oriented website The Mighty is also tearing into the movie.
“‘Split’ represents yet another gross parody of us based on fear, ignorance and sensationalism, only much worse. The harmful bigotry perpetuated by your horror film will inspire a new wave of revulsion and hatred against plurals and plurality,” the site wrote.
Many are calling for a boycott through a petition that has received over 20,000 supporters who are upset that the movie portrays a rare mental illness, also known as dissociative identity disorder, in a bad light.
Shyamalan rose to prominence after he directed The Sixth Sense, and followed it up with two big hits: Unbreakable and Signs. But after a string of bad releases, including After Earth and The Happening, the director fell from grace and left the public eye. He’s poised to make a return to prominence with his new thriller, which has been relatively well-received by critics and took in more than $40 million at the box office since arriving in theaters this past weekend.
Dissociative identity disorder gives its sufferers multiple distinct identities. It is real, but it also very rare, affecting 0.01% to 1% of the general population. Suffers have differences in posture, mannerism and speech pattern. They may also have their own gender, race, or age due to their dissociation from memory. In the movie, James McAvoy has 24 of them.
“I’m appalled that in the year 2017, films like this are still being created and released,” one social justice advocate, Lauryn Spencer, wrote on Medium. “I love horror films just as much as the next person, but this is no small thing, and it certainly isn’t okay.”
“Please do not support this movie. Instead, listen to those of us that are speaking out against it. These awful, ableist depictions of mentally ill people only help to diminish what little visibility we have and do not help us, they only make us bigger targets.”
Mental illness has long proliferated the media, through inaccurate, and often romanticized depictions in books, art, video games and film. Batman’s Rogues Gallery of the criminally insane comes to mind, as do the countless portrayals of psychosis, OCD, narcissism, borderline, and bipolar disorder. These depictions do not always stigmatize mental illness, and more often than not make people more aware of the existence of mental illness, which some people claim isn’t real at all.
Split has become a nucleus of outrage for progressives, who also claim that the movie is transphobic. Indeed, one of McAvoy’s two dozen characters wears a dress and is a woman, and the actor channels his best impression of Dolores Umbridge. But there’s nothing transphobic about it—unless you harbor a secret dislike towards transgender people and project that dislike onto a movie that doesn’t, in any way, depict its characters as having these biases.
Ian Miles Cheong is a journalist and outspoken media critic. You can reach him through social media at @stillgray on Twitter and on Facebook.
