Research about films focusing on mental illness or subjective world

Secret window is a film about a writer met a crazy farmer who claimed that one of the

writer’s novels was written by him, but it turns out that the farmer was just an imaginative

character inside the writer’s head.

The farmer showed up as a hidden dark personality inside the writer’s head and finally led

to the writer’s cruel murder of his wife.

The film does not give any clear hints about the writer’s Dissociative Identity Disorder, even

the writer himself hasn’t noticed it till the film’s last 15min.

A clear clue was that the writer took a magazine home from the post office, and no one can

have access to the magazine. However, package was already been opened when he arrived

home, and he found that the pages of his novel which could be key evidence to him were

already been torn off. But in the writer’s point of view, we can see that those pages were

torn off by the writer himself, who refused to remember it.

The film first shows us his multiple characteristics right after this magazine event, and the

crazy farmer that had been harassing him for a while was his own imagination too. The film

presents it by letting all versions of characteristics be in the same room, letting them discuss

like there really were that amount of people, even though in reality there was only the writer

himself.

Then the film directly shows how the writer turns into the crazy identity he creates, the

farmer from Texas. When he became that farmer, even his accent changed. When he

became this farmer, he was crueller and finally killed his ex-wife. This cruelty explains a lot

of events that happened earlier in the film.

Most part of the film focuses on the writer himself especially when he was alone, while he

has not aware of his DID and still believed that the crazy farmer claims one of the writer’s

novels was created by him.

The film let us believe and feel empathy for the writer at the beginning so that we were

convinced at the beginning that a crazy farmer is a real person, and that makes the ending

of the story more astonished.

Also, in the film El secreto de Marrowbone, the main character turned out to be bearing

mental illness that some parts of the film are only his imagination. The eldest brother of the

family, Jack, lost his siblings when their father who was a murderer came back for them. He

walled his father and his siblings’ bodies in the attic. As the shock was too much for Jack, he

create his siblings in his mind and imagined that they were still alive, and the film chooses to

show us the story in Jack’s point of view, in which the family were still alive.

The film did not tell the audience the truth nor the entire story at first, it makes us believe

there is something wrong with the house, something supernature. We get to believe that a

lot of strange things happen with the family are results of the ghost thing. But that means the

family have to be isolated from the outside world, as those ‘supernatural things’ actually

happened only in Jack’s head.

Additionally, to isolate the family, Jack’s siblings weren’t allowed to leave their state as the

family’s only guardian passed before Jack turns 21 to be the children’s new guardian. To avoid

the children being adopted by the facility, they pretend that their mother was ill and let Jack

be the only one leaving the house to connect with the outside world.

That means, the family was nearly isolated in their estate, no one actually meets other people

except Jack, which makes Jack’s multiple identity disorder hard to be found out. Until finally

Jack and his imagined family decided to let a girl from town, Ally knows the truth. Jack left

their notebook, on which the truth was written, to her. And the girl finally let him realize the

fact that his siblings were dead. Ally was also a symbol of the outside world to Jack.

However, that doesn’t mean the film hasn’t left any clues about Jack’s mental illness in the

former part of the film. The film frequently mentions the ghost in the house, and the siblings

covered all mirrors in the house because they thought that’s where the ghost comes out from.

Knowing the fact that the whole family was Jack’s imagination, we could know the real reason

why they avoid looking in the mirror, the mirror reflects them as Jack and only Jack. The mirror

reflects the truth. There is actually a shot in which the youngest brother of the family looked

in a mirror and saw Jack instead of himself.

But as the film was covered by a saying that the house was haunted, we couldn’t tell the truth

until it reveals the diary to Ally and also to us.

It is important to let the audience believe that the place the story happens as well as the

characters in it are true, even though you know eventually you will prove unrealistic of it.

The story has to be reasonable with tiny clues that show the virtuality of the story-telling,

such as the mirror from El Secreto de Marrowbone and the magazine from Secret Window.

It is not only in this way will the audience gets to believe your story and immerse themselves

in it, but also it is the way how the character with mental illnesses sees the world, that he

firmly believes it is true and sees all the unnatural bugs threaten to his life. These kinds of

‘bugs’ provide motivations and goals for the story, and while the character fight hard to

solve or escape from these ‘bugs’, he gradually reveals the truth to the audience and to

himself.

However, there are other ways of presenting a subjective mind world of a mental illness

character. In The Cell, it shows the audience the subjective worlds directly. It never covers its

virtuality. On the contrary, it exaggerates it by using visual effects and editing. The scenes

were filled with things that are clearly not from reality, and scenes that were clearly different

from time and space were edited together to create chaotic feelings.

The unreality of the film is so clear that the audiences won’t have trouble telling which is the

actuality. In this way, the virtual world is filled with symbols and metaphors about the

character’s mental states and his experiences. The settings help to create and enrich the

character, and also help with the story-telling.

While creating this kind of scene, the creators will have more freedom to build an

unexpected inner world. However, visual effects and art settings hold a highly important

position in the film. It is possible that the visual might attract too much attention that the

audience could not follow the story.

Unlike Identity and Secret Window, instead of using logic bugs to create the virtuality of the

story, The Cell shows virtuality directly and kind of avoids anything reasonable in the inner

world. But even though in this way films can tell the story with more freedom and are less

limited by time and space, the budget of this kind of filmmaking will be huge and might be

risky for a student’s work.

To create a film about the subjective world, it seems that we should either make it seem as

real as possible or make it as virtual as possible. The former choice tends to uncover the

truth at the end of the film while the latter one tends to create a secret hidden inside the

character’s heart, and the motivation or the goal of the film is to find it.

Either way tries to provide the film with a clear destination, and these kinds of films are

normally presented as mysteries as there are always unknown things hidden. And it is

important to uncover the secrets as well as create them.

For example in Identity, when the criminal identity was captured and tied in the restaurant, a

problem and an unsettling event were solved, even though he was not the real murderer.

In this way, only can the film shows the audience the next mystery event, one after one till

the end, and at last the greatest mystery can be presented and surprised the audience. Also

in this way, the audience can follow the story but not getting confused by guessing which

scene is the reality.

Even though what the film decides to present might be a misunderstanding towards the

truth, but what’s most important is to keep the audience focus on the story, and tries to tell

the story in a clearer way. It is like guiding the audience through a detective game, that they

will have the feeling of finding clues and solving it by themselves.

Compared to patients with dissociative identity disorder in real life, DID characters in films

tend to change identity much more often. Films need to present characters and the story in

a limited period of time. The story and the character have to be more exaggerated than in

real life.

Most time DID patients’ alters won’t have intense conflict, they all tend to live together in a

unique system in order to continue the life, and the showing up of the alters is usually in the

purpose of protecting the host. While in films, in order to present the struggle and trauma

the characters went through, sometimes we need to create conflicting events in the inner

world of the characters. Also it is truth that sometimes people with DID are possible to be

hurt by an alter inside them, as some alters are born to bear the trauma memories which

could be the reason to their unfriendly characteristic that some of them might try to hurt

themselves or people around as a result of their untrusty to the world. In films, we usually

try to exaggerate it.

What’s more, DID patients in real life won’t have trouble distinguishing reality and the

imaginary world. They talk with their imaginary alters and even have their own room or

spaces in their head, but they know it clearly that those are created by their head, in which

they communicate by some kinds of sense, different from the real-life communication. The

different ways of communicating makes them easy to divide imagination from real life.

However, in films, to create more complicated plots and relationships, most importantly, to

confuse the audience, the alters in a DID character’s imagination might not aware of their

unreality, and they might not distinguish reality from imagination either. In this way, the

audience will be curious about the truth and be surprised when the answer shows up.

Mystery and unknown things are also what the audience expects while seeing a film about

mental illness, as subject worlds are so changeable and unpredictable.

As a result, in order to meet the audience’s expectation also to present a DID character as

complete as possible, in screenwriting, DID characters tend to have more intense conflicts

with their altars, and the relationship, as well as the story-telling, could be more

complicated and mysterious than in real life.