Dissociative Identity Disorder in Popular Culture - Movies and Television

Movies and Television

• In 1967's Indian Bollywood film Raat Aur Din, directed by Satyen Bose, the lead female role played by Nargis Dutt suffered from dual personality disorder. Nargis, for her role, was awarded with National Film Award for Best Actress.
• In the 1976 television film Sybil, based on the novel by Flora Rheta Schreiber, a young woman is found to have at least 16 separate personalities. The fictionalized case of "Sybil", loosely based on the life of Shirley Ardell Mason, has become the iconic image of MPD/DID for most of the American public.
• In the 1975 television film Trilogy of Terror, the second segment concerns the rivalry of two sisters who turn out to be sharing a body. A similar story is the subject of an episode of the television series Magnum, P.I.
• Latka Gravas, one of Andy Kaufman's characters from the sitcom Taxi, was characterised as having multiple personalities. The normally shy Latka sometimes presents as womanizing Vic Ferrari. In at least one episode, he assumes the personality of the main character of Taxi, Alex Reiger.
• Norman Bates in the 1960 film Psycho (adapted from Robert Bloch's 1959 novel) can be said to have dual personalities, since he has internalized his dead mother.
• Mort Rainey in the 2004 film Secret Window (adapted from Stephen King's novella) has dual personalities, coexisting with John Shooter.
• Multiple personalities are a catalyst for numerous storylines on the ABC soap opera One Life to Live since its premiere in 1968.
• The 1999 film Fight Club features an unnamed narrator with dual personalities.
• The 1992 film Raising Cain is about a child psychologist who turns out to be harboring several personalities in stereotyped fashion. The cause of his mental disease is said to be mind control experiments performed on him as a small child by his father.
• The 1994 film Color of Night, starring Bruce Willis, the 1996 films Primal Fear and Shattered Mind, 1995's Never Talk to Strangers and 2001's Session 9, and the 2003 thriller Identity feature multiple personalities and explore the idea of responsibility for another personality's actions. The multiples in these films are characterized stereotypically as meek, peaceful people housing violent, psychopathic alternate personalities.
• Never Talk to Strangers features a psychologist who starts getting terrorized with death threats and then has her favorite pet cat killed. It is revealed that she has a second personality created from the frequent abuse she suffered as a child, and this alter was the one tormenting her.
• Me, Myself & Irene (2000) starring Jim Carrey as Charlie Baileygates and Hank Evans, is a slapstick farce about a man who becomes a "split personality" after suppressing angers and frustrations for years, his new personality 'Hank' actively seeking confrontation where Charlie avoided it, their relationship culminating in the two literally struggling for control over parts of their shared body.
• French Stewart played a multiple in an episode of Becker entitled "Papa Does Preach".
• The popular sitcom Barney Miller guest-starred Stefan Gierasch as a multiple in the episode "Power Failure", which initially aired December 9, 1976.
• In X-Men: The Last Stand (2006), mutant Jean Grey is described as having developed a split personality as a result of mental barriers placed in her mind by her mentor, Professor Xavier. This "creature" represented all her primal urges, and called itself "Phoenix". In X-Men: Evolution, two characters are subject to DID at some point in the series. Rogue, capable of absorbing the powers and personalities of others, suffers from a variation of DID after her accumulation of psyches overwhelms her and she loses her sanity. Legion, or David, Xavier's son has multiple personalities, each with a particular mutant ability.
• The NBC television series Heroes features a character, Niki Sanders with two other selves referred to as Jessica and Gina, implied to have been the result of her abusive childhood. Later in the series, the main villain, Sylar, develops multiple personalities as a side effect of the use of the shapeshifting ability when used in combination with his acquired psychometry; his mind has begun to fracture into the different personas of those whom he has shapeshifted into.
• In an episode of the USA Network series Psych, (2006) the main character confronts a murderer with typically theatrical split personalities.
• Various episodes of popular television series such as The X-Files, Psi Factor and Judging Amy, use the idea of multiples with a hidden "killer personality". The film Saimin plays on this idea with one personality being a demonic possession by a malevolent incarnation of the Monkey King; the Touched by an Angel episode "Loser" states that multiples are possessed by demons. The Babylon 5 episode "Divided Loyalties" (1993) postulates a hidden killer personality programmed into the mind of a telepathic woman and triggered by a telepathically sent password.
• The 2005 Indian psychological thriller film Anniyan, portrays Ambi, who has developed DID as a result of witnessing the devastating experience of his sister's death.
• The 1993 Indian horror film Manichitrathazhu, centers on Ganga, a woman who develops split personality disorder during a period of stay at her husband's family house.
• In the ER, episode "Jigsaw", and in the Nip/Tuck episode "Montana / Sassy / Justice", patients are portrayed with stereotypical dissociative disorders.
• Jacqueline Hyde, a villain in the game show Where in Time Is Carmen Sandiego?, is a teenager with (as usual) a sweet, innocent personality and an insane, evil personality.
• In the television series Criminal Minds, several episodes deal with criminals who have DID.
• The 2003 film Haute Tension (Switchblade Romance) ends with a "killer multiple" revelation.
• In the animated series Transformers Animated, the Decepticon Blitzwing has three separate personalities and faces to match.
• In the animated series Beavis and Butt-head, Beavis has a separate identity, the Great Cornholio, who usually surfaces when he consumes a large amount of sugar or caffeine, or occasionally in moments of extreme anger.
• In the animated series Garbage Pail Kids, the character Split Kit has one side that is good and the other that is bad.
• In an episode of The Mod Squad, Carolyn Jones played a woman with two personalities, one of which was the stereotypical passive "good girl", while the other was a psychotic who had put out a contract on the "good" one.
• Showtime's United States of Tara is about a mother of two who is diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder, and whose alters appear regularly when she is under stress.
• On India's NDTV Imagine's popular soap opera Jyoti, Sudha Sharma exhibits dual personality, morphing into the confident and brazen character "Devika" by night.
• In the 1990s soap opera, Melrose Place, Dr. Kimberly Shaw suffered from what was called multiple personality disorder. She was also variously characterized as psychotic and possessed by a demon.
• In the television series Jam & Jerusalem, Rosie Bales (Dawn French) is a factory worker who has an alter named Margaret, a stern and demanding older woman. It is hinted that this alter was created during a sexual trauma earlier in her life.
• In the television series Murdoch Mysteries, the suspect in the season 3 episode Me, Myself, and Murdoch has two personalities.
• The 2010 film The Ward depicts a young institutionalized woman who, while trying to escape from the institution and a resident killer ghost, finds that all the other killed patients and the ghost are alternative personalities she created in order to deal with a violent abduction in her childhood.
• In the television series Lie to Me, Cal works on a case of a woman who claims to have had a vision of murder only for it be discovered she has multiple personalities and the Lightman group must work out if the personality who witnessed the crime is a witness or the murderer. The personalities include a college student, prostitute, the silent protector and the original personality that the team inadvertently awaken during hypnotherapy.
• In the television series Family Matters, Jaleel White plays a character suffering from DID with two main personalities: intelligent nerdy Steven Urkel and suave sophisticated Stefan Urquelle.
• Robert De Niro plays David Callaway in Hide & Seek. Shortly after his wife's suicide, his disturbed daughter (Dakota Fanning) becomes friends with the mysterious and unseen Charlie, whom David assumes is an imaginary friend she has created. Charlie is soon found to be psychotic, who torments David in gruesome ways such as drowning the family cat. It is eventually revealed that Charlie is a split personality of David himself, created by David's anguish when he caught his wife cheating on him. In the film's finale, De Niro finally portrays Charlie as he goes on a murderous rampage.
• Kelly Sullivan plays Kate Howard and her alter/name she was born with Connie Falconeri on ABC's General Hospital
• In the animated series Total Drama: Revenge of the Island, one contestant, Mike, suffers four different personalities, each personality will appear in certain conditions which two nationality ( Australian, Russian) personas and two self-centered with ladies men; hot guy & bad-temper narcissistic old man persona. However, in the episode he is eliminated in, he cures himself of his DID by fighting his personalities in his mind.
• 2003 South Korean film A Tale of Two Sisters.
• The 1997 Indian tele-serial made in Tamil, Marmadesam, features the protagonist to be having two different personalities - the normal himself and an assumed personality of the village god. The later personality takes control when somebody does a mistake in the village and slays them with a sword. This tele-serial was inturn made from a Tamil nouvel Vittu Vidu Karuppa! (English:Leave me my God!) written by Indra Soundar Rajan.
• In the series South Park, it is revealed in the episode "City Sushi", that Tuong Lu Kim, the owner of the Chinese restaurant City Wok, is actually an alter-ego created by a therapist named Doctor Janus, who suffered from various MPD disorders; the episode concluded with the police deciding to force Janus to assume the Lu Kim personality their view because is that janus alter-ago is Asian despite is original personalty is caucasian and he owns the only Chinese restaurant in South Park. Other characters who may have aspects of DID (MPD) are Herbert Garrison and Eric Cartman, as Mr Garrison possesses various hand-puppets- Mr Hat and Mr Twig- who are perceived to be extensions of his own personality, and Cartman has been shown to treat his stuffed toys and even his own hand as separate identities.
• Session 9 is a 2001 American psychological horror film, directed by Brad Anderson and written by Anderson and Stephen Gevedon. The plot focuses on the growing tension within an asbestos removal crew working at an abandoned mental asylum, which is paralleled by the gradual revelation of a former Dissociative identity disorder (DID) patient's disturbed past through recorded audio tapes of the patient's hypnotherapy sessions.