Does Suffering Make You Super? | Split (2016)
This article contains spoilers for Split (2016) and deals with delicate issues, if you are easily offended or find such topics unsettling, please do not read further and have a nice day.
In 2016 M. Night Shyamalan released a film that restored his Hollywood credit: Split. A psychological horror film that follows Kevin (James McAvoy), a man with 23 split personalities (see where they get the clever name?), as he kidnaps three girls and holds them in a basement as a sacrifice to the 24th cannibalistic personality only known as “The Beast.”
Two of the girls kidnapped are conventionally attractive and popular, with the third, Casey (Anna Taylor-Joy), who is aloof and considered weird by the others. It’s Casey who survives the movie and has shotgun and showdown with the Beast. She only lives because The Beast sees the scars on her body and determines that she is “Pure,” sparing her life.
The film boasts an incredible performance from James McAvoy, and Anna Taylor-Joy. While the performances bring the film to life, it is the ideology of the film that is visceral when presented on screen. Horror, as a genre, has the ability to make manifest our hidden insecurities and fears and make them written large on the screen, Split (2016) does the same, but with a different kind of idea than normal.
Does Suffering Make You Super?
The film posits, through the mouthpiece of Kevin’s therapist, Dr. Fletcher (Betty Buckley), that people with Dissociative Identity Disorder (multiple personalities) are stronger than average people. She cites cases of blind people developing personalities with sight and growing back optic nerves.
The suffering of these people, the traumatic events in their pasts, create these personalities as a way of coping with the world. Dr. Fletcher believes the suffering has made them stronger, potentially superior, to average people. Her belief goes as far to consider they have “super powers.” Three of Kevin’s personalities, who have conspired to bring out the Beast, agree with this belief. They believe that the Beast is the highest form of humanity…
