Multiple personality and the discourse of the multiple in Hollywood cinema
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Hollywood has been instrumental in the de-pathologization of madness and mental illness through the appropriation of the symptomatic language of one particular mental illness, multiple personality, to create a new genre I call the multiple film: films dealing with multiple stolen, assumed or mistaken identities, realities or temporalities. Within the old illness model the multiple was the result of trauma; in these films, however, the multiple is both the result of trauma (or of another more mundane problem) and the solution to the trauma/problem. In this article I suggest some possible reasons for our current fascination with the multiple and for the depathologization of madness, sketch out the characteristics of the new genre of the multiple film, provide some representative examples of the genre and, finally, inquire into possible reasons for the Hollywood epidemic of the multiple. I argue that in an increasingly mediated culture, narratives involving multiple realities provide an outlet for the anxiety we feel over our passivity and powerlessness. They redeem the negative connotations of multiplicity instability, groundlessness and relativism by treating multiplicity as a reassuring surplus of possibilities.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".