It’s easy to mistake a movie’s popularity for an artistic phenomenon rather than a sociological one. M. Night Shyamalan’s “Split” is the latter. It has a scene early on, centered on a car, that suggests at least an effort at playful inventiveness. The rest of the film is the work of a puppet master who works with an admirable but unoriginal industrial efficiency, retrofitting characters and their lives to fit the mechanical dictates of a simplistic scare story. Yet it’s a hit, and there are good reasons for its box-office success. The movie commercializes, packages, exemplifies—and safely isolates—authentic phenomena and taps into authentic fears. “Split” isn’t especially well made, but it’s very well positioned.
It also is endowed with what’s being referred to as a surprise ending. I’m tempted to say “spoiler alert,” but it’s already all over the Internet: Bruce Willis turns up, playing his character David Dunn from Shyamalan’s 2000 film “Unbreakable,” to do nothing of any note except set up a sequel in which David will combat the antagonist of “Split.” I can’t wait.
What’s much more important is a surprise that’s integral to the story and equally integral to its societal resonance, which does need a spoiler-alert sign in neon. Here’s the story: three teen-age girls are kidnapped by a man named Kevin (played by James McAvoy), who suffers from dissociative-identity disorder and has twenty-four different personalities (twenty-three that are on the surface, and a twenty-fourth, the monster of monsters, that emerges near the end). He holds the girls in an isolated underground industrial warren and his various personae approach them in different ways, with different intentions.
The movie’s brief early scenes, leading up to the kidnapping, tag the three teens with facile identities. Two of them, Claire (Haley Lu Richardson) and Marcia (Jessica Sula) are popular, regular girls; the third, Casey (Anya Taylor-Joy), is unpopular, introverted, cantankerous, awkward, weird. The setup involves Claire’s birthday party, supervised by her cheerful parents—her father (Neal Huff) is a stereotypically goofy white suburban movie dad, complete with dad jokes—and it’s established that her parents insisted that she invite Casey in the name of decency, a charity invitation.
The girls react differently to their captivity—Claire and Marcia are frankly oppositional, intending to escape or, where possible, to fight, and neither succeeds. But Casey is different. Flashbacks interspersed throughout the action reveal that she was sexually abused by her uncle (Brad William Henke)—and that, after her parents’ death, this uncle became her guardian. Casey’s weirdness and introversion is traced to this abuse. Because she has experience with a predator, she doesn’t try to resist, flee, or submit to her captor. Rather, she attempts to probe his psychology and, in effect, to work a sort of mental jiu-jitsu in which she tries to get him to release her on the basis of a decision that he himself (his many selves) reaches.
Shyamalan suggests that the two “normal”—i.e., unabused and cheerful—girls are living with fatal illusions of safety, unprepared to face the threats that lurk behind the façade of decency with which their well-meaning but ineffectual parents have shielded them. Casey lost her illusions at the age of five (she’s played, as a child, by Izzie Coffey) and has been a psychological combatant ever since. Kevin himself, in his demonic incarnation as the Beast, emphasizes Casey’s decisive difference from her friends. It comes as the movie’s dénouement, after Casey sees that the Beast has killed Marcia and is killing Claire. Desperately fleeing, Casey reaches a barred-in place that might be safe—except that, with a physical transformation to match his mental one, the Beast has a Hulk-like super-strength and is preparing to bend the iron bars in order to seize her. But just as he’s about to make his catastrophic assault on Casey, he sees that her body is scarred (it’s unclear whether the scars are the result of torture or of self-inflicted wounds) and stops himself, telling her, “You are different from the rest.” Recognizing a fellow-victim, he bestially roars, “Rejoice! The broken are the more evolved! Rejoice!”
Shyamalan sets out the nature of that decisive difference between the broken and the rest in scenes involving another character—Kevin’s therapist, Karen (Betty Buckley), whom he sees often in the course of the action. Karen is more than just a mechanism of the plot; she’s a crucial figure in the movie’s symbolic scheme. Karen is a compassionate therapist who speaks calmly, even playfully, to Kevin and his alternate personalities, treating each of them respectfully as an individual. She recognizes that Kevin is seriously ill and in serious emotional pain, but she minimizes or even overlooks the possibility that he may pose a danger to others and to herself. She’s working for his good, not for that of society at large, and she does so in a way that Shyamalan tellingly depicts as naïve.
Karen says, “I’ve lost patients to the system,” and adds, “My patients are my family.” Her oppositional view of “the system” as an enemy rather than a mode of collective defense suggests a sort of countertransference, an identification with the desires of her patient, whose desires—due to his illness—may well prove destructive. It’s precisely because he’s mentally ill, and therefore blameless, that she mistakes him for an innocent, when, in fact, his experience of the abuse that led to his illness makes him the one with the deeper and darker knowledge, and her the comparative innocent. She’s desperate to maintain an emotional connection with him—with his various identities—and ignores the possibility that they’re merely playing her. Karen’s facile, albeit strongly felt, sentiment is reinforced by her even more telling use of the word “family” in an unreservedly positive way. She clearly means to imply great personal concern, even love; but for Kevin, as for Casey, “family” isn’t a word of comfort but of danger, fear, and agony.
In other words, though the central character of “Split” is a man with a split personality, the film also tells the story of a split in the world. Just as “Unbreakable” suggested the origins of a superhero in a near-death childhood experience, so “Split” shows a young woman able to combat evil because of the strength she has developed from horrific personal trauma. With its crude realization of the shibboleth that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, the movie is more than a story of feminist survivalism; it also makes the perversely tawdry suggestion that a woman’s tragic knowledge—and necessary power—comes with an unbearably high price. In the world of “Split,” “normal” women are left vulnerable, unprotected, undefended, ill-equipped to fight for themselves, precisely because they were brought up to believe civilized fictions. The movie’s simultaneous evocation of both the depravity at work beneath society’s deceptive surfaces and the inadequacy of the liberal technocratic order to defend against that depravity is the secret to its success.
