Tuesday, July 18, 2023

What "The Crowded Room" gets wrong about Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID)

The Apple TV+ series attempts to make a dissociative disorder a big plot twist — to mixed results.

Tom Holland shocked his fans last month when he announced he would take a year-long break from acting to look after his mental health after playing Danny Sullivan in Apple TV’s The Crowded Room. At first, it was difficult to see why — the show, following a young man accused of attempted murder as he reveals his dark past, was hammered in the reviews, and the series didn’t really seem to make a splash.

However, many reviews alluded to a big “twist” in Episode 7. Now that twist is common knowledge: Danny Sullivan is a Host in a Dissociative Identity Disorder system, and the crimes were committed not by him, but by his “alters.” Characters whom viewers thought were Danny’s friends and protectors were actually part of his internal life, and in later episodes, we see them “front,” or present themselves in Danny’s behavior. His accent, posture, and whole personality switches.

This wasn’t much of a twist if you knew where to look. The entire series is loosely based on the real-life case of serial rapist Billy Milligan, who pled insanity due to DID and was found innocent. Daniel Keyes’ book The Minds of Billy Milligan is even credited in the opening sequence, making the late twist a bit less shocking than intended. FULL STORY from Inverse

No comments:

Post a Comment