Who Is Looking Through Your Eyes?

"I am large, I contain multitudes." -Walt Whitman

You are not you. Personality, identity, who is looking through your eyes, is a surprisingly mutable thing.

I think of patients diagnosed with multiple personality disorder (now called dissociative identity disorder) who are able to identify dozens, hundreds, even thousands of separate personalities within their shattered selves. When someone has a thousand different "parts," it strains the credulity of the public and even the medical community. But it is so. Psychologists theorize that sufferers of this condition fragment due to trauma, offering up personalities better able to deal with suffering and abuse. They leave behind shells, personalities frozen in varying stages of childhood like some tragic nursery.

I think it is more than this. There is a door at the back of the human mind -- perhaps one much like the opening at the back of the wardrobe leading into Narnia. Usually, this door is sealed. Trauma, like an earthquake, can split this portal open, but the door can also be unlocked consciously, allowing strange other selves to slip through to the light of day.

Great actors know how to do this. But it's a dangerous, taxing practice and, typically, they stop. The great actors of my parents' generation have lapsed, mostly, into mannered performances, echoes of characters past, caricatures like the shouty, table-pounding Pacino, the rakish and grinning Nicholson. This is, perhaps, why they are still alive.

Heath Ledger, of course, is dead. No one who has seen The Dark Knight this summer can forget that. His Joker is not a macabre clown with a vest full of stupid tricks, but the very force of chaos itself. This is what people are lining up to see. Ledger plugged into some vast and overwhelming force. It probably killed him. Anyone who has seen the movie will attest that he is not himself.

Some pagans call possession being "horsed." You are being ridden by a god. It doesn't sound pleasant, does it, but apparently it is reasonably safe if invoked respectfully, with the proper offerings.

Online, one can find video of the "King of the Witches," the late Alex Sanders, allowing himself to become possessed by an Aztec fire spirit. "I'm a trance medium," he says as followers dress him in a golden mask and a gigantic feathered headdress. "The moment I put the mask on, I start to change. I don't particularly like to do it...When the feathers go on, then I become a leader of my people and I want to blaze a trail. I want to defend. Everything against evil and against wrongdoing."

Presumably a character like Batman feels much the same way when he puts on his costume. The history of comic books tells us that the stereotypical mask, tights, and cape superhero costume originated in vaudeville, from a practice akin to modern-day Mexican wrestling. Many of the early superhero incarnations, particularly in the films, kept this cartoonish quality.

Not anymore. The Dark Knight, then, has brought us something new in the performances of Christian Bale and Heath Ledger. Modern-day myth has connected at last with the ancient power of the mask, allowing the new gods of our imagination to walk among us, even for a little while. This is what people are lining up to see.

It is no accident that we happen to need them now. We live in the psychic Straits of Magellan, where two colossal oceans meet. Our little ship has no captain.

In myth, these are the times when the gods intervene and when magic awakens in the world. It is unclear what we are about to become, but it is clear that something is starting to happen.

Comments

[Kether Rye]

As a sometimes serious, sometimes dabbler in the medical and the magical, I am intrigued with the implication in your article that dissociative disorder may be an uninvoked invocation. Reminds me of R.D.Laing, the psychiatrist who related psychosis to a dehumanized society, alienation to violence, and schizophrenia to living with the unlivable. In a world like this, maybe 'ravings' are the new hieroglyphs.

[hijinks]

Does Dark Knight=Dark Night?

[hijinks]

Does Dark Knight=Dark Night?