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The Three Faces of Eve (1957)
Rate:
5
Viewed:
6/23
6/23:
Apart from Sybil, The Three Faces of Eve is notable for being the movie to
see that deals with multiple personality disorder (MPD).
Of course, it's all bullshit. Many psychiatrists agree that MPD isn't real and that it should be
removed from Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. To escape from its shady and
controversial history, the proponents have changed the name to dissociative identity disorder (DID).
Most likely, there's at least one underlying disorder which can be safely addressed with evidence-based treatments
whereas it doesn't exist for MPD. The "disorder" is rare and is rather exploited by criminals as a possible defense
to evade responsibility for their crimes (it doesn't work nowadays; judges and juries can see through such a ploy).
Those who do believe in MPD are only profiting from it. A patient can bring them $20,000 in income annually, but
many insurances have stopped paying for it.
Back to the film. Whoa! Alistair Cooke wants to be dramatic by saying it's based on a true story and nothing was
made up. Wrong. The real Eve White, her name was Chris Costner Sizemore. A high school dropout, she wasn't
prematurely "cured" but was rather so during her 70's. They also faked an incident while leaving out a couple.
Chris "had witnessed a series of gruesome incidents including her mother being bloodily injured in a kitchen
accident, the funeral of an infant, the dragging of a corpse from a ditch and a man being 'cut in half by a saw
at a lumber mill.'" She was also in an abusive relationship with a sadistic boyfriend.
Now, who knows if Chris did have MPD for real? But if I were to bet, I'm sure it's something else or two, but the
treatment of mental illness treatments was in the infant stage back then, even in the 30's and 40's when
electroshock and lobotomy were in vogue. It's probably the last two decades that various forms of mental illness
had been almost fully understood and therefore treated better.
As for Joanne Woodward, I'll say she did fine, but she's an actress which means anyone else in her profession
could've done the same thing. In other words, it's not remarkable, hence the silly Oscar win. To look at this in
another way, what Joanne did is play different characters for three different movies, but this time, she got to
play them all in one.
All in all, bullshit or not, The Three Faces of Eve isn't interesting.