Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) is a hugely controversial diagnosis. It’s one of the only conditions in the DSM that still has mental health professionals suggesting it may not exist—a sizable number of them, even. I am not an expert in the field, though I know that “Sibyl,” for example, probably never experienced the trauma and abuse her analyst claimed she did and to possibly did not even have the condition in the first place. Several other highly publicized cases are not all they’re cracked up to be. Obviously, this story is from well before Sibyl’s, but coincidentally, or not, the movie came out within a few months of the much more well known The Three Faces of Eve.
The book, by the magnificent Shirley Jackson, is the story of Elizabeth Richmond. She is a woman quiet almost to the point of nonexistence. She lives with her aunt, Morgen Jones. She works in a museum answering letters from people who don’t understand how museums work. She also always has headaches, often backaches. She’s started getting weird, threatening letters, and her aunt accuses her of taking sympathy and then sneaking out at night. Elizabeth has no memory of this. Her aunt eventually summons a doctor after Elizabeth is extremely rude to a minorly annoying if harmless friend of the family. The family doctor contacts Dr. Victor Wright, who is more qualified in issues of mental health.
It does not take long, using hypnosis, for Dr. Wright to discover that Elizabeth Richmond is more complicated than she appears. He quickly discovers new personalities. He dubs a shy, retiring one of whom he is quite fond Bess and a bright, brash one he doesn’t like Betsy. Midway through the book, Betsy takes the body to New York to find her mother; there’s a history there that’s clearly important but that isn’t well defined. While she is there, Elizabeth takes over the body briefly and so does Beth, but perplexingly, we see the arrival of a new personality, the greedy and money-obsessed Bess. For reasons, the body ends up in the hospital, and Dr. Wright must figure out how to treat the whole Elizabeth.
The movie does not do the book’s slow burn. We meet Elizabeth Richmond (Eleanor Parker), who does indeed work in a museum, where she’s known as kind of a drag. She does indeed live with her Aunt Morgan (Joan Blondel), albeit Morgan James, not Morgen Jones. And almost immediately, we see her sneaking out as Lizzie, who unlike the childish Betsy of the book, reciting nursery rhymes and playing tricks, is going to bars and meeting up with men. What was Betsy doing when she sneaked out? Not that. But she is sent to Dr. Neal Wright (Richard Boone).
In both cases, the problem is Elizabeth’s mother, Also Elizabeth. She’s played by Dorothy Arnold in flashback in the movie. We learn very little about Elizabeth’s father, only that her aunt was in love with him and that he probably regretted marrying the older Elizabeth instead. He died, leaving his money in trust with Morgen in the book; Also Elizabeth was, reading between the lines, a sexually profligate woman who didn’t care about anyone but her daughter and herself. She is accused of having resented that her daughter inherited the money and having been angry that her sister was in charge of the trust.
In the book, Also Elizabeth had a boyfriend named Robin. It’s creepy that Lizzie flirts-and-maybe-more with a coworker named Robin (John Reach), given the nature of her relationship with the boyfriend. It’s not fully made clear in the book, though there’s a definite air of Something Is Not Right that is implied as being part of what’s wrong with Elizabeth. I believe he’s Johnny Valenzo (Ric Roman) in the movie. As a warning, the movie contains the most tastefully done scene of a grown man assaulting a thirteen-year-old (Carol Wells) possible. Elizabeth’s thirteenth birthday was awful, folks.
If DID is real, it seems unlikely that what we know of Elizabeth’s life is sufficient for the history of abuse it’s generally considered to require. I don’t blame Shirley Jackson for this; the book’s from 1954 and there are a lot of mental health issues we didn’t know as much about then as we do now. We wouldn’t treat Jackson’s own agoraphobia today the way it was treated then. At least she presents a sympathetic portrait of her lead, including the detail that Aunt Morgen is ashamed to be related to someone mentally ill and practically no one takes mental health seriously. It even dodges the worst of the Freudianism that still so heavily coloured treatment at the time.
The movie is an interesting noir with many details changed from the book but the vague story similar in its overarching premise. The family is not as well off, and there’s a neighbour who is clearly flirting with Aunt Morgan at times. There are details to it that show to me the deterioration of the Code at that point—the word “slut” appears with astonishing frequency, for one thing. It’s not a bad movie, though it’s nearly impossible to track down—I won’t tell you how I did—and it only reinforces my belief that works should be either accessible or public domain.
In recent years, I’ve become a great fan of Jackson’s writing. One of my best friends gifted me her two works of autobiography for Yule last year, and I enjoyed them vastly even though she and I reacted very differently to having our children out of the house all day. I’d not really heard of this one; I don’t remember how I heard of it to put it on the list. Most people, I think, who know of Jackson at all know of “The Lottery” and The Haunting of Hill House. And both of those are quite good. But her work is so good that I really wish more people read her work beyond that. Start with Life Among the Savages.
Next month, we’ve got something recently covered by Dominic Noble and therefore arguably no longer qualifying for the column. On the other hand, it was on my schedule long before he got to it, and I have my own things to say. Also, how many of you watch Dominic Noble? So despite that, we’re on our way next month to The Phantom Tollbooth. I own the book, but you can support my eternal search for obscure movies by contributing to my Patreon or Ko-fi!