A Trope It's Time to Retire
Plus me fighting for my life to defend Tom Holland
There is absolutely no way to write about Apple TV’s The Crowded Room without spoilers, so this comes with a major spoiler warning. There are also spoilers for some other random movies and TV shows in here but those have been out for so long so I cannot be held responsible for any disappointment there. I’m not sure why I am writing this like I’m expecting a lawsuit.
There’s a scene in Law and Order: Special Victims Unit that I think about often. Cynthia Nixon (of Sex and the City and also being the once-potential governor of NY, which we shall never forget) in her early forties sits in Detective Elliot Stabler’s living room dressed as a teenager, threatening Stabler’s wife with a knife.
Anytime an adult acts like a teenager, I'm scared (for me this does include spending inordinate amounts of time at Disney World but does not include 25-year-old teenage girls who can’t do taxes or get their oil changed). But the scene seems extra sinister even for a show that is famously about especially heinous crimes. When I first watched, that was probably because Nixon’s character is essentially threatening to kill a woman while wearing pigtails. Now, the discomfort I feel watching it is different. At this point in the episode we know the detectives think the character has dissociative identity disorder (DID) — a disorder in which someone develops two or more distinct personalities as a protective mechanism to deal with a trauma, often from childhood — so the show is really making a spectacle of someone with an illness.
That’s not exactly new for SVU; I find myself thinking “that didn’t age well” in nearly every episode of the early seasons. Later, a new detective says, “I”m not saying I didn’t see crazies in Brooklyn, but you guys are cuckoo-makers” about the special victims unit. (In classic SVU fashion, Ice T’s response is, “You should have been here when the white supremacist shot Munch in his ass. He’s still got to sit on a special pillow.”) But SVU isn’t alone in its fascination with DID, previously referred to as multiple personality disorder. Procedurals like Lie to Me love this trope, as do many, many movies including Fight Club, Shutter Island, Psycho and that one from 2007 with Lindsey Lohan which I can’t remember if I actually saw or just read the Wikipedia plot of (a problem I deal with often). While it’s easy to point to these movies and blame the creators for furthering inaccurate stereotypes, I have to take some responsibility here too: They know I’ll watch.
The idea that the mind can do something as powerful as create multiple personalities with different accents, mannerisms and even handwriting as a defense mechanism is fascinating. Seeing someone, even if they’re just a character on a show, suddenly act like a completely new person is hard to wrap your head around. Creators of movies and TV shows about DID know they’ll enthrall us with this premise alone, though the legal question of whether someone can be held responsible for the actions of their “alters” make for a compelling story too.
There have been attempts to make more empathetic illustrations of DID, but not to much success. With The Crowded Room, there was hope.
I gave you a spoiler warning so don’t get mad at me! If you’re going to get mad at anyone, it should be whoever at Apple TV decided to put front and center in the credit sequence that The Crowded Room is inspired by the book “The Minds of Billy Milligan.” Because if you Google the title of that book you will immediately be told that this is a nonfiction book about the first person in U.S. history acquitted of a major crime by pleading insanity due to his DID. Instead of going with the actual story of Billy Milligan, who was arrested for three rapes at Ohio State University, The Crowded Room went with a more sympathetic character: lonely Danny Sullivan (Tom Holland), who is arrested for attempting to shoot a man in broad daylight at Rockefeller Center in 1979 who turns out to be the stepfather who sexually abused him for years.
The series doesn’t reveal that Danny suffers from DID until episode seven. In the six episodes before, it treats each of Danny’s personalities as distinct characters, each played by a different actor. Sasha Lane plays Danny’s housemate and best friend Ariana, Jason Isaacs is the conniving, older leader Jack and Lior Raz plays the protector Yitzhak. We come to know Jonny and Mike as Danny’s closest companions in high school — both funny and loyal and sweet, in their own ways. So it’s somewhat startling to learn that all of these different characters exist only in Danny’s head, and that he’s been alone the entire time.
I say somewhat because if you thought too hard about the plot, you probably would have guessed the twist or at least something like it. There is a lot of talk about Danny’s twin brother Adam who mysteriously disappeared when they were kids, and from the beginning, it’s pretty obvious Adam never actually existed. As a headline in Jacobin says, “The Crowded Room is a mystery series with no mystery.” But as someone who will go head-empty-no-thoughts anytime I think I’m going to guess a twist because I love to be surprised, I still found it entertaining. In addition to Holland giving a solid performance, the show stars Amanda Seyfried, who I will watch in anything, and great performances from Christopher Abbott as a public defender and Emmy Rossum as Danny’s mom (who, yes, is only 10 years older than Tom Holland but let’s just revisit a little something called 27-year-old-nepo-baby-Ben Platt getting to play a teenage Evan Hansen very unconvincingly, and just be grateful Emmy had some better makeup artists). But individual performances weren’t enough to save this show; critics absolutely pummeled it.
Reviewers said the show was a mini series that should have been a movie, that it’s slow and that it spends too much time on things that don’t really matter to the plot. But the biggest issue seemed to be how DID was used as the big, supposed-to-be-punchy spoiler but really fell flat, sucking all the life out of the show because the reveal is so unrewarding. Variety wrote that treating Danny’s mental illness as a bombshell is “a grievous mistake that torpedoes the show.” IndieWire called the decision “a choice so frustrating before it’s understood and exasperating once it’s explained that you can’t help but wish writer-creator Akiva Goldsman could go back and remake ‘The Crowded Room’ before anyone has to sit through the bad version.” Because it’s not very hard to guess the big reveal, the wait is even more frustrating, The Hollywood Reporter said. Reading these critiques, you can tell how irritated the writers were about having to cover this show without revealing the obvious twist — and I can’t blame them! The Daily Beast said it all in their headline: “We’re Forbidden From Telling You Why ‘The Crowded Room’ Is Such a Bad Show.”
I agree with them but also I love Tom Holland and he’s suffering.
“Being a Tottenham fan is somewhat like being in The Crowded Room. It has taught me resilience. Tottenham has never won anything and supporting them is incredibly difficult,” Holland said in an interview. “It’s no secret that my show has been so horribly reviewed but I’m here today to promote the show and I’m still here. So I’m very resilient.” Leave Zendaya’s boyfriend alone!!!
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Anyway, The Crowded Room is a mess and definitely plays on stereotypes but I found myself wanting to defend it for more than its performances. After years of watching — and enjoying, despite knowing the ethical conundrum of it — depictions of DID on the screen, I wanted to believe that in allowing us to get to know Danny and his personalities and understanding how he sees the world, they were doing a service to the DID community.
It would be about time, seeing as how rampant misconceptions of DID are in the media. Robert Muller, a psych professor at York University, pointed out in a 2013 Psychology Today article that one major misconception is that people with DID develop a Mr. Hyde-like identity to fulfill dark desires and criminal impulses. “Not all multiples develop maniacal alters, most of them do not,” Muller wrote. Another myth Muller points out is that people with this mental illness switch to alters with extreme emotional differences, like the life of the party suddenly becoming the social outcast. Not all alters have such limiting traits: “Many have as much of an emotional range as any other person.” In a 2014 podcast, Jason Hunziker, a psychiatrist at the University of Utah, said that Hollywood’s portrayal of someone going to the grocery store as one person and the car wash as another, then being a scared three-year-old isn’t accurate. He says instead, when his patients get under stress, they fall back onto disassociation to protect themselves: “They respond differently. But they are not Bobbie or Johnny, or Cindy; they don't have a name to it. It's just a part of their personality that remains to get the job done while the other part is protected and away from the stress.”
Holland and the team behind The Crowded Room say they did their research on DID, and that certainly resulted in a more empathetic portrayal of the disorder than other films and television shows have done. Kelly Caniglia of An Infinite Mind, a non-profit that provides resources and advocacy for those living with DID, told Inverse that one example of this is the depiction of Danny’s internal space, where the alters convene in a “crowded room” to talk to each other about what Danny should do next. Caniglia says some, but not all, people with DID do experience this kind of communion where their alters interact with one another. But in the end, she still wasn’t impressed with the show: “This population is already so marginalized that though this piece is entertaining and has points of great execution, it still reinforces the rhetoric that people with mental illness, in this case DID, are dangerous.”
The bar is clearly low for representations of DID in the media, but I do think Holland and the creators had a more empathetic approach than I’ve typically seen on screen. Holland’s performance was convincing as a person struggling with a debilitating mental illness. Danny is vulnerable as he does his best to face a disorder that has upended his life; he’s sympathetic and easy to root for. While The Crowded Room dramatized his dissociations, they also showed Danny trying to understand what is happening to him.
Danny may have committed a crime, but he’s not the villain. It’s a startling contrast to a movie like M. Night Shyamalan’s Split, which I saw in theaters and had actual nightmares about. The 2016 psychological thriller follows three girls (including baby Anya Taylor-Joy and Haley Lu Richardson) getting kidnapped by Kevin Wendell Crumb (James McAvoy), a man with 23 different personalities. The movie spends much of its time having McAvoy portray all these personalities — which include an old woman, a nine-year old and a teenage girl — as a 24th emerges that is superhuman and animal-like, climbing walls, growling, and eating two of the teens. He’s literally called “the beast.” Absolutely wild what they will let Shyamalan get away with, I’m telling ya (one day Rachel will write about her strange fixation on Servant).
Split got absolutely flamed for its portrayal of mental illness, rightly so. “While having a character with DID scale sheer walls on his fingertips and devour a human sacrifice might be shocking entertainment, these exaggerations may cause people to fear those with DID, who are simply people who have suffered, coping with their trauma in a rare and complex manner,” says one article at NeuWrite San Diego. Simone Reinders, a neuroscientist studying DID at King’s College London, told The Guardian, that Split makes it seem as if patients with DID are extremely violent when that’s typically not true at all. Split has turned into the example of how not to portray DID, prompting petitions to get it pulled from streaming, and #GetSplitOffNetflix to trend in 2020.
It’s interesting to watch the media industry wrestle with a culture that’s outwardly becoming less and less tolerant of suffering as a means of entertainment. I’ve touched on this in previous essays about Law and Order and its counterparts and true crime podcasts. The conversation seemed to come to a head last year, when Netflix released Ryan Murphy’s Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story. Friend of this newsletter Moises Mendez II broke down the controversy for Time, including criticism from the family members of the serial killer’s victims. Rita Isbell, the sister of one of the victims Errol Lindsey, for example, wrote a personal essay for Insider about what it was like to watch her victim impact statement at Dahmer’s sentencing recreated on television without production reaching out to her at all. I imagine we’re at the precipice of another reckoning around crime entertainment, since it was just reported that the wife of the Gilgo Beach serial killer is getting paid by NBC’s Peacock for an upcoming documentary. There was apparently intense bidding for her story, so we can only assume it’s a fat paycheck.
Those are of course very different situations than the portrayal of DID on screen, but it also comes down to entertainment companies — and us — constantly trying to justify the use of real people’s pain as something to consume for fun. After much resistance, Danny in The Crowded Room eventually admits he needs Amanda Seyfried’s character’s assistance, both with his trial but also in getting treatment. The show lauded the move as shining a light on how important it is to ask for help. It’s a common move from the minds behind entertainment like this: Our consumption of people’s pain is often justified as being “for the greater good,” created so we can humanize and thus emphasize issues that are unfamiliar. The Crowded Room might have fallen victim to the same tropes and misrepresentations of character with DID as we’ve seen before, but at least they created empathy — something Hollywood has constantly failed to do with this disorder.
"The message of the show, which can address various issues, is that asking for help should be celebrated in our society…It's an act of bravery,” Holland said in defense of The Crowded Room’s backlash. "I hope that people will feel educated about the powers of mental health, the struggles, [and] our incredible abilities to survive."
Despite how hard it tried (at least by Holland's account), The Crowded Room wasn't much of an education, but it might have been a step in the right direction.
B Plot
Question: Did TV show up in your Spotify Wrapped?
Mallika: The most shocking part of my Spotify Wrapped (aside from my listening habits being aligned with Provo, Utah … please sound off in the comments if you’re in the same boat), was that I only started watching The O.C. in September and yet the song playing when Seth climbs onto the coffee cart to tell Summer he likes her was my #2 song. Concerning, really. Labrinth snuck into my top artists too because I’m still stuck in 2019 listening to the Euphoria soundtrack from season one. Taylor Swift was my #1 artist which probably would have happened no matter what, but I think The Summer I Turned Pretty solidified her spot.
Rachel: I famously do not have a Spotify wrapped because I do not have Spotify… I know… crucify me. Apple Music — which is always in its flop era but as Mallika quoted Tom Holland as saying “I’m still here. So I’m very resilient” — does a similar end-of-year wrap up, but even that is not accurate for me because I share my Apple Music with my parents and my brothers which explains why Noah Kahan, Juice WRLD and Pete Seeger all make appearances on my top albums of the year. So unfortunately, I have to make my own assumptions about how TV affected my listening habits. I will say that if I had my own music streaming service like a grown up, Suki Waterhouse may have appeared somewhere in my most-listened to artists. Before Daisy Jones & The Six, I knew Waterhouse as the girl who Bradley Cooper read Lolita to, but the show introduced me to her musical prowess1 and incredibly mod haircut and I’ve never looked back. I’m guessing Alvvays’ “Archie, Marry Me” would also be in my list of top songs, for which I found a renewed love for after it appeared in the ending sequence for Hulu’s supremely underrated 2022 show Wedding Season.
C Plot
We know you come down here for hard-hitting industry news so first things first: All of Mallika’s friends saw Ryan Murphy at Jonathan Groff’s Broadway show Merrily We Roll Along last weekend but she didn’t because she was in the bathroom. She later saw the back of his head and judged him for not participating in the post-show auction for charity. Where’s that $300 million from Netflix, huh??
Charles Melton, who played on Reggie on Riverdale, is getting a lot of buzz for his new movie May December with Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore. If this man goes from RIVERDALE to an Oscar we will lose our minds and so will Cole Sprouse.
Every time a series regular returns to a show they have to do this lil jig that Marisa Hargitay and Kelli Giddish did for Detective Rollins return to SVU. This 10 second Instagram is better than all of the SVU seasons post like 2012 combined and no that doesn’t mean we won’t be watching next season.
Truly wild how many different communities Julianna Margulies of The Good Wife managed to insult in a recent unhinged rant on a podcast about the Black community's support for Palestine. If you think it can’t get worse she also tried to justify some of it with “as someone who plays a lesbian journalist on The Morning Show.” Playing Miss Laura pressures-Bradley-Jackson-to-come-out-for-professional-gain-then-tells-her-to-cut-off-her-family-and-go-to-therapy-after-dating-her-for-like-two-weeks Peterson is not as big of a flex as she thinks it is. It’s becoming less of a mystery why Archie Panjabi did not want to be in the same room as this woman.
The lineup for season 19 of Variety’s Actors on Actors series has been released. Emily Blunt and Anne Hathaway will reunite and hopefully take a little bit of time to dish on their former hell-boss Miranda Priestly, and we can only hope Jacob Elordi and Coleman Domingo will do the same with their former hell-boss Sam Levinson.
Though ironically the show doesn’t really showcase Waterhouse’s vocal or performance talent. That haircut alone prompted me to look up her solo stuff.