Imagine that there is a part of you that emerges for moments at a time. It takes over your body, your actions, your life — and when you come to, you have no recollection of what happened during its stay.
While that might sound strange, this isn’t an original premise by any means. Hollywood has recycled this narrative for blockbuster hits in the form of the “split personality disorder” trope. It’s an overplayed trope and a central concept to well-known horror movies ranging from the 1960 Alfred Hitchcock film “Psycho” to the 2016 M. Night Shyamalan film “Split.” Both movies, despite being released five decades apart, tell the same story: A serial killer, who seems relatively well-adjusted, is revealed to suffer from — surprise, surprise — a Dissociative Identity Disorder. The same concept is seen in 1992’s “Raising Cain,” 2005’s “Hide and Seek” and, most recently, the fourth season of 2023’s “You.”
The split personality disorder is often used as shock factor in these movies and, as a result, filmmakers focus less on an accurate portrayal of the mental disorder and more so on making a spectacle out of the mentally ill. The films draw the line between characters with DID and the average Joe, telling the audience that, surely, these characters could only be so sadistic because they’re not like us. As such, the trope is more than a little detrimental to the representation of individuals with DID. In fact, in the mental health education field, there have been tons of YouTube videos where licensed professionals break down the issue movie by movie and tell the audience that having DID does not equal murdering people.
The trope gets pretty boring pretty fast once you figure out that it’s just another flimsy excuse for a serial killer’s motives. What I’ve always found interesting about movies with the split personality trope, though, is they refuse to explore the innate horror of losing control over your own self. To me, the terror of these movies isn’t the atrocity of their actions when their “other self” takes over — it’s the fact that they don’t have any autonomy in these moments.
This is where the “split selves” trope comes in, a recent reincarnation of the split personality trope, except significantly less problematic. Within the span of two years, various Hollywood stories have played with the idea of splitting your physical and mental being into two, and these stories have not only steadily increased in frequency, but also been met with glowing reviews and praise. Recent films include sci-fi thriller TV series “Severance” (Ben Stiller, “High Desert”), which quickly became Apple TV’s most-watched series upon the release of its second season this year; the 2025 Academy Awards-nominated horror film “The Substance” (Coralie Fargeat, “Revenge”); and most recently, Bong Joon Ho’s “Mickey 17” — his first film release after the historical Academy Award-winning “Parasite.”
It’s interesting, then, that such a tired trope like the “split personality” could be repackaged into something seemingly new and refreshing like the split selves trope. Both essentially deal with the idea of self-control in an atypical sense. In the case of the split personality trope, self-control is taken away due to your mental state; in the split selves case, self-control is divided between your two selves. So, what is actually different with the latter trope — and what makes it good?
While the “split personality” trope centers on the horror and thriller genres, the split selves trope actually lends itself well to many different genres and plot lines. “Severance,” as a workplace, dark comedy drama series, follows Mark Scout (Adam Scott, “Madame Web”) who has undergone a procedure called “the severance” to surgically divide himself between his work and personal life. “The Substance” is a body horror film with sci-fi elements, focusing on an older celebrity Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore, “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent”) who takes an illegal substance that splits her body between her normal self and a younger version of herself, Sue (Margaret Qualley, “Honey, Don’t”). Meanwhile, “Mickey 17” plays with the idea that working class people can be made disposable, with main character Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson, “Die, My Love”) having been recreated 18 times through a 3D printer after dying 17 times while on dangerous expeditions.
As a storytelling device, split selves serve to deliver social commentary for their movies’ respective themes, often used to reflect our bleak society. “Severance” cast member Jen Tullock (“Perry Mason”) interprets the show as a portrayal of “American loneliness.” True enough, the show deals with isolation in its characters who find so much comfort in escaping from their own lives that they would be willing to undergo the severance process. Meanwhile, Fargeat intended to “tell a story with nudity” in “The Substance,” often showing a gratuitous amount of gore and nudity; this causes a visceral unease in its audience, reflecting Elisabeth’s discomfort in her own aging body. And Bong Joon Ho explores the injustice of class dynamics in “Mickey 17” — how the human inability of wealthy politicians to learn from history often disproportionately hurts the poor.
Media involving the split selves trope grant their characters far more empathy and understanding than their “split personality” counterparts. They use the trope to look at the characters’ complexities, thus commenting on the injustice of our society rather than explaining their actions away.
Despite its sci-fi elements, the split selves trope conveys a much more realistic lens to societal issues as opposed to the split personality trope. Often, the idea of splitting oneself is framed as something so unfair and self-destructive that, surely, no one in their right mind would agree to its terms. The split selves trope asks the same hypothetical question as the split personality trope — what if there’s another part of you, separate from yourself, that you can’t control? Except, it adds another question: What if you did it to yourself?
On the surface, the characters would only have themselves to blame; after all, they did sign the contract or purchase the product to split themselves. However, given their circumstances in the narrative, the consent isn’t real as much as it is coercive. Mark only consented to the severance procedure shortly after his wife died, turning to work to escape from his own grief; the burden of unrealistic beauty expectations led Elisabeth to inject a shady substance into her own body in pursuit of a younger body; and Mickey became an Expendable out of necessity after being targeted by a loan shark.
The real horror of the split selves trope lies in the fact that these characters make decisions only after being backed into a corner. Therefore, although the outcome is the same with the split personality trope — where the characters deal with a lack of control over their own selves — the split selves trope delves deeper into the destructive social structures we have in place today. The moment society makes it clear that anyone who isn’t young, wealthy and mentally capable will be discarded, the characters strive to fit societal norms.
These characters’ irrational decisions reflect what people normally go through — how we bury our emotions with work, how women constantly feel social pressure to be conventionally beautiful, how we willingly sacrifice our dignity to survive. The decision to split oneself, which presents these characters with the illusion of choice, is similar to the decisions we make to conform in society: It is not a choice at all. In the case of Mark, Elisabeth and Mickey, their particularly vulnerable positions as “undesirable” members of society make them easy prey for malicious corporations. These corporations capture the characters in the relentless cycle of their own self-hatred and self-preservation to churn out profit.
The function of the split selves trope compared to the split personality trope is in its exploration of consent; instead of writing off the characters’ irrational decisions as a symptom of “mental illness,” the new trope explores the desperate actions an individual may take to survive, mirroring the harrowing reality of our society today. In effect, the trope encourages us to evaluate our own place in society. It asks the question: Will we play into societal norms? Or will we heed the precautionary tales it has given us?
Daily Arts Writer Nat Shimon can be reached at nshimon@umich.edu.
