I saw this while I was moving my watchlist over here from Letterboxd, and I did actually watch this for psychology class in my sophomore year. I feel like this is worth logging. One thing that stood out to me from what I can remember is that this movie, despite being 69 years old, is filmed very well and does a good job at visual storytelling... at least in my opinion. There's this scene where Eve is in hypnosis during therapy and she's recalling a traumatic event, and she age regresses. → If you don't know what that is, age regression is the literal temporary recession to a mentally younger version of oneself. It usually shows up as a trauma response and has its own set of triggers. There's a community of people out there who do this as a healthy coping mechanism, and then there's people who do it as a stress response, completely involuntarily. Age regression is very common in Dissociative Identity Disorder, but that also doesn't mean everyone who does it has DID. Anyway, the visuals while this is going on are very accurate to how age regression actually looks, and I would know because I've seen it before from personal friends of mine. This scene is very focused on Eve's face, and the way her expression changes, especially in her eyes, how they get wider and more confused, and how her demeanor becomes child-like. It shows her crawling under a house to get a ball for Bonnie, and she sits there, and she shrinks. This story is so well written I think, especially for its focus being on mental health. The movie does no work to make you hate the main character, but doesn't really force you to pity her either, and instead shows the viewer the confusion and terror of something undiagnosed and, at this time, practically unbeknownst to the rest of the world making one act a certain way. There is no negative undertone on the age regression response that she has in therapy, and there is no judgment. This movie presents the discouraging journey of a long medical diagnosis and presents it exactly as it is. For the 50s, that is very ahead of its time. It does almost feel like since then, there's been a damper on research into DID. A lot of the things we know about it are based on few people who have actually been diagnosed with it, as the rest are people who are completely self-diagnosed. I don't think it's an inherently bad thing to self-diagnose depending on what it is, don't get me wrong, but when you go throughout high school turning it into your whole personality and excusing your own mistakes because "oh that was my alter, so-and-so, please excuse them, I take no responsibility," you are not helping the research being done into this disorder, and you are setting it back several steps. I had a friend who did this, who got very angry when I told them about what I learned about the disorder in psych class, because it was exactly the opposite of what they experienced, but I would very much trust a psychology teacher over a student who makes their unresolved trauma their entire shtick. Maybe it's not that nobody understands your DID, maybe it's that you're self-diagnosing, don't even have a therapist, and are still going into the psychology field thinking you know everything. When I spontaneously decide to act like a prick to someone, I don't go out afterwards claiming I have borderline personality disorder and that my sudden violent mood swings cause me to suddenly split on everybody I know. Because even if I do have suspicions that I could have BPD or bipolar, I'm not going to claim I actually have something so serious just to get pity and get away with everything. It could really be as simple as... I'm a dick sometimes and I need to learn that just because I'm in a bad mood doesn't mean everybody else has to be. Maybe the world just doesn't revolve around me. My point though, is that I really feel like DID has become one of the most stigmatized disorders with so little research, and that really sucks. You can have ADHD and explain to others what executive dysfunction is and why your house is so messy because of it, because there's been heaps and heaps of studies done on it. But if you have something like DID... I feel like you're basically fucked, because nobody truly has a solid answer on what goes on in the brain with something like this, and it makes sense, because the mind has been shattered into so many pieces that it's hard to keep track of where everything and everyone is. That's why I like this movie. It shows the first steps. Anyway, didn't mean for this to become a whole rant. Psychology is something I tend to feel strongly about. Good movie.