Thoughts about Raising Cain

Warning: this contains spoilers

Back in 1992 a film called Raising Cain was made about a man with multiple personalities.

Official description:

From master of terror Brian de Palma comes this psychological thriller that will keep you on the edge of your seat until the final frame.

Carter Nix (John Lithgow) is a respected psychologist, loving husband and devoted father who decides to take a year off to help raise his daughter. Carter's wife Jenny (Lolita Davidovich) is pleased to have her attentive husband home - at first.

When Carter shows obsessive behavior toward their daughter, Jenny becomes concerned. To further complicate matters, Jenny's old flame (Steven Bauer) re-enters her life. But nothing can prepare her for the emergence of Carter's multiple personalities, and a fiendish plot to recreate the experiments of his deranged father.

My thoughts:

I find the concept of multiple personalities very interesting, but luckily not as much as Carter Nix's father! As a Child Psychologist he had studied how when something really bad happens to a child its sometimes possible for the child to create another personality for the bad things to happen to. Fed up with just studying the after effects of these split personalities, he decided to experiment on his own child. He abused Carter in many ways and studied exactly what happened at every stage. One of the main additional personalities was Cain, a person much more able to cope with bad things that have happened or need to be done. The father wrote a book called "Raising Cain", but claimed at the time that it was somebody that had already been through all these terrible things, not of course that he had done the abuse himself.

The film itself is all set when Carter is an adult and at the start he seems like almost the perfect husband, but then his twin brother Cain turns up and they start abducting kids for their father to continue his experiments on. The way the different personalities are all played by John Lithgow is done in a good way and you actually do wonder if Cain and their father etc. are actually real people and not just creation's of Carter's mind.

Although I do believe in multiple personalities I did find the way that the film seemed to imply that everytime a child faced a serious trauma that they would split into different characters rather far fetched. Through my work and personal lives (I almost sound split myself there!) I have known many people that have faced very serious trauma in their childhoods and yet virtually nobody has mentioned anything about the things happening to 'different' people.

The biggest problem with this film and with a lot of films that deal with mental health is that the person is quite frankly a psychopathic killer. I know a LOT of people with mental health problems and none of them have killed anybody. The media always seems to think that mental health = nutter / psycho etc. but that just not the case. I am not saying that somebody with serious psychotic mental health problems may not be a danger, just that most people with mental health problems are not.

My overall thoughts:

Not the best film I have ever seen, but well worth a watch if you have never seen it before.

If anybody wants to contact me to discuss the film or the concept of multiple personalities then please do, I would especially like to hear the opinion of somebody with multiple personalities, not just on the film, but also what life is like for you, have you been 'cured', are there any good medications that have helped or made things worse etc.

Dean - Sussex Mad

Raising Cain is copyright of Universal Studios.