Click to play videoNew Delhi: On the celluloid there have been many examples of people with split personality disorders. From Hollywood to Bollywood, multiple personality syndrome has always been a much talked about subject.
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde a fictional work published in 1886 became a bestseller that popularised the concept of psychopathology or split personality. The idea itself has seen many interpretations and reinterpretations over the years on the big screen.
Starting with Hitchcock's classic cult, Psycho where the protagonist Norman Bates is seen as a charming and sweet 20 something inn-keeper who shocks the daylights out of the audience when he butchers people at the turn of dawn.
In a less frightening situation, the movie The Hulk, too, saw the portrayal of the superhuman alter ego when the otherwise lifesaving scientist kept delving into a state of isolation, whenever he faced extreme anger of stress.
Highlighting the dual state of mind was also depicted in the comedy The Nutty Professor, where an obese Sherman keeps switching this personality from being himself to this charming talkative, sexually charged Buddy Love. The battle between the two of his personalities finally dies as Sherman outdoes Buddy's effort to remain dominant.
And coming closer home, as early as the 1970s saw Rajesh Khanna play a suave casanova by day and a psychopathic serial killer by night in Red Rose. Khanna's characterisation as a woman-hater who murdered and buried women in his garden broke away from his lover boy image.
And of course Shah Rukh Khan's stammering act in Darr saw shades of a dual personality in his character Rahul Mehrotra, who repressed his darker side as an obsessive lover.
More recently Ajay Devgan played an obsessive lover with a split personality in Dewanagee.
Though many of these films may not be authentic in the portrayal of a medically unsound mind or condition, their depiction in reel life continues to dominate the larger public's perception about mental illnesses.
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