also this is not the first time m. night shyamalan has been blatantly ableist towards people with mental illness, and disabilities.
in the sixth sense, it wasn’t directly related to any one mental illness but there was a preoccupation with psychiatric and mental illness and the ~creepiness of it all. in the opening scene, the main character, a psychiatrist, is assaulted in his own home by a previous patient.
in his film the village, there is a character who appears to have a very poorly represented form of autism, and he turns out to be a violent and a villain, and the “scariest” part of the movie.
in the visit, which was released last year, the film dramatized a psychological and neurological phenomenon called “sundowning” which occurs most often in elderly people, where dementia symptoms may be exacerbated by fall of night; the “monsters” in the film were in fact an older couple whose sundowning prompted them to become violent.
and now of course, there’s split, which unapologetically turns people with dissociative identity disorder into dangerous murderers. from the trailer, it also draws on any other “scary” mental illness or symptom to make it even more thrilling for neurotypical people.
m. night shyamalan is a persistent and blatant ableist. his films rely heavily on the stigmatized of mental illness, psychiatry, and disability. he profits off of the oppression of mentally ill people.
(please reblog if you can)
I saw a mini-special with him while I was watching another movie on the SyFy channel. The spot was only a minute or so long, but he was talking about how when he first heard of Disassociative Identity Disorder he couldn’t wait to make a fucking movie about it. He was so proud of himself. And then James McAvoy talked about how exciting it was to stretch his acting muscles by playing different characters all at once.
As far as I’m concerned, fuck this movie and fuck everyone associated with it.
