Multiple Personality Disorder In Primal Fear: Directed By Gregory Hoblit

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The movie primal fear was directed by Gregory Hoblit and was released in 1996. It is a crime-thriller film based on William Diehl’s 1993 novel with the same name. Hoblit tells a story of a defense attorney Martin Vail who defends Aaron Stampler the altar boy who has been charged with a murder of a catholic archbishop. Hoblit portrays Martin Vail as a white male in his forties, wealthy and well known lawyer who loves public limelight and Aaron Stampler as a simple young boy who was born in a small town of Kentucky and moved to Chicago and ended up as a beggar on the streets where archbishop spotted him and took him to his savior house. The storyline begins when Archbishop was brutally murdered and Aaron was found running from cops with archbishop …show more content…

But the movie does not accurately show why the psychiatrist made the diagnose of multiple personality disorder. Hoblit just shows us that psychiatrist was interviewing Aaron and because he had an abusive background and he has been having these blackouts and could not recall she diagnosed him having a multiple personality disorder. however, in the last scene of the movie we were exposed that Aaron was acting to be suffered with multiple personality disorder. Aaron revealed to the lawyer that he faked his disorder by mistake when the lawyer was leaving the cell Aaron said “Tell Ms. Venable I am sorry and I hope her neck is okay” which clearly indicated that Aaron was faking because the lawyer never said anything about how Roy the alter personality of Aaron tried to strangle Ms. Venable’s neck in the court hearing. So if he was actually sufferings from multiple personality disorder he would not have been able to recall the court hearing because Aaron was in Roy’s personality. It was all an act for not taking the responsibility of the crime and he did not get charged for the murder because the insanity defense worked. The Aaron’s case is very similar to the example from the book. Where Spanos and his college conducted analogue experiment to prove their theory of multiple personalities are cause by role playing. Where they discussed about the case of the girl named Bianchi who acted out that she is suffering from multiple identity disorder because she was charged with murdering two college women and was implicated in several other rape-murder cases where victims were left naked on the hillside of Los Angeles (Oltmanns & Emery pg. 193-194) but she actually wasn’t

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