The Psychiatric Gaze: Deviance and Disability in Film

"This is a true story," Leaning against the seats in a seemingly empty theater, journalist Alistair Cooke stands in front of a blank screen and introduces the plot of Ttie Three Faces of Eve (1957), Cooke functions as a surrogate spokesman for Drs, Thigpen and Cleckley, the two psychiatrists who originally authored this case study. Much of the film's dialogue, Cooke reassures us, is taken directly from their clinical record, which has become a "classic of psychiatric literature," Cooke's preface is just as crucial as the narrative that follows: he helps to initiate the viewer's complicity in a psychiatric gaze. The Three Faces of Eve promises the spectators a privileged glimpse into a rare medical case involving the multiple Eve White, who has "one more personality than Jekyll and Hyde," Cooke notes. When Cooke conveniently drops the "Dr," from Jekyll's name, he does two things: he obscures the role Dr, Jekyll's scientific background played in Robert Louis Stevenson's original text, and he conceals the mutually constitutive exchange that exists at the permeable boundary of doctor and patient, of normal and abnormal. Except for the barely detectable cracks in Cooke's Jekyll and Hide analogy, the pathology of Eve White is safely specularized by this introduction.