Sybil

1,520 words ^[1]

In this edition of Time Capsule Cinema we’ll be looking at a film that has a lot in common with the last time capsule movie I wrote about: The Amityville Horror. They are both from the 1970s, they were both based popular books that claimed to be stranger-than-fiction true stories, and those “true stories” have since been come to be seen as likely hoaxes.The movie is Sybil, a 1976 made-for-TV movie starring Sally Field about a working woman in New York trying to get through life while burdened with multiple personality disorder.

Made-for-TV movies, particularly from the 1970s to the 1990s, are an overlooked part of our cultural history. People remember the music, movies, and TV shows of past eras but the made-for-TV movies remain largely forgotten. To be fair, most of them deserve to be. Many of them were exactly what you would think a made-for-TV would be: a crappier version of Hollywood movie with lower production values, less glamorous actors, commercial breaks, and sanitized to fit FCC standards. There was nothing more frustrating in the world than sitting down to watch your favorite weekly TV show only to find that it had been preempted by some mediocre made-for-TV movie.

However, you can’t write off the made-for-TV movie entirely. Many of them were watched by gigantic portions of the American population. Two-thirds of Americans watched the nuclear war drama The Day After. In the days before cable TV when there were only three channels, virtually everyone watched the made-for-TV movies that got enough hype. A handful of made-for-TV movies even won critical acclaim and became cultural memes. Sybil was one of those made-for-TV movies that everyone watched and had a massive cultural impact.

Sybil tells the strange story of Sybil Dorsett (real name Shirley Ardell Mason) and her psychiatrist Cornelia Wilbur. Sybil initially comes to see Wilbur for panic attacks and memory loss. Over extended sessions, it is revealed that Sybil has 16 multiple personalities in addition to her real one. Some of these personalities are older than her (one them is her grandmother) while some of the personalities are children. Some of her personalities are introverted while others are confident and sociable. Most of her personalities are female although one of her personalities is a male version of herself. But then it gets even weirder. Some of her personality can play piano while others can’t. One of her personalities can even speak French!

When in an alternate persona, these other characters will refer to Sybil as if she is a separate person. The personas know who Sybil is, but Sybil herself (her default personality) has total amnesia of what she said and did when in another persona. As a result, Sybil has episodes where she will “wake up” and several days will have passed or in one case, two years. At other times, she will have strangers approach her and start talking to her as if they know her but she has no idea who they are because she was in a different persona when she met them.

Wilbur’s experiences working with Sybil was turned into the non-fiction book Sybil by Flora Rheta Schreiber. The nation became fascinated by this bizarre medical curiosity and the book went on to sell 6,000,000 copies.

Before we continue, I think we should place this story within its historical context. Psychology is a relatively new field and in many ways, the human mind was much more mysterious than it is today. In the 1970s, there were still many open questions about what the mind could do with or without the assistance of drugs or hypnosis. There were still serious people who thought ESP might be real. During the Cold War, both the CIA and the KGB invested a lot of time working with supposed psychics ^[2] to see if someone could be hypnotized into becoming a spy without realizing that they are a spy. The Cold War movies Telefon ^[3] and The Manchurian Candidate ^[4] play on this theme. In addition to this was the emergence of hallucinogenics which could make the mind conjure up fantastic images or take someone to entirely new mental states. It was also a fairly widespread belief at the time that somewhere tucked away in the corner of your mind were memories of your past lives that could be unlocked with hypnosis. This is something that made Sybil the zeitgeist: it was another story of some of the strange and wondrous things the human mind is capable of.

Another way Sybil was zeitgeist was that it took a radical environmentalist view of mental health. The story makes very clear that Sybil’s disorder is the result of childhood trauma inflicted on Sybil by her mother. Aside from the amazing story of a woman with 16 different personalities, the other part of Sybil which was most talked about was the description of abuse which seems almost comically sadistic, the lingering example being an ice-water enema.

No doubt trauma can mess a person up in many ways. It can lead to depression, substance abuse issue, PTSD, and other unlovely conditions. But can it make someone so insane that they believe they have 16 different personas? I don’t know but according to Sybil, it can. So if you prefer the nurture side of the debate over the nature side, Sybil will confirm your biases as it is a story of extreme environmental conditions delivering an extreme outcome.

Accusations of “hoax!” began almost immediately and have only steadily increased over the years. Professionals who have listened to the tapes between Sybil and Cornelia Wilbur have accused Wilbur making a mentally ill woman believe through suggestion that she had multiple personality disorder when she was merely plain ol’ nuts. In the movie, Wilbur is shown bringing suppressed memories out of Sybil with hypnosis but in reality she used sodium pentothal, also known as the truth serum.

There is also a lot of controversy around the very concept of multiple personality disorder, controversy which was only made worse by the movie. From my research, it is a real condition but there is some debate as to how common it is. There was a famous case of it in 1950 when a woman named Chris Costner Sizemore was said to have had three distinct personalities. Her story was made into the movie The Three Faces of Eve ^[5] starring Joanne Woodward (who, coincidentally, plays Dr. Wilbur in Sybil).

Before the release of Sybil, only about 100-200 people in the history of America had been diagnosed with it. After Sybil, that number exploded into the thousands as scores of women stepped forward claiming to be real-life Sybils. Currently, it is estimated that 1.5% of the population has multiple personality disorder, which would make them 50% more common than sociopaths.

However, real life multiple personality disorders are usually more subtle and not the dramatic night and day transformations seen in Sybil, and people afflicted with it tend to have just a few different personalities, nowhere near Sybil’s supposed 16.

Much like The Amityville Horror, the “true story” Sybil was based on is not as widely believed as it once was. However, where it differs from The Amityville Horror is that without the “true story” gimmick, Sybil still has something to offer as entertainment. Sally Field’s performance as the unhinged Sybil is memorable to say the least. If Sybil had seen a theatrical release, Field probably would have won Best Actress for that year but because it was TV, had to settle for an Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Special Program.

Sally Field proved to be an inspired choice. In addition to the extraordinary subject matter, much of the Sybil’s “whoa!” factor at the time came from watching Sally Field play against type to an extreme degree. At the time, Sally Field was best known to people for playing saccharine sweet goody two-shoes characters in Gidget and The Flying Nun, so watching her play lunatic would have surprised audiences at the time.

It’s fortunate that Sally Field’s performance is so strong because there is not much of a story to be found across Sybil’s three hours. It only near the end, when Dr. Wilbur breaks the code for why Sybil is the way she is (by Jove, it’s the mother’s fault!), where we start to feel some sense of direction.

The ending of Sybil bears a lot of resemblance to the end of Good Will Hunting two decades later. The climax in both movies happens when the shrink finally leads their patient to the root cause of their suffering, causing an epiphany after which the spell is broken and the person is suddenly mentally healthy. In the case of Sybil, she still has multiple personalities, but she learns to integrate them together so that they are not in a perpetual state of conflict.

Is Sybil a great movie? Not really, but Sybil turned out to be a great meme. The name “Sybil” became a byword for a mentally ill woman and remained so for decades afterwards. Even today if a woman was acting particularly unhinged manner, it’s common to hear someone say like “Settle down there, Sybil.”