My friend once related to me a story of rejection by his long time female friend who had earlier parted ways with her boyfriend of five years. Having admired her for sometime my friend saw the timing, three months after his friend had separated with her boyfriend as the perfect timing for him to initiate a relationship and as also a way of consoling her of her experiences since she still appeared disturbed after her experience. My friend Peter thought that perhaps it was time for her to move on and that perhaps he could provide some form of an exit point and given that he also admired her.
One afternoon, Peter asked her friend Jane for a lunch date over the phone. The response he got had an immense negative impact on their relationship and on the perception of Peter towards other girls and on other people generally. ‘So you are just like the other men, I thought you were different!’ Jane blurted out and began sobbing uncontrollably. Their relationship took a turn for the worse from that point with contact significantly minimized. What Peter thought was a harmless invitation for a date and for which required a simple yes or no answer was apparently offensive to Jane who had just experienced a break up with her boyfriend. My friend John least expected the response from her long time friend who mistook the move as an attempt to take advantage of her situation. Her reaction seems to have emanated from her earlier experiences with other men, a fact that seemed to cloud her judgment of other men trying to approach her.
Since the experience, Peter has refrained from making any advances at ladies in the fear of being rejected in the same way. It has been several years since the experience but John has yet to make any advances on other ladies and has no girlfriend up to date. She generally refrains from developing intimate relationships lest he be treated in the same way.
This is a story of rejection that altered John’s perception of girls in general. The experience provides a source of conflict whenever he tries to initiate new relationships with other girls. He constantly evaluates himself on whether he did anything and normally blames himself for what he thinks was probably an inappropriate move. The experience has since hindered his ability to make new friends. He generally chooses to remain alone, only keeping a few friends he has known for a long time.
Secret window is a film directed by David Koepp and is based on ‘Secret Window, Secret Garden,’ a novel by Stephen King. It is a psychological story about a famous writer called Mort Rainey who has divorced his wife and after he found her cheating on him with another man Ted Milner. He also faces an accusation by John Shooter that he is a plagiarist an accusation which Rainey counters by saying that he has poof that in a magazine which he can not immediately locate. Shooters intent is to torment him psychologically which he does by killing his favorite dog Chico and burning his ex-wife’s house as well as killing his private investigator he had employed to protect him after the wave of killings by Shooter. Shooter’s demand is that he produces the magazine containing the “secret window, Secret Garden” pages. When he finally gets the magazine, he realizes that the pages he was looking for have been cut out.
John shooter in this movie represents Mort Rainey’s bad side as seen in his actions of killing his wife together with her new partner and burying them in Rainey’s garden as an act of revenge for infidelity. The character John Shooter has been created to represents split personality.
The theme in this movie is split personality as espoused by the main character Mort Rainey. Split personality relates to phenomenon where a person develops two or more independent personalities. (Leonard, 23)
In this movie Mort Rainey chooses to express his other personality in the form John Shooter who represents his dark side, his secret ambitions, and his ego who kills his wife in the story. Shooter represents the Id i.e. the satisfaction of immediate desires i.e. his desire to kill his wife for infidelity an action that is not sanctioned by the society. His feelings represent the unconscious mind which is seen in the psychoanalytic theory as a reservoir of urges, feelings, thoughts and memories usually considered unpleasant or unacceptable. The representation of John Shooter in both the film and the novel represents this unconscious mind in this case Rainey’s urge to kill his wife a deed that cannot pass if it is subjected to rationality i.e. the dictates of the conscious mind. (Michael, 57)
Symbols such as the transparent rear view mirror in which Tom sees both Mort and Shooter as he drives past the real Mort Rainey have been used to indicate that John Shooter and Mort Rainey is actually the same person, only that he has a split personality. The author faces this kind of personality and challenges such as that of plagiarism and he is expressing his feeling through literature. It represents both his conscious and unconscious feelings concerning the various accusations he faces in his real life.
Works Cited
Jackson, Leonard. Literature, Psychoanalysis, and the New Sciences of Mind. New
York: Longman, 2000.
Kahn, Michael. Basic Freud: Psychoanalytic Thought for the Twenty-First Century.
New York: Basic, 2002.
