2022 in review: On fragmented identities and how to put ourselves back together
By Jake Skubish
Most people understand that the persona we present online isn’t who we really are. At least, that’s the cliché perception of how identity on the internet operates. Instagram posts make us appear hotter and happier than we really are; tweets make us appear angrier than we really are; TikTok explainer videos make us appear more knowledgeable than we really are; the comment section on every website makes us appear more out of our minds than we really are. The same person can assume a different personality on each of these websites, and this shape-shifting has come to be accepted as a part of the facade of online life.
What is less commonly understood, I think, is that these identity modulations are less a form of deception than they are completely rational behavior. Identity is often reduced to a set of personal characteristics in a way that obscures the fact that it is a social product: Who we are is who we are in relation to one another. The internet creates visual marketplaces that make it easy to see how everyone else identifies, and make it easy to contort your own image to fit into that ecosystem. If I tweet something angry or sarcastic it is not because that is my identity as much as it is because that is Twitter’s identity. This principle may manifest in a network of total artifice, but it is at least a network where everyone knows exactly how they should be performing.
Far less certainty about our social roles exists outside of the digital world. People are increasingly working from home, living alone, spending less time with friends, and having less sex. And in spending so much time apart it feels as if we are unsure of who we are supposed to be to one another. The internet is often blamed for causing us to develop split personalities, but perhaps that is only true insofar as any time spent on the internet is time not spent with each other in reality. When it comes to identity formation, we are out of practice.
This lack of a coherent identity was widely reflected in the movies of 2022, perhaps nowhere more directly than in the year’s breakout indie hit Everything Everywhere All at Once. Michelle Yeoh portrays many different versions of Evelyn, a laundromat owner who finds herself the central figure in a multiverse-spanning adventure. Evelyn must jump across different realities in order to defeat a mysterious force wreaking havoc on the multiverse. The film examines the anxiety that is produced when existence, as one character laments, feels like a “lifetime of fractured moments.” Everything Everywhere All at Once struck a nerve with audiences and critics alike in its recognition of how this fractured reality alienates us from the world and from each other.
Other films, too, saw their protagonists dividing their own identity in a quest to save the day. The Batman found Bruce Wayne (Robert Pattinson) grappling with the responsibility of his new crime-fighting alter ego. In RRR, Raju (Ram Charan Teja) masks his true self from both his best friend and his employer in order to achieve his mission. And in Glass Onion and The Northman, protagonists played by Janelle Monáe and Alexander Skarsgård infiltrate enemy territory by assuming an alternate identity. In each of these films characters make a choice to split their identity, and they each do so in response to a past trauma, striving to bring justice. These films suggest that a fractured identity may be a useful means to an end, but such transformations are born of incidents that have exacted a cost.
A fractured identity is not always a choice, though. For some characters it was a burden forced upon them. Sometimes this burden existed from birth: Pixar’s Turning Red saw a young girl named Meilin (voiced by Rosalie Chiang) alarmed by her genetically inherited transformation into a giant red panda, while in Armageddon Time young Paul (Banks Repeta) is torn between the traumas his Jewish American family experienced in the past and the white privilege he possesses that promises a more upwardly mobile future. Both films grapple with ideas of ethnic assimilation, and questions of what should be kept and what should be left behind. Meilin opts to hang onto parts of her newfound identity, while Paul eventually comes to recognize the duality of his identity as “oppressed and oppressor.” Both characters remain of two identities, because both are part of who they are.
Olivia Wilde’s much maligned Don’t Worry Darling, too, sees a protagonist facing a split identity not of her own choosing. The film follows a woman named Alice (Florence Pugh) who is stuck inside a pristine virtual reality and prevented from seeing her real-world captivity. The shimmering vistas of her virtual home seek to distract from the violence being used to prop up this dystopia. Slowly recognizing the nightmare she is living in, Alice leaves behind the false comforts of this virtual reality for a messier and independent existence.
The coercion of a fragmented identity was also the foundation for one of the year’s best television shows, Severance. The sci-fi show centers on a group of office workers at Lumon Industries, a company whose employees are required to split their memories so that outside of work they cannot remember their lives inside the office and vice versa. When the workers, led by team manager Mark (Adam Scott) and new employee Helly (Britt Lower), start to question the Lumon arrangement, they make plans to escape their contracts.
It is fitting that, after years of remote work separated employees from their jobs and prompted people to question the link between their labor and their self-identity, a television show came along that made this idea literal. We are not our jobs, and the more we try to become our jobs the more we end up destroying ourselves. It is no coincidence that two of the best workplace dramas on television this year, Severance and Industry, have pilot episodes in which someone is passed out in the office.
Across television and film these stories of coerced identity fragmentation still demonstrate people making choices about who they are — as long as they can see that they have a choice to make. For Melin the dilemma is obvious: She can retain the ability to transform into a giant red panda or not. For Paul the choice is less apparent, and he fails to see the damage engendered by his privilege until after he has caused great harm to his friend Johnny (Jaylin Webb).
Alice and Mark, meanwhile, are stuck inside worlds that split their identities between two realities in order to deliberately hide those realities from each other. They are able to recognize this division because they feel the same disturbance in the universe articulated by Waymond (Ke Huy Quan) in Everything Everywhere All at Once. “You’ve been feeling it,” he says. “Something is off.” When society is organized around individualism, unease signals to many of us that there is something we need to change about ourselves. What these films and this television show suggest is that perhaps the system around us is the cause of that unease; perhaps it’s this system that needs changing.
The prospect of systemic overhaul is daunting, though, and characters in other films found splitting their identities to be the safer option lest they risk societal rejection by revealing their true selves. The Inspection tells the story of Ellis (Jeremy Pope), a gay man who enlists in the Marines during the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy era. The film is based on director Elegance Bratton’s own experience, and it wrestles with the agony that comes from being able to achieve love and community only if you conceal your true self. In Rothaniel comedian Jerrod Carmichael abandons that concealment despite the risk of losing his loved ones. Carmichael discloses to his audience that he is gay during the special, and then sits in the implications of having to reveal that information to his friends and family. In both films the protagonist carries no shame in his identity, but rather fear of how others will react to it.
Carmichael and Ellis’ struggles with their identities are lonesome affairs, but in Bones and All Maren (Taylor Russell) finds someone who shares her need to hide her identity. Maren is a cannibal, and after being left by her father (André Holland) to fend for herself she meets Lee (Timothée Chalamet), a fellow cannibal who's been on his own for a while. Their nomadic lives are defined by a distrust of everyone around them, yet they find solace in their companionship. For the characters in The Inspection, Rothaniel, and Bones and All there is a danger in revealing one’s identity — but all of those characters only approach wholeness when they overcome their fear and share who they are with someone else.
More pernicious were the characters who presented a false identity not out of fear but out of self-interest. Take Tár and Not Okay, two films about women whose public adulation is destroyed when the unsavory truths about their past are exposed. Lydia Tár’s (Cate Blanchett) meticulous performance as an artist and a genius is so all-consuming that she is practically bursting at the seams; in front of an audience she is in control, but behind the scenes she is consumed by obsessive-compulsive tics. She is haunted by her past in ways psychological and perhaps literal. So too is Danni (Zoey Deutch) in Not Okay, a ditzy writer who finds fame when she lies about witnessing a terrorist attack. Danni delights in her celebrity status even as the deceit takes its toll on her. She has visions of actually being present at the terrorist attack, and director Quinn Shephard evokes the sense that this is not just a manifestation of guilt but a legitimate case of trauma experienced voyeuristically.
As with Lydia, Danni’s downfall is swift and righteous. Both women fail to acknowledge their true identities, burrowing so deep into their personas they lose sight of the truth even to themselves. In this self-deception they guarantee their own undoing. Blanchett and Deutch construct enthralling, multidimensional characters in their performances. There is not only pleasure in watching these monsters squirm but relief for characters freed from a self-imposed burden. Their split identities are ripped away from them when the false part is uncovered; whether we choose to admit the truth or have it revealed by others, it seems, we come back to our genuine identity one way or another.
What if evil is the essential part of someone’s identity, though? For some characters the terrible sides of their personalities were not a burden to carry but rather fundamentally who they are. Such was the case for the vicious men at the heart of horror films in 2022: Men, Fresh, and Barbarian. Men, like Tár and Not Okay, centers on a character haunted by the past: Harper (Jessie Buckley) has recently witnessed her abusive husband James (Paapa Essiedu) fall to his death, and when she retreats to a scenic cabin to de-stress she is stalked by a stranger (Rory Kinnear) who appears to take the form of every man she encounters. This mutant is something less than human, it turns out, and also the subject for an obvious metaphor: At their core, all men are the same.
You wouldn’t second-guess this message watching the scheme carried out by Steve (Sebastain Stan) in Fresh: After Noa (Daisy Edgar-Jones), who has been dating Steve for a short time, agrees to take a weekend trip to his isolated home, she finds herself chained in the basement. It’s part of a routine for Steve, who captures women and sells their body parts to other rich cannibals like himself. For Steve, the split personality is the foundation of his business model; He mimes the qualities of an ideal man in order to take advantage of his victims. In this deception the burden of the split personality is transferred to those who might be duped by it. When women must be skeptical that men really are who they present themselves as, they bear a risk by extending their trust.
The terror inherent in this risk is played to brilliant effect in the word-of-mouth horror hit Barbarian, in which a woman named Tess (Georgina Campbell) rents an Airbnb only to discover a man named Keith (Bill Skarsgård) has double-booked the same home. The film works off the audience’s assumption that Keith is not what he seems — that he is only pretending to be a kindhearted housemate until he can act on his true intentions. The reality of Tess and Keith’s situation is much darker than that assumption, though, and as Barbarian jumps across intersecting storylines we see horrors that give credence to that initial fear Tess experiences. It’s a fear rooted in past evils carried out by men who truly did deceive women about their identity. Even if men have evolved, Barbarian suggests, there’s still a threat lurking below.
What Barbarian and all of these films show is that there is a cost to fractured identities, both in terms of what they do to ourselves and how they affect our expectations of each other. They also show the difficulty of escape, even when the characters in these films recognize those costs. In Not Okay, Danni anguishes over the lie she is living but doesn’t know how she can endure the consequences of admitting the truth. The protagonists in Severance and Don’t Worry Darling, meanwhile, start to piece together the truth but struggle to figure out how they can get out. In escaping, they ultimately must sacrifice a part of themselves in order to be whole again.
These sacrifices are challenging, and part of why Everything Everywhere All at Once was so widely beloved, I think, is because it offered a less arduous path toward finding oneself in a confusing, chaotic, splintered world. Late in the film Evelyn, struggling to reign in the impending multiverse catastrophe, tells her daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu), “Of all the places I could be, I just want to be here with you.” It is this profession of love that brings the multiverse back into order, and offers a solution for how to put ourselves back together.
Joy and Evelyn mend their world not by escaping from alternate realities as much as embracing the reality they already have. There are a million other places we could be, and a million other versions of ourselves we can imagine. But the clever irony of Everything Everywhere All at Once’s title is that we can only ever be right here, right now. Alternate identities are a defense mechanism, the film suggests, an escape hatch from a world that doesn’t feel like it has enough love for us in it. But as Waymond insists, “There is always something to love.”
Waymond’s claim echoes a piece of wisdom offered in a New Yorker profile of Céline Sciamma, whose own film Petite Maman was a case of split identity. In discussing the supposed balance between pursuing one’s career and maintaining a personal life, Sciamma asks, “What if the thing you’ve been weighing against “life” is itself life? What if it’s all one thing, and not a bunch of trade-offs? I’m not saying that you have to love it all. But, yes, you should love it all.”
Sciamma labels these so-called trade-offs as culturally prescribed scams. We need not always choose a side in these conflicts, she says; we need not be caught between who we are and who we could be. Sciamma describes resisting this scam in the narrative structure of her films, and it is revelatory to think that avoiding this sort of conflict in the stories we tell is even an option. The classic coming-of-age arc follows a character who is faced with two paths, two divergent possibilities for their future identity, and is forced to decide which path they will take. But maybe who we are is more beyond our own control than this narrative structure implies. Perhaps we are defined by the love between ourselves and others more than we like to admit.
The pandemic gave people more time to think about who they are, but we couldn’t truly find ourselves because that is only possible when we are with others. I agree with Waymond, I think; there is always something to love. But we have to return to each other in order to find it, and find ourselves.