The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a title you may not have heard of before but is a story you definitely know. In order for you to understand the topics discussed in this article, you need to understand the plot of the novel, so here is a quick summary.
Basically, there is a well-known doctor named Henry Jekyll who has a lawyer/friend named Mr. Utterson. Mr. Utterson admires his friend very much , but is concerned when Dr. Jekyll has him write up a very strange will naming his entire estate to a man named Edward Hyde, whom Utterson has never heard of before. The will is odd because it states that
“in case of the decrease of Henry Jekyll, M.D., D.C.L., L.L.D., F.R.S., etc, all his possessions were to pass into the hands of his “friend and benefactor Edward Hyde,” but that in case of Dr. Jekyll’s “disappearance or unexplained absence for any period of time exceeding three calendar months,” the said Edward Hyde should step into the said Henry Jekyll’s shoes without further delay and free from any burthen or obligation, beyond the payment of a few small sums to the members of the doctor’s household (Stevenson, 39).”
Utterson begins to investigate Mr. Hyde and is told a story about a brute of a man who knocked down a little girl in the street near where Dr. Jekyll lives, everyone on the street yelled at the rude man, and the man offered to pay a large sum of money to the family of the girl. He then disappeared through the door of Dr. Jekyll’s home and office, only to return with a large check drawn from Dr. Jekyll’s bank account. Utterson is appalled by this story and goes to talk to Mr. Hyde himself. He hunts down Mr. Hyde and describes him as a man with evil oozing out of his pores. He then asks Dr. Jekyll about these odd arrangements. Dr. Jekyll refuses to comment, and nothing happens for about a year… Skip ahead to one year later where the brutal murder of a popular public politician occurs and Mr. Hyde is the one and only suspect. Everyone tries to hunt down this evil man, but no one succeeds and it is forgotten. But during this whole situation with Mr. Hyde, Dr. Jekyll is in excellent health and is throwing dinner parties for his friends, including a certain Dr. Lanyon. Once again, skip to 2 months later, where Dr. Lanyon and Dr. Jekyll fall terribly ill after admittedly fighting with one another and Dr. Lanyon dies, leaving mysterious documents with Mr. Utterson’s, to ONLY be opened if Dr. Jekyll dies or disappears. Dr. Jekyll remains in seclusion, even though Mr. Utterson visits him often. Finally, one evening, Dr. Jekyll’s butler visits Mr. Utterson at home and tells Utterson he is worried about his employer’s mental state and health and is convinced there was some sort of foul play. The butler persuades Mr. Utterson to return to Dr. Jekyll’s house, where they break into Dr. Jekyll’s laboratory. There they find Edward Hyde dead on the floor and Jekyll nowhere to be found. Utterson finds several documents written to him in the labratory, and goes back home to read what he later finds out is Mr. Lanyon’s narrative and Dr. Jekyll’s narrative, which turns out, is two parts of the same story about Mr. Hyde. These documents tell us that Dr. Jekyll was able to transform into Mr. Hyde by means of a potion that he created and as Mr. Hyde, he discovered a world of pleasure and crime. In his story, Dr. Jekyll writes that Mr. Hyde became very powerful and very harder to control, in the end the dominant personality beat out the weaker one.
“I guess we’re all two people. One daylight, and the one we keep in shadow.”
— Bruce Wayne/Batman, Batman Forever
That is a very basic summary of all the important plot points in the story but it is the two people inside one body that you most likely recognize. In today’s popular culture, this story makes itself known very frequently and all exmaples stem from this original “split personality story”, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde! A few current examples of this story in today’s popular culture are:
The Hulk, also referred to as The Incredible Hulk is a character from the Marvel Comic Universe created in comic book form in 1962. The nuclear Physicist Dr. Robert Bruce Banner is caught in the a blast of a gamma bomb that he created. This nuclear blast creates a alternate personality/physical distortion within himself named Hulk; a giant, green angry monster. The character, both as Banner and the Hulk, is often pursued by police or armed forces, usually because of the destruction Hulk causes. The powerful and monsterous emotional alter ego of an emotionally repressed scientist who comes forward whenever Banner experiences emotional stress, is an example of the Jekyll and Hyde motif. While the Hulk usually saves the day, seeking usually to protect, his terrifying nature drives Bruce Banner into isolation, much like Jekyll, fearing discovery. Stevenson’s book was also the inspiration behind Two-Face, a villain created in 1941 for the Batman comic book series. Harvey Dent, an upstanding citizen and DA, was horribly scarred on one side of his body and traumatized in a warehouse fire set by The Joker. This caused his formerly repressed “Hyde” personality to emerge. The two personalities come into direct conflict often and make decisions they are split on using the outside moderator of a flipped coin. Bane is another character from the DC Comics universe and another villain from the Batman comic series. Shrouded in mystery, Bane appeared in Gotham City with the one goal to eliminate Batman once and for all. Besides being a man of great physical size and power, Bane’s strength is augmented by “Venom,” a Super Steroid that increases his strength, physical size and durability for limited periods of time. Much like Dr.Jekyll turns himself into Hyde using a potion, the Venom potion, injected into his body is also his weakness — when the supply of the chemical is cut he goes back to normal and loses his powers. I also see a huge parallel between Jekyll and Hyde and the most iconic movie villain of all time, Darth Vader. Just like Dr. Jekyll, Anakin Skywalker has his alter-ego. In EPISODE V, Yoda tells Luke Skywalker “Anger, fear, aggression; the dark side of the Force are they. Easily they flow, quick to join you in a fight. If once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will” — just like when Jekyll first transformed into Hyde and then he felt the urge to do it again and again until finally he lost control over the transformation and ends up as Hyde permanently. Similarly, Anakin Skywalker first tastes the power of the dark side when he kills an entire camp of Sand-people to protect his mother and this starts his fall to the dark side and his eventually transformation into Darth Vadar. Another Marvel Comics supervillain was named after and based on Mr Hyde. Calvin Zabo was born in Trenton, New Jersey. He was a morally abject yet brilliant medical researcher who was interested by the effect of hormones on human physiology. One of his favorite books was The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. He was convinced that the experiment in the book could actually be performed and became obsessed with the idea of letting loose his full beast-like nature in a superhuman form. He was eventually successful in creating the formula, and turned into a huge, Hulk-like creature he named “Mister Hyde”. The character of Jekyll and Hyde can be seen in Alan Moore’s comic book, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. In the comic, interesting team of crimefighters, made up of famous characters from classic literature, fight crime in Victorian London. In the issues Hyde is very strong and has a Jekyll persona, whereas in the novel, Jekyll has a Hyde persona. Sometimes in film, television, literature, or theater, a character and his evil twin, evil counterpart, or shadow archetype (all different titles for the same type of character) are really the same guy in the end or sometimes, a completely different character is sharing body space with another. The point is, the villain sometimes lives inside the hero’s body, therefore hiding in plain sight. For the entire story, the hero is trying to catch himself; which has created many of the detective stories you read today. You can also see this idea in many different pop culture examples. If the two personalities are aware of each other, it becomes a case of Gollum Made Me Do It.
A character has another personality to keep him company, the other personality isn’t exactly a model citizen. However, he is… persuasive. He often finds himself being bullied or forced into following his darker side’s advice, even if it’s advice he wouldn’t have followed normally.
The Hyde personality’s crimes are outside of Jekyll’s control and, often, the character is unable to stop themselves from becoming “evil”, this is often a case of being Driven to Villiany.
Sometimes, your villain’s just a normal guy who’s brought into villainy against their own will. Don’t get confused with mind control or possession, it’s because they’ve been warped by events happening around them, and forced into villainy by forces outside their control. A broken shell of a human being, the only thing left is insanity.
Sometimes they’re not really evil but, occasionally this can be resolved with a Split-Personality Merge that reconciles both sides into a healthy whole.
There are many possible reasons for the existence of these split personalities, but this co-habitation is rarely peaceful or long lasting. It usually results in a battle of the central mind to try and find out which personality will take over. Sometimes, the winning personality does not reduce the loser to a small, powerless voice but, instead offers to become one again; they merge into a single, whole person that is greater than the sum of its minds.
Also, the Jekyll side isn’t necessarily “good” either. Comes, of course, from The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson. It used to be a twist ending, but it no longer suprises anyone. Most adaptations of the work focus on said twist. The real life example of Deacon Brodie is said to have inspired Stevenson. William Brodie or Deacon Brodie was a Scottish cabinet- maker, deacon of a trades guild, and Edinburgh city councillor, who maintained a secret life as a burglar. As did the story of Horace Wells, a pioneer of medical anaesthetics. While researching the chemical formula, chloroform, Wells tested many of the various dosages on himself. Because of this, Wells unknowingly built up a dangerous level of the drug in his system, and ended up attacking two prostitutes during a sulfuric acid drug related episode. Once he sobered up and learned of what he had done, he committed suicide.
Doctor Horace Wells born January 21, 1815.Along with many comic book characters, there are examples of Jekyll and Hyde’s story in one of the most popular shows of the past few years, American Horror Story. American Horror Story (AHS) is a show that uses so many of the important details that make up the story The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in the show’s many series. In season one titled, Murder House, there is a character named Dr. Charles Montgomery who is a “surgeon for the stars” and the original builder of the “murder house”. In the series, his character is technically a ghost but we do get flashbacks to when he was alive. The Jekyll and Hyde connection is that the Doctor becomes addicted to the drug Ether and starts to lose his mind and kill is patients without realizing it. He is later on shot and killed by his wife after he tries to stitch their dead and dismembered son back together Frankenstein-style.
In season five of American Horror Story titled Hotel, there is another Jekyll and Hyde like character/storyline named the Ten Commandments Killer. Season five basically revolves around a LAPD Detective named John Lowe, played by actor Wes Bently, trying to hunt down the Ten Commandments Killer.
Now before I continue with the storyline and connection to Stevenson’s novel, let me explain the story of the Ten Commandments Killer’s and his MO. The original Ten Commandments Killer was a man named James March, designer and owner of the Hotel Cortez (the main setting for the entire season), which opened on August 23, 1926. James Patrick March was born in 1895 and started killing people in 1920. He was described as a man of new money and he decided to build and open a grand hotel to make it easier to kill people without getting caught. He built many secret rooms and hallways into the hotel to allow for more killing and he used the hotel’s infrastructure to hide all the evidence of the crimes. His wife Elizabeth knew all about his murdering and actually enjoyed the sounds of his victims screams, so she encouraged his dark habit. There are many gruesome details to the murders he committed but most of his early murders in the hotel involved playful, thespian-esque ways. The actual Ten Commandments killing started with March when he explained to one of his victimes that he despised religion and that it was the worst thing in the world. March said he was going to have to kill God, because as long as there was a God, men like himself would never find peace. His hate of religion is what gave him the motivation to collect all the bibles from the hotel bed stands and arrange them with a pile of his victims to leave behind for the police; this is where the Ten Commandments murders started. But on February 25, 1930 an anonymous phone called tipped off the police and they came to the Hotel Cortez to arrest March. Before the police could arrest March however, he killed his servant and slit his own throat leaving the Ten Commandment murders unfinished. March, along with all of his victims and numerous other victims of the hotel are trapped in the hotel as ghost that appear to guests and interact as characters in the show.
This is where the character John Lowe comes into play in the show. As previously stated, John is a LAPD officer trying to solve the case of the Ten Commandments Killer, but in 2010, John visited the Hotel Cortez on a drunken night and the ghost of James March sees potential in him to finish his work as the Ten Commandments Killer. It wasn’t until 2015 when John finally agrees to complete the murders and this is where the season begins. Each murder symbolizes one of the ten commandments, for example the first murder is Thou Shalt Not Steal and the victim is a infamous thief whom is killed, and for each murder something is taken from each victim and places it in a glass jar in Room 64 of the Hotel Cortez, so for the first murder the thief’s hand is cut off. James March was able to complete two of the ten murders in 1926 but then John Lowe finished off the other eight in 2015. The connection I see to Jekyll and Hyde in this whole story is the fact that John has no recollection of committing any of these murders or even his first time at the Hotel Cortez in 2010. It isn’t until the second to last episode where John finally remembers that he has been doing all this and has a psychotic break and is eventually killed by the SWAT team in the last episode. When watching the season, you can actually see a physical change in John throughout the season as more and more of the ten commandment murders happen. His eyes sink in, be becomes pale and loses weight, his clothes are wrinkled and he just looks physically exhausted more and more as each episode happens. It isn’t until that final episode that his appearance is like this because his good personality is losing strength as his evil, murderous personality is slowly taking over and killing more people.
The scene where Detective John Lowe suddenly remembers all the murders he has committed as the “Ten Commandments Killer” that he has been so desperately searching for at his day job in the police force. Along with the story of Jekyll and Hyde inspiring so many different movie and television characters and plot schemes, the 1931 film version of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde made movie history with it’s incredible never before seen or done on screen transformation (see the video below). Fredric March, the actor who played Jekyll and Hyde in the movie, actually won an Academy Award for his performance in the film. Film directors and makeup artists everywhere wanted to know the secret behind the scene but it wasn’t until 1970 when director Rouben Mamoulian described how it was done: it was done with colored make-up and matching colored filters, which were removed or added to the scene to change March’s appearance. Since the film was in black-and-white, the color changes didn’t show.
The 1931 transformation scene that rocked the film industry and won actor Fredric March an Academy Award. All in all, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson has had a HUGE influence in popular culture since it’s first publication in 1886. You can see it’s influence in television, movies, horror makeup, comic books, theater, and so much more. This storyline is here to stay and will probably be influencing popular culture for generations to come.