Nyaknno Stephanie Owodiong-Idemeko
Dr. Glass
June 10, 2018
Terror in the Self
As human beings, we go through life in a constant tug of war between our body, mind
and spirit. More often than not, we are put in a state of terror by our own dreams, fears, worries and anxieties; terror completely changes the self. When we are unaware of the fact that we are living in a state of extreme fear and distress it can lead us to do horrific things and bring about many psychological illnesses including but not limited to hallucinations, paranoia, schizophrenia and even nightmares. The terror in our minds hold us captive; prisoner to them. Because our minds are not free, and we are insane, we are therefore not thinking for ourselves nor are we in control of our actions. Terror in the self is so powerful that it controls every aspect of our psyche. This paper will discuss how internalized terror affects one’s actions, the forms in which people may experience terror in the self, as well as the consequences that arise when terror in the self is experienced.
Internalized terror can radically affects one’s actions. It impacts our thinking and decision-making in negative ways, changes our perception of the world around us, distorts the mind and leaves us vulnerable to intense rush of emotions which cause us to react on impulse. All of these effects can lead us to act inappropriately and in a manner, sometimes violent, that we would not normally behave in if the self weren’t experiencing such terror. Terror in the self comes in different forms. For some, it begins from the constant pressure to attain perfection. The Academy Award winning psycho-drama Black Swan, perfectly portrays this form of terror in the self. At the centre of this movie is a ballerina named Nina who is vulnerable, sexually naïve, and is suffering from mental illnesses which also causes her to self-harm. Nina lives with her mother who had no choice but to abandon her ballet career upon realizing that she was pregnant with Nina. Since then, she has channeled her energy into grooming Nina as a ballerina. She has also infantilized Nina – treating her like a child, decorating her room in pink – and not giving her the room to grow and develop into her own self. Together, they both strive for Nina to reach the peak of her ballet career being the principal dancer, playing the Swan Queen in Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. This has bred a meticulous, over-achieving Nina whose want for the role of Swan Queen starts to consume her. First, Nina is told that she does not possess the ability to play both the black and white Swan. However, she is cast as the Swan Queen and now has to prove that she is capable of playing the two roles. Rehearsal after rehearsal, Nina is weighed down by her director who praises her for her portrayal of the white swan – a character that is sweet and innocent, but harshly criticizes her black swan – the dark and sexy alter-ego of the white swan. He also starts to compare her counterpart Lily, a new member of the company. He urges her to become like Lily. To “lose herself” and dance in a sexy and seductive manner when dancing the part of the Black Swan. Nina begins to think that Lily wants her role and this further drives her mad. Consequently, driven by forces coming from her confused perceptions of her mother, her sexual inhibitions, her ambitions and her increasing fantasies, as the movie progresses, we begin to see Nina’s mirror-image start to develop a life of its own. When she is not in rehearsal, Nina continually sees this doppelgänger acting out her fears and horrors. Essentially, this doppelgänger is her own self-made anti-Nina similar to the Swan Queen’s good – bad, black – white, alter-ego rivalries. Engulfed and exhausted by the terror in her mind, she is finally transformed into her “evil twin”. She finally attains perfection and triumph but only in death when she accidentally kills herself as a result of paranoia. Throughout the movie, we never see the willpower and handwork that gets her to her triumph. Only the psychosis and finally, the martyrdom. If she were not experiencing terror in the self, Nina would not have made the decisions that she did, that finally led to her death.
Another form terror in the self inflicts itself on people is through horrific past events such as child or domestic abuse or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), that is most often linked to war and suffering. We can see the gravity of this situation in the movies Shutter Island and Ordinary People. In Shutter Island, the protagonist, Teddy Daniels was consumed with madness so much so that he was unable to distinguish reality from fantasy. He believes that he is a U.S. Marshal and World War II veteran who has just returned from war and has been asked to find a lost patient, Rachel Solando, who was imprisoned for murdering her children, at a government facility for psychotic criminals called Shutter Island. The movie shows us that Teddy is haunted by his memories from serving during the war, his dead wife, and his dead children. His extreme state of mental distress drives him insane and leads him to create a false reality. At the forefront of his new fictitious life is a “monster” named Andrew Laednis who created the fire that killed his wife. While at shutter Island, he insists that Andrew Laednis is the unrecorded 67th patient and goes on a man-hunt for him so that he could kill him for killing his wife. However, in reality, Laednis is a reflection of a part of himself he cannot bear. As we delve into the movie, we find out that the deeper Teddy goes in his search for the missing patient and Laednis, the deeper he is going into his psyche and into the truth of his story. We discover that this so-called 67th patient is in fact “Teddy Daniels” himself, who had actually indeed, been a patient at the facility for two years. We also discover that Edward ‘Teddy Daniels’ is just an anagram for his real name, Andrew Laednis, and that the missing patient Rachel Solando was actually just an anagram for the name of his dead wife, Dolores Chanal. Driven to insanity by the fact that he had killed his wife, for drowning his children, as well as the blood and gore of the war, his psychosis created a world in which he (Teddy Daniels) is the hero and not the antagonist (Andrew Laednis). Teddy’s terror is too frightening to accept that who he really is and the things that he did that he prefers to be stuck in his delusion and be lobotomized as Teddy – a good man – than his true self, Andrew Laednis. The movie allows us to see that both perceptions of himself experience terror in the self. Even as Teddy, he is haunted by the ghosts that terrorize his true self, Andrew. He is unable to do make certain decisions because he hallucinates about his dead wife and the dead children he assumed to be Rachel Solando’s, but were actually his. He also hears the voice of his dead wife telling him to find Laednis and kill him. Likewise, Andrew could not live with himself for having to murder his dear wife for drowning their children and his memories from WWII. Nevertheless, he could not escape his “reality,” no matter which way he turned. This eventually led to his demise in him making the decision to die as a good man rather than live with the sins of Laednis.
The movie Ordinary People provides a different angle through which an individual may fall victim to self-terror; through guilt. In the movie, the principal character, Conrad, is driven to attempt to commit suicide after the death of his older brother, Buck, in a boating accident at which he was also present, but survived. Since his return home after the failed incident, he has been experiencing insomnia, PTSD and hallucinations from the accident. This causes him to isolate himself from his friends and even quit the swim team. In addition, Conrad decides to start seeing a psychiatrist twice a week to help deal with his traumas at the request of his father. From his meetings, we discover that Conrad has struggled with feeling rejected by his mother who loved and favored Buck more than she did him; this feeling of rejection seems to have amplified since Buck’s death. However, through the movie, we find out that Conrad isn’t the only one suffering from depression since Buck’s death. Both his mother and father are dealing with trauma as a result of the loss of their son. However, because they are unable to communicate effectively to heal, and Beth (the mother) shuts down Calvin’s (the father) request to seek treatment as a family, the family becomes divided with Beth and Calvin separating. This interferes with them being able to heal together as a family. Despite the fact that terror in the self pushed Conrad to make the decision of choosing self-destruction, he differs from the characters in the other movies like Nina and Teddy. This is because we get to see him heal slowly as the movie progresses because of the fact that he became aware of his situation through his therapy as well as the fact that he had a strong support system like his father.
Furthermore, in the movie Incendies, through the story of the protagonist Nawal Marwan, we are shown a unique perspective of how terror in the self can affect an individual. Nawal’s story begins with the murder of the man she loves. She is told that she has brought disgrace to her family because she was impregnated prior to her getting married first. Nawal however, is spared by her grandmother who decides to send that the best thing to do would be to send the baby away to an orphanage, and Nawal to live with her relatives. Nawal spends most of her life looking for her baby which was not made easier due to the fact that a religious war had fallen upon the country. As she struggles to protect herself, Nawal faces many near-death experiences and later finds herself in crosshairs when she is hired to kill an important figure in the Christian militia. She is then sent to prison for 15 years. While there, she is raped, abused and tortured by a man names Abou Tarek whom she recognizes to be her long lost son – the baby she had looked for all these years. She becomes pregnant as a result of the countless times she was raped. Throughout the period of her pregnancy, Nawal, traumatized, tried many different ways to abort the babies – punching her stomach in hopes that the babies would die – not only because of her pregnancy was a result of rape, but also because it was a result of incest. However, Nawal comes to terms with her situation and decides that she would love and cherish her babies no matter what. As she draws near to the end of her life, she charged her children Jeanne and Simon with the task of finding their estranged father and brother coupled with a handwritten letter for each child and the father, expressing her love. It is through this quest that we discover all Nawal’s terrors, and the children discover that their father is also their brother. We also discover that Abou Tarek, born Nihaid, had been trained to fight as a child soldier during the war, when all he wanted to do was look for his mother. As he got older, shaped by his experiences, he became a killing machine, crazed with war and decided that all he wanted to do was be a martyr so that his mother could see his pictures everywhere. In this twisted puzzle we are shown the ways different ways of how internalized terror can affect an individual. Nawal, able to recognize and come to terms with her situation, found comfort in loving her all children while Tarek, enraged and filled with terror, chose violence and destroying other people.
Psychological warfare is another method through which self-terror can develop in a person. Typically involving the use of propaganda to demoralize the enemy, break his will to fight or resist, and sometimes to make him favourably disposed to the attackers position, the Rape of Nanking shows us how brainwashing and not being in a position to reason can stir terror in the self. Although the book is an in-depth discussion of the horrible atrocities committed by the Japanese military at Nanking, we see that the very first victims of terrorism, were the young Japanese soldiers. Brainwashed from an early age with an special military propaganda, and educational system that was abusive, regimented and robotic, walled off from outside pleasures and interests, a curriculum in which everything was bent to perfection and triumph, where students turned to suicide for fear of not meeting exam expectations and had to internalize a “will that knows no defeat” (31), desensitized and stripped of all emotions and sense of individual self-worth, these children who later became adults in the Japanese military did not even know right from wrong. They had been psychologically molded into killing robots; killing every “enemy” in sight, so much so that they did not view the women they tortured, raped and killed at Nanking at humans but as pigs and dogs. If the soldiers were not plagued by terror, their stories would have probably been different as they would have been thinking for themselves
As can be seen from these analyses, terror in the self holds us a complete slave to its power. Directing our every thought and action, and debilitizing our individual power. When we cannot find equilibrium, or allow our minds and bodies to be wholly consumed by trauma and terror we are left in a position to be dragged along, with terror as our master. From Nina, to Teddy, to Conrad, the puzzling story of Nawal and her children, as well as the Japanese soldiers, we are shown that we are never really free from anything until are free from the terror in ourselves.