Insomnia: Personal Ghosts That Do Not Make You Sleep

The Christopher Nolan thriller of 2002,  Insomnia ,  revolves around a strange murder in Alaska. Will Dormer (Al Pacino) is a Los Angeles homicide detective who, along with colleague Hap Eckhart (Martin Donovan), investigates the mysterious murder.

When they are about to catch the killer, Eckhart is accidentally killed by Dormer. The killer watches the scene and then runs away. Will is unable to accept what happened and tells a different version of the facts and hides the evidence. The killer, however, begins to blackmail him over the phone. The detective, tormented by his friend’s death and feelings of guilt, begins to suffer from insomnia.

Insomnia : when the guilt translates into insomnia

Al Pacino, in the part of Will Dormer, is unable to metabolize the accident he caused, he rejects the incident unable to integrate it into his own identity. He does not want or cannot identify with the fact that has happened and accept his faults, but his conscience has registered everything.

When such an event is experienced as a trauma, it is necessary to work out a realistic version of the fact itself to make sense of it. In this case, the rejection and denial compromised the basic physical and mental faculties of the lead detective.

The personal ghosts they don’t let live

After the accident, Will begins to convince himself that he is not at fault. Behavioral and mental avoidance of what happened helps him to realize the intolerable aspects of his “I”, of others and of the world.

Al Pacino interprets a clear example of post-traumatic stress disorder. The protagonist experienced an extremely traumatic event to which he reacted with fear, helplessness and horror. After the misfortune, he begins to relive the moment of his friend’s killing, through dreams, intrusive memories, flashbacks.

Will knows that the only solution to solving the case is to tell the whole truth and get rid of the guilt, but he prefers to avoid the memories and thoughts by switching sides and telling lies. To construct a new account of the incident, work out distorted versions of the cause or consequences of the trauma, trying to blame another person.

The only way to carry on the lie and hide his guilt is to distance himself from others. Will loses his ability to experience positive emotions. Only a young assistant realizes the detective’s change, finding in him a lesser ability to concentrate and attention due to insomnia.

The disintegration of the personality in trauma

In Insomnia  the trauma is divided into two or more psychobiological systems which are very rigid in their functions which cause adaptation problems. The personality subsystems can reach different degrees of elaboration and autonomy and become:

• Emotional personality (EP) : a high emotional charge of traumatic experiences that is relived on a sensory-motor level. This part unwittingly directs attention to possible threats that may be oversized due to the traumatic past.

• Seemingly Normal Personality (ANP) : A part that avoids traumatic memories and focuses on the functions of daily life. Even if the person seems “normal”, he certainly exhibits negative symptoms such as withdrawal, numbness and partial or total amnesia related to the traumatic experience.

This marked subdivision of the personality characterizes simple dissociative PTSD, including PTSD. The disintegration between emotional personality and apparently normal personality prevents the integration of traumatic memories and blocks the transformation of the events that occurred into autobiographical narrative memory. In other words, the traumatized person needs to be able to tell and tell himself the truth of what he experienced.

Our life is a stage where we are protagonists and the script changes the characters in one direction or another. Ultimately, the film Insomnia makes us understand how a traumatic experience can mark a before and after based on how it is integrated into the life and history of the person who lived it.