Moon Knight is just a day away from premiering on Disney+.
According to the official synopsis … Moon Knight follows Steven Grant, a mild-mannered gift-shop employee, who becomes plagued with blackouts and memories of another life. Steven discovers he has dissociative identity disorder and shares a body with mercenary Marc Spector. As Steven/Marc’s enemies converge upon them, they must navigate their complex identities while thrust into a deadly mystery among the powerful gods of Egypt.
Obviously the six episode series looks to differ from the comic book origins. However, factor in the fact that every writer seems to have a radically different position on whether or not Marc Spector really died and was resurrected by an ancient Egyptian moon god or if he’s just a mentally ill person with split personalities and said moon god is just a hallucination.
The series could be borrowing ingredients from many a telling of the tale. For a long time, the official explanation was that Marc fractured his own psyche by putting so much effort into maintaining a series of aliases.
Then the Warren Ellis arc came along and a doctor explained, in so many words “That’s bull ISHT, Dissociative Identity Disorder doesn’t work that way. Your problem is that Khonshu (based heavily on the ancient Egyptian deity Khonsu) has worn a spot into your brain where they comfortably sit, like it was a couch, and the human psyche simply can’t handle that.”
Next, the Jeff Lemire run said “No, no, Marc has always had this problem from childhood and his aliases were a coping mechanism for the alternate personalities within him the whole time. But Khonshu’s been manipulating him since long before their first official meeting, and may be partially responsible for his condition or at the very least has exacerbated it.”
The Mr. Knight angle is interesting as well. I’m admittedly slightly behind on the comics so maybe they’ve changed this, but I know in the arc where he first appeared that persona wasn’t a separate identity but an alternate costume Marc/Moon Knight wore when interacting with the cops. This is because, to quote the first issue of that run, Moon Knight is a “dangerous vigilante” and if the cops spotted him, they’d have to “follow a very specific set of standing orders and restrain him using whatever force was necessary.” Instead, they deal with Mr. Knight, who’s a “concerned citizen,” and conveniently gives him an excuse to not wear that cape all the time when it might look dumb, stupid or off putting.
I am looking forward to this. Moon Knight is in the top five for me. Whether or not the creatives at Disney did or did not do an accurate job of mental disorder depiction will most definitely be up for debate when all is said and done. Connecting real-life issues, including illness and mental illness, to very unreal fictional characters, does not intrinsically “make light” of anything. How respectfully or poorly it handles the topic, and the accuracy or error with which it treats, determines whether it’s making light or exploiting reality.