The trailer for Moon Knight, Marvel’s new series on Disney+, is super trippy. When the trailer begins, we meet a British man named Steven (Oscar Isaac) who’s suffering from a sleep disorder. He lies awake at night, suffers from nightmares so bad he has to tie himself to his bed, and struggles to stay awake during the day. But it soon becomes clear that that’s not all he’s dealing with. Steven finds a phone buried in his apartment, and when it rings, an American woman’s voice is on the other end. “Oh my god, you’re alive,” she says. “What’s wrong with you, Marc?” This is our first clue that Marc Spector, the hero of Moon Knight, has multiple identities.
What’s going on here? Fans of the Moon Knight comic books, which have been running since 1975, know that Marc is an ex-Marine who struggles with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), a condition that has caused his psyche to split into multiple personalities. DID is a trauma response and a rare form of dissociation, in which someone responds to experiences that are too violent or painful to acknowledge by shutting them away. Dissociation often takes the form of seemingly leaving one’s body or escaping into fantasy, but with DID, entirely new personalities arise in order to cope with the trauma.
Like the Marc Spector of the comics, it looks like DID will be one of Marc’s defining features in the MCU. Of course, this being Marvel, there’s an element of mysticism in it, too. Moon Knight is a superhero who draws his powers from Khonshu, the Egyptian god of the moon. In Moon Knight, Khonshu has transformed Marc into his priest, tasking him with fighting evil in his name. Is Khonshu a product of Marc’s mental health struggles, or a real entity? It seems like it’s a bit of both.
In the comics, Marc has five core identities that exist independent of each other, but work together to fight crime. Let’s take a look at who those five identities are, and how they might come up in the Disney+ series.
(Oh, and a quick reminder that DID is a real thing that affects real people. I’ve tried to be sensitive to that in this article, so please try to be sensitive in the comments!)
Marc Spector
Marc Spector is the foundational identity at the core of all the others. In the comics, Marc is the son of a rabbi who escaped the Nazis and moved to Chicago. His father abhors violence, but Marc is obsessed with war. A traumatic incident with a family friend who turns out to be an escaped Nazi triggers Marc’s Dissociative Identity Disorder, and leads to his first encounter with Khonshu. Is his DID the result of psychic trauma, or does Khonshu engineer it? That’s left to the reader to wonder.
When he grows up, Marc becomes a marine, but his mental health struggles lead to a dishonorable discharge, and he becomes a CIA agent and eventually a mercenary. While on assignment at an archaeological site in Sudan, Marc clashes with another mercenary named Raul Bushman, and Bushman mortally wounds him, leaving him for dead at the feet of a statue of Khonshu. As he’s dying, Marc receives a vision of Khonshu offering to save his life in exchange for his service as a priest. Is it a visitation or just a hallucination? It’s not clear, but Marc rises from the statue, healed, and begins his life as Moon Knight.
Steven Grant
One of the first personalities to emerge from Marc’s DID as a child, in the comics, is Steven Grant. The original character of Steven Grant is a Bruce Wayne-esque millionaire playboy who finances Moon Knight’s operations, but it looks like the series will be taking him in a different direction. Instead of a millionaire, the trailer depicts Steven as a disheveled museum worker who endures abuse from his coworkers while trying to keep his head together. Steven also sports a weirdly fake-sounding accent, which Oscar Isaac claims is intentional.
Jake Lockley
Jake Lockley is another personality to emerge pretty early on in Marc’s life. The polar opposite of Steven Grant, Jake is a lowly cab driver who gathers intel for Moon Knight by keeping his ear to the ground and making contacts in the seedy underbelly of New York City. There’s some speculation that, since the personality in the trailer more closely resembles Jake than Steven, the MCU may be combining or switching Marc’s various identities. I guess five separate personalities are a lot to keep track of in a six-episode series.
Moon Knight
Hey, like the title of the show!
Some see Moon Knight as Marvel’s answer to Batman, only scarier. As a high priest of Khonshu, he’s a vigilante who hunts criminals at night, dressed in all white to make sure they see him coming, and using various gadgets and vehicles to get the job done. He also draws his powers from the moon, becoming more powerful when the moon is full. With a brain “rebuilt into a god’s weapon,” according to the comics, Moon Knight’s powers include heightened strength (as much due to Marc’s background as a marine and mercenary as to Khonshu’s influence), weapons mastery, resistance to telepathic attacks, and even immortality, since Khonshu can resurrect him when he dies. In the comics, Moon Knight is one of Marvel’s more violent characters, and we get a brief glimpse of him brutalizing someone in the trailer.
Unlike Batman, Moon Knight isn’t Marc Spector in a caped suit. He’s an entirely separate personality.
Mr. Knight
Mr. Knight is one of the newer identities to emerge from Marc’s DID. He’s kind of … Moon Knight in a suit? Like, picture Moon Knight, but attending a fundraiser gala instead of fighting crime. You’ll find him dressed in a white suit and acting as a consultant to law enforcement. You know what? He’s Moon Knight in detective mode. Yeah, let’s go with that.
How will the MCU handle Marc’s various personalities from the comics? Will they all emerge, or is what we saw in the trailer evidence that they’ll be compressed or streamlined? We don’t have to wait long to find out. Moon Night premieres March 30 on Disney+!
(image: Marvel)
