Fictional portrayals of psychopaths

Psychopaths in fiction generally possess a number of standard characteristics which are not necessarily as common among real-life psychopaths. The traditional "Hollywood psychopath" is likely to exhibit traits which make them ideal villains.

Portrayals in film and TV

Film

Psychopathy in film is often portrayed in an exaggerated fashion to enhance the dramatic properties of a character or characters to render them memorable. Typically, a psychopathic character in a film is often in the role of a villain, where the general characteristics of a psychopath are useful to facilitate conflict and danger. Because the definitions and criteria for psychopathy have varied over the years and continue to change even now, many characters in notable films may have been designed to fall under the category of a psychopath at the time of the film's production or release, but not necessarily in subsequent years.

Early depictions

Early representations of psychopaths in film were often designed with a poor or incomplete understanding of a psychopathic personality: they were often caricatured as sadistic, unpredictable, sexually depraved, and emotionally unstable (manic) characters with a compulsion to engage in random violence and destruction, usually with a series of bizarre mannerisms such as giggling, laughing, or facial tics. The public's overall unfamiliarity with mental disorders made this depiction acceptable and even perceived as "realistic" at the time of release. Up until the late 1950s, American cinematic conventions usually relegated the psychopath to roles of genre villains such as gangsters, mad scientists, supervillains, and many types of generic criminals. Even homosexuality was displayed as a type of psychopathic behavior in films such as They Only Kill Their Masters (1972) prior to the removal of homosexuality from the DSM in 1973.

Examples of this type are Tommy Udo (Richard Widmark) in Kiss of Death, Cody Jarrett (James Cagney) in White Heat, and Antonio 'Tony' Camonte (Paul Muni) in the 1932 version of Scarface. One exception to this depiction during this period is the character of child murderer Hans Beckert (Peter Lorre) in the 1931 Fritz Lang film M. Lorre portrays Beckert as an outwardly unremarkable man tormented by a compulsion to ritualistically murder children, a substantially more realistic depiction of what would eventually be known as a serial killer.

Developments

The arrests and resulting notoriety of serial killers John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and Ted Bundy led to an additional increase in the way psychopathy was both perceived and portrayed in film. An increasing interest in realistic depictions of psychopaths led to the formation of a new hybrid of traditional psychopaths from early film and late-19th Century literature with the high-functioning behaviors detected in psychopaths such as Bundy and Dahmer.

An example of this type of character is that of the cannibalistic psychiatrist Dr. Hannibal Lecter, as portrayed by Anthony Hopkins in the Academy Award-winning 1991 film The Silence of the Lambs. Lecter is intelligent and sophisticated, and his disarming charisma and wit disguise his true nature as a psychopath. He spends most of the film in a prison cell, taunting protagonist Clarice Starling with clues to the identity of another serial killer, Buffalo Bill, in exchange for intimate details of Starling's troubled childhood. The movie is based on books by Thomas Harris and in the first, Red Dragon, Chapter 7, the medical director of a psychiatric hospital calls Lecter a 'pure sociopath' but also says he doesn't fit any known profile; in the movie The Silence of the Lambs, the same character calls Lecter a "pure psychopath". In the prequel, Hannibal Rising, Harris has Lecter as a child witnessing his sister being killed and eaten by Nazi's, who would become his first victims. In 2013 Harris indicated that he originally based the Lecter character on Alfredo Balli Trevino, a Mexican physician who had killed and chopped up his homosexual lover in what was classed as a crime of passion.

Television

Numerous characters in television shows have been described as psychopaths, including Natalie Buxton from Bad Girls, Sean Slater and Micheal Moon from EastEnders and Dexter Morgan from Dexter.

Further reading

• Narcissists, Psychopaths, and Other Bad Guys: What do personality labels contribute to popular discourse? Steven Reidbord, M.D., January 2013, Psychology Today.
• Portrayal of psychopathy in the movies Hesse, M. (2009). International Review of Psychiatry, 21(3), 207-212 (Login needed for full text).
• Is James Bond in fact a psycho? Stephen Dalton, The National, UAE, Oct 29, 2012 ([http://peterjonason.com/uploads/dtstmnewscientist.pdf cited study actually on 'dark triad')