Fictional portrayals of psychopaths

The meaning gradually narrowed, initially as 'psychopathic inferiors' covering all of what today might be called personality disorders and various other conditions, then intertwining with the terminology of the 'sociopath' (and eventually antisocial personality disorder), though psychopathy remained variously defined in both broad and narrow ways.

Early representations of psychopaths in film 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. Up until the late 1950s, cinematic conventions usually relegated the psychopath to roles of genre villains such as gangsters, mad scientists, supervillains, and many types of generic criminals. Examples of this type are Pinkie Brown (Richard Attenborough) in Brighton Rock, 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. Homosexuals were also referred to as psychopaths under the broad definition then in use; the American Psychiatric Association in the first Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1952 would list it under 'sociopathic personality disturbance'.

One exceptional depiction in this period was 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 German film (allegedly based on the real life serial killer Peter Kürten), it was released in America in 1933 and has been seen as indicative of a turning point in American media depictions of psychopaths. Until the 1930s psychiatrists typically applied the diagnosis to unemployed males or 'hypersexual' women, but several psychiatric, cultural and economic trends, together with sex crime panics, converged to transform the popular psychopath into a violent, male, sexual deviant or criminal—a threat to innocence, gender roles and the social order.[6]

The Ostap Bender character from novels The Twelve Chairs and The Little Golden Calf by Soviet authors Ilf and Petrov is also considered a portrait of a charming psychopath.[7][8]

One of the earliest real life cases which had a pervasive influence on American movies was that of Ed Gein, arrested in 1957. A farmer who had resided with his mother until her death, he had then killed two women and dug up female bodies from the local cemetery, making various items out of their skin. Rumours spread that he was also a necrophiliac, cannibal or transvestite, though these appear to have been unsupported other than by brief affirmations from Gein to leading questions by interrogators.[9][10] Gein was found mentally ill and legally insane before trial, deemed to have had schizophrenia (psychosis including delusions and hallucinations) for at least 12 years, though at least one media psychiatrist dubbed him instead a 'sexual psychopath'.[11][12] Robert Bloch, a prolific pulp horror author, says his 1959 novel Psycho was based on the Gein murders and the idea of an apparently sane person in a local community committing heinous crimes, but not necessarily on Gein himself, despite numerous similarities.[13] The villain, Norman Bates, is portrayed as an outwardly unremarkable man who murders a woman while under the control of an alternate personality that takes the form of his domineering mother, who he himself murdered. Both the novel and Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 film adaptation were influences on the popular media portrayal of psychopaths.[14][15] Neither the book nor film elaborates on the term 'psycho', though it is commonly taken to refer to either psychotic or psychopath. At the end of the film, a psychiatrist describes Bates as having a split personality. Multiple personality disorder was at that time very popular (cf 1957 movie The Three Faces of Eve) and is to this day commonly confused with schizophrenia. Bloch later wrote a script for the 1966 film The Psychopath, the original working title for which was "Schizo".[16]

A different thread within fictional portrayals of psychopathy continued to focus on rebelliously antisocial characters. The title of the 1955 film Rebel Without a Cause, starring James Dean, came from a 1944 book of the same name detailing the hypno-analysis of a diagnosed psychopath. In the book, psychiatrist Robert M. Lindner also discussed psychopaths in general as pointlessly selfish individuals who appear unable to accept society's rules. In Ken Kesey's 1962 novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Randle McMurphy, after being admitted to a mental institution, is repeatedly referred to by the authorities, other patients and himself as a possible or definite psychopath. He reads from his record: "repeated outbreaks of passion that suggest the possible diagnosis of psychopath", and adds that a doctor told him it means "I fight and fuh-pardon me, ladies-means I am he put it overzealous in my sexual relations." The current doctor then reads out the note: "Don't overlook the possibility that this man might be feigning psychosis".[17] In the script for the popular film adaptation in 1975, only the latter is retained and the term psychopath is never used. Ironically, the main authority figure in the hospital—the cold, sadistic Nurse Ratched—was later described as a psychopath under later understandings of the term.[18]

American mystery author Patricia Highsmith often featured psychopathic characters in her books, most notably her Ripliad series about Tom Ripley, a "suave, agreeable and utterly amoral" con artist and serial killer. In the first book, 1955's The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ripley murders a rich man and steals his identity; in four subsequent novels, he commits several murders and engages in a long-running art forgery scam, all without getting caught. Ripley has been described by several critics as a psychopath,[19][20][21] while author and diagnosed narcissist Sam Vaknin has said that Ripley fits the criteria for both psychopathy and narcissism.[22]

The 1973 film Badlands involved two lead characters based loosely on Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate. While the male protagonist, spree killer Kit Carruthers (Martin Sheen), is sometimes described as a psychopath or sociopath, psychologist Robert D. Hare, a leading proponent of the assessment of psychopathy, has identified his girlfriend and accomplice Holly (Sissy Spacek) as exemplifying his concept of a psychopath due to her poor emotional sense of the meaning of events and her attempted mask of normality. However, writer and director Terrence Malick has said he considered Kit's shallow, bitter insensitivity to be a result of suffering and neglect growing up in the Midwest, and 15-year-old Holly, though immature and mis-estimating her audience, to be a quite typical Southern girl wanting to help narrate and come off well but still give the hard facts, and not dwell on herself or on personal tragedies.[23][24]

The increasing media focus of serial killers in the late 20th century, fueled by cases such as John Wayne Gacy (1978), Ted Bundy (1978) and Jeffrey Dahmer (1991), lent an additional momentum to the way psychopathy was both perceived and portrayed in film and literature, sometimes incorporating a hybrid of traditional psychopaths from early film and late-19th century literature with the high-functioning behaviors detected in some serial killers.[25][26]

The psychiatrist and cannibalistic serial killer Hannibal Lecter, most notably portrayed by Anthony Hopkins in the Academy Award-winning 1991 film The Silence of the Lambs, is perhaps the most infamous fictional psychopath of the 20th century. Lecter is intelligent and sophisticated and his disarming charisma and wit disguise his true nature as a serial killer. He spends most of the film in a cell, taunting FBI trainee Clarice Starling with clues to the identity of another serial killer, Buffalo Bill, in exchange for intimate details of Starling's troubled childhood. Lecter first appeared in Thomas Harris' 1981 novel Red Dragon, in which he is characterized as not fitting any known psychological profile. In the film adaptation of The Silence of the Lambs, he is referred to as a "pure psychopath".[27] In the later novels Hannibal and Hannibal Rising, Lecter's psychopathy is portrayed as the result of seeing his sister Mischa murdered and cannibalized during World War II. In 2013 Harris revealed that he originally based the Lecter character on Alfredo Ballí Trevino, a Mexican physician who had killed and dismembered his homosexual lover, in what was called a crime of passion over a financial dispute.[28][29]

The novel American Psycho tells the story of Patrick Bateman, a yuppie serial killer working on Wall Street in the 1980s. It was made into a film in 2000. Author Bret Easton Ellis has told interviewers that the book is a satire on shallow consumerist lifestyles, but also that the writing of the violent scenes was based on fictional horror and FBI material on serial killers, along with how he imagined "a psychotic who worked on Wall Street" would describe such incidents. Some commentary, including in scientific journals, has suggested the Bateman character appears to be a psychopath. However, Bateman also exhibits signs of psychosis such as hallucinations, and as such appears to be an unreliable narrator; it is left ambiguous whether Bateman is actually a serial killer, or is merely hallucinating about committing murder.[30][31] In Ellis' 1998 novel Glamorama which features models-turned-terrorists a character also remarks "basically, everyone was a sociopath...and all the girls' hair was chignoned."

In the 1993 book Girl, Interrupted and its 1999 film adaptation, the character of Lisa (played by Angelina Jolie in the film) is a rebellious, antisocial young woman who is diagnosed as a sociopath.[32] However, it is left ambiguous whether that diagnosis is accurate.

The 1996 film Primal Fear depicts a suspected murderer who appears to have multiple personality disorder, who at the end reveals that he has been faking the disorder. In the original novel by William Diehl, the psychiatrist Molly Arrington and others repeatedly explain psychopathy and psychosis as if they are the same, inherently antisocial, condition.

Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling has described Lord Voldemort, the series' main villain, as "a raging psychopath, devoid of the normal human responses to other people's suffering, and there ARE people like that in the world".[33]