Why Literary Psychopaths Fascinate Us

Dexter, from Season 4

Dexter, from Season 4

Monday

It’s that time of year when my seniors are completing their St. Mary’s Projects, an optional two-semester senior thesis. I require a full rough draft prior to spring break, which gives them a month for revising.

I also ask for their permission to describe their project for this blog. That way they can see how their ideas appear to outside eyes. This is important for the revision process as it helps them move from a writer-based to a reader-based perspective.

Kate Hedrick is an English-psychology double major who is examining the growing respectability of crime fiction that features psychopathic killers. The slasher genre used to be viewed with disdain, but that has changed markedly over the past 30 years or so. Now scholars write extensively about the works that Kate has chosen.

Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, once regarded as drive-in movie fare, is now applauded for having changed the direction of the horror genre. Silence of the Lambs, meanwhile, is the first horror film to win the Oscar for Best Film while Dexter is a much praised television drama with high production values.

As a psychology major, Kate wants to know how accurate is psychopathy as portrayed in these dramas. As an English major, she wants to understand what fascinates us about psychopath protagonists.

The answer to the first question is “not very.” You won’t to be surprised to hear that the dramas take a lot of liberties. Kate begins her project with a definition of psychopathy and sociopathy, both of which are “antisocial personality disorders”:

In order for individuals to be diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder, they must demonstrate that they fail to conform to social norms in following lawful behavior, are deceitful, impulsive or cannot plan ahead, irritable and aggressive, recklessly disregard the safety of themselves or others, consistent irresponsibility such as problems sustaining work behavior or financial obligations, or have a lack of remorse. At least three of these above symptoms must be present in order to be diagnosed.

 Psychopathy is generally associated with nature, sociopathy with nurture:

Psychopathy is believed to be related to physical brain abnormality to the impulse control and emotion areas of the brain whereas sociopathy is linked to childhood trauma and abuse.

Most of the psychopathic or sociopathic killers in novels, films, and television dramas go back to two killers: Ed Gein and Ted Bundy. Gein skinned the corpses of women that he dug up to make various items. Then, in 1957, he shot a shopkeeper and was caught soon after skinning her. He died in a mental asylum.

Bundy, who was considerably cleverer, confessed to killing over 30 women between 1974-78. He tricked women into trusting him and then had sex with their corpses. He was executed in 1989.

Norman Bates in Psycho is loosely based on Gein while Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs is a conflation of Gein and Bundy. Dexter, a sociopath with a code of conduct that allows him to only kill other serial killers, comes up against killers with a number of psychopathic traits. One of the episodes mentions Jeffrey Dahmer, a serial killer responsible for the death of 17 men and boys.

But while the depictions of psychopathic slashers are inspired by real people, the resemblance to reality ends there. Most people who suffer from antisocial personality disorders, Kate says, do not kill people. Rather, authors have borrowed certain traits from psychopathy and sociopathy and molded them into their own fictional creations. Norman Bates, Buffalo Bill, Hannibal Lecter, Dexter, and Dexter’s various foils tell us more about ourselves than they do about people suffering from antisocial personality disorder.

So what do they tell us? Kate’s thesis is that they articulate various male insecurities that have arisen during confusing social transitions.

Kate historically situates each of her dramas. Robert Bloch wrote Psycho in 1959 (Alfred Hitchocock turned it into a film the following year), a time when many men were moving from the factory and the farm to corporate offices. One became, say, an IBM man, with assured benefits that extended from hiring to dying. Many feared becoming a sensitive mother’s boy such as that portrayed by Tony Perkins in the film, which is why the western was also popular during the 1950. Some blamed women for their new domestication. Their anger, which became toxic as they repressed it, found an outlet in the shower stabbing scene.

The 1980s saw men adjusting to a new set of shocks. As they lost their earning power following stagflation and recession and as they found themselves competing with newly empowered women in the workplace, they discovered in Buffalo Bill their own mixed feelings. Bill is making a dress out of women’s skin, and while the act itself is horrifying, the desire to join the gender that seems to be succeeding is not. Of course, wanting to be a woman is shameful, which is why the desire is repressed. Uncanny horror, Freud tells us, occurs when we can’t admit what we secretly desire.

The fact that a father figure like Hannibal ultimately prevails offers a kind of satisfaction. Although a woman defeats Buffalo Bill, it is under the mentorship of a man. Besides, Jodie Foster does not come across as a “ball-busting woman.”

Darkly Dreaming Dexter, the first of the Dexter series, appeared in 2004, another time when American men felt under assault. 9-11 had cast serious doubts upon America’s sense of itself as invulnerable, leading men to feel that they had failed in protecting their loved ones. To make matters worse, Americans appeared to be descending to the level of their attackers, waterboarding at Guantanamo and abusing prisoners at Abu Garib. Through Dexter one can both acknowledge one’s panic and salvage some self respect—after all Dexter, unlike those he hunts, has a kind of code, one seemingly necessitated by the violent world in which he exists.

So that she isn’t exploring only male anxieties, Kate is also studying Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, first a 2012 novel and then a film. Kate is still working out the psychological dynamics of the book but her idea appears to have something to do with women’s resentment of anxious men and their own anxieties about being dependent on such men.

Because the horror genre makes its home in our fears, reading and watching horror makes us feel less alone. Kate demonstrates that we are not obsessed with actual psychopathic slashers but with our own fears and shameful desires.

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