Fictional portrayals of psychopaths

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Some of the information in this article or section may not be verified by reliable sources. It should be checked for inaccuracies and modified to cite reliable sources.

Contents

[edit] Characteristics

Psychopaths in popular fiction and movies 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 some or all of the following traits which make them ideal villains:

  • High intelligence, and a preference for intellectual stimulation (music, fine art etc.)
  • A somewhat vain, stylish, almost "cat-like" demeanor
  • Prestige, or a successful career or position
  • A calm, calculating and always-in-control attitude

[edit] Smooth psychopaths

[edit] Deceptively charming types

A calm, calculating, and always-in-control attitude is probably most at odds with the typical true-life psychopath. A true psychopath is much more likely to be impulsive, disorganised, short-sighted and short-tempered with little resemblance to the artful, wryly charming, and often enigmatic classic screen villains such as

[edit] Explicitly morbid types

By the same token, the disordered narcissism and crudely aggressive personal style of the true-life psychopath rarely resembles the self-possession present in later, more explicitly morbid characters such as:

[edit] Comedic psychopaths

[edit] Burlesque types

Clearly psychopathic personalities can be found in black comedy, melodrama and satire, with characters such as Charlie Chaplin as the eponymous anti-hero of the 1947 murder farce, Monsieur Verdoux (based on the actual case of the French "Bluebeard" killer, Henri Désiré Landru), and Lee Marvin as the cartoonishly over-the-top outlaw in John Ford's famed elegiac 1962 western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. In the musical genre, Steve Martin's sadistic biker dentist, Orin Scrivello, D.D.S., in Little Shop of Horrors, is yet another example of a comedic psychopath. (However, this buffoonish brute also presents realistic clinical traits of the true-life psychopath when he sings of how he enjoyed abusing animals as a child.)

A notable recent example of this type is Tim Roth's performance as the effete, gleefully treacherous and ribald Archibald Cunningham in the 1993 film of the eighteeth-century Walter Scott adventure romance, Rob Roy, which sketches the psychopath in the campy style of outsized stock villainy characteristic of burlesque. Other burlesque psychopaths include Margaret Hamilton as the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz; Kenneth McMillan as the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen in Dune; Rowan Atkinson as the centuries-spanning English ne'er-do-well, Edmund Blackadder, in the period-set British comedy television series, Blackadder; Alan Rickman as the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves; and Kelsey Grammer as the voice of Sideshow Bob — a homicidal clown probably inspired by serial child killer John Wayne Gacy — on the animated American television series, The Simpsons.

[edit] Supervillains

In a similar way, comic book-inspired movie supervillains such as Gene Hackman as Lex Luthor in Superman and Jack Nicholson as the Joker in Batman also qualify as comedic psychopaths (although it is to be noted that certain interpretations of the Joker in the comic book series depict him more in the manner of the postmodern psychopath). With their wild antics and extravagant crimes, supervillains often make comic stooges out of their straight, stiff-backed superhero nemeses. Even Mike Myers as the absurd, pompous Dr. Evil, an effete megalomaniac forever plotting world domination in the Austin Powers movies, is but a parodic pastiche of the preposterously well-financed, well-equipped psychopathic supervillains (both smooth and comedic) that appear in the James Bond series, such as Dr. No, Auric Goldfinger, Blofeld and Max Zorin. Action-movie supervillains also fall into this category. Zim, the titular character in the Nickelodeon animated series, Invader Zim, is also a parody of the supervillain; his comic absurdity is tempered by moments of genuine malice and destructiveness.

[edit] Postmodern psychopaths

In the past fifteen to twenty years, psychopaths, comedic or otherwise, have increasingly been portrayed in popular movies as caricatured exemplars of a kind of aggressively "hip", permanently jaded, ironic, postmodern sensibility of cool. This type of fictional psychopath assiduously cultivates and promotes his deviancy amidst a pervasively cynical and nihilistic pop-culture wasteland. The postmodern psychopath necessarily exists in a chaotic, fragmented environment — one devoid of any authentic values and feelings, saturated with banal consumerism and ephemeral mass-media simulacra, and informed by what French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard has called "an incredulity toward metanarratives". Hence, extreme anti-social behavior becomes the normative method for negotiating one's way through all of the violence, confusion, vacuity and absurdity that abounds. It is by remorselessly and efficiently committing crimes with depraved deadpan indifference that the postmodern psychopath attains the nihilistic grace of self-referential coolness which is his calling card.

The appeal of postmodern psychopaths in the current popular culture is not entirely clear, but it is quite possible that they are meant to reflect and cater to the narcissism, hostility, jadedness and cynicism of a certain portion of the contemporary audience which prefers to experience garish displays of violence and criminality unencumbered by the implied moral framework of the classical "grand narrative" pretext that is traditionally grounded in the Aristotelian teleological imperatives of justice and catharsis.

The influence of the French New Wave films of the 1950s and 60s — particularly the self-consciously philosophical and formally experimental crime melodramas of Jean-Pierre Melville and Jean-Luc Godard — as well less reputable genres like the blaxploitation flick and Hong Kong action picture are also salient in many of the current movies which adopt the ironic, self-referential, and playfully amoral and pitiless worldview of the postmodern psychopath.

A dubious and obviously limited style and stance, the burlesque of postmodern psychopathy is most comprehensively represented in the highly self-referential seriocomic crime films of Quentin Tarantino as well as the satirical 1991 novel, American Psycho, by Bret Easton Ellis.

Examples of postmodern psychopaths include John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson as a pair of casually murderous hitman-hipsters, Vince Vega and Jules Winnfield, in Tarantino's Pulp Fiction; Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis as the giddy white-trash spree killers, Mickey and Mallory Knox, in Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers; Peter Stormare as the surly, soft-spoken, soap opera-watching Swedish-American kidnapper/murderer, Gaear Grimsrud, in the Coen brothers' Fargo; Frank Giering and Arno Frisch as the two deceptively cleancut dilettante sadists, Peter and Paul, in Michael Haneke's Funny Games; Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman, a callous and superficial serial killer who lives a materialistic yuppie lifestyle in American Psycho; and John Cusack's hitman, Martin Blank, in Grosse Pointe Blank, a nice, ordinary guy who doesn't have the slightest qualm about committing murder for a living.

[edit] Dystopian psychopaths

Notable antecedents to the postmodern psychopath are featured in dystopian science fiction, particularly in the genre's treatment of speculative themes like brainwashing and artificial intelligence. For example, the character of Dr. Benway, a perverse, power-seeking, drug-addicted surgical artist in William S. Burroughs' experimental stream-of-consciousness dystopia, Naked Lunch, and other writings, also exhibits distinctive psychopathic personality traits such as pathological selfishness and a depraved indifference towards the wellbeing of others — most notably his patients. In the context of the fragmented Burroughsian narrative, Benway serves as a satirical personification of what the author perceives as the amoral narcissism and economic parasiticism of the American medical-pharmaceutical industry, and of modern scientific practice and modern technocratic social-political-economic organizations in general.

[edit] A Clockwork Orange (1962)

A prime example of this type is the crafty, wicked and exuberantly "ultraviolent" juvenile delinquent Alex DeLarge in Anthony Burgess' ironic dystopian fable, A Clockwork Orange. Throughout the course of the story, Alex — who archly narrates his own story and takes the reader/audience into his confidence in the manner of Swift's Gulliver — reveals himself to be completely devoid of any moral agency or free will as it is defined by either the Kantian system of transcendental idealism or the Sartrean model of existential humanism. However, the implications of this critical irony in the book are not clarified in Stanley Kubrick's 1971 film featuring Malcolm McDowell's iconic performance as Alex.

In the book, the state-sanctioned behavior modification program — "the Ludovico technique" — which is designed to stifle, through artificially induced Pavlovian aversion therapy, any aggressive criminal tendencies in the subject's personality, suggests a fanciful panacea "cure" for psychopathy. However, when Alex recovers from having been a guinea pig in the state's heavy-handed experiments in social engineering, he is restored to his original mad, bad delinquent self once again and realizes that he had essentially been a kind of automaton all along, albeit an anti-social one.

Burgess' implicit contention is that Alex's anarchistic, thrill-seeking creed of "ultraviolence" does not constitute true freedom and self-actualization but is rather a regression to a primitive kind of automatism. This innately corrupt and altogether psychopathic belief system is a symptom of the anomic Weltschmertz endemic to a dehumanized, fragmented postmodern society where the vacuous amoral pursuit of jouissance is the only value remaining for the disaffected masses. Thus, Alex's fondness for Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is not a sign of his taste and refinement, but rather an indication that the fine arts have been reduced to the level of a quasi-pornographic stimulus in this decadent, inhospitable world of the near future.

It follows that Alex, the rampaging delinquent who abuses his liberty through violent crime, is just as inauthentic a person as Alex the good citizen, who has been coercively rehabilitated by unnatural means and thereby robbed of any free moral choice. Regardless of whether Alex is actively anti-social or passively complaisant, his behavior is ultimately as overdetermined and mechanized as that of a wind-up toy — i.e., "a clockwork orange". In this sense, Alex DeLarge certainly qualifies as a kind of post-human dystopian psychopath.

However, the ending of Kubrick's film adaptation significantly strays from the spirit of Burgess' Christian humanist conclusion, which holds that, when given a free choice between good and evil, the vast majority of people will ultimately choose to be good citizens.

[edit] Psychopathic automatons

Other examples of dystopian psychopaths include the relentlessly murderous automatons portrayed by Yul Brynner in Michael Chrichton's Westworld and Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Terminator. In contrast, the principal villain of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner — a film based on Philip K. Dick's classic science fiction novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? — is an example of a dystopian psychopath who discovers what it means to be human. In this particular instance, the artificially designed and genetically enhanced "replicant", Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer), ceases to be destructive and murderous and — in a sudden unexpected volte-face — turns compassionate and humane when he finally realizes the implications of his own mortality as well as that of actual humans themselves.

[edit] Realistic depictions of psychopaths

Perhaps more accurate portrayals of psychopaths are

The Cuban drug lord Tony Montana in Brian De Palma's 1983 updating of Howard Hawks' original film is an explicitly morbid type. As a character, Tony Montana does not qualify as a realistic psychopath since Al Pacino's overheated, melodramatic performance is too broad and mannered.

All are crude, impulsive, manipulative, small-minded characters who are quick to anger and who relentlessly torment other people while demonstrating a consistent lack of remorse for their vicious actions.

[edit] Psychopaths as men of affairs

Ruthless, amoral, grasping men of affairs like the powerful newspaper columnist, J. J. Hunsecker, in Sweet Smell of Success — based on Walter Winchell and played by Burt Lancaster — and the unscrupulous corporate raider, Gordon Gekko, in Wall Street — based on Ivan Boesky and played by Michael Douglas — also exhibit many traits of the true-life psychopath such as extreme egotism, manipulativeness, lack of remorse with limited insight into the effects of one's own behavior, and a general inability to establish and maintain normal relationships. Although these characters are not serial killers or thugs, these two respectable and financially successful business leaders are both deeply selfish, vengeful men who have no compunction whatsoever about destroying the personal lives of others and, when under stress, both threaten irrational violence.

John Huston's obscenely wealthy, sexually depraved, Vanderbilt-style robber baron, Noah Cross, in Chinatown, epitomizes the Hollywood psychopath as a ruthless and powerful man of affairs. But perhaps the most significant early precursor of this type is the remorselessly deceitful, parasitic, venal Pardoner from Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, written in the fourteenth century:

What, do you suppose, that while I can preach,
And win gold and silver because I teach,
That I will live in poverty voluntarily?
Nay, nay, I never thought it, truly!
For I will preach and beg in various lands;
I will not do any labor with my hands,
Nor make baskets and live thereby,
Because I will not beg idly.
I will imitate none of the apostles;
I will have money, wool, cheese, and wheat,
Although it were given by the poorest servant boy,
Or by the poorest widow in a village,
Even though her children should die of hunger.
Nay, I will drink liquor of the vine
And have a pretty wench in every town.
But listen, gentlemen, in conclusion:
Your desire is that I shall tell a tale.
Now I have drunk a draft of strong ale,
By God, I hope I shall tell you a thing
That shall, for good reason, be to your liking.
For though myself be a very vicious man,
Yet I can tell you a moral tale,
Which I am accustomed to preach in order to profit.
Now hold your peace! My tale I will begin.

(lines 439-462 from "The Prologue to the Pardoner's Tale", modern verse translation from The Riverside Chaucer, edited by Larry D. Benson)

Another notable early portrayal of the psychopath as man-of-affairs — possibly the first within English literature at least to be depicted onstage — is the character of Barabas the Jew in Christopher Marlowe's play, The Jew of Malta. In this Elizabethan tragic drama, Marlowe presents the villain Barabas as a rather curious combination of the morbid and the comedic psychopath. However, he is a kind of psychopath whose personality style appears quite susceptible to the influence of external pressures and circumstances.

[edit] Mixed and ambiguous portrayals of psychopaths

[edit] M (1931)

One of the first films to seriously explore the subject of psychopathy was Fritz Lang's 1931 German Expressionist suspense thriller, M, which features a celebrated performance by Peter Lorre as a manic serial killer who compulsively preys on young children. However, the anti-social psychopathology of the Lorre character is presented as particularly complex. In the film, the killer appears to be internally conflicted and motivated more by a desperate need to relieve some overwhelming mental stressor or persistent trauma or delusion rather than a deliberate wanton indulgence of vicious, egotistical impulses for their own enjoyment (as is the case with most psychopaths). Also, when finally captured and interrogated by a kangaroo court, the killer's own tortured explanation of his condition and the underlying reasons for his actions (as he understands them) sound closer to symptoms of possible psychosis than psychopathy.

[edit] Psychopaths as social nonconformists and unconventional heroes

In Ken Kesey's satirical novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, the main character, Randle Patrick McMurphy, declares himself a psychopath in order to enter a mental ward, and he does show some real symptoms of the condition — such as sexual promiscuity, violent behavior, as well as a chronic lack of remorse — which point to the truth of his diagnosis. Film critic Pauline Kael's review of the 1973 crime thriller Magnum Force, also describes the apparently righteous but brutally violent and impersonal public avenger "Dirty Harry" Callahan, played by Clint Eastwood, as an "emotionless hero, who lives and kills as affectlessly as a psychopathic personality" and who exists in "a totally nihilistic dream world".[1]. In Last Man Standing, the Bruce Willis character, John Smith, declares himself to be a man without a conscience, and yet he consistently demonstrates a rigid personal system of honor whereby he obtains a kind of justice for others and becomes an incidental avenger of the innocent and aggrieved.

[edit] Brimstone and Treacle (1976)

Yet another example of an ambiguous psychopath occurs in Dennis Potter's controversial 1976 play, Brimstone and Treacle (later filmed in 1982 by Richard Loncraine), which features as its main character a young con man and drifter who calls himself Martin Taylor. Martin ingratiates himself with a deeply religious middle-aged English Home Counties couple and soon becomes aware of the couple's disabled daughter, who has existed in a state of catatonia ever since surviving a hit-and-run accident several years earlier. After gaining the couple's trust and establishing himself as a lodger in their home, Martin begins secretly molesting the daughter and eventually rapes her — which suddenly brings the girl out of her paralysis, prompting the young man to flee the house never to be seen again.

To the audience, Martin's predatory sexuality, egregious deceptions and betrayals, and cynical sneering at all forms of religion and morality, clearly mark him as a remorseless anti-social psychopath. What is left unclear, however, are Martin's true origins and identity, as well as the possible providential implications of his despicable actions in the wider allegorical context of the play. Potter's play has strong religious and theological overtones as well as ambiguous elements of black comedy and social satire — some versions even suggest that Martin may in fact be the devil himself, taking the shape of an incubus. Paradoxically, the young man's sexual interference with the daughter appears to serve a positive benefit in the form of the health-restoring miracle her mother had long prayed for.

[edit] Ambiguous psychopaths in recent popular culture

In Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film of Stephen King's The Shining, Jack Nicholson's hysterical, mugging performance as the alcoholic domestic-abuser-turned-axe-wielding-maniac, Jack Torrance, suggests — on the surface at least — a burlesque variation on the comedic psychopath. However, it soon becomes quite apparent that Torrance's homicidal frenzy has in fact been triggered by a series of psychotic delusions.

In the 1990 film, Miami Blues, the main character, Fred Frenger, played by Alec Baldwin, fits the profile of a psychopath. He lies and steals habitually, attacks and kills people without provocation, makes and breaks promises to get what he wants, and does not show remorse. Roger Ebert describes him as "a thief, con man and cheat. He also is incredibly reckless... He wanders through the world looking for suitcases to steal, wallets to lift, identification papers he can use". Leonard Maltin writes in his Movie Guide that Frenger is a "psychopathic thief and murderer". Other critics have simply dubbed the character a "sociopath" (an alternate clinical term for a psychopath).

Similarly, Michael Madsen's notorious portrayal of Mr. Blonde in Quentin Tarantino's 1991 film, Reservoir Dogs, appears to combine the stylized Hollywood stereotype of the smooth, unflappable, "hip" psychopath with the more impulsive, vicious deviant behavior of the true-life psychopath.

Angelina Jolie's character, Lisa, in the 1998 film Girl, Interrupted is diagnosed as a sociopath, but, in the end, we are left wondering just how valid that diagnosis might be. Likewise, in the 2005 film, Cry Wolf, the murderous schoolgirl, Dodger Allen (Lindy Booth), exhibits many characteristics of a psychopath, but the movie never states that she is one.

In a slightly different vein, the controversial 1999 Japanese novel, Battle Royale, features a character named Kazuo Kiriyama who appears to suffer from a form of Pseudopsychopathic Personality Disorder.

[edit] Female psychopaths

Female psychopaths are often represented in fiction as treacherous schemers and/or sexual predators in the stereotyped model of the femme fatale, the lesbian vampire, or the abusive care provider.

[edit] Femme fatales

This type is exemplified in the classic movie femme fatales of 1940s and 50s Hollywood film noir like Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity), as well as more recent portrayals such as

All are prime examples of the type of "smooth" female psychopath who uses her feminine wiles to ensnare and destroy her victims.

The tradition of the femme fatale can be traced back to the Sumerian goddess Ishtar as well as the "scarlet women" of the Old Testament such as Jezebel and Delilah, and the Greek myths of Circe and Medea. Both the femme fatale and the lesbian vampire are of course stereotyped depictions of female psychopathy that contain strong and perhaps biased and distorted elements of sadomasochistic male sexual fantasy and fear.

[edit] Lesbian vampires

The lesbian vampire (or witch) of horror films similarly uses her ambiguous sexual magnetism and ethnic exoticism to seduce and overpower her victims. Notable portrayals of lesbian vampires include

The sixteenth-century Hungarian Countess Erzsébet Báthory, known as "the Bloody Lady of Čachtice" and "the Blood Countess" — the female equivalent of Gilles de Rais — is reported to have slaughtered and bathed in the blood of up to 2000 maidens in the alleged belief that this would preserve her youth and beauty. The legend of the Countess Báthory remains the primary historical model for the lesbian vampire and perhaps the earliest known true-life precursor to the modern female psychopath.

(Acclaimed Slovak director, Juraj Jakubisko, is presently making a film based on the life of Countess Báthory with Anna Friel in the title role; it is scheduled for release in 2007. French actress Julie Delpy is also reported to be working on a film about Báthory, which she is directing herself.)

[edit] Abusive care providers

Unlike the femme fatale and the lesbian vampire, the abusive or sadistic care provider often has little or no sexual allure to those around her. Instead, this type of female psychopath exploits the trust that is generally reserved for women in such social and professional roles as nannies and nurses, as well as the traditionally sanctified family roles of mothers, daughters, and sisters. This type of female psychopath victimizes those persons who are placed in her care such as children, the elderly, or the infirm.

Examples of the abusive care provider include

Of the three main types, the abusive care provider probably comes closest to accurately representing the personality and behavior of the true-life female psychopath.

[edit] Psychopaths in literature

[edit] Elizabethan-Jacobean drama

Characters in Christopher Marlowe who exhibit psychopathic personality traits include the unremittingly vengeful and treacherous anti-heroes of The Jew of Malta (as mentioned above: see "Psychopaths as men of affairs") and Tamburlaine.

Characters in Shakespeare who appear to be psychopaths include Aaron the Moor in Titus Andronicus; Richard, Duke of Gloucester (later King of England) in Richard III; Iago in Othello; and Edmund in King Lear.

[edit] The Libertine novel

In the libertine novel of the eighteenth century, the Marquise de Merteuil, the cold-blooded manipulatrix who dominates the action of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos' epistolary novel, Les Liaisons dangereuses, presents as a female psychopath.

In the works of the Marquis de Sade, most if not all of the major villains featured are perverse criminal psychopaths on a truly monumental scale. These include the Duc de Blangis, the Bishop, the Président de Curval and Durcet in The 120 Days of Sodom; Dolmancé, Madame de Saint-Ange and Le Chevalier in Philosophy in the Bedroom; and Clairwil, Noirceuil and Saint-Fond in L'Histoire de Juliette. Sade's writings constitute the most extensive catalogue of psychopathological impulses, perversions, and paraphilias in world literature, but whether the author himself was a psychopath is open to question.

[edit] Fairy tales

Children's fairy tales also feature psychopathic characters, such as the eponymous villain of Charles Perrault's "Bluebeard" (inspired by the notorious fifteenth-century criminal Gilles de Rais) and the wicked, infanticidal stepmother in the Grimm brothers' "Hansel and Gretel".

[edit] Victorian literature and lore

Psychopathic characters in Victorian fiction include Bill Sikes in Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist and Edward Hyde in Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Alegernon Charles Swinburne's dramatic monologue, "Anactoria", characterizes the speaker — the seventh-century BCE Aeolic Greek poetess Sappho — as a kind of lesbian vampire who entertains sadistic fantasies of cannibalizing her lover, Anactoria, while immortalizing her death in poetry. "Anactoria" is a rare example of a poem spoken in the voice of a psychopath as well as the only dramatic monologue in Victorian poetry which assumes the voice of a woman.

It has also been suggested that Bram Stoker based the descriptive details and characterization of his Count Dracula on the style and mannerisms of a real person — actor manager Henry Irving [2] — and, in so doing, may well have left us one of the first ever detailed, fictionalized pen portraits of a contemporary psychopath. Count Dracula fits the stereotype of the "Hollywood Psychopath", and predates it so perfectly that it would be reasonable to consider him something of a prototype. Likewise, in Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, the master criminal Professor Moriarty, called "the Napoleon of crime" — a character believed to have been based on legendary London criminals like Jonathan Wild and Adam Worth — is a precursor to the contemporary psychopath as supervillain. The nineteenth-century legend of Sweeney Todd, a fictional London barber in Fleet Street who murders unsuspecting victims with a straight razor — later made famous in a musical by Stephen Sondheim — similarly anticipates the modern criminal psychopath.

[edit] Nineteenth-century American literature

In nineteenth-century American literature, the Italian aristocrat, Montresor, in Edgar Allan Poe's story The Cask of Amontillado, thinks and behaves very much like a psychopath. In Herman Melville's novella Billy Budd, the envious, vengeful Master-at-Arms of the HMS Bellipotent, John Claggart, is described by the author as being possessed by "a depravity according to nature" (homosexuality?). Claggart's neurotic hatred and fear of the enigmatic Billy Budd — possibly triggered by a reaction formation of repressed homosexual desire which manifests itself as a suspicion of mutiny — invites comparison with Iago's irrational motivation to arouse Othello's jealousy in order to destroy him. In this manner, Claggart presents some of the anti-social personality traits common to psychopaths.

[edit] Existentialist and social realist fiction

Psychopaths also appear prominently in modern existentialist and social realist fiction (in addition to the expected crime and horror genres). In Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Devils, the ambitious power-hungry revolutionaries, Nicolas Stovgorin and Peter Verkhovensky, are both ruthless, violent, scheming psychopaths who will manipulate and destroy anyone in pursuit of their radical political program.

The murderer Raskolnikov — the main character in Dostoyevsky's earlier novel, Crime and Punishment — would not qualify as a psychopath in the accepted sense of the word. Indeed, after having committed a murder to help finance his career, Raskolnikov is gradually eaten away by remorse until he ultimately abjures all dilettante intellectual rationalizations for his crime. He redeems himself by confessing and accepting just punishment in exchange for the unconditional love of a destitute bit pious woman and the eternal reward of Christian salvation.

Bertolt Brecht's libretto for The Threepenny Opera opens with "Die Moritat vom Mackie Messer" ("The Ballad of Mack the Knife"), which introduces the gangster-protagonist Macheath as a psychopathic murderer, robber, arsonist and rapist. However, in the subsequent drama, Macheath is ironically portrayed as a rather sympathetic and even heroic figure. Despite being a vicious and violent criminal, he sees himself as a businessman of the underworld and a romantic free spirit who simply reacts against the legalized injustices and inequities of private property.

The boy gangster, Pinkie Brown, in Graham Greene's contemporary theological allegory, Brighton Rock, is a classic example of a criminal psychopath. Pinkie takes sadistic pleasure in brutalizing and murdering people and even kills one of his own henchmen, Fred Hale, for perceived disloyalty. He also suffers from a variety of neuroses as a consequence of his Catholic upbringing. He is disgusted by sex and has an irrational hatred of women, seeing them as the embodiment of weakness, but is nevertheless preoccupied with losing his virginity. And he is morbidly obsessed with the Catholic notion of original sin to the point that he believes himself to be purely evil and beyond redemption, although he would still like to know the experience of being loved. He later marries a young waitress named Rose in order to keep her from talking to the police about Fred Hale's murder. Despite the fact that Rose sincerely loves him, Pinkie degrades and abuses her constantly, and she sees her suffering at his hands as holy penance for engaging in sex. In the allegorical design of the story, Rose serves as a symbol of pure Christian goodness wedded to, and struggling against, Pinkie's evil.

In the confessional, semi-autobiographical novels of Jean Genet, such as The Thief's Journal and Our Lady of the Flowers, the author faithfully promulgates the immoralist philosophy and inverted principles of hardened criminals, con men, and homosexual drifters, a few of whom appear to be bona fide psychopaths. The most notorious of Genet's anti-heroes is the sailor Georges Querelle in his novel Querelle de Brest. Querelle is a homosexual serial killer with sadomasochistic tastes who betrays and murders several lovers and acquaintances while on shore leave in the city of Brest before finally departing on his ship Le Vengeur.

Alan Sillitoe's short story, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, is told in the first person from the point of view of a young delinquent protagonist, a conscienceless petty thief who expresses his consuming hatred of rules and authority — personified by the headmaster of the Borstal school where he has been sent for rehabilitation — with all the venomous anti-social ferocity of a true psychopath.

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../f/i/c/Fictional_portrayals_of_psychopaths.html"