My Psychopath, the Hero

Jack Torrance in The Shining. Tyler Durden in Fight Club. Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. Arthur Fleck in Joker. Alex in A Clockwork Orange. The Joker in The Dark Knight. Walter White in Breaking Bad. Norman Bates in Psycho. Patrick Bateman in American Psycho. Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs. Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men.

The list goes on and on and on. Which list? The list of amazing male performances? The list of fascinating characters? Yes and yes. But it’s also a list of toxic masculinity, of violent men. So what’s the problem?

The problem is that these characters are idolized in our culture to a degree that is worrisome because it reinforces ideas of masculinity and codes them as ‘cool’. By doing that the characters are also re-interpreted or, if that’s possible, mis-interpreted in a new way, so that their more dangerous side becomes less obvious and the filmmaker’s intentions get lost. Let’s take a look at some of these examples.

Jack Torrance, The Shining (1980)

The iconic image: Jack shouts “Here’s Johnny” and bursts through a bathroom door, he is always smiling.

Who we are applauding: Jack Torrance, as portrayed by Jack Nicholson in Kubrick’s movie, is a maniac right from the start, distant and irritable with his family, but always with a sense of dangerous craziness beneath the surface. This was Stephen King’s biggest criticism because it takes away the idea of the hotel drawing out his hidden demons and instead just gives us another freaky Nicholson performance. Nicholson is good, for sure, but it’s a one note performance and that one note is: this man is dangerous for his family. The most iconic shot of his face in the door must respond to our idea of breaking free of norms that entangle us. Which might be the ultimate reason why these characters fascinate us so much. If they feel like exploding, they explode and no bathroom door will stop them. That’s an intriguing fantasy for people living isolated lives.

This doesn’t change the fact that Jack, at least in this movie version, has no redeeming qualities. He is not a good father or husband, is selfishly focused on his creative work which then turns out to be non-existent. In the final third of the film he kills one “good” character and tries to kill his child and wife as well. That’s Jack Torrance. That’s the icon – a homicidal phoney with extreme anger issues. Where is the coolness in that?

Travis Bickle, Taxi Driver (1976)

Travis Bickle is another notorious case for a character that is presented to us as a man slowly losing his mind and falling into extremist views, which still ends up as a kind of strange role model in many people’s eyes. How else can you explain that the most iconic moment is him talking to himself, getting ready to kill while looking cool at it? Yes, De Niro plays it perfectly, it is really well filmed by Scorsese and written by Schrader, but the point of the scene is not that Bickle is a cool guy. It’s the key moment where he gives up the last remains of his sanity.

Contrary to Jack Torrance, it is possible to feel some sympathy for Bickle, who clearly has a past full of traumas (probably the war) and in the beginning seems desperate to find human connections. That is something we can easily identify with. But it’s also clear, quickly, that he is probably too far gone already, completely incapable of real empathy, only seeing his own needs. When he is rejected by Betsy (for good reason), he reacts with contempt and anger, slowly turning into an incel, full of hate for the world and only seeing violence as a solution. But it isn’t a solution. Yes, Sport, the pimp, and the other people he eventually kills are obviously “bad” people but Bickle doesn’t get any satisfaction. The other iconic shot of Bickle with his mohawk, gesturing a gun at his head, shows him willing to end his life because there’s nothing left for him. He is not in a better place now, he doesn’t feel like a hero and the movie is not too ambiguous to show us that he is probably completely lost now.

Is that a cool role model? A stalker, a violent extremist, a delusional, traumatized man? Again, there is a lot of room to sympathize, to understand his behavior, but the movie never approves of it because it opposes any idea of humans living together. His actions put him perfectly into our times, but again, there is nothing to idolize here.

We can easily go on. Brad Pitt as Tyler Durden is extremely cool and funny, until we realize that he is just another violent extremist who prefers destruction over actual change. The protagonist in Fight Club does not embrace this persona because the movie doesn’t think it’s a solution but a dead end. The Joker in The Dark Knight is fascinating but ultimately also has no goal, no ambition, just showmanship and violence. Walter White starts out sympathetically but the iconic parts are him shedding his humanity to become a crime lord. Alex in A Clockwork Orange is an incredibly shallow character who tries to overcome that with style, fancy language and, of course, violence. Arthur Fleck, the most troublesome, really seems to find gratification in his violent outbursts, as the movie barely attempts to tell us otherwise.

These characters are not role models. It’s possible to feel sympathy for them, if we learn some of the circumstances that made them into who they are, but often we don’t even get that. What makes Anton Chigurh tick? What was Patrick Bateman’s childhood like? We don’t know and, it seems, often don’t care. We idolize them. THE 10 COOLEST VILLAINS. TOP MOVIE PSYCHOPATHS. You don’t have to dig deep to find such lists or posts. What these often highlight is not their backstory, not a psycho analysis but the ‘cool’ moments. Mostly these are moments where they threaten or are about to kill someone. It’s easy to imagine people watching precisely these clips again and again.

If you confront people with this, they will tell you that they’re only admiring the acting skills of the performers in these scenes. But you have to wonder why admiration for acting is so often focused on one tiny sliver of performances and coincidentally it’s performances by sociopathic white men, often lonely, often inflicting violence against women.

Most of these movies are really good movies. The performances are often amazing. Often though, they have a message that is completely contradictory to the highlight real ‘threat scene’. And if you put a poster with one of these men (or a collage of several of them, as you’ll again easily find online) up on your wall or post a meme of them, what message are you trying to send. Do you want to show the world how cool it is to fuck all the rules and do whatever you please? That’s not the worst message and is sometimes many people feel societal pressure not to do. But if that message is only conveyed through toxic male violence, we shouldn’t be surprised that we see real life toxic male violence happening again and again. Think about why don’t use real life examples, like Manson or Bundy (and many people do). There are other movies with such messages. There are other ways.