Media's Depiction of the Sociopath

The sociopathic character has been appearing in movies for many years, and this trend reflects a burgeoning public awareness of and fascination with murder, violence and crime. This paper will discuss Albert DeSalvo played by Tony Curtis in the movie "The Boston Strangler" (1968) and John Doe played by Kevin Spacey in the movie "Se7en" (1995). Both Albert DeSalvo and Jonathan Doe are sociopaths who commit serial murders. Albert DeSalvo murders women for sexual stimulation and Jonathan Doe kills men and women in order to spread a message. Though the two characters are assigned the same label given their criminal behavior and the lack of conscience that they seem to possess, they are two individuals existing within different contexts and motivated by different goals.

Sociopathy is characterized by egocentricity, impulsivity, grandiosity, recklessness, contentment with self, an ease with pathological lying, and most disturbing of all, a lack of conscience. Albert DeSalvo is driven by a desire for consumption, for pure enjoyment, and Jack Katz's theory on the recreational seductiveness of crime (moral seduction theory) is applicable to him. Katz's theory presents a phenomenological theory of the causes of crime, in that the perpetrator is often lured in by the appeal, thrills, and euphoria of committing crimes (Katz 1998). Jonathan Doe, on the other hand, is fanatically moralizing, but also has a gross disregard for human life. His reasons are empty rationalizations that stem from his inability to see fault in himself.

DeSalvo murders women by pretending to be a repairman. He is manipulative and uses his disguise to enter the homes of his victims. Once inside, he waits for his chance to kill the occupants by strangling them. His actions and method of communicating (using words and facial expressions to gain people's trust) are geared towards the ultimate goal of killing the victim.

Doe believes that people need to be aware of the consequences of the Seven Deadly Sins: Pride, Lust, Sloth, Wrath, Envy, Greed and Gluttony. He kills in ways that gives evidence that people practicing these sins will ultimately face the terrible consequences. His posing as a reporter in order to get close to the two detectives who are investigating the series of gruesome deaths shows his manipulative tendency.

Both sociopaths murder in order to play out their games of power: DeSalvo views his victims as his objects of control, and Doe commits horrific crimes and uses the media coverage that they receive as a way to relay his message. DeSalvo and Doe feel that their murders empower them because they have been able to carry out their schemes. They are both stimulated by the thrill of holding a person's life in their own hands, and watching the person's life power ebb. They receive gratification by ensnaring people, and forcing them to adhere to the rules of the world that their minds have created. The behaviour of these two characters is based on a demented desire to move people like pawns in and out of existence for their own personal gains and to prove that they are indeed powerful enough to decide who lives and who dies.

These movies give insight into the minds of two sociopaths and to portray the manipulative behaviours that are characteristic of sociopaths. DeSalvo lives two lives: that of a family man, and that of a serial killer, a ruthless predator seeking its prey and killing it at will. He fools his victims, and uses them as tools for gratification. Doe believes that he is on a mission from God to spread the message of God's judgement on sinners. Like DeSalvo, he plans his murders in detail, leaving clues at each murder site in hopes that the two detectives who are pursuing him will find these clues that are part of his plan (which ultimately involves his own death at the hands of one of the detectives). These movies are accurate in delineating the types of instrumental violence that sociopaths, when engaging in criminal activity, resort to, as opposed to the reactive (non-premeditated and marked by emotional arousal) violence committed by non-sociopaths. Instrumental violence is typically associated with premeditation, motivation by an external goal, and a lack of affective arousal during the crime. This is where sociopathic homicide gains its reputation as being "cold-blooded" in nature. In addition, instrumental violence tends to be geared towards strangers (Williamson et al 1987).

The two sociopaths are portrayed negatively in the films; there is no glorification of their behaviour. They use strategies which are sometimes so simple that they are hard to distinguish from "normal" behaviour. There is certainly a human tendency to want to manipulate people. However, sociopaths go beyond the normal limits of manipulative behaviour and dwell on strategies to accomplish specific goals by pulling individuals into their trap. Once the potential victims are in their trap, they often play with them as a cat plays with a captured, helpless bird.

I felt especially disturbed by DeSalvo when I watched "The Boston Strangler", as I saw how humans can be possessed by unquenchable needs for consumption. Doe is obviously deeply disillusioned and angered by the deterioration of morality in modern times, and his demented and tormented mind had convinced him that he was specifically chosen by God to warn the people of God's coming wrath because of their sins and immorality.

People with a susceptibility to mental illness would find these depictions especially disturbing as they might begin to similar patterns of reasoning and thinking going through their own minds. The truth is, such patterns lie on a continuum, and this continuum exists in all of human nature, and as horrifying as these portrayals are, anyone with the "right" combination of genetic and psychological predispositions and sociocultural environment could find themselves in a place not too far from where Doe and DeSalvo exist.

Nonetheless, the audience isn't going to try to identify with these two characters. In fact, after viewing such films, the public may grow increasingly worried about such individuals. Because of the rapid increase in the media coverage of sociopaths, the perception of the presence of such individuals in society could get distorted, and a moral panic could possibly ensue, in which the public is both enraged and terrified by the individuals who represent the other end of the continuum of socially acceptable behaviour. Socialization process theory states that individuals learn the roles of acceptable behaviour as defined by society. Sociopaths, because of their disregard for other human beings, and because their motivations and decision processes subsist in a context free of concern for societal ramifications, find such regulations irrelevant. They've skipped out on the crucial human development and enculturation of socialization and therefore, pose a disruption of the social structure.

These films merely represent the most extreme cases of sociopathic behaviour. Though I will not exclude the possibility that their primary purpose for existence is for entertainment, it does not make sense to omit such films from educational repertoire. They do serve as noteworthy contributions to the public awareness of the darker side of our society. We have to remember that there are people who live and behave in ways that we have yet to understand. It's an ugly thought, it's terrifying for most, yet it does nothing to help society if we ignore this truth. In addition, if one wants to criticize these films as contributing to the ever-growing murder rate, one should first look at the action movies and video games with gratuitous death and destruction that ultimately glamorize violence and could potentially condition individuals to enjoy horrific depictions of death. Compared to these point-and-shoot, consequence-free-violence-promoting productions, these two films actually present murderers in a much more realistic- and therefore, deeply unsettling- light.

As stated earlier, such films heighten public awareness of sociopathic individuals. While it would be nice to claim that such films could proliferate successful treatment and/or prevention of sociopathy, the reality is that sociopaths tend to be resistant to treatment because they find no defect in themselves. So the next thing that increased public awareness could do is to help the members of "conventional" society recognize sociopathic behaviour, prevent themselves from being conned and to collectively preserve free will, ethics, benevolence and an ever-present moral conscience-in short, to maintain the social bond that is created from the socialization process.

Viewing these two films have helped expand my understanding of sociopathic individuals. The movies have effectively illustrated that though sociopathy is a heterogeneous phenomenon, associated with different contexts, motivations, systems of beliefs and types of perpetrators, it still reflects the deteriorating moral responsibility that threatens our social unity.

Works Cited

20^th Century Fox. 1968. The Boston Strangler.

Katz, Jack. 1988. Seductions of Crime: Moral and Sensual Attraction of Doing Evil. N.Y.: Basic Books.

New Line Cinema. 1995. Se7en.

Williamson, S., Hare, R. D. & Wong, S. 1987. Violence: Criminal psychopaths and their victims.

Canadian Journal of Behavioral Science, 19, 454-462.