Category: Politics

This is part two of ‘Femme Fatales, “Female Psychopaths” and Narrative “Science”‘ by Tristam Vivian Adams, author of The Psychopath Factory. Find part one here.

Film and Television’s methods for hinting or alluding to the non-conforming private life, to the ‘deviant’ inner world, reveal an intrinsic sexism. There is, generally, a gross inequality in terms of deviance from the conformist norm. A character doing something appalling usually conveys a male psychopath’s ‘bad side’: Hannibal’s cannibalism or Underwood’s canicide, for example. But female psychopaths’ tells are less extreme.

A trope of depicting female psychopathy is to show a woman doing something considered traditionally ‘male’; like being sexually independent and going to a bar to pick up a partner. The Last Seduction (1994, Dahl) is a great example of this. Bridget Gregory, a telemarketing manager (played by Linda Fiorentino), leaves her husband Clay (played by Bill Pullman). Bridget takes a large sum of cash that Clay made that day by selling pharmaceutical cocaine to drug dealers. She essentially dupes her husband, promising him sex before taking off with the cash whilst he is in the shower. Previously Clay, when returning with the money, physically abuses his wife. Bridget’s opportunistic thieving and fleeing is bold but understandable. After some driving her car runs out of fuel and she finds herself in Beston, near Buffalo. Bridget Gregory is by no-means a fulltime charming psychopath. She deceives and cheats, but only does so with charm and social niceties – only conforms to expectations of being a vulnerable and demure young woman – when it will immediately advantage her.

When she walks into a local bar in Beston, filled mostly by local blue-collar worker type males, she asks for her Manhattan without chit-chat, social prelude or manners: ‘Gimme a Manhattan’ she says flatly. The barman, Ray, ignores her. ‘I know you hear me, pal.’ She presses. The barman then begins checking if anyone wants a drink, feigning obliviousness to Bridget. ‘Jesus Christ. Who’s a girl gotta suck around here to get a drink?’ despairs Bridget before asking again, ‘Gimme a Manhattan!’ At this point Mike, taking his chance to save this out of town damsel in need of a Manhattan, steps in.

Ray, a Manhattan for the lady please.

Sure, Mike.

What – that’s the game? I gotta say please?

Er, yes, it helps.

You’re not from around here?

Fuck off.

Of course, after this brief encounter, Mike follows Bridget back to a booth hankering for attention like a once fed stray. At first Bridget is dismissive, but even when she changes her mind her too-direct frankness feels sociopathic. She doesn’t play the role of the to-be-wooed nice-little-lady, instead she takes the advantage. ‘Could you leave? Please.’ She asks…

Well I haven’t finished charming you yet.

You haven’t started.

Give me a chance.

Go find yourself a nice little cow-girl, make nice little cow-babies and leave me alone.

I’m er, I’m hung like a horse. Think about it.

Let’s see.

Excuse me?

Mister Ed, let’s see.

Bridget checks Mike is as equine-good as his word, and that he has his own place, and that it is clean and has indoor plumbing. Mike, a little taken aback, confirms all of these. Bridget then finishes her drink and tells him to meet her outside.

But let’s switch the gender roles round, suppose a young out of town male went into a local bar. Suppose he ordered a drink and picked up a partner for the night. Would this scene tell the viewer there is something deeply manipulative, conning, narcissistic or ‘cold’ about the character? If a male walked into a bar and picked up a partner for some casual sex he would just be another ‘red-blooded’ male – but not necessarily a psychopath, to be that the man would have to do something much worse (like killing a dog or cannibalism, to recall the previous examples). It seems that the tells directors opt for to tell viewers a character is psychopathic are murderous and criminal for men, but merely a case of over independence or confident sexuality for women. For male psychopaths the sociopathic tell scene is always undeniably bad. Yet for female psychopaths the sociopathic tell scene is subtle – it is often merely a case of not conforming to traditional expectations of female characters: or, to put it another way, being a bit too ‘male’, being too equal to the heteronormative male equivalent.

Saga Noren, a vaguely autistic sociopath type (like a Replicant in dire need of a social protocol systems update), is another example. In The Bridge (2011, Rosenfeldt) the private-life scenes that tell the viewer Saga is different are, again, based around picking up partners for casual sex in bars. The scenes play out in much the same way as Bridget’s in The Last Seduction. Saga is all too frank and single-minded – to the point of being blunt and rude at times. Saga is not interested in finding a nice man to marry; she wants ‘just sex’ as she orders, more than once. Her attitude intimidates and baffles the nameless male characters from the bars. This is a 2011 series from a liberal European country. Why is a women’s freedom to independently pursue casual sex presupposed as being outré, significantly outré enough reveal the character as socially ‘deviant’ to the viewer? What sort of archaic gender role assumptions are being presupposed in this choice of ‘tell’ scene?

There is an additional facet of intrinsic sexism at play in depictions of female psychopathic characters. There is the resurgence of the femme-fatale in ‘men’s-rights films’. Not only are independent women demonised as being manipulative or psychopathic – by being ‘too male’ (i.e. equal), but in a cruel double bind their very femininity (adherence to a feminine ideal) is pitched as being manipulative. When women are being too independent they are demonised for not being placid good-girls, yet when they play up to the good-girl role it is taken as being manipulative, conniving and disingenuous.

To Die For (1995, Van Sant), Knock Knock (2015, Roth) and Gone Girl (2014, Fincher) all tow this double-double standard for women. In To Die For, Suzanne Stone-Maretto, played by Nicole Kidman, is too career driven in a man’s world. She is too ruthless, too goal oriented and single minded and not ready to fulfil the traditional role expected of her: ‘housewife’. However, Suzanne also plays on the heteronormative assumptions of her gender role. She flirts and utilizes the construct of her femininity (much like Bridget in The Last Seduction at times) – but, and this is what is supposedly wrong, for her own personal gain.

In Knock Knock, two young women appear at the door of a family man, Evan Webber (‘played’ by Keanu Reeves). They ask to use his phone, they are cold and wet, then over the course of the evening, after escalating favours reminiscent of Haneke’s Funny Games, begin flirting, then sleeping with, then torturing and blackmailing Evan. The average viewer might suppose that Evan has been duped, he has fallen for the womens’ feminine wiles. But at each turn in the first hour of the film Evan has choices, he doesn’t need to entertain them with his DJing skills. He doesn’t need to engage in lengthy conversations that lead to flirting and banter – but he does. This leads up to consensual sex, before Evan’s regret, before his being held hostage, before blackmail. The viewer’s sympathy is supposed to be with Evan, the poor old affluent and physically stronger man who has been unlucky enough to fall for these temptresses.

The opening line of Gone Girl is a husband’s sadistic fantasy of dispelling the mysteries of what lurks behind his wife’s, Amy’s, pretty face:

When I think of my wife…

…I always think of her head.

I picture cracking her lovely skull…

Unspooling her brains…

Trying to get answers.

The primal questions of any marriage.

“What are you thinking?”

“How are you feeling?”

This is, albeit violent, the ponderance of an epistemological blind spot. How to know for sure if others feel and think like oneself – the anxiety about empathy in others, of other’s capacity for iso-experiential connection – the sharing of the same feeling. Gone Girl tells the story of Amy Elliot Dunne, played by Rosamund Pike, and how she, after staging her own disappearance, leaves her unfaithful husband framed for her suspected murder. Whilst on the run, she stays with an ex-boyfriend, Desi, whom she frames as her rapist and captor – but not before murdering him. When Amy utilizes the heteronormative assumptions others hold for her it is manipulative and conniving – in a domestic correlate of our CCTV’d and selfie’d online existence she uses the surveillance of Desi’s luxury home to her advantage: knowing where the cameras are she performs the aftermath of a rape. Bridget, in The Last Seduction, also leads others to believe she was at risk of being raped. Her husband’s (black) private detective catches up with her and forces her to drive them back to her place where the money is. After noticing that the vehicle is driver-side airbag only, Bridget pesters the man into confirming the old myth about penis size. At this point she accelerates and steers the car into a lamppost. The detective is thrown through the windscreen. Later, in hospital, Bridget leverages small-town racism to her advantage:

There’s only one more question I need to ask. I don’t mean to pry…the man with you appeared to be not entirely in his pants at the time of impact. Can you tell me what happened just before you went off the road?

Well, like I told you before he tried to get me to contact my husband and… I refused of course. Well he became… you know, ‘motherfucker’ this, ‘motherfucker’ that…

Like in the movies?

Exactly. Next thing I knew… I only remember bits and pieces of it but he… the jist of it was that he was going to…impale me with his…big…

The prevalence of supposed female psychopaths making false accusations or framing male characters is notable. But the mode of framing or accusation is always an ultra-reflexive return to the damsel in distress role. The opposite of the woman’s, all too equal, too independent, ‘sociopathic’ and ‘deviant’ tell scenes. This is the cruel double bind for women protagonists in films that have a whiff of men’s rights propaganda about them. When acting the girl they are manipulative, conniving types, temptresses – yet when refusing to conform to a gender stereotype they are framed as sociopathic deviants.

When Amy or Bridget refuse to kowtow to dated expectations of gender it is within sociopathic tell scenes – directorially presupposed as divulging there is something sinister about their character, something amiss. Yet, on the other hand, when they do adhere to heteronormative expectations of subservience and neediness, it is manipulative, conning – psychopathic. Amy and Bridget are psychopathic by virtue of both hamming it up, playing on patriarchal gender expectations, and by virtue of refusing to conform to such asymmetrical expectations and value sets.

The term psychopath is frequently employed in commentary about these three films, to refer to and describe these, at once, too independent and manipulatively feminine characters. The limbo of too feminine to too equal is the double bind. The former temptress facet of the narratives is one informed by a history of femme-fatales in film and television. However, the too equal facet, the case of being psychopathic solely by doing/behaving in a way that is traditionally reserved for men has correlates in how the sciences, particularly criminal psychology, attempt to define female psychopathy through physical traits. Many studies effectively seek to equate female maleness with psychopathy and/or criminality.

An above average testosterone level in women is frequently posited via correlation and comparison with psychopathic, sociopathic and criminal behaviour proclivities. Here we meet the political reductions and warped logics of ‘science’ that seeks to find physical traits in an individual for ‘their’ social failures (criminality). Of course, this assumption between testosterone (or the physical traits associated with the hormone) is not right on a number of levels. Testosterone has, at a stretch, only a semi-firm relation to aggression and confrontation in males, however, much of this data is mostly gleaned from an atypical – read incarcerated – set of subjects (as is the case with most clinical data regarding psychopathy).

However, for women, there is even less cause for such a connection. Even in incarcerated females little connection between testosterone and aggression is found – yet increased testosterone in females with an anti-social personality disorder is pervasive myth. A similar lack of causation holds true for many other hormones and neurochemicals. Nonetheless, studies and cultural commentary exist that seek to equate the physical traits of testosterone with masculine characteristics before retrofitting the fiction into a correlation of say, below average hip-waist ratios, laryngeal prominence, clitoris size and chin/jaw profile with psychopathic character traits in women. Cultural conservatism and politicization of science thrive in the penumbra between etiology and fictioneering (Simon Baron-Cohen’s The Essential Difference is a case in point – the thesis being that there is a genetic essentialism behind the differences in gendered adult brains: ‘from page 1: The female brain is “predominantly hard-wired for empathy” and the male brain “hard-wired for understanding and building systems.”’[1] – let’s not let the wealth of research into gender qua social construct or epigenetics or neural-plasticity get in the way of a popular science hit.) Less creative than mythopoeisthesizing, this is the crude jerry-rigging of traditional constructs into biases of causal scope. The tale wagging the dog.

Testosterone is not the sole cause of maleness in terms of behaviour. Acting masculine is not solely due to chemicals or genes but a kaleidoscope of developmental, social, personal and political experiences and histories. This is not to say that gender is a personality, but that the characteristics (with varying degrees of validity) of physical and behavioural gender are as subject to historic environments as any empirically based proclivity (be it chemical or genetic) within individual. Plasticity and epigenetics are of more relevance here than the out-dated yet stubbornly continuing click-bait simplicity of simple correlations and the reductive determinism of ‘hard-wiring’. The politicized and essentialist mode of much criminal psychology that seeks to equate female criminal psychopathy with subjects being too male or not quite feminine enough are examples of how the ASPD variant of psychopathy is a gendered concept with ultra-conservative social undertones.

The diagnostic criteria for psychopathy are deeply political and conservative. Cleckley and Hare (the two major checklists for the personality disorder) both list sexual behaviours and proclivities as characteristics. ‘Promiscuous sexual behaviour’ is one of Hare’s criteria, as is ‘Parasitic lifestyle’ and ‘Many short-term marital relationships’. Cleckley lists ‘Sex-life impersonal, trivial and poorly integrated.’ Cleckley’s conservative bias out to be regarded with more tolerance than Hare’s – the former’s ground-breaking work on psychopathy, The Mask of Sanity, was published in 1941 whereas Hare’s Without Conscience, in 1993. Each list paradoxical criteria; psychopathy is a subset of anti-social personality disorder, yet so many of the criteria seem pro-social. Hare’s and Cleckley’s flip-flopping from anti-social to seemingly social personality facets is the same mode of oscillation we see in the television shows and films mentioned previously. The dynamic of shifting from seemingly charming, intelligent, empathetic and social character to deviance and anti-social behaviour is the privilege of a narrative structure.

Cleckley’s The Mask of Sanity spends a great deal of time analysing works of fiction (e.g. characters in the works of Dostoevsky, Dickens, Faulkner…). Hare’s Without Conscience utilizes many examples from True Crime literature and newspaper reports. Perhaps, then, it is unsurprising that the established psychopathic checklists read like impossible fictional narratives (where we see a character behave both perfectly socially and grossly anti-socially) rather than objective arrays of consistent observations. It is this fictionalized mode of character definition that allows cultural bias into the concept of female psychopathy. Just as the catch-22 of psychiatric evaluation renders those who say they are not mad to be regarded as mad, the same double bind operates for women in the examples cited – even when the characters are seen as a the ideal heteronormative cis-gendered feminine they are just as suspect as the sociopathic antithesis. (Precisely this issue is found in the damned either way injustic Amanda Knox, explicated in the eponymous 2016 Netflix film. Mongibello via Perugia; Knox’s lack of upset was cited as evidencing her guilt, yet when she was upset this was regarded as histrionics, conning, performance and manipulation).

The intrinsic sexism of screen portrayals of female psychopathy share much in common with clinical approaches of criminal psychology and other ‘sciences’. The reinforcing of gender inequality and the demonization of at once femininity and non-feminine equality are prevalent in each (conformity is just as suspect as deviance). However, perhaps the more troubling parallel is the utilization of narrative strategies for telling a story about the differences between the sexes that serves to impose asymmetrical values and inequality for women. Akin to how the problematically masculine threads of Sci-Fi and Fantasy genres don’t let explicit sexism get in the way of the good story, neither does these character portraits of psychopathy both on screen and in textbook. Sadly, the non-fiction popular science shelves contain as much creative story telling for the purpose of reinforcing gender constructs as the DVD library.

[1] See: http://www.dana.org/Cerebrum/2003/Extreme_Problems_with_Essential_Differences/

This is part one of two of ‘Femme Fatales, “Female Psychopaths” and Narrative “Science”‘ by Tristam Vivian Adams, author of The Psychopath Factory. Adams discussed the topic of this essay in a recent episode of Very Loose Women on Resonance FM. Read part two here.

In The Psychopath Factory I make a distinction between psychopaths and sociopaths. Ordinarily, in the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) and in culture more generally, the two terms are interchangeable. But sociopathy is distinctly distinguishable from psychopathy. Sociopaths fail at behaving socially; they might do or say the wrong thing, they might be awkward or just plainly dangerous and anti-social. Sociopathy requires an audience. The dominant consistency of sociopathy is that it is observable, it is about interaction – we know when someone does or says something they shouldn’t. In a sense young children are adorably cute mini sociopaths; they don’t always know what is acceptable and what isn’t – they might say something a little rude or embarrassing for parents. I would class Alan Partridge, David Brent, Larry David (the character in Curb Your Enthusiasm) and Mr. Bean as comedic examples of harmless sociopathy – they are also quite childlike, their cringey blunders stem from their social myopia and self-absorption. Nonetheless, sociopathy is conspicuous.

Psychopathy is different. It cannot be detected through behaviour; it isn’t obvious. Psychopathy is more about the inner world – being cold hearted or lacking empathy. If sociopathy is about the external social realm psychopathy is more about the inner psychological realm. More precisely, psychopathy is about how a hidden psychology is not reflected in behaviour. Take Patrick Bateman, Frank Underwood or Hannibal Lecter – they seem nice at first, charming even, but of course beneath their superficial manners lurks a truer personality: anempathic with dangerous impulses or uncaring narcissism.

It is this anxiety about the disjunct between behaviour and character that is fascinating for us. People say ‘take care’ or ‘have a nice day’ after we buy coffee from them – but how does one know for sure that they mean it? Most of the time we might expect that they do not mean it, it is just what people say – normalized psychopathy. Psychopathy is about the disjunct between external presentation, behaviour, and inner intents that we cannot fathom.

Of course, we are quite like sociopaths and psychopaths on some level. In terms of the former, we have all made a faux-pas at some point and accidentally offended someone – if not that then perhaps we failed at the minutiae of social code: manners and the ‘correct’ ways to dine (elbows off the table, don’t slouch Miss Ward…) But we are psychopathic at times too – our behaviour doesn’t always reflect our wants; we curb, temper and conceal ourselves sometimes. Haven’t we all lied a little for the sake of politeness? Further still, we may even have lied plainly and brazenly during a job interview: ‘genuinely I, myself, am personally passionate about admin’ or suchlike is now a mandatory performance – its disingenuous nature more acceptable than the truth: ‘I don’t care about admin. I just need the money.’

The at once fascinating and unnervingly relatable facet of psychopathy is this disjunct between a person and their behaviour. This, of course, leads to an anxiety about the empathy of others – sure, they seem nice, they seem genuine: but how can one tell for sure? We do not have Voight-Kampf machines in this boring dystopia of ours, instead we have Facebook, Twitter and Tinder.

Dating sites seem to evidence an insatiable appetite for ‘banter’. But banter is anything but honest or genuine… isn’t it more a mode of evasive social sparring: a jolly and smirking façade? In a similar vein, social media sites like Facebook and Twitter that ingeniously monetise both relationships and loneliness, we project a life of holidays, achievements and Disneyesque Apple-pie positivity. We sycophantically like, love and praise yet omit our woe, bitterness, jealousy or vexation whilst, IRL meet/meat space we erect a wall of sarcastic (so-caustic) banter. This is normalized disingenuousness; to call it the lowest form of wit is too generous. Online selfhood qua self-promotion is indefatigably optimistic and ‘fun’. We gaze affectless, icy-eyed and apathetically type ‘lol’. ‘Lol’ is commonly accepted to mean audible laughter yet doesn’t this de-abbreviated acronym of laugh-out-loud also refer to silent supine apathy? The de-abbreviated acronym of ‘lol’ was originally intended to signal energy and fun, yet now it is employed in a sense closer to the older homograph of lol – signalling a lack of energy, a passivity, a lateral indifference with shades of languor, lethargy and torpor. One can pivot around the term ‘lol’. One can strafe to regard the antithesis of its accepted online textual staging, the z creeps in orphaned from its multiplied guise as comic shorthand for snoozing (Zzzzzz), in a term that cites, re-cites and makes legible the opposite of laugh-out-loud lol/lolz: narco-lolzzzzzz (can’t we, then, now, Jacques?).

Our online self is an unblinkingly positive projection, a resolute departure from our ‘true selves’. A contemporary register of this is the online dating profile that claims to adore everything: the calculated personality match trawler net pitch of ‘loves laughing, going out and staying in’. In life, it is difficult to know people for sure, because people increasingly present an edited (a shopped) version of themselves. When we type lol is it a testament to the inadvertent convulsion of hilarity or the passive placeholder of sleepy isolation and interactive avoidance? When people urge us to ‘take care now’ is it a caring personal sentiment or a void-scripted platitude or is it a vaguely authoritative reference to the stipulations of health and safety regulations (‘caution HOT beverage’)? What do others really mean and feel?

TV, Film and literature are different. We get to see multiple aspects of a character’s personality. We can read of, even in first person fiction, the inner world on one page whilst learning of the social interactions of a character on the next page that are at odds with their ‘true’ character. Film and television is particularly quick at flipping from depicting inner self to social self. Time is of the essence for the digitally twitching and attentively fickle box-set viewer. One must watch a character trick, con, and lie and know that they are doing so; if the film or show does not allow the viewer to be privy to the character’s true intent then how do they know the scene they watch is one of deceit, conning or manipulation? Film and television must show the viewer that despite a character acting one way, they do not mean it – they are lying, it is a ruse.

This is the satisfying difference between the fictional psychopaths and the polite people we speak to every day. TV and film always provide a clue that someone isn’t what they seem. The viewer is shown the disjunct between behaviour and intent. The psychopath’s disjunct is manifested in film and TV’s penchant for mirror scenes, masks and various other methods that show a character is one of façades and pre-meditated self-projection. The mirror scene trope or the mask metaphor tells the viewer in the opening scenes of a film that whilst a character appears normal they, as well as being hyper-reflexive, are hiding something. They might be charming, polite and perfectly social… but really…

The mirror scene trope in serves this purpose well. Patrick Bateman’s mirror scene in American Psycho (2000, Harron) tells the viewer that the man is all show, that what he does and says is all an act, a façade, a mask. The same trick is employed in Malice (1993, Becker). Tracy Safian, played by Nicole Kidman, stares into the mirror mimicking emotions – she is practicing her façade, rehearsing the ‘right’ ways to react, preparing her performance for when it is needed within a social context. Friedkin’s Cruising (1980) also deploys the same trick of reflectively divulging character.

Another strategy employed to convey a character’s janus faced double life is the fourth wall break. Francis “Frank” Underwood, played by Kevin Spacey in HBO’s House of Cards (2013), breaks the fourth wall to tell the viewer he’s only pretending to be nice so he can get his way; as does Stuntman Mike in Tarantino’s Deathproof (2007, Tarantino). Note the smirking irony of Underwood’s preferred name ‘Frank’; he is anything but. Stuntman Mike is similar – his job is to con the viewer: he’s a stuntman, like magicians and actors his trade is deception. In comedy a more recent example can be found in Fleabag (2016). The eponymous protagonist, wrote and played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, quick-fires asides to the viewer relentlessly. Fleabag is schizo-narrative, an Adderalled up oscillation of the fourth wall. The break of the forth wall is a satisfyingly plain way to show that even though a character is doing or saying one thing they mean to do another. They might seem social… but really…

Peep Show (2003-2015) depicts deceit and social performance in a different, more multi-faceted manner. The show is essentially multiple first-person perspectives replete with inner monologues. A character strolls about, forcing smiles and convivial greetings one second, but in the next moment we hear their inner thoughts – often derogatory – about the acquaintance currently being charmed or ingratiated to.

But the simplest example of this showing a character one way whilst also depicting them to be opposite is in Silence of the Lambs (1991, Demme). Hannibal Lecter, played by Anthony Hopkins, is perfectly polite – but we are primed before hand, peripheral characters explain just how bad he is. As FBI Agent Clarice Starling, played by Jodie Foster, is walked through the labyrinth of the prison holding Lector she is informed of the abhorrent nature of his crimes by Dr Chilton (Anthony Heald). The spiel is as much for Clarice’s benefit as it is for the viewer. Moments later Clarice stands before Lecter. He is softly spoken, polite and eloquent. He stands in stark contrast to both the incarcerated ‘degenerates’ in the neighbouring cells and the history of his crimes recounted moments previously.

Certain interactive antisocial behaviours in film and TV also tell the viewer a protagonist isn’t entirely what they seem to be. The opening scene of House of Cards shows ‘Frank’ Underwood killing a wounded dog with his bare hands. Right from the start, we see that despite his stately magnanimity and deep southern crooned charm Underwood is a cold man. In itself the act is sociopathic, Underwood shouldn’t kill a domestic animal quite so readily and with such ease. However, only the viewer is privy to this act – the other characters remain unaware of such behaviour. This strategy is a step away from the mirror scene, fourth wall break or diegetic priming. We see a character act in different ways in different contexts. The two-scene trick evokes their mercurial personality.

Often the two-scene trick involves the protagonist being antisocial, or nonconformist, with someone who is not involved in the main narrative thread. Most commonly this involves an out-of-hours sociopathy. By day the characters are polite conformists, but at night they indulge in whatever wants they have, be they nonconformist, misanthropic, antisocial or dangerous. These are the TV equivalents of the boring office suit whom by day talks the pseudo-Deleuzian late capitalist jargon of business speak – all abstractions and metaphors – but whose nights are antitheses whiled away feverishly fretting a Burzum din or writing atrocious modernist poetry or similar avocation.

TV and film must depict both sides of someone’s double life: the viewer must be shown how a character might seem fine at work, but after hours, when a conning charm is not necessary, they might do something unusual or ‘bad’. This is the troubling parallel between Stella Gibbons and Paul Spector in BBC’s excellent The Fall (2013-2016). Both lead, for most of the first season, double-lives. Spector is a counsellor and family man by day but a rapist and torture-murderer by night. Stella is a shrewdly demure and sensitive detective, knowing to bite her lip when dealing with institutional and personal sexism by day, yet at night she is portrayed as being sexually independent, and, in notable juxtaposition to the heteronormative machismo of the police force, bisexual. The mode commonly employed in TV and film to convey a psychopath often involves some slight slips into sociopathy, of doing something ‘wrong’, to allude or hint that their truer personality, the person behind the niceties and charm, is anti-social, non-conformist, heartless or anempathic.

But, again, is this not how we behave on a ‘daily basis’? In an office one might feign or cultivate an interest in something that, had one not had to ingratiate oneself to the many others treading water in the open-plan jungle of pointless work, wouldn’t interest one otherwise. The reflexive double lifer, the Ripleyesque pretender (‘I just love Jazz!’), is essentially a fantastic and exaggerated version of our working selves – the self that performs passionate enthusiasm for customers and clients by day but lives a private life by night, whinging about managers or colleagues, indulging in niche interests, fringe pursuits and underground cultures.

Continued in part two here.

One in five CEO’s have high levels of psychopathic traits!  It is a common headline. Bankers have no empathy, are greedy narcissists or egomaniacs. But such vilification misses some important, perhaps uncomfortable, subtleties and similarities. Considering that the laissez-faire finance industry is essentially a state-funded gambling racket where initiated gamblers can play to win with the money of others, such demonisation is understandable. But, how different are we to these Savile Row-suited silhouettes? We can take some general outlines of so-called corporate psychopathy in turn.

Narcissism first. Greed, egomania, attention seeking, vanity and a grandiose sense of self-worth seem apt descriptors for such Gordon Gekko types. But today we live in a world of normalised narcissism. Taking an unsolicited selfie to share with hundred or thousands of strangers is now a perfectly accepted public activity. Yet, in the late 90s and early 00s (before the dawn of ‘smartphones’) if I was to walk into a local pub and take photographs of myself I’d have garnered some strange looks – in that context I’d look, well, a little crazy, unhinged. I’d have appeared as narcissistic to the point of delusional. Today, however, such practice is normal, we don’t bat an eyelid. The same can be said for other aspects of social media. We don’t hesitate to share our organic, locally-sourced, dairy and gluten free lunch with hundreds of followers, or tweet that our train is late, or that it is raining where we are. Does the world need to see my avocado on toast? Of course! Just Do It. Because I’m Worth It. How self-centred, how utterly narcissistic, it is to share every opinion piece we look at (or even read) with the hundreds of follows we have? The term, narcissism of questionable validity today – because distinguishing narcissism from normalcy is like slicing fog. We are way past what Tom Wolfe called ‘The Me Decade’.

Vanity is now accepted too. The rise of the metrosexual (whilst doing nothing for gender equality) opened out the worst forms of conscious and conspicuous vanity to heteronormative male culture. Creatine, moisturizer and fake-tan have partially usurped cigarettes ’n’ alcohol. Façade and appearance is sought instead of experience. This is symptomatic of the shift in the nature of working. In the industrial era, bodies were owned and put to work, whilst the mind went largely unused. Today however, we are stationary, in the open-plan-purgatory of contemporary decline-Britain. Our attentions and social exchanges are colonised by the requirements of work. We have little say over our cognitive and social-life, but we can take ownership of bodies. ‘The Man’ exploits our creativity, cognition and social-networking, but ‘pecs’ and ‘delts’ are within our vestige of control. Patrick Bateman’s (1980s) obsession with his physique, his vanity, is not abnormal by today’s selfie-snapping and protein-chugging standards.

Machiavellianism is similarly normalized too. The brutal honesty and ruthlessly rude, unsocial culture of macho corporate Darwinism has gone. Consider how Gordon Gekko (Wall Street, 1987) or Guy Ackerman (Swimming With Sharks, 1994) would fare in the contemporary work place. They wouldn’t ‘get on’ – because social exchange, empathy and bonds are now the mode of power and control. A ‘boss’ no longer cracks the whip by sheer expression of authority, but by being friendly, social and convivial. Managers, it seems, are now everyone’s best friends: ‘Hi mate. New shirt? Good weekend?’ More recent explorations of workplace meanies reflect this shift. The ‘villains’ depicted are the opposite of Gekko and Ackerman. Christine Stanford and Isabelle James in De Palma’s Passion (2012) are nice, polite and charming – at least on the surface. House of Cards riffs upon a similar dichotomy of façade and intent; Francis Underwood schmoozes and cajoles his way to power, his understanding or empathy with other characters is always a con. The disjunct between Underwood’s social self and his deeper, malicious and selfish, intent is impressed by his constant breaks of the fourth wall: ‘I know I’m being nice to him but…’ But, such Janus-faced disingenuousness is more normal than we might like to admit. We often, out of politeness, tell people we are fine really we are quite the opposite. During job interviews we spout barefaced lies about being ‘passionate and enthusiastic’ about, say, customer service or retail experience or admin. Perhaps part of such social-con artists appeal in contemporary culture is that they appeal to what we have to do daily. Francis Underwood and Christine Stanford are dramatically exaggerated characters, yet on some level we might identify with their conning and faked sociality – everyone fakes enthusiasm or interest at some point. That’s life, part of being a social person: ‘say sorry like you mean it’ we teach our children. One curiously relevant example from film recently is Ex Machina (2015), the film is saturated with questions of façade and what is truly genuine, what is real. Ava (the smart one) even asks: ‘Is Nathan your friend?’ But Nathan is the real con artist, the one with the convincingly casual façade. Like Mark Zuckerberg (everyone’s friend) Nathan is an unfathomably rich and powerful CEO, yet he is presented as a casual and social fellow. Wearing a T-shirt and jeans, a few beers on the couch are his preferred method of dominance: ‘I want to have beer and a conversation with you’ he presses on Caleb. He even explicitly rejects any position of authority, he calls Caleb buddy all the time: ‘You see, there’s my guy, there’s my buddy’. Of course, similar to social-networks, the whole social and friendly set-up is a ruse for exploitation.

Being like Nathan, Christine or Francis Underwood is hard though. And there are risks. We can get lost in our narcissism, vanity and mimicry of enthusiasm and empathy. To be narcissistic, Machiavellian and vain requires reflexivity. Yet, we can become paralyzed by reflexivity, confused and uncertain. It is one of the binds of late-capitalist living and post-modernity: we, our self, may become lost and discombobulated. Two recent novels explore this symptom of the uber-reflexive self. Ben Lerner’s Leaving Atocha Station (2011) is a first person (mostly) narration by Adam, an American poet in Madrid. Adam’s self conscious reflexivity is giddying, vertiginous. He succumbs to the Drost effect, the rabbit hole of self-reflection. Adam constantly views or considers himself from the third-person; the effect is soporific, sinking, and endless – like a literary Shepard Tone. Shifts from first to third person, much like the ‘mental breakdown’ section in Ellis’ American Psycho, Adam, like Bateman, is a casualty of self reflexivity:

But if there were no sun and the proportioning was off, if there were either too many people around or if the park was empty, an abyss opened up inside me as I smoked. Now, the afternoon was boundless in a terrifying way; it would never be tonight or the next day in room 58; silver and green drained from the landscape. I couldn’t bring myself to open the book. It was worse than having a sinking feeling; I was a sinking feeling, an unplayable adagio for strings; internal distances expanded and collapsed when I breathed. It was like failing to have awoken from at the right point in a nightmare; now you had to live in it, make yourself at home. He, if I can put it that way, had felt this as a child when they sent him to camp; his heart seemed at once to race and stop. Then his breath caught, flattened, shattered; as though a window had broken at thirty thousand feet, there was a sudden vacuum. Some of the gray was sucked inside him, and he was at a loss; he became a symptom of himself.

(Lerner, Leaving The Atocha Station, 2011, pp.16-17)

Another example is more literal, Adam’s self is splintered into the self that watches himself and the self he considers as if from afar.

In the distance airliners made their way to Barajas, lights flashing slowly on the wing, the contrails vaguely pink until it was completely dark. I imagined the passengers could see me, imagined I was a passenger that could see me looking up at myself looking down. (…)

I would roll one or two spliffs and put them in a pack of cigarettes, drink a glass of water, brush my teeth, walk down the stairs and out of the apartment into the plaza. I felt as I crossed the plaza that I was observing myself from the roof of my apartment; from there I could see that I was walking too fast and I’d stop, light a spliff or cigarette, then resume walking at a less frantic pace toward Puerta del Sol, the literal center of the city, which I could reach in a few minutes. From Sol I would pause and decide where to pretend I needed to be.

(Lerner, Leaving The Atocha Station, 2011, pp.21-22)

Tao Lin’s Taipei evokes the protagonist’s vertiginous reflexivity in a way that alludes to a much more technologized way of living life. Taipei is written in the third person mode, unlike Lerner’s. The protagonist of Taipei, Paul, often imagines himself as a red dot moving on a map like GPS tracked parcel, views life as a series of windows that may be collapsed, regards waking as accessing a PDF file and remembering as accessing a memory stick. Notably, Lin’s prose remains painfully yoked to our technologically imposed reflexivity and isolation (we have all considered our ‘online self/persona’).

In a taxi to a party, forty minutes later, Paul imagined another him walking toward the library and, for a few seconds, visualizing the position and movement of the two red dots through a silhouetted, aerial view of Manhattan, felt as imaginary, as mysterious and transitory and unfindable, as the other dot. He visualized the vibrating, squiggling, looping, arcing line representing the three-dimensional movement, plotted in a cubic grid, of the dot of himself, accounting for the different speed and direction of each vessel of which he was a passenger- taxi, Earth, solar system, Milky Way, etc.
(Lin, Taipei, 2013, pp.24-25)

 

Most mornings, with decreasing frequency, probably only because the process was becoming unconscious, he wouldn’t exactly know anything until three to twenty seconds of passive remembering, as if by unzipping a file-newroom.zip-into a PDF, showing his recent history and narrative context, which he’d delete after viewing, thinking that before he slept again he would have memorized this period of his life, but would keep newroom.zip, apparently not trusting himself.

(Lin, Taipei, 2013, p.35)

There were times when his memory, like an external hard drive that had been taken away from him and hidden inside an unwieldy series of cardboard boxes, or placed at the end of a long and dark and messy corridor, required much more effort than he felt motivated to exert simply to locate, after which, he knew, more effort would be required to gain access.
(Lin, Taipei, 2013, p.75)

 

Paul realized he’d said “America” not “Canada” and, in his state of near immunity from shame and/or anxiety, acknowledged a theoretical embarrassment, which someone not on MDMA, in his situation, might experience.
(Lin, Taipei, 2013, p.120)

Paul is constantly beside himself with self-consciousness, ensnared in a vicious doubt and reflexive stasis. Crucially though there is the use of the smile — or, to be more precise, the seemingly earnest grin — in Lin’s work. In Taipei there are over fifty references to grins and/or grinning. The grin is significant because a grin is often taken as being somehow disingenuous, when we force a smile we grin. The grin, has an implicit dishonestly, it is for appearance, a calculated expression, not a ‘natural’ expression like uncontrolled laughter. ‘Seemingly’ and ‘earnestly’ also populate Lin’s prose to impress the same sentiment of façade and the fragility of genuine interactions.

Many forms of work today are colonised by social interaction and empathy, but it is a shallow, exploited and, I argue, psychopathic mode of interaction. Friendly managers grin, seemingly earnest, as workers apathetically parrot various faux-social sentiments of consumerism like ‘take care now’ or ‘have a nice day’. Psychopathy is not the reserve of the ultra-rich or ‘greedy’ bankers but a facet of contemporary subjectivity. Charming, social psychopathy is more a symptom of our time, than it is characteristic of the criminal, amoral or villainous.