Magical Power of the Psychopath
The perfect villain is a one-dimensional menace
by Peter Clarke
As a psychology undergrad, I was obsessed with psychopaths. I couldn’t wrap my mind around them, even after reading extensively about their condition. And that’s what kept me so enthralled. I could see someone having depression. I could see someone hearing and seeing things that didn’t exist. But for someone to cause needless harm to others and utterly lack the capacity to feel remorse? Crazy!
My impression is that it’s not just me, that we’re all a morbidly fascinated by psychopaths.
I recently watched Infinity Pool, a horror movie featuring a woman who psychologically tortures the lead character simply for her own amusement. At any point in the film, the woman, Gabi Bauer, could have been shown to have complex emotions and motives for her actions. This would have almost certainly enhanced the somewhat flat storyline.
But no. Brandon Cronenberg, the film’s writer and director, leaned hard into not giving the audience a single peek into her state of mind. And for good reason: The fact that Gabi is mercilessly cruel for no reason is infinitely more terrifying than if she had a legitimate motive.
This is the magical power of the psychopath in stories. As an antagonist, they’re most effective when they’re as shallow as possible—the opposite as is the case for any other character. Generally, the more psychological nuance, the better. But not so with the psychopath.
In this respect, the psychopath is very much like a gun in a story. Having a gun present automatically increases the stakes and the drama. The gun is cold, heartless, and deadly. Just like the character Gabi Bauer in Infinity Pool. Or Patrick Bateman in American Psycho. Or the hitman Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men.
In college, while studying psychopaths, I remember sitting in the library with a notebook and making a list of all the most terrible actions a person could take. It’s a shockingly short list, ultimately coming down to causing needless psychological or physical harm to innocent people and doing it for no good reason.
Staring at the list, it’s weirdly boring. Like, that’s it? That’s really all the worst things ever?
But then you picture the person who might do such things and it immediately becomes a source of endless fascination. Their eyes are sharp but dead inside. Their lips curl into a babyish grin. They wipe the blood off their hands. And then they go about their business as if nothing happened.
That’s the perfect villain. To bring the villain to life, your imagination barely even has to try. But good luck wrapping your mind around how such a person could actually exist in the world.
Peter Clarke is the editor-in-chief of Jokes Review. Read his Substack newsletter The Decadence Project and follow him on Twitter @heypeterclarke.
Fully agree. It's the same reason a ferocious animal is dangerous—you don't know what they will do, and you have no way of communicating with their mind. Chigurh has always seemed to me the perfect villain for this very reason. A close second is Ledger's Joker. The Joaquin Phoenix Joker film is an attempt to explain why the Joker is who he is, but he isn't the same character as Heath Ledger's Joker.