Storytellersunplugged

Justine Musk

1

So I was thinking a bit about serial killers.

We love our serial killers – in movies and fiction.

So much so that readers like me have been known to pick up a paperback on the New Releases table, groan, “Not another serial killer novel,” and toss it back. But I imagine that serial killers are like vampires: just when you think the genre has been done to death (no pun intended), someone comes and reinvents it, makes it hot all over again.

2

Vampires might come and go (and come back again), but sociopaths are always among us. You don’t have to kill to qualify as a sociopath; you can find perfectly legal ways of destroying lives and wreaking emotional havoc while remaining convinced that you and you alone are the world’s hero, martyr, and victim, and the only honest person to boot (even though you’re a pathological liar).

When I was a teenager I read a book called PEOPLE OF THE LIE by M. Scott Peck, in which – if I remember correctly — he tried to cast human evil into specific, diagnostic terms, so that you could identify ‘evil’ the same way you could schizophrenia or OCD. He pointed out that a person can be characterized as ‘evil’ not by the magnitude of his acts but by their consistency.

And one way you might begin to recognize a person as ‘evil’ – and he was talking from his experiences as a psychologist dealing with a certain type of patient – is that, although a sociopath can seem normal at first, intelligent and charming, eventually you will find yourself….not menaced or threatened by them (although maybe that too)…but kind of , well…baffled. Repeatedly baffled.

A sociopath personality, a ‘disordered’ personality, is like a wall that can’t be penetrated, no matter how many bones you break by hurling yourself against it. Sociopaths work off their own unique sense of reality and logic, which bears little resemblance to yours, or to anyone’s.

Something about them just doesn’t add up.

3

At the center of any definition of ‘sociopath’ – or ‘antisocial personality disorder’ or ‘malignant narcissistic personality disorder ‘– is the inability to experience empathy, to see things from the viewpoints of others.

Empathy has been traced to the part of the brain known as the premotor cortex, which is responsible for planning movements. In 1996, scientists were examining the brain of a macaque monkey and noticed something curious. When the monkey made a movement or performed an action – such as reaching for a banana – a cluster of cells in the premotor cortex always fired. At one point they noticed those same cells were firing…even though the monkey himself was perfectly still.

What he was doing, however, was watching.

One of the scientists lifted his arm and reached for an object. The monkey’s brain responded as if the monkey was reaching himself. Further experiments bore this out: whether the monkey was performing a movement, or watching another monkey or a human perform that same movement, the cells in the premotor cortex fired the same. They made no distinction.

The neuroscientists named these cells ‘mirror neurons’ (or, unofficially, ‘monkey see monkey do neurons’) and soon established that in addition to mirroring actions, they also reflect sensations and emotions. They play roles in speech and learning, facial decoding, threat analysis, the perception of intentions and emotions; they contribute to social intelligence and theory of mind. Just as an average person doesn’t have to think about moving her fingers across the computer keyboard – it simply happens, the way it’s happening with me right now – nor does she have to think much about what her friend must be feeling when his dog gets hit by a car. Mirror neurons allow us to see ourselves in other people and other people in ourselves. This mapping of our own inner selves onto others allows a vast, deep network of relationships and shared experience and knowledge, which in turn produces art, literature, culture: all those things that take the personal and make it universal (or vice versa). We learn we aren’t alone, but part of something much bigger than our own petty selves — you might call it the human condition.

4

No one really knows what makes a sociopath. If all it took was a horrific childhood, someone like the bestselling novelist Dean Koontz, who has written frankly about his impoverished upbringing under the so-called care of a psychopathic father, should have made a career out of sociopathology to rival Ted Bundy’s.

He went another route.

Some theorize that sociopaths are (much like the rich, at least according to Scotty F.) simply different from you and me; something in the brain works oddly or not at all. Perhaps they were born like this. Or suffered a traumatic head injury as a child that somehow…changed them.

Take away a child’s ability to develop empathy, and you take away massive chunks of context in which that child comes to understand reality itself (or realize that reality isn’t something you can adapt to your own needs and desires, that talking out a fantasy isn’t enough to make it so). Those broken mirror neurons can’t map on to anything beyond the self, and it’s not even the ‘self’ reflected through the reactions and expressions of others, because the sociopath can’t interpret those reactions in the first place. All sociopaths can see are themselves, and not as they actually are but as they want to be: the self-image that must be preserved at all costs, no matter the gap between image and reality, no matter how transparent others find them. Just as they lack knowledge of the inner workings of other people, they also lack knowledge of themselves.

Or maybe they can’t bear to look.

5

Someone with malignant personality disorder — whom many, if not most, psychologists regard as untreatable (since the personality they’re treating actually is the disorder, and doesn’t consider itself disordered in the first place), and whose advice to anyone involved with a malignant narcissist would likely be to cut off all contact and keep your distance — is the original ‘hollow man’ (or woman). Narcissism is not about being in love with your self, but being in love with an image of yourself. The truth behind the image doesn’t interest malignant narcissists; they’re not convinced it exists..

They learn young that if they’re to win any degree of social acceptance at all, they must behave in certain ways. They must mimic emotions and reactions they don’t truly feel. Sociopaths are often the most sentimental people in the room, since sentiment itself can be defined as hollow emotion, melodrama: what it lacks in actual substance it makes up for with overblown affects, exaggerated gestures.

Knowledge like this can add an interesting wrinkle to fictional bad guy. Someone who might go out and strangle a prostitute, for example, and then take his new girlfriend to a revival theatre showing Gone With the Wind. And the girlfriend thinks he’s sensitive (maybe too sensitive, maybe she rolls her eyes) because she sees how he tears up when Rhett delivers that final line.

6

People take it for granted that other people can empathize. People will also assume that the problem is one of proper communication; that if only everybody involved could sit down together and air out their feelings, possibly with a medical health professional involved, resolution will slide into view.

But sociopaths often love to talk. They’ll talk for hours.

When a sociopath is in your life, and social workers and judges and shrinks and neighbors and whoever else gets involved, part of the frustration becomes having to explain the situation all over again to the latest newest person on the scene. People will be skeptical of you because they want to give everyone a fair hearing…and also because the stories you tell about the sociopath’s behavior sound so insane that they can’t help wondering if maybe you’re the one with a screw loose.

All you can do is be calm and rational and patient. Wait for the sociopath to implode or explode — since they can’t stay on their best behavior for long — and expose that personality in all its malignant glory.

Again.

7

What it must be like, to exist without the burden of conscience.

You do what you want. You take what you want.

You are never wrong, even when people keep insisting you are.

You never have to worry about anyone’s feelings.

You never beat yourself up about your mistakes…because you never make any (at least, not anything serious).

Sociopaths are often confident and charming. They have charisma. Sometimes I wonder if the lack of conscience, of empathy, could be the reason why. They are not being eaten alive by self-doubt. They’re the only real person in the room, and everybody else is just figments, shadows, bit players.

Of course they’re confident. The world is a movie starring them, and they’re just waiting for their Oscar.

And applause.

8

In 2005, Michael Platt and his partner Robert Deaner showed how monkeys will pay to gaze at images of the dominant members of their troop.

Male monkeys were set up in special chairs in front of computer screens. One screen remained grey. The other screen flashed images of monkeys from their troop.

Look at the grey screen, they got the same amount of ‘juicy juice’ squirted in their mouth every time. Reliable payment. Look at the image of the monkey, and the amount of juice varied. Not so reliable.

What the researchers discovered was that monkeys would ‘pay’ — give up their chance at juicy juice — in order to stare at pictures of the monkeys who ranked higher than they did.

But they had to be paid extra juicy juice to look at the subordinate monkeys.

They would ‘pay’ to look at images of female hindquarters…but had to be paid extra to gaze at female frontals.

There’s an evolutionary explanation for this. When the alpha males are asleep, or away, or injured or sick, the subordinates can seize their chance to sneak around and mate with the females. The monkeys best at watching and gathering information — about the leaders’ habits and activities, about which females are currently in heat and receptive to advances — stand the best chance of surviving and reproducing.

This could apply to humans. In prehistoric days, it helped a man to gather as much information as he could about his leaders. He could use this knowledge to build alliances or stage rebellions or conduct affairs with inappropriate women. A man with a talent for social information stood the best chance of passing on his genes.

In his book FAME JUNKIES, writer Jake Halpern suggests that this curiosity about the powerful is hardwired into us, naturally selected through generations of our ancestors. This skill for social information expresses itself now, somewhat uselessly, through our fascination with celebrity-watching and the popularity of entertainment magazines like Us Weekly, or blogs like www.socialitelife.com or www.perezhilton.com. We pay our own form of juicy juice to look at photos of Brad and Angelina…but we’d have to be paid a little extra to bother looking at photos of Howard and Jill who run the convenience store down the street.

Serial killers may not be our leaders — unless we’re extremely unlucky — but they are the apex predators. All the novels and movies and media stories and true-crime books we write and read about them could signal something more than lurid voyeurism or armchair thrillseeking; could be our instinctive, hardwired way of watching from a distance, gathering the information we need to survive them.

9

Before Anne Rice invented a new kind of vampire subgenre with her character Lestat, vampires were repulsive, alien creatures who spread death and terror. They were serial killers with a particularly ghastly signature.

We use stories to explore the things that scare us, to confront our fears and release ourselves from them. So we found ways of taming the vampire, first by stake and fire and decapitation, and then by making him a brooding romantic anti-hero, and sometimes even hero.

Now the vampire often gets a sympathetic first-person perspective.

We seem to be reaching a similar point with serial killers. Instead of crosses and holy water, storytellers used forensics and FBI profiling. Hannibal Lector evolved through a series of novels and movies from vicious monster to brilliant anti-hero with a tortured horrific past. Last fall, Showtime premiered a television series centered around a likeable guy named Dexter. Who happens to be a serial killer. But he wins our interest and sympathy because he only goes after other killers, the kind who get away with it.

Perhaps the next writer who reinvents vamp fiction in some new and startling way will take the vampire out of his rock-star duds and turn him into a monster again.

But the sociopath? Whether it’s the extreme of a serial killer cruising the highway for victims, or the more garden-variety kind, like your suburban neighbor who takes great pains to present the image of a perfect happy family while verbally and emotionally abusing his children (and when, as adults, they try to sit down and truly communicate with the man, clear the air, achieve some kind of healing, he will swear up and down and oh so vociferously that the abuse never happened, they’re either lying or imagining things or out to ’get’ him for some reason he can’t imagine yet will quickly invent), the sociopath remains among us after the final page is turned and the movie screen goes dark. Unlike the vampire, the sociopath is the one monster no storyteller had to invent. We only need to watch — and learn — and keep our distance.

–Justine Musk