Viewing Psychopathy Through a Different Lens
Whereas critics have reckoned Erika as a prisoner of maternal jouissance, a substitute father and husband figure, and a rebel against the mother’s law by means of auto-trauma, I argue that Erika can also be construed as the embodiment of
psychopathy. More precisely speaking, I consider Erika as a “psychopath of everyday life,” as referred to by Martin Kantor, as well as what Robert D. Hare addresses as a
“subcriminal psychopath,” who appears to function reasonably well in society and even holds a prestigious occupation. Nevertheless, the way The Piano Teacher gives life to its psychopathic heroine renders her considerably distinct from the abominable psychopaths depicted in most films.
In regard to how realistic and clinically accurate psychopathic characters in cinema are, Samuel J. Leistedt and Paul Linkowski study 126 psychopathic characters from 400 films. They point out that the portrayal of psychopaths in film is by and large inextricably linked with the horror genre, particularly under the influence of the arrest of Ed Gein, the infamous American serial killer, in 1957 (Leistedt and
Linkowski 168). The details of the Ed Gein case, which include grave robbing, cannibalism, and necrophilia, become a template for the attributes of what is considered as psychopathic behavior, which is nevertheless most likely a type of psychosis (168-71). The traditional “Hollywood psychopath,” which emerges during
the 1960s and 1970s, tends to exhibit numerous traits that render the character villainous and superhuman, including high intelligence and a preference for intellectual stimulation, a vain and stylish demeanor, a calculating and always-in-control attitude, and unrealistically exceptional skill at killing people, especially with blades or household objects (172). The aforementioned traits, particularly in
combination, are generally not present in real psychopaths (172).
What’s more, psychopathy in cinema is typically portrayed in an exaggerated fashion to magnify the dramatic properties of the psychopathic characters, among which the criminal or antisocial psychopath is the most common form to appear (172). Famous examples, among many others, include the cannibalistic psychiatrist Dr. Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs (1991), the wicked serial killer John Doe in Seven (1995), the “Ghostface” killers in the Scream series (1996-2011), as well as Patrick Bateman in American Psycho (2000), who is a Wall Street banker living a double life as a serial killer and a rapist (169-70). Furthermore, as in reality, female psychopaths in cinema are relatively rare and not well known, and they are often depicted as scheming manipulators whose main weapons are sexual (172).
These female characters include Catherine Tramell in Basic Instinct (1992), Peyton Flanders in The Hand that Rocks the Cradle (1992), and Amy Dunne in Gone Girl (2014), all of whom are adroit at using their sex appeal to beguile and manipulate others for personal gains (171).
It is in the early 2000s that variations of the non-maniacal and relatively realistic psychopaths begin to emerge, which lead to more psychopathological and clinical characterizations of psychopathy, in place of an abundance of dysfunctional and horrific behaviors (172). Among the most recent and realistic idiopathic
psychopathic characters, Leistedt and Linkowski consider Anton Chigurh in the 2007 Coen brothers’ film, No Country for Old Men, as a well-designed prototypical
psychopath, who exhibits incapacity for love, absence of shame or remorse, lack of psychological insight, inability to learn from past experience, cold-blooded attitude, ruthlessness, total determination, and lack of empathy (172). Nevertheless, the authors also point out that despite the comparatively accurate portrayal, the character serves as an extreme description of psychopathy, considering that “[h]e seems to be
affectively invulnerable and resistant to any form of emotion or humanity” (172). In the concluding remarks of the section, Leistedt and Linkowski stress that, “at the opposite end of most of the fictional characters presented in films, they are vulnerable and have limits, as they do in the real world” (173).
All in all, despite a clinical evolution since 2000, psychopathy in cinema remains fictional, and most psychopathic characters in films are still confined to villain archetypes to a certain extent (173). However, cinema provides a vicarious experience through which one can obtain a glimpse into the complex human psyche.
Some of the realistic fictional psychopathic characters, although in minority, can be considered valuable for teaching and illustrating several aspects of forensic
psychiatry, such as personality disorders and paraphilia (173).
As Leistedt’s and Linkowski’s study indicates, psychopaths in films, including both the prototypical mass murderers and the elite psychopaths, frequently exhibit intelligence and physical ability exaggerated to a superhuman level (171). The unrealistic yet exceptional psychopathic characters are often foregrounded as the selling points of the film, on account of the sensational stimulation along with the marketability it entails. Nevertheless, a realistic portrayal of psychopathy should not simply dwell on the general attributes of the psychopathic character, but also the chaos and instability concomitant with the disordered personality in a psychopath’s life. As a result, in consideration of how psychopaths in cinema generally impress viewers with their image of invulnerability, I maintain that Haneke’s The Piano
Teacher can be regarded as a portrayal of psychopathy that acts in a way
diametrically opposite to that commonly seen in cinema, by virtue of its emphasis on the psychopath’s vulnerability. In this sense, the film offers a more realistic
delineation of psychopathy, given that psychopaths are essentially human beings who are bound to have limits, as highlighted by Leistedt and Linkowski. In a similar vein, Gilson’s conception for vulnerability also verifies the ineluctable nature of
vulnerability, regardless of an individual’s attempt to pursue invulnerability, which is intrinsically illusory and impossible to fully achieve.
Before I investigate the issue of vulnerability in The Piano Teacher, which I argue is the kernel of the film, I will begin with a detailed clarification of how the film depicts psychopathy. More specifically put, I will elaborate on how Erika can be construed as a psychopath, on the grounds of the following psychopathic traits she displays: grandiose sense of self-worth, lack of remorse or guilt, lack of empathy, failure to accept responsibility for own actions, need of stimulation, and poor behavioral control.
Grandiose Sense of Self-Worth
To begin with, Erika is a narcissistic individual who ceaselessly seeks
perfection in music, love, and life. Her narcissistic attitude is most likely the corollary of her relationship with her mother, whose abusive supervision over the daughter reflects the projection of her own fantasies onto Erika’s prodigious musical career. In other words, the mother’s use of Erika as her own narcissistic extension greatly impacts the way Erika perceives herself as well as the world, making her aloof and contemptuous towards others, especially her students. As a matter of fact, Erika’s cruel treatment of her students duplicates her mother’s overbearing conduct towards
the daughter, which entails an absence of empathic attunement and a yearning for absolute perfection.
The grandiose sense of self-worth is registered in particular through Erika’s exorbitant perception of music and love. As Isabelle Huppert, the actress who plays Erika in the film, suggests, “For her, love is high up on a pedestal, like Bach. […]
She’ll learn the hard way that in real life, in matters of love and even friendship, you have to learn to compromise. She refuses to compromise, probably because she lives with this idea of perfection that one aims for in music” (Huppert). The unduly exalted opinion of music and love signifies Erika’s sense of self-worth, which she regards should be commensurate. In one scene, she brutally demeans a male student verbally during their piano lesson, after she catches him looking at porn magazines in a store.
While the nervous student is trying to focus on playing, Erika scathingly rebukes him in a contemptuous manner that eventually forces him to halt: “It sounds as clear as a muddy windscreen. Probably due to the images lodged in your mind” (The Piano Teacher 00:40:17-24). The student is flustered and apologizes for the earlier awkward
encounter, which provokes Erika even more. She calls the student “a pig” and suggests that he take a job in a strip club instead of studying music (The Piano
Teacher 00:40:48-00:41:23). Apart from the sadistic manner that substantially mirrors
the way Erika is dominated by her mother, the conversation reveals Erika’s opinion of music as a divine and inviolable form of art, of which a man with an obscene mind is underserving. Nevertheless, as it will later be revealed, perhaps what truly annoys Erika is the sight of a man’s access to superiority through the objectification of a woman’s body, given Erika’s own hunger for superiority, power, and control, which she has no access to beneath the suffocating hegemony of her mother.
Moreover, Erika’s quest for perfection in every aspect of life concurs with Martin Kantor’s assertion of psychopaths’ dichotomous thinking. According to
Kantor, psychopaths think dichotomously in order to create a distorted and self-serving perception of personal injustice along the lines of “either they are for you or they are against you” (99). In other words, a gray area hardly exists within
psychopaths’ egocentric judgments, and they have a clear-cut standard for how others should act and behave in order to contribute to their own benefits. If the expectation is not met, psychopaths can easily abandon, or even inflict harm to, those they could gain no value from. As Kantor points out, psychopaths can view anything less than unconditional love as complete dislike and abandonment (99). In Erika’s case, she harbors a radical view of not only love and music, but life in general. Placing these elements “high up on a pedestal,” as described by Huppert, Erika concurrently
maintains a sense of self-worth that is correspondingly superior to others. The result is a severe degree of interpersonal detachment, along with an impractical demand for absolute perfection, which yields no room for compromise.
Lack of Remorse or Guilt
During a recital rehearsal, one of Erika’s pupils, Anna Schober, is overwhelmed by the pressure to perform, and bursts out crying. The situation gives Walter an opportunity to play the chivalrous role. He comforts her, making her smile and stop crying, and even takes the job of being the girl’s page turner. At the sight of Walter’s and Anna’s interaction, Erika is imbued with rage and jealousy, to the extent that she can no longer bear to stay and quietly retreats to the cloakroom. As an evil thought rises in her, she breaks a glass and places the shards in Anna’s coat pocket. A few moments later, the crowd is stunned by Anna’s painful shriek and the sight of her mutilated hand, including Walter, to whom Erika sardonically says, “The sight of blood makes me ill. Go to her. Be her brave protector” (The Piano Teacher 01:04:58-01:05:02). The absence of remorse and guilt Erika exhibits is a typical attribute of
psychopathy. By damaging Anna’s hand, Erika practically destroys the pupil’s future as a professional pianist. In this respect, viewers may recall the earlier conversation between Erika and her mother on their bed, in which the mother cautions Erika about Anna’s talent for play Schubert, which she worries may threaten Erika’s musical career. It is likely that the mother’s concern may somewhat conduce to Erika’s insidious conduct, which she feels no guilt or regret for.
As a matter of fact, Erika seems to derive great pleasure from bullying and causing pain to others, just as she enjoys verbally abusing her students. After seeing how she has ruined Anna’s hand, Erika rushes into the bathroom, and we can hear her urinate, which Christopher Christian reckons as a manifestation of pleasure and excitement. In fact, in another scene where Erika is spying on a couple having sex in a car, we also see her urinate at the height of sexual excitement. As stated by Christian,
“Urination causes sexual pleasure not only by virtue of the physical stimulation that urination produces in her, but by the fantasy that the stream of urine is the equivalent of male ejaculate” (776). In this sense, Erika’s physical impulse to urinate right after she sees Anna’s hand disfigured may indicate the excitement induced by causing suffering to others, which resembles that produced by sexual stimulation. As a consequence, the malicious act gives rise to exhilaration as opposed to guilt and remorse, which reflects Erika’s egocentric and psychopathic personality.
Lack of Empathy
The pleasure Erika derives from hurting Anna implies not only her lack of guilt and remorse, but also her lack of empathy, which Hare describes as the indifference to the rights and suffering of others (45). According to Hare, owing to psychopaths’
general inability to appreciate the feelings of others, they are often capable of behavior that empathic people find unacceptable and baffling, such as parasitically
bleeding others of their possessions and dignity, or shamefully neglecting the physical and emotional welfare of their families (45). While everyone is appalled by the scene of Anna’s bloody hand, Erika mockingly tells Walter to go “be [Anna’s] brave protector.” Her acidulous remarks on the incident clearly evince that she is still preoccupied with jealousy, and that she obviously does not concern herself with the pain Anna is suffering from. In other words, the egocentric nature has placed her feeling of being unjustly treated above everything else, including the moral responsibility not only as a teacher, but as a human being as well.
In addition to Anna’s mishap, there are several other occasions which also indicate Erika’s lack of empathy, including the scene where she deliberately embarrasses the male student browsing porn magazines in front of his friends.
Furthermore, Erika frequently displays a relative insensitivity to shame, especially in consideration of the conservative Viennese musical milieu where she lives and works.
In one scene where Erika visits the porn shop to watch porn videos, she is waiting outside the booths along with several men, who curiously stare at her and converse in whispers. Erika, however, remains utterly nonchalant to the men’s inquisitive gazes.
As a matter of fact, starting from the moment she steps out of the elevator in the department store and heads to the porn shop, Erika exudes a sense of complete detachment from the jubilant crowd, and maintains a cold and emotionless
expression. Even after a man roughly bumps into her, she simply casts at him a glance that involves neither anger nor impatience, but disdain and indifference. What’s more, during another scene in a drive-in movie parking lot, Erika is spying on a couple having sex in the car. At the height of sexual excitement, she squats down by the car door and begins to urinate, which catches the attention of the man in the car.
However, as the man glares at Erika in shock, Erika shows neither panic nor shame, and even calmly locks eyes with the man for a few seconds. It is when the man finally
opens the car door and furiously shouts at Erika that she begins to trot off. Along with the scene at the porn shop and the tragedy of Anna, the incident in the parking lot suggests Erika’s inability to perceive the feelings normally engendered in most empaths under similar circumstances, such as shame, anxiety, guilt, and fear.
Erika’s callous comportment is not the only suggestion of her apathetic
personality. The camera movement of the film also sheds some light on the heroine’s unfeeling stance, as well as her emotional detachment from the surroundings. For instance, throughout the sequence from the elevator of the department store to the porn shop, the camera follows Erika with a tracking shot, which is a camera movement technique often employed to maintain continuity and manifest austere realism, as she walks past the cafeteria and the video game arcade. Nevertheless, this is not the only occasion in the film where a tracking shot is utilized to create an objective and apathetic distance between Erika and the audience. The same technique is used in the scene where Erika retreats to the cloakroom out of her jealousy of the intimate interaction between Walter and Anna during the recital rehearsal. The long tracking shot begins from the moment Erika enters the cloakroom, and follows her as she moves through the racks of clothes, until she finishes placing the glass shards into Anna’s coat pocket. As Stephen Heleker indicates, during this scene, the camera gives nothing and refuses to interpret Erika’s behavior, so the audience must try and
understand the piano teacher’s behavior on their own (Heleker). More precisely speaking, the tracking shot employed in the two occasions – on the way to the porn shop and the evil scheme to appease the heroine’s jealousy – maintains a similar frame throughout the long take (see fig. 2 and 3). In this way, the camera movement offers a dispassionate perspective, from which viewers observe Erika’s actions in a manner as detached as the icy demeanor of the piano teacher.
Furthermore, in a scene following Anna’s tragedy, Anna’s mother, Mrs.
Schober, sobs out to Erika about her daughter’s mishap, without any clue that her interlocutor is the one responsible for the vicious conduct. As Mrs. Schober tearfully condemns the abuser, whom the police assume to be another student acting out of jealousy, Erika coolly chimes in, “They’ll find the man who did it” (The Piano Teacher 01:17:29-31). The mother then bitterly comments that the man should have
his hands chopped off, which starts to annoy Erika, and she asks the mother to leave.
The conversation not only testifies to Erika’s lack of remorse, guilt, and empathy, but also her inability to accept responsibility for her own actions, even upon seeing the misery and suffering she inflicts on the victim’s family member. On top of that, the
“peeping-Tom” scene in the drive-in movie parking lot, together with Anna’s unfortunate incident, also suggests Erika’s need of stimulation and her poor behavioral control, which, according to Hare, are common traits found in psychopaths.
Fig. 3. The dispassionate and objective perspective in the tracking shot creates empathetic distance between the audience and the subject, making the subject’s state of mind ungraspable, The Piano Teacher (01:01:42).
Fig. 2. The use of tracking shot creates a dispassionate, objective perspective that reflects Erika’s emotionally detached personality, The Piano Teacher (00:24:33).