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Nightcrawler A Sociopath Analysis

Decent Essays

It was a pleasant surprise seeing that NightCrawler was one of the film choices for this psychopathy paper, I saw it in theaters when it was originally released and it has been one of my all-time favorites ever since. Even after rewatching it countless times since, the movie still never fails to keep my attention. One thing is for sure, Jake Gyllenhaal’s character, Louis Bloom, is a bona fide psychopath. I will go into greater detail about the reasoning for this later, after discussing what exactly being a psychopath entails and the different traits that are used to characterize them. Believe it or not, many people in today’s society cannot really distinguish between the two terms, psychopath and sociopath. Back in the early 1800s, the doctors that were working with mental patients began to realize that some of their patients who appeared outwardly normal had what they termed a “moral depravity” or “moral insanity”. These patients seemed to have no sense of the rights of other people, or even of ethics in general. The term psychopath was initially applied to these individuals around the beginning of the twentieth century. In the 1930s, the term switched to sociopath to focus more heavily on the detrimental effect that these people can have on …show more content…

These items are as follows: glib and superficial charm, grandiose (exaggeratedly high) estimation of self, need for stimulation, pathological lying, cunning and manipulativeness, lack of remorse or guilt, shallow affect (superficial emotional responsiveness), callousness and lack of empathy, parasitic lifestyle, poor behavioral controls, sexual promiscuity, early behavior problems, lack of realistic long-term goals, impulsivity, irresponsibility, failure to accept responsibility for own actions, many short-term marital relationships, juvenile delinquency, revocation of conditional release, and criminal

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