I was looking at the newspapers description of the movie Pulp Fiction, and it says 'blah, blah, blah, blah, two psychopathic hit men, blah, blah, blah."
OK, I understand why being a murderer for money could be called less that well-adjusted, but I rather get the idea, from the paper, that these two hitmen were more psychopathic than other murderers. So, my question is: What is it that makes these guys psychopathic? No other hitmen were ever called psychopathic, in the movie descriptions that I have read. Did I miss something?
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I don’t know if they’d fit the bill for psychopathy. I don’t know that Jules would, since he does express remorse. Then again, is that because he’s afraid of going to Hell because of the sign from God? Who knows?
Their callousness is definitely played up (talking about things like Burger King and fast food one minute, shooting a guy, then later accidentally shooting a friend in the face and then arguing over cleaning it up). It sort of reminds me of the Goodfellas mentality–shooting someone becomes more a logistics thing about dealing with the body/mess and less about actually giving a shit about the person. I would classify Tommy Devito in Goodfellas as probably being a psychopath, whereas Jules and Vince seem a bit too cartoonish to necessarily classify as being psychopaths.
Though I guess to be accurate we should be using the term sociopath, right?
Sounds like sloppy journalism to me. I don’t know the clinical definition of psychopath or sociopath, but either one has me thinking of a delusional, self-destructive madman on the loose, not the calculating killers of Pulp Fiction.
ETA: Now, Vincent’s brother in Reservoir Dogs (played by Michael Madsen) is a good example of what I think of when I hear “psychopath.”
Well, a sociopath doesn’t mean that you’re a violent madman. Many of them are very charming and can mimic being normal people with regular emotions…once you get to know them you realize it’s a facade.
There’s no way to know if they’re psychopaths. They act to each other like they don’t give a shit about the people they kill, but maybe privately they feel horrible about it and they’re wracked with guilt about it and they can never sleep. We know Vincent is a heroin addict; maybe his drug addiction is his way of coping with the stress of having to kill people. We never know because we don’t know the thoughts of the characters. Without knowing what they actually think, we can’t know if they’re psychopaths. Just killing people does not make someone a psychopath or a sociopath.
No, they’re just professionals. I’m pretty sure Quentin Tarantino agrees with me: