Opinion: It’s time to change the way we think about sociopaths.

Editor’s note: sarah stewart I’m a film and culture writer living in western Pennsylvania. Her views expressed here are her own.view more opinions On CNN.

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This article contains mild spoilers for scenes from the Netflix series “Ripley” and the movie “Civil War.”

Are we finally ready to take another look at why we hate sociopaths so much? The answer to that question may depend on how you feel about empathy.

Something interesting happened when Andrew Scott played Tom Ripley in Netflix’s gorgeous new adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel. He almost disappears in Ripley’s complete lack of charisma.

Scott is incredibly remarkable as always. But his portrayal of Ripley, while highly capable and chameleonic, is far from charming, and represents a fresh take on one of literature and film’s most famous sociopaths. Some of the most fascinating work in Steven Zaillian’s new series focuses on his grunt work as a murderous con artist, delving into the messy, frustrating and exhausting aftermath of two murders. Scott’s performance as he scrubs the massive blood stains on the marble stairs is absolutely convincing, but it’s not an act that makes you think, “That’s what he did.” nice”

His acclaimed performance is one of two new meditations on the concept of the sociopath, which has recently become somewhat obsolete in the pop culture consciousness. On the one hand, we expect sociopaths to be threatening, but at the same time, we often expect to root for them. But “Ripley,” like recent depictions of sociopathy, makes the case that it’s more interesting and more useful to view sociopathy through a nuanced lens.

That’s not to say viewers don’t have the right to live vicariously through whoever they like – escapism is precious Coping Mechanisms — But because we live in what Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin called the “empathy gap,” we can go from catering to cold-blooded sociopaths who aren’t good at empathy. This might be a good time to step back a little. concern. Last year, Rubin said, “We have a profound lack of empathy, a collective inability to see the world from another person’s perspective, to understand their fears and hopes, and our common humanity.” It is natural to conclude that the

Traditionally, the majority of our cherished sociopathic antiheroes on television and movies have been male. Think Tony Soprano, Walter White, Patrick Bateman, Dexter Morgan, Don Draper. I’ve always found it hard to like mob movies and series. “The Sopranos,” “Goodfellas,” and all the other films, despite ostensibly depicting the horrors of brutal violence, have an extraordinarily passionate fanbase that seems genuinely obsessed with them. There are layers. Their central villains.

This is a concept coined by The New Yorker’s Emily Nussbaum the “bad fan,” referring to viewers who miss the critical lens through which a character is represented and instead focus their efforts on empathizing with that character. Masu. She traces this dissonance back to Norman Lear’s All in the Family. The film was a groundbreaking 1970s satirical comedy in which the bigoted protagonist Archie Bunker, played by Carroll O’Connor, created true fans for the character’s actions, against Lear’s wishes. “Sharing Archie’s dissatisfaction with the culture around her was the ‘silent majority’ who got away with hearing her taboo ideas out loud.”

One of the most notable modern-day examples of large-scale malicious fan attacks is the extremely gluttonous series “You.” This is a Netflix thriller about a bibliophile sociopath who follows a long dead body. Star Penn Badgley has repeatedly challenged his thirsty fans on social media, but his Joe Goldberg is both a representative of the worst red flags of the walking, talking male species and a challenge to his fans. It was also very popular.

But this month, the release of “Ripley” coincided with the publication of “The Sociopath,” a memoir that offers a very different case for demythologizing the disorder. Author Patrick Gagné, a successful therapist, married with children, writes about his lifelong (and largely successful) struggle to quell his more violent impulses, a condition that is widely misunderstood. They argue that it is highly stereotyped and likely to be underdiagnosed.

Gagne feels that Hollywood almost always misinterprets the depiction of sociopaths, reducing them to a collection of cartoonish, villainous traits. “Contrary to popular belief, emotional narrowness is not inherently immoral,” she wrote in Vogue. “The vast majority of people whose personalities fall on the antisocial spectrum are capable of playing perfectly happy and socially acceptable roles in loving family units. Talking heads on television, newspaper articles, and countless magazine headlines usually mistakenly confuse sociopaths with malignant narcissists, or based on the worst examples of the personality type, such as serial killers and monsters. They continue to denigrate and denigrate sociopaths by stereotyping them.

Gagne sees an encouraging trend in recent depictions of sociopaths, such as Jenna Ortega, who plays the icy Wednesday Addams on the Netflix show that bears her name. And Gagne says the fact that pop culture portrayals are becoming more diverse is proof of how many different kinds of people see parts of themselves in them.

In fact, I found one of the most recent sociopaths in the movie to be unusually chilling because of how plausible he is. He appears in Alex Garland’s “Civil War.” This is a polarizing film that depicts a vague conflict set in modern-day America. Jesse Plemons, like Scott, is a consistently brave actor, but he appears in a solitary scene that you’ll be thinking about for days afterward. His soldier character wears rose-tinted glasses in morbidly funny detail, interrogating the film’s central group of journalists about “what kind of Americans” they are and giving them a satisfying answer. Those who do not will be shot dead. He is a highly visible white nationalist and, as described by critic Owen Gleiberman, a sociopath.

“Garland lends this sequence a chilling sense of tension, and we see that the attitudes of the Plemmon family characters reflect contemporary nationalist hatred,” Gleiberman said. writing. “For a while, this movie seems to reflect a part of today’s America.” It’s such a harrowing scene that it’s hard to imagine him harboring any admiration for Plemons in his heart. It also becomes very difficult to see yourself as a hero.

For a country currently grappling with the concept of whether empathy is a strength or a weakness, it’s probably a good thing to throw cold water on facile stereotypes about sociopathy. If we can embrace the banal complexity of Scott’s repulsive Ripley, and at the same time understand, thanks to writers like Gagne, that real-life social pathology is not black and white; You will be able to understand them better. Including the one that currently features a lot of real estate in the public consciousness.