crimeculture

A Weed or a Plant Out of Place? Responsibility and the Psychopath in Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me and Pop. 1280

Mary Stringer, Lancaster University

‘A weed is a plant out of place. I find a hollyhock in my cornfield, and it’s a weed. I find it in my garden, and it’s a flower. You’re in my yard, Mr Ford’ - The Killer Inside Me
‘You can’t fault a jug for being twisted because the hand of the potter slipped.’ - Pop. 1280

Renowned for his bleak social satire, Thompson’s texts The Killer Inside Me and Pop. 1280 are based on a satiric framework and steered by satiric, psychopathic protagonists. As Horsley (2005), Davis (2007) and O’Brien (1982) have all posited, Thompson uses the characters’ psychosis itself in order to satire the small town communities he depicts in these texts, ‘representing his schizophrenia as an internalisation of society’s hypocrisy’ (Horsley 2001, p123). The reader is left in little doubt about the nature of this satire; Lou Ford and Nick Corey both illuminate and mirror through their satiric language and actions the hypocrisy of small-town ‘law and order’ and the actuality of chaos and corruption in small town society. Their respective positions as policeman and sheriff in the texts further underline this irony. However, while Thompson’s satiric treatment of psychosis has been widely critiqued, comparatively little has been written about the criminal responsibility of the protagonists, whose supposed insanity eclipses the question of liability in the eyes of the reader. As the extracts above indicate, certain characters within the texts appear to absolve the killers for their crimes, and it is implied that the reader too, ‘[becoming] the “I” of the story’ (Dargue, 2009), must excuse Lou and Nick for their crimes on the basis of Insanity. However, my reading has shown that psychopathy is a complicated by-road of insanity in which responsibility may not automatically be waived. Any attempt at a concrete definition of morality is automatically complicated by the event of insanity, and yet, as I will endeavour to illustrate, Thompson himself does not excuse his protagonists for their crimes; his portrayal of their psychopathy is complex and problematic, and, while it is implied that conventional concepts of morality are undermined by hypocrisy even in the realm of the sane, I believe that Thompson also institutes a deeper sense of universal morality which remains present even in the chaos of the psychopathic mind.

As a psychopath, Lou Ford of The Killer Inside Me is unique in that he is not only able to comprehend his own condition but also relate it to the reader. While many critics have taken this as a verification by Thompson that ‘murderous potential can lurk in ‘everyman’ (Horsley 2005, p127), I suggest that there is a deeper underlying purpose to this strange quirk. Firstly, Insanity by definition robs people of their reason: ‘a derangement of the mind’ (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/insanity), and therefore it follows that, were Lou truly psychopathic, he would not likely be able to diagnose himself, let alone defend himself to an unseen audience. The ambiguity and limitations of psychoanalytic explanations are laid bare in The Killer Inside Me by Billy Boy Walker: ‘Insane? Well the only definition we have for insanity is the condition which necessitates the confinement of a person. So, since he hadn’t been confined when he killed those women, I reckon he was sane.’ (Killer 282)

Secondly, Ford’s style of revelation to the reader is so coy as to suggest farcicality, adding to the black satire whilst implying to the reader a certain unreliability at the heart of his apparent defence: ‘I went blind ma-angry seeing him so pretendsy shocked’ (Killer 251) Whilst implying a sense of denial, this ‘mistake’ is too obvious to be accidental. Additionally, as Clark notes, ‘If Lou provides a grand narrative, it is one in which he uses the appearance/reality, outer/inner world motif to pitch to us a too- apparent Freudian psychoanalytic explanation for his actions’ (Clark, 54). Lou says ‘I could strike at any of them... and it would be the same as striking at her’ (Killer 269), which could be viewed either as an incredibly insightful psychological explanation, or a devious excuse with which to excuse his actions. As Clark notes, his insight is ‘too apparent’ (Clark, 54), and the reader must consider that Thompson is portraying Lou not as morally insane, but as morally ill, ‘cold-blooded and smart as hell’ (Killer 54).

‘Freudian explanations of childhood trauma and sexual abuse would have been immediately recognisable and acceptable as an enlightened, rational approach to understanding aberrant human behaviour’ (Clark, 54) and so Lou’s apparent self-knowledge may in fact just be another layer of deception to confuse the reader into explaining his evilness away via a widely socially accepted psychological explanation.
Both Lou’s outer, social character and his inner narrative are steeped in contradiction. Lou frequently acknowledges his social persona to be an artificial construction, mocking his fellow policemen and the construct of law: ‘you don’t need proof, know what I mean? All you need is a tip that a guy is guilty... then it’s just a matter of making him admit it’(172). His inner narrative contains subtle contradictions, indicating as it does many of the textbook psychopathic symptoms, yet rebutting them in turn as he expresses obscure elements of guilt and responsibility. ‘I grinned, feeling sorry for him.’ (235) This reveals his actual ability to distinguish between good and bad moral values.

Thompson uses psychopathy in order to deceive the reader on two levels: first, to trick them into security; second, to draw them into collusion with the protagonists. Billy Boy Walker, who Dorothy Clark defines as a textual emancipating ‘metonymic figure for a deity’ (Clark, 57) expresses an attitude of acceptance towards Ford which mirrors disturbingly that of society at the time; a professed tolerance towards the insane (In 1963, Kidd writes ‘In a civilised community one hopes that public, police, and the courts will learn to develop a tolerant, compassionate sense of humour and understanding towards these people’ (p443)). Walker’s view of Ford as a weed, a ‘plant out of place’, resonates with natural imagery and promotes tolerance, and his deific position of apparent agency lends the assertion superficial authenticity. But if gardeners were not to weed, their crops and plants would be choked. A weed is a weed precisely because it inhibits the growth of other plants, ‘a valueless plant growing wild, especially one that grows on cultivated ground to the exclusion or injury of the desired crop’ (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/weed). Whilst tolerance towards insanity is a crucially humanistic and wholly positive attitude, Thompson’s final portrayal of Lou as blowing up his house and Joyce indicates that tolerance of the dangerously insane within a community is irresponsible. Dangerous psychopaths and serial killers need social protection (Wilson 2007, p73).

Thompson’s ambiguous treatment of the concept of ‘psychopathy’ brings into question the moral and social responsibility of Lou Ford and Nick Corey. As Robert J. Smith (1984) has noted, psychopathy does not fall under the general guidelines of mental illness: ‘Unlike cases of outright psychosis, the psychopath usually passes traditional tests of legal responsibility’(178). Smith also claims that mental health authorities invoke all too often the absolving premise that ‘the psychopath is mentally ill, therefore not responsible’(178). He even goes so far as to claim that the psychopath is ‘a poor candidate for the charge of being mentally ill.’ Therefore, the liability of the psychopathic serial killer is a complex issue, and one which Thompson treats accordingly. As Clark (2009) notes, in the 1950s ‘Freudian explanations of childhood trauma and sexual abuse would have been immediately recognisable and acceptable as an enlightened, rational approach to understanding aberrant human behaviour’ (Clark, 54), and, whilst invoking Freudian explanations for Lou, and Christ-like delusions for Nick, under closer scrutiny it becomes apparent that Thompson is in fact attempting to display the very limitations of such psychological premises at that time. ‘Lou’s discourse has toyed with us and put into question two of the most familiar and generally accepted scientific explanations for evil human behaviour: childhood trauma and psychosis’ (Clark, 54). The reader is encouraged by Lou to accept his explanation- coming as it does from a textbook- at face value, but in the manner and language he uses it becomes clear that Thompson himself is not convinced by such explanations. The psychopath, Thompson appears to suggest, may shrug off more responsibility than he ought to.

To approach this dilemma scientifically, I will study Ford and Corey’s behaviour against the background of psychopathic symptomatology* in an attempt to measure the medical severity and indeed authenticity of their ‘condition’. Then I will consider the concept of responsibility within this framework, in the hope of locating a fixed definition from which we can gauge Ford and Corey’s respective moral responsibilities. In this essay, the concept of responsibility will encapsulate both the protagonist’s respective crimes, and, by extension, their actions in inducing reader collusion through their control of the narrative and relation of events.

Smith’s symptomatology of psychopathy (derived using data from research assimilated by a multitude of clinicians and researchers) consists of the following ten main criteria: 1. Beguiling, 2. Guiltless 3. Manipulating 4. Cynical 5. Primitive egocentricity 6. Unempathetic 7.Professes conventional values 8. Unperturbed 9. Restless 10. Oriented in the Present (Smith 178). Given the confines of this essay, I am going to focus on the symptoms which best fit Ford and Corey’s behaviour.

Ford and Corey both share many of the same criteria, as can be observed in their guiltless manipulation of their victims and the larger community (particularly in the case of Corey), in their cynical attitude of life and their roles in their respective communities, and their shocking lack of empathy for their victims. Both succeed in duping their respective outer communities though a combination of guile and manipulation.
The Killer Inside Me and Pop. 1280 are disturbingly similar in characterisation and setting. Both are set in small-town communities, both have psychopathic protagonists in positions of social responsibility, both have a school-teacher named Amy Stanton, both a would-be femme-fatale figure (Joyce in Killer and Rose in Pop. 1280), and both a ‘confession’ scapegoat in the respective textual characters of Johnnie Pappas and Uncle John, to whom the protagonists explain their motives and moral actions before murdering them. They are not murdered because they have become aware of the crime; both Johnnie and Uncle John pledge their allegiances to Lou and Nick. Rather, they are murdered because they have become party to what the two protagonists do not want people to find out; that Lou and Nick are not insane, that they recognise moral values and that they are able to consciously make moral choices. These textual similarities are deliberate constructions by Thompson with the effect of creating an absurd doubling- absurd because on the surface it serves no particular purpose. The characters have subtle differences, however; Corey claims to worship Amy Stanton in Pop. 1280: ‘Something that kind of grabbed you round the heart, that left its mark on you like a brand, so that the feel of her and the memory of her was always with you no matter where you strayed’ (p479). Ford on the other hand is detachedly cruel in his every observation of The Killer Inside Me’s Amy; in the throes of death as she clutches her purse, Lou notes ironically, ‘It was so much like her, you know, to latch onto her purse. She’d always been so tight...’ (Killer 249). Ford attempts to explain his behaviour to the reader by invoking Freudian explanations, whereas Corey, entertaining delusions of grandeur, sees himself as a Christ-like figure, a deified agent, an angel of mercy. Their respective psychopathies then, whilst occupying many of the same criterions of Robert Smith’s symptomology, are inherently different. This suggests that psychopathy is too diverse a phenomenon to assign simple concepts of responsibility or non-responsibility to.

Many critics have taken Lou Ford’s explanations for his actions at face value; the Freudian explanations about Helene becoming ‘every woman’ (269) fit very well- almost too well. Upon closer examination, it becomes clear that Ford is much more self-aware of his condition than is first suggested. Descriptions of his bestial, seemingly out of control behaviour gradually give way to more laboured descriptions of his carefully orchestrated verbal assaults and disguises. After his first murder, he reports:

I laughed- I had to laugh or do something worse- and his eyes squeezed shut
and he bawled. I yelled with laughter, bending over and slapping my legs. I
doubled up, laughing and farting and laughing some more until... I’d used up
all the laughter in the world. (167)

He drops hints about his childhood, holding back the crucial information in order to allow the reader to reach their ‘own’ conclusions. His use of italics when speaking of ‘the sickness’ is also significant; not only does it illustrate to the reader the severe and fractured nature of his condition, but by putting it in italics it encourages the readerly act of absolution for the thoughts italicised, emphasising as it does the separateness the evil takes to his ‘true’ self. As Clark notes, to further bolster his psychoanalytic argument ‘he provides the implied reader with a series of corroborating claims: he notes how much Amy looks like Joyce, so that he would have to “kill her a second time.”’(Clark, 55)

I believe that Lou’s psychosis is a fabrication, a smokescreen for his true cold-blooded nature. Like Corey, he genuinely believes that it is his duty to reveal hypocrisy in society and to punish wrong-doers, but, by blaming his actions on reams of psychoanalytic explanations, he effectively refuses to take moral responsibility. Thompson makes this evident through Ford’s language and satire. When in an asylum, Lou consciously re-enacts out loud previous conversations between he and the deceased Amy, aware that he is being recorded and intent on maintaining his pretence of insanity. His self-diagnosis of dementia praecox is recited to the reader in a practiced, almost teacherly manner, memorised from a textbook:

“The condition usually begins around puberty, and is precipitated by a severe
shock... He reasons soundly, even shrewdly. He is completely aware of what he
does and why he does it...” That was written about a disease, or a condition,
rather, called dementia praecox. Schizophrenia, paranoid type. Acute, recurrent,
advanced. Incurable.

He ends this deluge with the teasing rhetoric: ‘It was written, you might say, about- But I reckon you know, don’t you?’ (272). The dramatic use of the abstract noun ‘Incurable’ consciously mirrors and mocks society’s eagerness to explain evil using limited psychoanalytic and scientific narratives about evil. As Clark puts it, ‘Lou is always already beyond all the accounts he offers of himself... like the evil he ostensibly is trying to explain, he keeps disappearing behind his explanations and in the end disappears into the ellipsis of the text- a textual black hole- a fitting end for an impossible narrative’ (Clark, 52). His limited explanations may lack cohesiveness, but never-the-less they succeed in screening his true motives.
Ford does have many of the qualities of the textbook psychopath. However, self-diagnosis of his kind implies a heightened self-awareness, and Ford is responsible for knowing his condition yet not seeking medical help for it. In this way he is at least indirectly responsible for the murders. In ‘The Psychopath as Moral Agent’, Smith uses a variety of previous research data to support his belief that psychopathic moral responsibility is not clear cut. Particularly drawing on the work of Haksar (1965), Smith distinguishes between ‘moral sickness’ and ‘moral insanity’. This crucial differentiation suggests that a psychopath, unlike a generalised textbook definition of an insane person, is able to recognise moral values and concepts such as ‘good’ and ‘evil’, yet has an inability to choose such moral values.

Ford illustrates an awareness of good and evil through his very speech defending his actions: ‘we’re living in a funny world kid... it’s a screwed up, bitched up world, and i’m afraid it’s going to stay that way. And i’ll tell you why. Because no-one, almost no-one, sees anything wrong with it’ (208) By positing himself as separate from everyone who can’t ‘see anything wrong with it’, he implies that he does see something wrong with it. Thus by attempting to justify his actions on the basis of moral awareness, i.e. that society is immoral anyway so his actions don’t count as immoral, he reveals his awareness of moral values. If able to recognise the moral evil in his surrounding society, it follows that he should be able to extend this moral awareness into making the correct moral choices in his personal life. His cool logic and intelligence lead him to unintentionally reveal his ability to choose moral values. As Owen Clayton has noted, Ford describes himself as paranoid schizophrenic, his ‘moral confusion leading from a disintegration of the self’(Clayton, 2004), and yet ‘his italicised voice seems to suggest multiple personality disorder, rather than Schizophrenia’(Clayton, 2). This further destabilises Ford’s reliability as narrator.

Clayton has also written of the significance of stereotype and cliché in The Killer Inside Me, noting that such techniques are used deliberately by Thompson to form ‘resistance to society’ (Clayton, 2). Further to this, Clark and Horsley both note that Lou’s cliché’s are a form of violence. ‘Lou’s weapons are cliches’ (Horsley 2005, p19); by boring the people around him with overused clichés he is attacking them verbally, ‘an act of veiled violence’ (Clark, 53). This is significant because it reveals language to be just another false construct by Ford to absolve himself for his crimes; he uses society’s language, along with their hypocrisy, to simultaneously carry out and justify his actions. ‘Cliché, the production of dead language, is linked with murder, the production of dead people’ (Clayton, 6), and so it appears that Ford’s language is the key to unlocking the meaning of the narrative.

Like Ford, Corey attempts to escape responsibility for his actions by affecting insanity, but his cool satire betrays his moral awareness. What makes the satire work is the underlying moral knowledge inherent in the humour. For example, at various points in the text he stages subtle resistances to racist commentaries by other characters. Ken says ‘niggers ain’t got no souls because they ain’t really people’, and Corey retorts, ‘But if they ain’t people, what are they?’ (Pop. 1280, 437). His subtle questioning of Ken’s racist comments hint at a wider social and moral awareness than his self-description allows. For his particular brand of satire to work, there has to be a moral basis; without the implicit moral criticism, the humour in the exchange falls flat.

Whilst displaying moral awareness in these instances, however, Corey is eager to emphasise his sense of exception from moral duty. As he explains to Uncle John, ‘I can’t help what I am’ (502). Inwardly however, he decides that ‘What I loved was myself and I was willing to do anything I God-dang had to go on lying and cheating and drinking whiskey and screwing women and going to church on Sunday with all the other respectable people’ (502). The reference to ‘all the other respectable people’ can be read as an acknowledgement of institutionalised socially acceptable sinning in a hypocritical society, an issue which allows him to get away with his own sins. For example, to cover his tracks when sleeping with Amy, Corey tells a group of townsmen that he had seen a naked woman committing adultery. He then muses to himself,

It was just a shot in the dark of course. Sort of a double shot. I figured that with
this many Pottsville citizens involved, someone was just about bound to be two-timin’
his wife, or someone’s wife two-timin’ him...Anyways, it sure looked like my shot hit home...Mr Dinwiddie started to ask just whose house I was referring to, but the others
shot him a look that shut him up fast (526).

Surprisingly, Corey then rejects this idea of himself as a sinner like any other just a few pages later in his allusion to himself as the son of God: ‘One cross is bad enough but I hadn’t ought to carry a whole god-dang lumberyard around with me!’ (532) His evident view of himself as a servant to the Lord, a sufferer, is ludicrous in light of his previous statement: ‘What I loved was myself’.

* * *

Nick: ‘I mean, well what’s worse George, the fella that craps on the doorknob
or the one who rings the doorbell?’
George: ‘But, but- suppose the same person does both?’ (544).

The above exchange epitomises the theme of moral responsibility which runs through the text; while Corey would have us believe that it is God who ‘craps on the doorknob’, thus making himself the innocent accomplice, Thompson reveals through Corey’s verbal inconsistencies his ultimate awareness of his responsibility. Under the combined cover of his ‘insane’ Christ-like delusions and his icy satire, Corey attempts to excuse his behaviour to the reader through a combination of pinning the blame on society, madness and God. Thompson disallows this view in George’s reply: ‘But, but- suppose the same person does both?’ This answer reveals the ultimate responsibility and agency of humanity for their actions; Thompson recognises both ‘the necessity and impossibility of making sense of [evil]’ (Clark, 50), and, through Nick’s refusal to take responsibility, reveals the inherent limitations of the grand narratives society has developed in order to explain evil. Ford attempts to escape responsibility by pleading insanity, but again Thompson reveals his disguise through the very language in which he uses to create it. Thompson uses Ford and Corey to reject all ‘grand narratives about evil’ (Clark, 51). ‘[the text] erases any clear moral or psychological boundaries between good people and evil ones and to suggest... that murderers are not outsiders at all’ (Clark, 62). David Glover describes the confessions of Ford and Corey as ‘unreadable, beyond interpretation’(David Glover ‘The Thriller’ in The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction Martin Preistman Ed., 2003 p149), but what he does not acknowledge is that they are deliberately so; by bombarding the reader with conflicting excuses and random clichés, Ford and Corey create smoke screens to cover the fact that they are fully responsible for the murders.

Thompson reveals the dangerous absolving properties of grand narratives concerning evil, reaffirming the retro concept of innate monstrosity; he illustrates that evil cannot be fully explained by science. The individual is ultimately morally responsible for his actions. Corey, like Ford, acknowledges the emptiness at the moral core of society, ‘with all the sad terrible things that the emptiness had brought people to’ (Pop. 1280 p566) and blames this on God- ‘that ain’t hardly my fault... I was just doin’ my job’ (p561). Corey concludes his ‘defence’ by inciting religious language: ‘Christ knew it was clear: love one another’. The phrase rings hollow in the light of his crimes against humanity, and, whilst it may be true that Corey and Ford’s actions are influenced by the hypocrisy of small town society, the responsibility for their crimes still lies with them. The crucial issue in terms of religion is that of free will; Corey asks ‘just how much free will does any of us exercise?’, inviting the reader to question human agency. His motives with doing this are to further convince the reader that events are out of his control through yet another false guise.

‘The Killer Inside Me’s attempts to use psychoanalysis to critique mainstream society fail because the psychoanalysis used is a fixed part of that society, including its stereotypes and cliches’(Clayton, 8). Lou’s insights into his condition are thus proved bogus, and his alibi is shattered to reveal the moral culpability at the heart of humanity. He ‘represents his schizophrenia as an internalisation of society’s hypocrisy’(Horsley 2001 p123) in order to distract the reader from his own moral sanity and ability to make moral choices. Pop. 1280’s religious imagery also fails due to the clichéd and conflicting messages Corey uses to confuse the reader, again revealing his agency and ultimate moral culpability.

Copyright © 2010 Mary Stringer