The Psychopath as Artiste-Provocateur: "The Incident" [Larry Peerce, 1967, USA]

"The psychopath, like the child, cannot delay the pleasures of gratification; and this trait is one of his underlying, universal characteristics. He cannot wait upon erotic gratification which convention demands should be preceded by the chase before the kill: he must rape. He cannot wait upon the development of prestige in society: his egoistic ambitions lead him to leap into headlines by daring performances. Like a red thread the predominance of this mechanism for immediate satisfaction runs through the history of every psychopath. It explains not only his behavior but also the violent nature of his acts." -- Robert Lindner, Rebel Without A Cause: The Hypnoanalysis of a Criminal Psychopath

Released almost fifty-five years ago, The Incident remains a disturbing film -- even by today's standards -- in refusing a psychological comeuppance for its irredeemable villains. I write "psychological comeuppance" because I had to invent a term for the kind of act that might properly counterbalance the violence the film's two psychopath delinquents inflict upon a subway car full of passengers traveling from the Bronx to Manhattan on a typical late Sunday night. These psychopaths, Joe Ferrone (Tony Musante) and Artie Connors (Martin Sheen, in his debut screen performance), rarely inflict physical violence on the passengers but instead humiliate most of them in the form of threats, harassments, mocking criticisms, slurs, taunts, and other forms of verbal abuse. The psychopaths commit this abuse in a haphazard and improvised manner -- they target the passengers at random (unless a passenger dares to challenge them, in which case the challenger immediately becomes a new target) and then attack those passengers according to their particular vulnerabilities.

At the core of those vulnerabilities typically lie pathetic cowardice and hypocrisy, and this is where the film's unique structure comes into play. The Incident possesses an unusual narrative organization: the film's first ten minutes introduce the psychopaths, who threaten a billiards club manager, harass a couple, and then mug and beat a man just before hopping on the subway; the next thirty-eight minutes introduce the psychopaths' future victims; and the final hour consists of the torturous confrontation between the two sets of characters. During the nearly forty minutes when the psychopaths remain off-screen the viewer studies the other characters in relation to them, for the psychopaths' attitudes and behaviors set a comparative framework for the remainder of the action. Whereas the psychopaths refuse social masks or roles behind which they might otherwise hide their true selves and through which they might otherwise conform to the body politic, almost all of the psychopaths' victims have made a tacit agreement with society to conceal their true selves behind such masks and roles. For instance, the film introduces Arnold Robinson (Brock Peters) as a marginalized African-American who shields his wounded feelings of victimization behind a wall of militant anger; when his wife Joan (Ruby Dee) encourages him to exercise patience in his demands for social change Arnold rejects her temperance and expresses pride in identifying as an unrepentantly violence-endorsing, white-hating anti-Uncle Tom. But when the psychopaths race-bait Arnold with (among other disgusting taunts) repeated, aggressive use of the most offensive racial epithet in the English language, Arnold cannot bring himself to unleash the anti-white violence he has previously advocated -- he's all talk, and the public exposure of his true, and heretofore hidden, pusillanimity forces him to break down and cry.

In this manner the psychopaths act as confrontational artists whose off-the-cuff provocations cross the line of creative representation into the dangerous realm of the Real. Faced (and "faced" is a perfect word in this context, because director Larry Peerce makes startling use of shot-reverse shot close-ups to juxtapose the arrogant, sneering countenances of the psychopaths with the fearful, cringing countenances of the victims) with the Real in the truth the psychopaths uncover and in the Real the psychopaths live as walking ids, most of the victims break down psychologically and become reduced to crippled caricatures of their civilized selves. (In the film's final dark joke, the viewer is made to realize that the only passenger whom the psychopaths were not able to break down is a bum who remains passed out throughout the entire narrative. The psychopaths intended the bum to be their first victim, but since he doesn't even possess a position in society -- as symbolized by his state of unconsciousness -- the bum proves impervious to their bullying tactics.) The Incident thus posits that psychopaths serve a social function -- even if, or especially when, they refuse to don social masks or identities -- through their performative provocations. They hold up a mirror to the "average citizen" who has repressed his or her own psychopathic urges, desires, anxieties, hatreds, etc., and in doing so psychopaths show the "average citizen" who he or she really is. Despicable as they are, psychopaths who refuse to act as anything or anyone else cannot be charged with cowardice or hypocrisy, which is why -- to return to the first observation of this essay -- The Incident is so disturbing for delivering Joe and Artie's comeuppance in the unsatisfying form of a physical beating. These psychopaths are never exposed as frightened children underneath their outward bravado, nor are they revealed as defective or deranged according to pat mental health diagnoses -- in short, they are never broken down psychologically in the same manner as their victims. Even after they've been justifiably denied their physical safety and freedom the Real-ness of the psychopaths' confrontational performance persists because the Real they embody and disseminate can never be discredited, and thus the specter of their provocative art haunts and unsettles long after The Incident ends.