MOVIES & CRIME: UNFAITHFUL

Personality Profiling:   Edward, the Husband

Unfaithful

What a windy day in the city . . .  Gee I take the train all the way out here for a meeting and I didn’t expect the winds to change to this extent. Uggh . . . my papers, my things . . . they’re flying everywhere from the gust.  Oh no!  They’re blown everywhere!  Wait, who is this? Phew, what a nice gesture.  He’s cute too . . . and exotic.  Hmmm . . . I think I will take up on his offer and go upstairs to his place. 

Diana Lane and Olivier Martinez in Unfaithful

Uh-oh.  A married suburban woman takes a trip out to the city for a meeting and some shopping but meets a stranger by chance — a younger, Spanish stud who grasps her attention by his nice gesture and old world charms.  Paul is a stud.  It does not hurt that he is.  Connie has had a hectic day and needs a relief amidst the chaos of windy chills and the swarm her belongings undergoes scattering her work life onto the streets of New York City.  Only she has forgotten that she is married!  She goes up to the younger man’s apartment and they have small talk; he ices her knee scrapes and gives her a book from his library collection.   What a nice gesture.  After their initial meeting, Connie uncovers his contact and calls him up.  He asks her to meet him.  They do.  Then they have completely spontaneous sex which more than excites titillates rushes newfound sensations inside this suburban wife.  Well, the younger man owns the spontaneous sex.  Connie is restrained and hesitant at their first encounter.  Connie shakes and trembles as the young stud gets his hands on her unraveling her clothes seducing her with his old world charms.  She has not done this before; she is not uninhibited.  She is inhibited. 

Richard Gere in Unfaithful

Neither is her husband. Edward is not uninhibited.  Why do I say this?  The two characters both do something atypical based on their usual personalities.  Offenders are uninhibited; non-offenders are inhibited.  But Edward does something that is a case for voluntary manslaughter —gripping a snow globe off of a table which he sees on Paul’s, a gift he as given to his own wife Connie, a discovery of an affair with an attractive younger man which would reasonably rouse disturbed feelings in any man.  He crushes Paul's skull with the snow globe against his head using applied force. The man immediately bleeds and dies before the husband.  Before Edward does his act, his breathing rises to a disturbed rhythm showing his upset state.  Edward may be an inhibited suburban man but not your best citizen.  But he is not a cold-blooded killer either.  He cries. A cold-blooded killer would not have felt . . . guilty.  He shows remorse for his severe mishap.  Ah, so we begin to weave a complex web of lies and cover ups. 

California Personality Inventory

California Personality Inventory studies at University of California at Berkeley have found 18 true/false claims similar to Minnesota Multi-Phasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) in which a third of CPI are also on the MMPI. CPI describes not psychopaths but the normal population. Measuring a person’s intelligence, age, and socioeconomic status, higher CPI score indicates a highly socialized person —your high school’s best citizen is at the top.  Inmates and prisoners are at the bottom of the CPI scales. Frequent marijuana users have a lower score than occasional or non-users.  College students who cheated on their exams have a lower score than those who have not.  Highly socialized individuals behave with “rectitude and probity.”  Your high school’s class president and year book editors make best citizens.  MMPI has 566 subdivisions of personality which measures psychopathological problems. Delinquents usually answer these surveys dishonestly so you cannot gauge their real answers. 

MMPI

1.) Hypochondriasis (Hs): abnormal preoccupation with physical ailments. 

2.) Depression (D): Self-deprecation 

3.) Hysteria (Hy): stress avoidance by conversion into physical or mental symptoms. 

4.) Psychopathic deviate (Pd): conflict with authority and shallow personal attachments. 

5.) Masculinity-femininity (Mf): high scores represent opposite sex attitudes and behaviors. 

6.) Paranoia (Pa): Undue defensiveness, suspiciousness. 

7.) Psychoasthenia (Pt): anxiety, fearfulness, guilt. 

8.) Schizophrania (Sc): bizarre affect; withdrawal from personal contact. 

9.) Hypomania (Ma): unproductive hyperactivity. 

10.) Social Inversion (Si): social insecurity and shyness. 

Criminals and psychiatric patients have a high Pd.   Not only criminals but actresses; Gretta Garbo’s old screen tests shows shallow emotions.  High Pd scorers have behaviors which look odd to normal bystanders —shooting a person which skids and brushes against another’s outer skin for example.   Unfortunately, poverty is a main cause for high MMPI scores among its inhabitants.  I would explore Edward’s Hysteria.  White-collar crimes are often met with higher Hysteria scale.  Sexual perversion = high Mf scale.  

CPI Scores of Male Groups Differing in Socialization 

Male samples	Number of cases	Averages	Standard Deviation
1  1.  High school “best citizens”	90	39.44	4.95
2.  Medical school applicants	70	39.27	4.82
3.  Bank officers	71	39.06	4.61
4.  City school superintendents	200	37.58	4.19
5.  Business executives	116	37.47	4.72
6.  College students	1,745	37.41	5.28
7.  Electronic technicians	1,745	37.41	5.28
8.  Correctional officers	620	36.72	5.47
9.       Skilled and semiskilled workers	108	36.62	5.17
10.   High school students	4,474	36.46	5.56
11.  Social work graduate students	182	36.40	4.62
12.   Military officers	495	36.38	4.74
13.   Machine operators	105	35.99	4.98
14.   Psychology graduate students	89	34.24	4.23
15.   Selective service inductees	139	32.83	6.71
16.   High school “disciplinary problems”	91	31.25	5.40
17.   County Jail Inmates	177	29.27	6.44
18.   Young delinquents, California	206	28.66	5.86
19.   Prison inmates, New York	94	28.28	5.80
20.   Prison inmates, California	177	27.76	6.03
21.   Training school inmates, New York	100	26.58	5.98

 

Total samples 1-15 [non-offenders]   8.559                                   36.70                                      5.65

Total samples 16-21 [offenders]        845                                       28.58                                      5.98

 

 

                                    diff. = 8.12 [between non-offenders and offenders]

                                    C.R. = 10.55 [critical ratio]

                                        P < .01 [statistical significance]

  

What is a psychopath?    

“Irresponsible, impulsive, undependable, tactless, egocentric, deficient in ability to calculate own stimulus value, incapacity to evaluate consequences of own behavior and marked facility in rationalization.” 

 Quick Tip:  Criminal minds show high competency in rationalizing other’s behaviors and situations. 

Convicted murderer Phil Spector (my opinion of a recent psychopath)

Cleckley finds psychopaths to have poor judgment and failure to learn from experiences.  Whereas high school’s best citizen shows responsibility, an understanding of social controls; self-control where approval of social goals has been shown.  

Gough describe psychopaths: 

 "overevaluation of immediate goals as opposed to remote or deferred ones, unconcern over the rights and privileges of others when recognizing them would interfere with personal satisfaction in an way; impulsive behavior or incongruity between the strength of the stimulus and the magnitude of the behavioral response; inability to form deep attachments to other persons or to identify in interpersonal relationships; poor judgment and planning in attaining defined goals; lack of anxiety and distress over social maladjustment and unwilling to consider maladjustment; tendency to blame others and take no responsibility for failures; meaningless prevarication often about trivial matters in situations where detection is inevitable; almost complete lack of dependability of and willingness to assume responsibility; and emotional poverty." 

Diane Lane and Richard Gere in Unfaithful

Edward is not a psychopath.  Because he showed anxiety and distress after committing manslaughter, his emotional ranges are clearly expressed that of a normal person who happened to find himself in a situation he had not planned.  But he does not immediately turn himself in to the police.  He covers up his murder by rolling Paul’s body up in a rug.  To top off his act, he is negligent towards a dead man’s body leaving it in the trunk of his car for days.  He finally dumps Paul’s body in the town’s waste yard.

Diane Lane's character Connie has an affair with Olivier Martinez's Paul

Adultery of a spouse and the act of adultery is sufficient grounds for jury to find the defendant in fact had been provoked.   If the defendant finds the spouse in the act, then the Courts find sufficient provocation.  Reasonable provocation states that a reasonable person would have been provoked; the person acted out of passion than judgment. 

•  Provocation caused a reasonable person to lose control. 
•  Defendant was in fact provoked; the provocation caused the defendant to kill the victim. 
•  The interval between provocation and killing had not been long enough for the passions of a reasonable person to cool. 

Olivia Martinez as Paul, Connie's other man 

Edward can plea for voluntary manslaughter under the argument that he was prompted to kill Paul when Paul disclosed the affair; upon seeing the snow globe he had gifted to his wife, he lost control of his emotions from the unraveling of his wife’s ongoing affair and the discovery of his own gift to her.  Edward’s murder charge is reduced to manslaughter by extreme disturbance —under the influence of extreme mental or external disturbance where a reasonable explanation is based.  But all of this could have been avoided if Edward would have trusted his wife.  Eventually, an inhibited suburban wife like Connie would indeed cut an affair off with a man like Paul.