This is a million times better than any of the film-based re-appropriation memes out there. It's also probably the only truly successful meme using footage of Tom Cruise that doesn't make fun of his Thetan obssession, but rather his trademark po-faced intensity:
Speaking of which, apparently Christian Bale took inspiration from Tom for one of his finest roles. Can you guess which one? No, not Velvet Goldmine:
It was, in fact, AMERICAN PSYCHO. Quote:
And then one day he called me and he had been watching Tom Cruise on David Letterman, and he just had this very intense friendliness with nothing behind the eyes, and he was really taken with this energy
Seriously, it's just a matter of time before these guys appear on-screen together and have a psycho-off
I find it wonderfully perceptive of Christian Bale to have picked up on the idea of "superficial friendliness, but nothing behind the eyes". This is a common description used for genuine psychopathy, a subject I could never tire from studying. The awesome Jon Ronson's new book sees his customary humanistic approach applied to the weird and terrifying world of psychopaths:
Psychopathy is considered a dangerous personality disorder, and while my jaded friends who've worked at Broadmoor may scoff, I do still find it shocking on some level that instead of serving the sentence one is given for a corresponding crime, claim to be coo-coo and you could end up in an institution for the rest of your life. This is because while a transient psychotic episode may (rarely) lead an individual to commit a violent crime, a personality disorder obeys the three P's:
Persistent – consistent and inflexible pattern of coping over time
Pervasive – can be seen across different situations such as work, family and social relationships, and not just specific to offending
Problematic – has negative impact for themselves and/or others
What that means is that you ain't gon' change, son. Which means that nobody knows what to do with you, which means that only "preventative measures" can be taken as a viable solution for your care i.e. the most fun you'll ever have from now on is brewing prison wine (I don't know if they do this in Broadmoor, it just seemed like a good moment to reference an excellent blog).
What's mildly chilling is that the Biomedical model of mental illness (i.e. all things CBT and prescription meds related) has gradually adopted this same approach to illnesses well beyond the scope of personality disorder.
I'm fairly new to clinical research in mental health, having come from an Experimental Psychology background (which is NOT the same thing), but I still find it shocking to think that a major assumption within current approaches to mental illness is that underlying all disorders are stable, enduring traits that cannot be changed. These underlying "vulnerabilities", may then create a higher predisposition towards developing affective or psychotic disorders.
This stems from personality research, which is somewhat poo-pooed in Experimental Psychology, but has become a dominant feature of modern Psychiatry, and purports that concepts such as the Big Five are stable over time and predictive of all kinds of social outcomes, despite mixed evidence here and there...
Modern evidence-based therapies thus concentrate not on changing the person, but rather helping them come to terms with who they are (or what they have, depending on your narrative), and learning to accept themselves while adopt compensatory behaviours that will hopefully limit their suffering and that of those around them. I acknowledge that CBT is designed to change cognitions, but this is not the same as striving towards changing fundamental aspects of the self (a dangerous term that no self-respecting psychologist would use for fear of ridicule by the empirical community, but that psychoanalysts bandy about willy-nilly).
I can't find a good reference that discusses these various points directly, thus undermining my argument, but this article certainly broaches the topic indirectly in that it is now apparently hard to distinguish between mental illness and personality disorder in the current approach to mental health.
Also, check out A Barefoot Therapist Speaks.
Obviously I'm massively generalising and what I'm saying is coming from someone who would very much like to enter the world of Psychiatry and become a practising clinician, so feel free to disregard/assassinate with logic.
It's also weird to think that a single academic's personality checklist has utterly dominated the field of psychopathy research for over 20 years.
In fact, as with many such things in academia, sadly, attempts to move the field forward are not always met with open arms.
Poorly referenced diatribes aside, I think I've gone quite off-track given that this all started with a funny video of someone doing an Aussie stereotype.
The video was actually made by Adam Buxton, one half of my fave comedy duo Adam and Joe, who sadly have ended their run of excellent podcasts (but have not been thrown in the bin/trash and forgotten about!).
No one understands our beardy man-love
Incidentally, the other, taller half of the duo, Joe Cornish, recently released his debut film Attack the Block, which I thought was very confidently directed and highly entertaining. I wonder whether the DVD release will suffer due to the recent London riots...(see my last post).
Ok, I've run out of steam, so I'll end by giving my Song Of the Day here.
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