Today’s piece is basically a recommendation post introducing a documentary and a director.
The documentary is called Curiosity, produced by the Discovery Channel. It ran for two seasons, with more than ten episodes per season. Each episode stands on its own, revolving around a question that makes people intensely curious.
The episode I especially want to recommend is Season 1, Episode 14 of Curiosity. Its title is “How Evil Are You”.
The guest host for this episode is American director Eli Roth, who directed the famous horror film Hostel. Under his guidance, the Curiosity crew recreated the famous Milgram obedience experiment. They wanted to see just how much “evil” ordinary people might reveal under certain special circumstances—for example, when pressured by an authority figure.
If you know anything about psychology, the “obedience experiment” should not be unfamiliar to you. But I’m guessing that when you see it presented so vividly and dramatically in the film, it will still come as quite a shock.
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There’s one particularly interesting behind-the-scenes anecdote in this episode. In between planning the recreation of the “obedience experiment”, Eli Roth went to visit James Fallon, the author of The Psychopath Inside and a renowned neuroscientist. He asked Fallon to scan his brain using functional magnetic resonance imaging, hoping to find out just how “evil” he himself was.
The results showed that Eli Roth’s “empathy” response was markedly different from that of ordinary people. Empathy means resonating with other people’s feelings—emotionally putting yourself in their place.
Fallon found that when Eli Roth looked at things associated with positive emotions, such as children playing or cute dogs, the orbitofrontal cortex responsible for empathy in his cerebral cortex became significantly activated. This showed that when Eli Roth saw other people displaying positive, sunny emotions, he would become happy right along with them—his empathy for positive events was no different from that of a normal person.
But when Eli Roth looked at things associated with negative emotions, such as someone having a gun pressed to their head or a bloody battlefield, his orbitofrontal cortex simply “shut down”. He seemed completely unmoved by negative, brutal events, with no empathic activation at all.
If you’ve already finished listening to last week’s New Knowledge Class, “Special Issue: The Survival Advantages of Psychopaths”, then you know that a lack of empathy is a typical response of “psychopaths”.
Fallon told Eli Roth bluntly that he was a “part-time psychopath”.
A full-fledged psychopath has no empathy for either positive or negative events, whereas Eli Roth is only numb to negative events. He’s simply a person with bloodlust.
That might explain why Eli Roth can make torture por**n like Hostel.
In The Psychopath Inside, James Fallon also revealed more details about this story. Eli Roth told Fallon privately that the first movie he saw as a child was Alien—and he threw up right there in the theater. In other words, Eli Roth was actually terrified of bloody, gory things when he was young. Given his childhood nature, he should have grown up to make nothing but romance films. So how did he later make a complete 180-degree turn?
James Fallon told Roth, “You’re treating yourself.” In Fallon’s view, the slaughter films Eli Roth later made resembled a kind of exposure therapy—like people with arachnophobia deliberately approaching spiders to overcome their inner fear.
He started out as an innocent little lamb, forcing himself to smell blood. Then, after smelling it again and again, he somehow fell in love with that bloody smell and turned himself into a “part-time psychopath”. Whether this was a blessing or a curse for Eli Roth himself, who can say.
All I know is that, for a gore-loving movie buff like me, this was definitely a wonderful surprise.
p.s.:
On the right in the image below is Eli Roth playing a Jewish commando in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. That’s right—he’s the one who smashes a Nazi’s head with a baseball bat. Doesn’t he look pretty abnormal at first glance?
Note
- This article in the “New Psychology Knowledge Mini-Class” series was a short popular-science essay and miscellany piece written at the time to accompany related content from Zhichao Wei: New Psychology Knowledge Class. It was published on the now-closed platform Fantuan, and the original link no longer exists.
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