What is a psychopath? A psychopath is a person with a disorder that causes them to act in a violent, abnormal matter towards another human being. This may include, acting awkwardly social to crimes such as serious as murder. In the film House of Games, Mike, a con man sneakily tricks Margaret Ford, a psychiatrist into giving him her cash. This occurs not only once, but multiple occasions with many attempts to con her out of her life savings. To find if Mike is a psychopath, we will compare our evidence from the movie and corporate them with Bob Hare’s PCL-R checklist from The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson. The PCL- R Checklist is a list that consists of twenty items that would typically fall under the characteristics of a psychopath; …show more content… On the side, he acts like he is in love with Ford in order to get her money, this makes him manipulative. Knowing that Ford had feelings for him, he would use her heart in order to get the money. To get her eighty thousand, Mike had made it seem like his life was at risk with the mob if he had not given the money back by the next morning. Ford’s love for Mike caused her to withdraw the eighty thousand from her bank right then and there and Mike just left her stranded upon having the money in his cold hands. A tendency that stand out in Mike on the PCL-R checklist is “Item 4: Pathological lying” (Ronson 97). Pathological lying is when one lies consistently and consecutively. A psychopath lies because he or she feels a sort of dominant power over the person that is being lied to and that it lowers their chances of getting caught in the lie. That is exactly what Mike does to squirm his way out of the trouble he lands himself into. To Mike, lying becomes a skill when you are a can man for a living. Mike lies multiple times every day. The first time Ford and Mike encounter one another, he tells her to enter this poker game Show More
