By Katherine Ramsland 

(Continued)

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Chapter 2: Split Personalities?

Costner never had ambitions to play a serial killer, but he found the Brooks character intriguing and the script unique.  "I was immediately taken with it," he said. "I had to call up the writers and congratulate them on how original it was.  It's one of the best scripts I've ever read.  It's incredibly well-crafted."  Well, yes and no.

Apparently Evans and Gideon believe that someone can actually be a split personality in the Jekyll-Hyde sense, although no criminologist or psychologist has ever found one.  Personality dictates behavior, profilers say, so it's unlikely that Brooks can be "genuinely loving," as Evans says in one interview, but also have this mode of remorseless, erotic violence.  More likely, he protects his "normal" life as an extension of his narcissism. 

Dennis Rader

While it's true that killers such as BTK, John Wayne Gacy, and Jerome Brudos had wives and families and seemed to be respectable members of the community, they were not the well-rounded people like the person that Brooks presents.  Even in their "normal" lives, they were deceptive, manipulative, self-centered, and without remorse.  They play-acted their way through life, using seemingly generous acts for their own ends.  While compartmentalizing is the norm among those serial killers who keep careful control over their lives, they generally don't have a conscience about much of anything — especially not to the point of attending 12-step meetings.  It's the secret life that more closely depicts who they are. 

Yet there was one solid psychological moment that expressed the addiction like no other film of this genre has: Brooks tells a wannabe serial killer that picking out a victim is like falling in love.  How he describes this experience sounds like what several actual killers have said. (A side note: What he does with this wannabe provides one of the more unique scenes.)  In addition, when juxtaposed against Brooks's humdrum "normal" life, it's clear that in killing he's found the one arena of excitement that can energize him.  That, too, is confirmed by some theories about serial murder.

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by Katherine Ramsland

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