Antisocial Personality Disorder or a Sociopath Essay Example
Antisocial Personality Disorder or a Sociopath Essay Example

Antisocial Personality Disorder or a Sociopath Essay Example

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  • Pages: 3 (643 words)
  • Published: March 6, 2017
  • Type: Film Analysis
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Amon Goeth first joined the Austrian Nazi party at the age of seventeen, he journeyed to Germany where he worked as guard in many failed labor camps and later in 1942 he was introduced to Oskar Schindler and became the commander of his Jewish forced labor camp. In 1994 Steven Spielberg released the film “Schindler's List”, which told the true story of Oskar Schindler using Jews to start a factory in Poland during World War Two. He witnessed the horror the Jews endured by the Nazi Party and started to save them.

In the Steven Spielberg film “Schindler's List”, the character of Amon Goeth was exaggerated just a bit to be shown as a psychopath to better show the mistreatment of Jews in slave labor camp. Amon Goeth was used in the film “Schindler's List” to symbolize the Nazi part

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y as a whole. It gave him an obvious, representation of someone who displays Antisocial Personality Disorder or a sociopath. Ralph Fiennes, the actor who played Goeth made Hitler himself look like a puppy. Though behind the Hollywood mask does not lay a saint; Amon Goeth was represented as a sadistic, human killing machine sociopath.

Goeth can be seen as pulling the trigger on every execution in the movie. He made his appearance by shooting a female Jewish engineer who advised him that he needs to re-pour a foundation. Goeth was hardly the only member of the Nazi party employed to guard Schindler's labor camp, yet he is seen as the only member to have executed any of the workers. Steven Spielberg used this technique to highlight Goeth's brutality, to position the audience to see him as evil,

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as he was symbolized as everything evil in the Nazi party.

Also it can be depicted that the movie was a little unfair to the character of Amon Goeth’s brutality. Steven D. Greydanus, a movie critic commented that “Amon Goeth's brutality was not necessarily heightened but that everyone else's was lowered” (Greydanus, 2000). Goeth in the film “Schindler's list” was highlighted as the main source, behind all the killings and the other members of the Nazi party were seen as bystanders, This gave the impression that he was the most psychopathic, sadistic member.

Steven Spielberg used Amon Goeth as the pure representation of evil, and I think that Spielberg wanted to make an obvious comparison between Oskar Schindler’s morality and Amon Goeth’s evil. Oskar Schindler is clearly defined in the film as the hero, but there cannot be a hero without a villain. Schindler and Goeth in many ways are very similar, both reckless drinkers, both money hungry and both sexually voracious. Steven Spielberg clearly classified their differences to position the audience into seeing that Oskar Schindler is the hero to contrast Goeth’s sociopathic behaviors.

Spielberg used a technique where a Jewish couple is getting married and the scene is then switched to Schindler drinking with friends, and then switches to Amon Goeth assaulting Helen Hirsch. This scene highlights Amon's barbarity to distinguish that he has the characteristics of Antisocial Personality Disorder. Another scene where Spielberg positioned the audience to see their differences is when Schindler and Goeth are having a conversation on the balcony, Oskar says to Amon “Power is when we have every justification to kill and we don't”.

Schindler urges Amon to stop killing the Jews

at the camp and like any sociopath; Amon refuses for he sees his actions as ok or normal to the “Jewish problem. ” To quote Howard Adelman, from the Novel Schindler’s list and the Holocaust, Truth, Art and Morality, “Oskar Schindler takes on Amon Goeth in a tournament of good versus evil. Goodness and evil spar like medieval knights” (Adelman, 1994). Steven Spielberg represented Amon Goeth as the ultimate bad guy/sociopath to highlight Schindler's heroism.

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