Psychopathic Personality Disorder (PPD) plays a central role in forensic clinical practice. It has relevance for violence risk and treatment responsivity; those suffering from it place financial and other burdens on services. PPD remains a controverted concept; the essence of the disorder remains disputed. In this chapter I examine the history of the concept, methods for its evaluation, its demography and its relevance to clinical practice—from the first interview, through risk formulation to intervention. I describe recent attempts to explicate the concept of the PPD, including the development of the Comprehensive Assessment of Psychopathic Personality (CAPP). I conclude by considering current controversies regarding the diagnostic significance of criminal behaviour, the predictive utility of historical instruments such as the Psychopathy Checklist Revised and the reliability of that instrument in forensic clinical practice.

The blockbuster syndrome

During the 1970s, the calculus by which a movie was considered successful or not in the marketplace had changed. Between the mid-and late 1960s, the studios teetered on the brink of insolvency because of the impact of the Paramount decrees, the national diffusion of television, and poor financial decisions made in their wake—the abortive attempt to convert to full stereoscopic production in the early 1950s among them. Starting with Universal's acquisition by MCA in 1962 and Paramount's absorption by Gulf and Western Industries in 1966, the classical Hollywood studios were all bought up by larger corporations who didn't really know how to run them, resulting in an industry-wide recession between 1969 and 1971. At the same time, in October 1968, the 34-year-old Production Code Administration (PCA) was replaced by a Code and Ratings Administration (CARA) that transformed the national audience—more or less homogeneous since its formation, except at the ethnic fringes—into a demographically segregated one. The conviction grew in Hollywood that the regular flow of product was no longer profitable because there was no longer a regular and predictable audience for its films. In such a volatile context, if a few productions became big hits, they could amortize those that produced a loss or simply broke even. This idea of engineering “event” movies to generate windfall profits and carry the rest along with them became known as “the blockbuster syndrome.” This was not a new phenomenon—“blockbusters” like Paramount's The Ten Commandments (Cecil B. DeMille, 1956) and MGM's Ben-Hur (William Wyler, 1959) had kept their respective studios profitable for years after their release, and expensive flops like Cleopatra (Joseph Mankiewicz, 1963) had nearly ruined 20th Century Fox. What was different was the amount of capital involved in hedging the bets.

Between 1972 and 1979, the average production budget or “negative cost” for a single film rose by 178 percent, or nearly four times the rate of general inflation. By the end of 1979, negative costs had doubled their 1977 level to reach the then-staggering sum of $8.9 million, so that the financial risks of production were substantially multiplied.

While digital stereoscopy represents the most recent manifestation of a process that began with Charles Wheatstone's stereoscopic line drawings nearly two centuries ago, it is not the end of it. The ultimate technology for seeing things in three dimensions is Virtual Reality (VR), which uses a hybrid of advanced modern technology—Lidar scanners, hyper-accelerated graphic cards, and so on—and the stereoscopic illusion first quantified by Wheatstone to create a state of sensory immersion that borders on otherness. Finding a way to massmarket the VR experience as a form of popular cinema, rather than as an enhanced form of video game, has become the new Grail Quest of the film industry. But VR also has a more elevated, philosophical justification.

The iconic French film theorist André Bazin believed that each new technological development in the history of cinema (e.g., the introduction of sound, color, widescreen, and 3-D) brought it closer to its ultimate destiny—the production of a total simulacrum of realty—which was implicit in its very beginnings. As he wrote in 1946:

Most of the three-dimensional (3D) cinema discussed or mentioned in this book originated in the United States and Europe, with some nods to work done in China, India, and Japan. Many other countries experimented with stereoscopic motion pictures in the early 1950s (e.g., Hungary, the Soviet Union, West Germany, Italy, and Mexico), but each produced only a few films in the process and experienced nothing like the 1952–55 boomlet in Hollywood. In the post-Avatar period, 2010–20, digital 3D movies were widely popular and produced by many non-Western industries, but only a handful of such films appeared outside of their domestic markets either in theaters or on 3D Bluray discs. When the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020–21 ravaged the world's film industries, stereoscopic films nearly disappeared altogether because they could not be viably exploited in either theaters, due to the possibility of viral infection, or homes, due to the scarcity of 3D-capable televisions since 2016. The omission of non-Western cinema cultures from this study is therefore due to a lack of accessibility rather than critical choice.

Motion pictures

The source of Émile Reynaud's despondency was apparently his failure to have invented true motion pictures, in which he was preceded by the Edison Corporation in 1893 and Lumières Freres in 1895. The Edison Kinetograph, actually “invented” by laboratory assistant William Kennedy Laurie Dixon (1860–1935), was a clever synthesis of existing principles and techniques derived from Eadweard Muybridge (series photography), Étienne-Jules Marey (chronophotography), and others that used celluloid roll film in a battery-driven camera to take photographic exposures of things in motion at the approximate rate of 40 frames (and later 16 and 24) per second. The Kinetograph incorporated what have come to be recognized as the two essential components of motion picture camera engineering: (1) a stopmotion device to ensure the regular but intermittent movement of the film strip through the camera (adapted by Dixon from the escapement mechanism of a watch) and (2) a perforated film strip (first innovated by Reynaud for his Théâtre Optique). Intermittency permits the unexposed film strip in its transit through the camera to be stopped for a fraction of a second before the lens while the shutter opens to admit light bouncing off the subject and expose the individual frames. The synchronization of the film strip and the shutter is accomplished by the perforations in the film strip, which is pulled through the camera by a system of clawed gears known as sprockets. This process is reversed in the projector or viewing device, with the perforations—or sprocket holes—ensuring the exact regularity of the film strip's movement as it passes through both machines. Because it was battery-driven, the Kinetograph was virtually inert, weighing about 600 lbs, and it could only be used inside of a purpose-built studio called the “Black Maria.” Furthermore, Edison did not initially commission the designing of a projector, so motion pictures made with the Kinetograph were first seen in a coin-operated peepshow device called the Kinetoscope. (In 1896, Edison bought the rights to a projector invented by C. Francis Jenkins and Thomas Armat and patented it as the “Edison Vitascope,” so that Kinetograph films could then be exhibited to large audiences.)

Stereoscopic prehistory

Most of us see the world in three dimensions. This is so primarily because humans possess binocular vision, although other factors such as foreground overlap, gradient texture, and relative size are important to depth perception too. (For example, the illusion of depth on the flat surfaces of paintings, drawings, and photographs depends on the replication of these alternate depth cues through the system of linear perspective.) Because our two eyes are aligned so that their fields of vision partially overlap, causing a slight parallax in which each eye sees objects from a slightly different point of view, their combination in our minds creates binocular vision. The distance between the two eyes of a normal adult is almost invariably 6.5 cm, and this binocular disparity provides cues that the brain automatically interprets as depth.

Humans since ancient times have also been understood as beings who create and manipulate signs—things that take the place of or stand for other things. We are the “representational animal,” or animal symbolicum in the term of early twentieth-century philosopher Ernst Cassirer. Representation (or “re-presentation”), significantly, is the central characteristic of art. So, it is not unnatural that three-dimensional representation would become an important issue for aesthetics early in our history. By the middle Renaissance, such concerns were manifest in the development of linear perspective in painting and drawing, as noted above; the disposition of scenographic space in the theater; and the manipulation of spatial perspective in landscape architecture, sculpture, and bas-relief. Contemporaneously, at the level of popular entertainment, a cultural precedent for three-dimensional cinema appeared in the form of the European peepshow, which in the eighteenth century spread to the United States, China, and Japan.

According to Richard Balzer, a peepshow is a closed or semi-closed box having at least one hole through which a perspective is seen, which may or may not use mirrors to create its illusion; the factor of enclosure is important, because it gives the viewer the sense of approaching an inaccessible space and seeing a hidden image, similar to the voyeuristic experience of watching a movie in a darkened theater. Its origin seems to date from the work of Italian painter and architect Leone Battista Alberti, who in 1437 developed an instrument to view perspectives through a small hole in a box.