Was Todd Evil???????? - Apt Pupil (1998) Discussion

[–] voice_of_all_reason 19 years ago

No, he's pretty bad. The movie leaves out the true ending, in that Todd kills Mr. French when confronted, then snaps and heads to the highway with his rifle to snipe drivers until the police finally take him down.

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[–] kdeluc428-1 19 years ago

of course he was evil...he blackmailed the guy and made him do weird things! sicko!

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[–] fredbel6 18 years ago

Who knows? Perhaps that's just the message of the movie : we all are evil (some more than others), and dependent of our influences, we can do good, or evil... In a sense it maybe explains how so many Germans could have sided with a mad man like Hitler.

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[–] dead_doll00 18 years ago

I believe that he didn't start out evil. When he met Dussander he went down a road that took a turn for the worst the moment he chose to resort to blackmail to get details of Dussander's life from the old man. Even they, he could have been a redeemed character had all that contact with Dussander and his obsession with the Nazi's stories not warped his ideals and had he not developed such a deep fascination with violence and hate.

I think the Todd of the beginning of the book/movie, in a strange way, represents most of us. It asks us what we would have done in a similar situation, had we found out about Dussander, and how those decisions would have affected us. We are all capable of good and evil based on the decisions we make and based on the influences of the people in our lives. If an "evil" person has more influence on us than anyone else (ie. Dussander clearly has more influence over Todd than, say, Mr. French) then we will be driven to be evil ourselves, eventually.

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[–] 18 years ago

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[–] stevenlogandk 18 years ago

Well, I got some nine killings under my belt, myself. But I'm not evil. Its okay for one to snap and snipe people of the freeway.. Not evil atall.

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[–] melacynthe 18 years ago

Well, its a perfectly natural thing to do, isn't it?

(Insert something clever here)

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[–] ci03mak 18 years ago

Hey tferreira23, what an insightful response. I agree with your perspective, but there is just one piece missing from your jigsaw puzzle. If Todd was not evil, why did he kill a helpless pigeon with a basketball??? Do you not think that this act of violence may indicate that Todd was in fact going through "change" regardless of his will? And that perhaps, he was becomming evil under the influence of a walking, talking, breathing nazi? However, to adopt the view that Todd was not evil but was rather protecting himself from disaster is equally plausible of course.

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[–] ferreira0665 18 years ago

The bird was dead anyway. Yes he could have taken it to a vet to fix its broken wing. But if that could have been done why hadn't somebody done it already? The bird was going to die. It was just lucky a cat or something else hadn't nailed it yet. I am guessing wings are very fragile so if he happened to pick it up to try and save it he could have made it worse.

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[–] stevenlogandk 18 years ago

Yeah, *beep* that *beep* Thats for *beep* boyscouts. Kill the birds!

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[–] Y2Johnny 18 years ago

I haven't seen the movie yet, but I fully intend on doing so. However, I just read the book, and based on the book, I have to disagree with you. I believe Todd already started out evil. He was cold and calculist, knowing full well what he was doing when he started blackmailing Dussander. And in the book, at least, it shows his descent into even-more-evil. He kills the bird, running over it on his bike several times, he kills several bums, and lastly kills Mr French and goes on a rampage. He had wet dreams about the concentration camps and killing bums. If that is not evil, I don't know what is, really.

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[–] ferreira0665 18 years ago

they tone alot of that down for the movie.

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[–] melacynthe 18 years ago

yeh, the movie almost succeeds in making him look like the victim of the bad old nazi man

(Insert something clever here)

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[–] cheekeeteeta 18 years ago

I only read the short story and also concluded from it that Todd was evil to begin with. I think it made the novella that much creepier. By the way, I found it's ending one of the most simple yet chilling that i've ever read. that last sentence stayed with me for days. So i hesitate to see the movie, if they just made it about a somewhat innocent kid being "turned" evil by an evil man. I don't think most people would resort to blackmail even if it was an opportunity to have information about a subject that we find fascinating. It takes a lot of arrogance and to follow through with it. The idea had a very strong and perverse appeal to Todd because it was an opportunity to dominate. So it wasn't just curiosity that led Todd to Dussander's doorstep.

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[–] 18 years ago

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[–] jschillig 16 years ago

I'm going more on the book (which I've just been re-reading) than the movie, but I do believe Todd had a little something wrong with him from the get-go. True, he did have an interest in the Holocaust, even an eerie fascination--there's nothing necessarily wrong with that. If it hadn't been for others who had that interest, we wouldn't know what we do about it--and maybe the twits who deny it ever happened would have more headway.

But at the age he was when the book started (thirteen), Todd was old enough and smart enough (smarter, even, than most his age) to know that the whole thing wasn't some horror movie--that it was real, that real people suffered and died, people with hopes and dreams and loved ones. It wasn't his fascination that was the problem--it was the lack of moral horror. His reaction was more "Whoa! COOL! I wanna hear all the REALLY gross stuff!" rather than "Sure, I find this story interesting in a way--but God, those poor people! How could something like this have happened?" (Which might have led him into a different field altogether--the question of those who looked the other way.)

I forget whether it was in the movie or not, but there was a point early in the book where Todd tells Dussander about the first paper he did on the Holocaust. He explains that he made sure to take the tone that most historians did--that the Holocaust was a horrible thing and that we can't let it happen again--and that helped get him an A. The point is, that whole tone of moral horror was just a role he adopted to get himself a good grade. Most people wouldn't have had to play the role...they would have FELT it.

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[–] lostn 13 years ago

The basketball scene was watered down. In the book, he rides his bike over the bird, then reverses back over it, and rides over it again. He continues this for 5 minutes after the bird stops twitching.

It was most certainly not a mercy kill.

The book is far more explicit about whether he is evil or not.

And yes, Todd was sick even before he met Dussander. You can't pin all this on Dussander. Todd always had a morbid and unhealthy fascination with concentration camps. When he forced Dussander to tell him about them, he starts having dreams and fantasies about himself being a Nazi torturing jews, and enjoys it. It gives him hardons and wet dreams. He masturbates after having these fantasies.

He hates his girlfriend and can't get it up when he's with her. Only keeps her around to look normal to other people. He hates his parents, and often imagines shooting them.

He kills a bunch of winos and feels no remorse for doing it. He kills Ed French when cornered by him, then goes and snipes people for hours.

The only thing Dussander did to him was tell him about conentration camps, which he made the guy do. Then Dussander made up a story about a safety deposit box in order to defend himself from any attempts by Todd to murder him.

Dussander didn't awaken any evil in Todd, or turn him evil. The evil was always there, it just didn't find an outlet until later. It was Todd who awakened an evil in Dussander. Dussander was evil during the time of his war crimes. But it was dormant until he met Todd. He tried to live normally and cut himself off from his past but couldn't when Todd made him relive all those events.

Dussander did not tell or encourage Todd to murder anyone. He was really a victim to Todd, and had they not met, he would not have gone back to murdering people.

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[–] melacynthe 18 years ago

In this case, I don't see blackmail as an "evil" act, it was self preservation. Blackmail was a way of making sure the old man knew that if anything should happen, the secret would get out. You wouldn't confront a mass murderer/serial killer without some kind of safety net, would you? Some way of saying "I know you did these things, but if I disappear because of telling you so then people will know who you are and what you have done..."

I don't believe that Dussander 'made' Todd become evil... Todd made the choices to continue his lessons, he asked questions about darker and more disturbing topics. He was influenced, yes... but he was already curious, already interested, the more he learned the more he wanted to know.

(Insert something clever here)

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[–] lostn 13 years ago

In this case, I don't see blackmail as an "evil" act, it was self preservation. Blackmail was a way of making sure the old man knew that if anything should happen, the secret would get out. You wouldn't confront a mass murderer/serial killer without some kind of safety net, would you? Some way of saying "I know you did these things, but if I disappear because of telling you so then people will know who you are and what you have done..."

Keeping dirt on a guy to stop him from killing you is fine in my book. But forcing him to do things he doesn't want to do, such as relive the attrocities he commited and tried to forget about, or putting on an SS uniform and making him march is a separate matter.

If it was only self preservation Todd was concerned about, he didn't need to keep visiting Dussander every day. He could have left the guy alone. He used blackmail to feed his sick fantasies, not to protect himself from Dussander. Dussander would not have done anything to him had he stopped visiting him.

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[–] rockycairns 15 years ago

In the book he's killing Hobo's and then kills his teacher before heading to the highway with his rifle and sniping drivers.

Dude was f-cking insane.

They tone down his role quite a bit in the film.

"It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything." - Tyler Durden

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[–] jseger9000 15 years ago

I don't remember the movie so well, but having just reread the book: Todd was evil from the get-go. He found a pile of the old pulp 'war' magazines that had cover paintings of Nazis torturing women and had decided that he had discovered his purpose in life.

When he goes to Dussander the first day, he says he wants Dussander to tell him all the really 'gooshy stuff' that they had to leave out in school and those magazines.

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[–] kairingler 14 years ago

well i do believe there was some evil in him,, i mean why would you purposely snoop into someone else 's life,, dig up dirt on them,, and then torture them with it,, i believe once he found out, he should have just turned him in quietly,, but then of course we wouldn't have a mov ie.

are you going to bark all day little doggie,, or are you going to bite

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[–] I_Shall_Be_Released 14 years ago

I don't think either Todd or Dussander were evil. But if you're gonna say Dussander is evil, then that makes Todd equally bad.

Both start out pretty okay. Todd is just curious kid who doesn't fully understand what he's delving into. He's like any other kid who's interested in violent things. The difference here is that Todd actually has an outlet, something to fuel the more animalisitc tendencies within human nature.

Then you've got Dussander. He has done some terrible things in his past, but starts in the novella as a harmless old man who has put the worst moments of his life behind him. Just like Todd, he also has nightmares. This is not very clear in the movie and partly why Dussander's characterization was not very effective.

Once the two begin talking is when they sort of unleash the darkest parts of their humanity. And they need more outlets, so both begin to kill homeless people. We are all capable of the same things, just because both Todd & Dussander have committed terrible crimes it doesn't mean either were 'evil'.

I think by the end of the novella, however, Todd's character had really transformed for the worst. It is quite sad in that regard. He starts out as a curious little boy and by the end his psyche is completely effed up.

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[–] tad-32 14 years ago

I think he was evil, definitely a sociopath, just that it had not fully bubbled to the surface until after his association with Dussander, the killing, and the blackmail of his teacher.
Nietzsche said (and I'm paraphrasing most likely) "...when you stare into the abyss, the abyss also stares into you..." to some degree that's what happened. However at any moment, Todd could have looked away, could have done the 'good' thing, but didn't.

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[–] 14 years ago

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[–] lostn 13 years ago

In the book, he was most certainly evil, and that was not the result of manipulation from Dussander. He was a sick and twisted boy from the very beginning.

In the movie he was not evil, but simply a jerk who became corrupted by the influence and manipulation of Dussander.

They changed his character quite a bit for the movie, and antagonized Dussander more. I would argue that in the book, Todd was more evil than Dussander, concentration camps notwithstanding.

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[–] 13 years ago

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