#murderbfs

Quick disclaimer before i get too deep in my own head: this is one way to read the movie, not the only truth. i really got into the idea that Alex had begun the whole thing, rather than just choosing to follow along with nigels beliefs after his death.

i’m definitely not a psychologist or anything, and i don’t know everything about sociopathy or the actual clinical traits. this is just me pulling threads from the movie and noticing how certain behaviors alex shows line up really closely with what we tend to associate with sociopathic behaviours, and what that means if you view it from the perspective that he was the the true manipulator the entire time. it’s just really hard to ignore how loudly those traits ring in the film once you start paying attention.

alright. imagine the whole thing from the second alex stands up in class and starts talking about the Templars. not as some shy, fascinated kid but like someone who’s been told all their life they had descended from that very same bloodline. Nigel watches all of this unfold and it’s intoxicating. to him, alex isn’t just smart. he’s dangerously alive. Alex being so well read, like we see in nigel’s notes and like it’s said a bunch of times that he’s the top student because that’s the one thing that made his father proud, means something. it lets you imagine he had the kind of quiet genius to find the bloodline myths himself, to get enamoured with that history, to feed into the delusions (the whole monologue about what nigel’s beliefs were on their ancestors reads like something alex could have rehearsed) and then actually carry out the prophecy. he could have been the one to spark the idea, to convince nigel, to corroborate the destiny argument between them until it felt real. Then they go on to enact their twisted fantasies of murder. for alex, maybe the justification was a kind of proving. besting others, proving he was superior, a reckless rebellion against his father and the church; you can see the leopold & loeb echo (i wrote about that elsewhere), but there are plenty of ways he could have rationalised it. add in the sociopathic, manipulative tendencies. the way he scripts normal morality and files it away, and it becomes easy to picture him not only starting the whole thing but also neatly covering tracks, shifting blame onto nigel, and letting the cycle continue.

on the first day in the dining hall Nigel is watching him from across the room. it’s tiny and it’s huge. it suggests either nigel notices alex immediately because he’s already fixated, or they had some private orbit before the “official” meeting. (I have aus and fanfic ideas at the ready) either way, that look makes later things make sense. the left-behind book, the way certain details about the train show up in alex’s retelling. if they were paying attention to each other from the start, a lot of the supposed surprises stop feeling like random escalation and start feeling like collaboration.

the book nigel leaves behind is one of those small, intimate moves that functions as a dare and an invitation at once. nigel leaves the book; alex sees it. it’s a poke: i see you, do you see me back? that “poke and prod” dynamic is through their relationship. alex never rejects the invitations; he takes them. that’s important because it means they’re amplifying each other, not simply one leading the other. sometimes the leader/follower line is blurry; they’re mutual accelerants. that left-behind book is not just a prop, it’s proof they were feeding into one another.

where did alex’s delusions of grandeur come from? the easy explanation is that nigel recognised something in alex and named it, and that recognition let alex feel permission to act on darker impulses. but alex also has evidence of being well-read, a top student, someone who could have found the templar/bloodline mythology himself and been fascinated by it long before nigel. given the class scene and his background, it’s plausible alex was the one who first became interested in the prophecy, and nigel simply validated and amplified what alex already had.

most of what makes this reading feel possible comes from nigel’s notes and the holes in the story. from this interpretation, alex spends most of his time with nigel being told he has this darker, malicious thing inside him, and alex has been running from that idea his whole life. he knows he’s not normal, he recognises the sociopathic tendencies in himself, but he’s been raised on church morals and the version of him that everyone expects is a performance he’s learned to put on. so when nigel actually sees him and names those worst parts out loud, it’s terrifying and thrilling all at once: alex feels understood in a way he never has, and he hates that feeling because the person who understands him is also the embodiment of someone who rejected morality altogether. he tells himself he’ll never be the Jack Nigel wants, that he’ll fight it, and he tries, he really does deny it, but he can’t run from the truth forever. nigel frames it as fate and destiny and, piece by piece, alex starts to accept that script; nigel’s death becomes the catalyst that finally pushes him fully into that role, into being the person nigel always thought he could be.

although, he always had the "Jack" in him. Alex literally drugged and kidnapped nigel. like, think about that for a second. not a fight, not a dare that went too far, but drugged and kidnapped. he takes someone’s agency away on purpose, straps them into a plan, and then swings them over a train to “teach him a lesson.” and he’s smiling while he does it. even when josh begs him to stop, alex keeps going. that smile is not the smile of a kid messing around; it’s the smile of someone who’s getting something from the act itself. the thrill of control, the private satisfaction of having pulled the strings. Read wants to hand us a simpler line: alex is a rowdy teenage boy who made a bad decision that escalated. it’s an easy story, and the film makes it easy to accept because alex is charming and we want to root for him. but if you slow down and look at the details, the cadence changes. drugging and kidnapping are deliberate choices. swinging nigel back over the track after josh says stop is deliberate. smiling through it is deliberate. those aren’t mistakes; they’re behaviors that map onto what we’d call sociopathic tendencies. shallow affect, thrill-seeking through risk, habitual deception, and a real appetite for control.

so what does that mean for the narrative? it changes the stakes. if alex is actually getting off on that control, then he isn’t merely the passive kid dragged into tragedy; he’s an active participant in shaping it. the film asks us to feel for him, to accept his confusion and his grief. but maybe that’s the point. his charisma is part of his toolkit. he performs remorse when it helps him, and he hides what he needs to hide when it doesn’t. that smile in the train scene is a key. it’s a crack in the performance he gives everyone else. when you see it, you have to ask: is this the face of someone who made one terrible choice, or the face of someone who has been practising the look of normality while keeping a separate shelf for the things he actually enjoys?

how did alex know Nigel undid the train handle? the simplest explanation that fits the pattern im following is that they staged the incident together or at least confirmed details afterward to make it look like an accident. that kind of corroboration explains how alex seems to anticipate nigel’s motives later in his retelling. the pieces fit together too neatly for pure coincidence.

look at the aftermath. alex doesn’t mourn josh in a straightforward way. he avoids the confrontation and instead seeks proximity to nigel, someone he saw make the conscious choice not to reach out a hand to save. rather than wrestling with guilt or confessing, he focuses on the play, on the role, on the continuation of the narrative. that pattern matters. someone who truly grieved would have been more likely to confess or break down; alex instead moves toward the personification of the idea he and nigel had been enacting. he’s invested in the role more than in remorse.

When Susan dies, Alex shoves the knife away instead of reporting it. that’s active concealment, not simple fear of getting in trouble. choosing to hide evidence is a decision that preserves secrecy and keeps the story manageable for him. each time he dodges implication (each avoidance) it looks less like panic and more like control over what gets known. that behaviour adds to the sense of deliberate shaping of events. he hides things. he arranges what people see. He can let these pieces of information be glazed over in his retelling simply because he let sally believe Nigel had been playing tricks on his mind, absolving him from the responsibility or suspicion for his choice not to report anything.

the final scenes with sally and the gestalt conversation make the film’s bigger move explicit: this story is about perspective and manipulation. alex convinces sally (and by extension the audience) that he’s the sympathetic, confused teen who was pulled along. that final flip is where the film reveals that what we just watched might be the version alex wanted us to see. he’s good at convincing people he is the passive one. he’s good at persuading an audience to root for him, to justify his acts because they want to believe in him. the film benefits from that; it makes us complicit in preferring his version.

so what is alex? he’s not just reckless or performative. he’s a high-functioning manipulator who can quote morality like a script and then file it away when it no longer serves him. he needs to be seen; he wants an audience, and he wants someone who understands the horror in the way he does. nigel is that perfect sociopathic mirror: a confessor and collaborator. together they become a duet that validates and inflames the other’s worst instincts. As Gregory Read put it:

Alex is a sociopathic character.  You could say almost bordering on psychopathic, however I wouldn't necessarily go that far, I would say top level, high performing sociopath.  He will manipulate and control.  As I have said he'll be a really good CEO or merchant banker.

the cracks in alex’s story are the key evidence. I could go through every scene and justify it through this theory. Which is why I believe that the narrative is Alex yet again fooling the audience just like how he’s fooling sally. Each of those is a stitch in a fabric alex has sewn himself. read straight through, the film gives you a sympathetic protagonist. read closely, and the sympathetic story looks like a performance designed to minimize alex’s agency and maximize nigel’s. a version that lets alex be both victim and misunderstood hero while hiding the fact that he had a hand in building the whole thing.

i really don’t think alex is innocent. i think he knew too much from the start. I believe he and Nigel were in this together from the very beginning, feeding into each others delusions on the prophecy narrative, and that he nurtured and performed the role that let the violence happen. nigel isn’t the sole instigator; he’s the mirror that allowed alex’s darker side to be seen and acted on. the whole film depends on you liking alex enough to believe him. your job reading it this way, and the job of anyone who wants a different take, is to pull the script apart, follow the small details, and show how he builds the story he wants everyone to accept.

watching this movie for the 27th time made me really want to view the narrative from the lens of both nigel and alex being in on the entire thing from the very start, and the more I began writing this analysis the more I realised I could apply this theory to literally every single scene. Jesus christ.

Take this essay with a grain of salt! These are the ramblings of a girl who is way too sleep deprived for her own good, (and who has watched the movie 18 times in the past week) but this movie really got me thinking about their delusions of grandeur — that feeling that there’s always something extraordinary out there for us. The movie mirrors the kind of hope that religion offers, even if we’ve rejected the notion of God.

Disclaimer: I know enough about religion, but I’m not claiming to fully understand all aspects of it :) This is just a brief analysis and I could be entirely wrong. These are my interpretations of it all...

It’s interesting to view the story from both sides of the narrative.

Following along with Nigel’s whole “mythological reckoning” and “destined” argument as being actually true is one way of seeing it. But it’s also just as interesting to view it as his personal justification — a reason for why he always felt so out of place and not “normal” throughout his life. He needed reasoning for his behaviours, sexual orientation, and inability to socialise. So when he starts obsessing over the order and sees it as his “true purpose” to be the pike, an implement for killing, then finally meets alex and experiences homosexual attraction for the first time… he frames Alex as his "knave" or “jack,” the missing piece of the puzzle that explained why he was so extraordinarily fucked up.

Alex is a very unreliable narrator throughout the story, and I think both of them genuinely believe that they were made for some purpose because of how out of place they were all their lives until they met each other. But I also think Alex was unable to see that it may have just been a coping mechanism or psychological illusion that Nigel twisted to have moral reasoning for his actions. and you can see the parallel in Alex’s behaviour too — he justifies his bad choices under false reasoning. Both of these characters are very easily susceptible to the idea of a mythological practice being what has “made them” who they are. partly because of their issues, and partly because they’re still teenagers. There’s still that thin line connecting them back to childhood, the hope that you have a “purpose” in life, that the hardships you’ve faced aren’t your fault but a “predestined” act. Because it’s so hard to make sense of a world that feels cruel and unfair — why would a god have created it in such a way?

and when you’re young, especially, it feels unbearable to accept that maybe there isn’t a reason. if you’ve been isolated or mistreated your whole life, it’s almost comforting to imagine your suffering was written into some bigger plan, rather than admitting it was meaningless. that’s what makes them latch so tightly onto the myth: it offers structure. it says “you were always meant to be this way” (cough cough their homosexuality) instead of “you’re broken and nothing explains it.” it’s easier to be a tragic figure in a story than a kid in a random, uncaring world.

that’s also why the myth becomes so intoxicating for them — it takes all their shame, their loneliness, their inability to fit in, and transforms it into destiny. they’re no longer just two messed-up boys fumbling through adolescence; they’re chosen. and even if that destiny is dark (murder, violence, obsession), it’s still something greater than the nothingness they’re terrified of facing.

Nigel finds religion in Alex, in the idea that he gives him purpose and gives his murderous intent a driving force behind it all. 

soooo it leaves a lot of questions. Do you perceive it as the characters being destined to commit atrocities because of some old myth? or were they just two boys who loved one another but were so fucked up they fed into delusions to justify their moral ambiguity?

And thats why i think this movie sticks with you. It's about that desperate need for meaning. Nigel and Alex want their suffering to be part of something larger, and in finding each other, they turn their pain into a distorted kind of faith.

Thank you for reading if you have! I am currently working on an analysis on their big confrontation in the rain and how it ties back to a euphemism for their sexuality SO. I will link that here when ive published it :)

I have so many thoughts about this movie (shocking, i know). like it’s been rattling around in my head and i cannot stop thinking about the way it frames society basically conspiring against two people who just wanted to be together. it’s messy and tragic and so painfully queer-coded that it almost feels like this scene is mocking them, like the story itself is screaming about everything they couldn’t say out loud.

By the time we've hit the confrontation in the rain, it’s not even about fate anymore. it’s just a euphemism for their love, surviving where everything else wants it destroyed.

okay so. let’s talk about that scene and that line:

“Who is the enemy now?” “We are. Because we wanted more to life than what it has to offer.”

like. hello?? this line is literally a euphemism for their love for one another. it’s not just about “life” in general; it’s about the fact that their love was seen as unacceptable in that society. and Nigel knew it. he felt like he had to go to these extreme lengths to keep Alex in his life because they were never going to get the eternity of marriage, or domestic bliss, or just being together like anyone else. so he decides: fine. if society won’t give us forever, then I’ll write us into history myself.

Nigel just fucking loved him. baseline of the movie. but more than that, it’s love transformed into obsession, into what tragedy would call hamartia, the fatal flaw. his desire for permanence pushes him into extremes, but it also exposes the impossibility of their situation. he wants more than what life (read: heteronormative society) has to offer. that tension between yearning and denial is what drives him to create meaning through destruction.

and then you have Alex on the other side, with the “you’re deluded” mindset; he’s still stuck thinking what they’re going through is wrong. partly because of his own internalised homophobia - he feels that their connection is sinful. And the movie shows that through their murders and twisted morals, it’s that classic queer-coded narrative where their love is reframed through their actions as “immoral” to make it easier for a heteronormative audience to digest. (don’t even get me started on how often queer media does this. another essay for another day.)

My main point is that Alex still doesn’t want to accept that Nigel has to die just for them to be together. so when Nigel hits him with “Why am I deluded? This is our fate.” it’s basically him saying: even if society doesn't want us to be together in this lifetime, I’ll make us eternal. if not in romance, then in memory. 'you’re going to remember me forever, whether you want to or not.' haunting-as-love-language. (And a great big Fuck You to society)

Both these boys were raised on god, taught that what they feel is wrong and sinful, so they also convince themselves they’re part of some prophecy because otherwise, how do you explain that kind of connection? Nigel literally decides: fine, I’ll commit sin if it means I get to be with Alex. and in his head, redemption comes only through death.

Alex starting to believe in Nigel’s “fate” stuff (whether he believed it from the beginning or not) is literally his way of coping. because how else do you survive the trauma of Nigel’s death? it’s also the closest thing they ever get to a love confession. When Nigel says, “we’re one now”, that’s the moment. that’s the confession. it’s not framed in traditional romantic language, because it can’t be. not in their society, not in their world. but it carries the same weight. Nigel didn’t have to die, except in his own twisted view, where dying was the only way to keep Alex. If it wasn’t fate, then it was just society screwing them over for being in love. and Alex needed to believe it had meaning, because if it didn’t, then all it proved was that their love was doomed just because society couldn’t handle them.

also can we talk about Alex’s intro and the whole “heavens” thing. god mocking their love. “it’s like the gods were rejoicing for what was done.” Nigel sacrifices himself, and nothing changes. society doesn’t forgive them. it never would. it was never going to give them what they needed.

and finally. THE ENDING. (as seen in the beginning) Alex literally drops the gun and just cradles him. sits there with Nigel in his arms like time has stopped. and it’s only because the train servicers showed up that they even got him to move. he picked him up and held him against his chest. that moment is Alex finally, finally, recognising the love he had for Nigel. out loud? no. but in action? absolutely yes.

Gotta love a good confession in the rain scene (glances at Hannibals mizumono). Thank you for reading! Hopefully this all makes sense and isn't just incoherent ramblings... very much my opinion on this scene, because I always do look too intensely into the queer subtext.

this was caused because I went on a bit of a rampage because of @mistedandfogged's post here and thought it best for me to move it to my own analysis post. I don't exactly know how I drew this conclusion, but it happened, and it ended up with me researching a new psychology theory. So I'm going to bore you all to death about that today!

Sources I used: Emotional salience Reconsolidation (they are really quite interesting!)

The main point I'm making is Alex's description of Nigel's "terror in his eyes," and how he doesn't appear to be that terrified. Now, the use of this wording strikes us all as odd, and it can be attributed to Alex's unreliable narration as a form of foreshadowing, but I have a few rather unconventional ideas about how recounting this moment might be because of how much he is falsifying and feeding us lies about what actually happened and how some elements of truth are picked up during it. My theory (which led me to research the theory of reconsolidation and emotional salience) is that he subconsciously incorporates true visual and auditory cues into his false retelling, which confuses Sally and the audience, as they don't seem to match up. But it works in Alex's favour because he was painting Nigel in a negative and delusional light anyway. If Alex was lying through his teeth about the events on that train, playing it off as a freak accident while still keeping Nigel as a suspect (when he could have been the one to kill Josh), a lot of this dialogue and his retelling of the scene would make a lot more sense.

First, let's explain the theory: Emotional salience/reconsolidation refers to how much an event or detail stimulates your brain's threat/reward system. The more emotionally charged something is (fear, disgust, terror), the more "important" your brain considers it. and the greater the likelihood that detail will be preferentially stored and later retrieved. In practice, this means that screams, a terrified face, and a rotten odour are more likely to return when you remember than mundane background information.

There are two major players: the amygdala (which flags emotional significance) and the hippocampus (which binds contextual details into episodic memories). When something emotional occurs, the amygdala sends signals to the hippocampus and cortex, and stress hormones (adrenaline/noradrenaline, glucocorticoids) modulate synaptic plasticity, causing the event to be consolidated more strongly. That is why emotionally charged bits are "boosted" during encoding and can withstand rehearsal or fabrication better than neutral details.

Emotions have a tendency to narrow attention. Central, threat-relevant features (the face, the weapon, the angry line of dialogue) become more prominent, while peripheral details (what the lamp looked like, exact turns of conversation) frequently fade. This is called the weapon-focus/attention-narrowing effect. So, when Alex falsifies a scene in his retelling, he is likely to keep these details while inventing or misplacing the others.

Alex is a highly intelligent sociopath who can manipulate his environment and others to his advantage. While being interrogated, he convinces the audience and a forensic psychologist that, despite having the means and motive, being in the right place and time, and being the only survivor of that event, he was completely innocent of all charges. This is seen when he was supposed to meet Susan for that movie, and despite being there at the right time, he still passes the blame to Nigel. This is also seen during Josh's murder aboard the train. If he had been partially to blame for Josh's death rather than the entire weight of the murder falling on Nigel's shoulders, he could have easily explained the events and cleared his name of all suspicion. However, his description of Nigel throws him under the bridge. Sally, unlike us, does not see the events unfold visually, so she must rely on Alex's word to determine whether or not he is telling the truth. We on the other hand, see Nigel, completely cold and unconcerned about what had happened before him, which led us to confusion about what Alex's choice of description really meant.

I have two ideas based on Alex's description of the events and the accompanying visuals.

1) Nigel had fully chosen not to reach out his hand to Josh, and his sociopathic nature shows no remorse for it. Alex's description of the "terror" he sees is simply to paint Nigel as the villain to Sally, adding depth to his story. What we see as visual events is the truth, and it foreshadows his unreliable narration.

Or 2) it's a case of reconsolidation and emotional salience. His description of the events is accurate because he saw Nigel with terror in his eyes, which could only have occurred if Alex had been a contributing factor to Josh's murder. The visual events we see are the lie he told Sally about what happened on the train, but his subconscious couldn't help but include some true details in his story. He is reactivating a memory that can be altered simply by telling it. If he retells the train scene to Sally (or to himself), he creates a reconsolidation window in which whatever sensory cues exist in that moment are re-encoded as part of the memory.

So, when Alex paints Nigel with the phrase "terror in his eyes," it could be a theatrical phrasing or the imprint of a sensory fragment that stubbornly survived Alex's lie and reattached to the memory during retrieval. Reconsolidation frames this as memories cycling from inactive to active and back, which is precisely the process that allows truthy fragments to survive attempts at total falsification.

Because he is essentially narrating the events from memory, and because he is falsifying the vast majority of it, he adds some details simply because Nigel did something visual or auditory. It would be extremely difficult to come up with new dialogue on the fly to fit your story while being interrogated, so the theory of reconsolidation supports my claim that you would tend to turn those into lies. He didn't have enough time to corroborate his story, so those are truths that he unintentionally incorporated into the story...

For example. Alex claims that Nigel said he "could smell you on her," but does not provide any contextual evidence from that day. He plays it off as if Nigel was just a fucked up weirdo who was deluded, but given that he never went into detail about what happened after Nigel showed him the body or what any of that actually meant, there appears to be a LOT he never told us, raising the question of whether any of what he said about Nigel was true in any way.

All in all, It would be interesting to see if Alex caused Josh to slip up and Nigel had that 'terror' in his eyes as a result, rather than the other way around. Now, I don't necessarily believe it to be true, but it's an idea that has been brewing for a while.

The film literally gives us the breadcrumb... Sally flips to a page showcasing the Leopold and Loeb case. That is not accidental. The movie wants you to make the comparison. this post is me following the trail Greg Read left behind and tracing how that old case reverberates in Nigel & Alex’s narrative, and their desperate need to be something bigger than themselves. it’s messy, it’s speculative, and i've drawn so many conclusions im starting to go crazy.

This was inspired by @laurelwen posts about it here! literally all credits goes to them for mentioning it in the first place... I didn't think too much of it when I first saw it in the movie, but ive gone down a rabbit hole and couldn't stop myself from writing this.

Nigel and leopold are basically trying to dodge being actual people, and they do it in the same convincing way but with different costumes. nigel wraps himself in destiny: i was made for something, prophecy this, fate that. doubt, guilt, sympathy. All gets labeled weakness and shoved into a drawer. suddenly he’s not a person making choices, he’s a role fulfilling a script. and yes, that script needs an axis: alex becomes the thing his identity spins around. it’s less “i choose” and more “i was meant to be,” which is a tidy way to avoid moral responsibility.

leopold goes the opposite direction but it’s the same trick. he chops feeling out and calls the result reason. intelligence = exemption. emotions are primitive noise; cleverness is the shield. if everything can be translated into a calculation, then shame doesn’t stick. you don’t have to feel bad if you can always say, “i was being rational.” it reads like control, but it’s actually a defense against having to admit you’re wrong or cruel or small.

what’s wild is how similar the payoff is: both hand off the messy parts of conscience to something outside themselves. nigel to destiny, leopold to pure reason. both end up outsourcing responsibility. both stop being people and start being programs that run on a single rule. and that’s the scary bit: when the rule falters (the prophecy misfires, the logic collapses) there’s nothing left. no real accountability, sure, but also no real self.

Different aesthetics, same outcome. one dresses surrender up as holiness; the other frames emotional flatness as moral clarity. neither actually frees you. they just erase you behind a story that promises absolution but delivers emptiness. wild, kind of tragic, and honestly, exactly the sort of thing that makes you squint at a character and wonder who’s narrating and who’s being narrated.

"Leopold embraced his own version of nihilism, believing that there was no morality or meaning to existence and that intelligence was the only trait worth cultivating. Leopold sought to bury or eradicate his emotions in order to reinforce his idea of himself as a superior and rational being. Seeking solace in his fantasies and his sense of superiority in lieu of an acknowledged emotional life, the defense alienists describe Leopold’s problems as growing progressively worse over time as his fantasies came more and more to dominate his mental life. Leopold’s relationship with Loeb allowed him to bring some of the elements of his fantasy life into his real life, integrating his two worlds. He suppressed his emotions and separated himself from his peers in part to embrace this view of himself as an exceptionally rational human being. Undoubtedly, Leopold’s self imposed social exile was in part because he had always had trouble socializing with his peers. Aside from Loeb, Leopold had had almost no friends over the course of his life. His feeling of superiority allowed him to justify his social problems in a way that made him feel good about himself."

sounds like the certain dark-haired, socially reclusive, taxidermy fanatic that we all know and love....

Alex wears danger the way other people wear sweaters. you can see it the second he steps onto that damn train again and again (you know the scenes) the grin, the little tilt of his head, the way his whole body leans into risk. it’s not just doing wild things for him. it’s the secret knowing afterward. the delicious, poisonous little knowledge that he’s done the thing and no one else will ever quite understand it the way he does.

publicly he’ll mouth the right words. he can quote normal morality like it’s a script. because he’s practiced it, and it sells. privately, though, he files those words away in a neat compartment labeled for show. inside the other compartment: rules don’t apply. he tells himself he’s above them (and honestly, maybe he even believes it sometimes). he needs an audience, not necessarily a stadium of people, but someone who will get it, who will watch and then laugh with him in the dark. that someone is Nigel. Nigel is the perfect confessor-slash-collaborator: the only person who appreciates the horror the way Alex does.

and here’s where I’m choosing to read the movie a certain way (because art is a mess and interpretation is fun): Alex is completely lying about what really happened. when you watch it with that suspicion, all the neat little gaps and sudden emotional pivots start to look less like slips and more like stage directions. the performances, the half-truths, the way he frames events, it starts to read like sociopathy on display. charming, thrill-seeking, shallow affect, habitual deception, all tuned to avoid blame and keep control. he’s not just reckless; he’s performing recklessness for a very specific payoff: the thrill + the secrecy + the person who applauds in the wings.

contrast that with Loeb. Loeb doesn’t just want to be dangerous. he wants to know in a way that’s almost religious. relish in being the one who holds the secret. he’s the guy who commits the act and then bathes in the exclusive knowledge of it. Alex? he stages. Loeb? he savors. Alex recruits devotion; Loeb performs superiority. both want the power that comes from secrecy and intellectual transgression, but their flavors are different: one manipulates a narrative to make himself the star, the other luxuriates in being the solitary keeper of an illicit truth.

it’s messy and kind of sick and also kind of brilliant in a storytelling sense. like, both characters are hungry for the same thing: to be seen as someone beyond ordinary moral life. they just wear different costumes to get there. and me? i’m over here rewatching these scenes and squinting at every grin, convinced these guys are less archetypes and more carefully edited performances of what we do when we want to feel godlike.

"Loeb compartmentalized his feelings and his actions rather than seeking to eradicate his feelings. Loeb considered his moral viewpoint to be “the normal one,” but considered himself exempt from the behavioral restrictions of his inferiors. The alienists concluded that “a careful estimate of the way in which this boy has developed his tendencies shows that the divergence between his thinking and his feelings or emotional life had its origin even before he was ten years old.” According to the defense alienists, Loeb developed intellectually but not emotionally, remaining “pathologically backward in his emotional make-up” as he got older. Loeb’s need for a feeling of superiority was more outward than Leopold’s. The alienists asserted that Loeb differed from Leopold in that “to him [Loeb] the possession of knowledge which others did not possess was a great thrill, and he found that by committing crimes and knowing the true details he could discuss them with others who were unaware of the true facts, and thus receive a secret thrill and satisfaction, which was most pleasurable.” Leopold tried to remain emotionally neutral in all things, but Loeb enjoyed crime for the thrill of the experience."

And who can we relate this reckless, denial-is-the-key-to-success behaviour to?

Leopold and Loeb were basically a deadly duet: one wants to be possessed, to dissolve into being controlled; the other wants the rush of being above, the performative superiority. they fit together in the worst way possible. and yes, the 1920s homophobia and the way their sexuality got forced into a closet? that social exile is not a cute little backstory that excuses anything, but it’s absolutely the soil their fantasies grew from. critics who point to stigma and repression aren’t saying “oh they were doomed to be evil.” they’re saying: isolation, shame, and exile made a particular kind of fantasy feel like the only answer. not some mystical “inherent evil.”

the movie throws gestalt at us for a reason. gestalt (the whole is greater than the sum of its parts) is exactly how alex frames the thing: two broken solos fusing into a single, self-justifying chorus. when he says he believes in gestalt it’s not just academic posturing. it’s a survival manual. fuse together, and your separate small humiliations and lonely disgusts get swallowed into a we that rewrites meaning. suddenly the atrocities make sense inside that shared narrative in a way they would never make sense for one isolated person.

that’s the terrifying mechanic: fantasy needs an audience and a co-conspirator to flip into action. Leopold and Loeb weren’t just privately cruel; they built a shared reality where atrocity had a script and a rationale. the film’s nod to gestalt is the cleanest way to explain it. the violence doesn’t come from a blank moral void, it comes from two minds creating a whole that justifies what the parts could not. wild, awful, and eerily believable when you watch how people stitch their shame into something that feels like power.

"In Kalin’s portrayal of the case, it was not an inherent deviance that led Leopold and Loeb to murder, but rather the society in which they lived and the stigma that that society attached to their sexuality and their Jewish heritage, alienated them and thereby drove them to murder. If, as White argues, Kalin was making a film intended to “[indict] the cultural misrepresentation of homosexuality,” why use cultural representations based on an actual event that was almost seventy years old at the time of Swoon’s release? Why try to create “a valorizing sexual politics . .. based on the behavior of those who [cancelled] out their own humanity by murdering a child?" "

okay so kalin’s point, the one about films like Swoon calling out how culture gets queerness wrong, is basically asking: why keep reaching back to an old crime to talk about this? Like Minds does that exact thing. it uses Leopold and Loeb not because it wants us to reenact history, but because their story is shorthand for a deeper pattern: when society tells you you’re unacceptable, you start inventing other stories to make yourself acceptable. and sometimes those stories go catastrophically wrong.

Nigel and Alex are the local version of that pattern. their sexuality is hushed because the world around them will punish it. so what do they do? they either hide, deny, or transmute desire into something else; a prophecy, a mission, a fused we that gives permission for things an isolated self could never stomach. that pivot (turning private shame into a collective justification) is the psychological key. it’s not mystical; it’s practical: make a narrative that explains you, and suddenly actions that felt monstrous alone start to feel necessary together.

and the dominance/submission dynamic matters here in a very specific way. leopold’s submission to loeb lets him belong without surrendering the idea that he’s intellectually superior. it’s like a weirdly rationalized masochism. nigel’s hunger to be part of a higher story, to be chosen, makes him an easy mark for alex’s charisma and appetite for danger. alex/loeb need someone who validates their superiority or spectacle; nigel/leopold need someone who validates their surrender. it’s mutually feeding, a loop: admiration makes performance possible; surrender makes belonging possible.

this is also social, not just psychological. it’s not two damaged boys in isolation; it’s two boys shoved toward the edge by a culture that offers no healthy scripts for desire, shame, or power. that’s the point critics like kalin are getting at: the violence isn’t explained away by stigma, but the stigma creates the conditions that make these particular fantasies and arrangements feel like plausible options.

the film keeps sexuality mostly in subtext on purpose. naming it outright would change the whole argument, and historically both leopold & loeb and lots of queer-coded crimes have been either sanitized or turned into lurid spectacle. hiding sexuality in the margins mirrors how society historically hid queer people. euphemism, rumor, coded behavior. the film’s silence about desire is itself meaningful: it’s the same architect of silence that helped produce the violence the movie is gesturing at. the form reflects the content, and that’s the sharp, uncomfortable move the film is making.

so yeah... two boys, both lonely, both full of fantasy, both trying to steal meaning from a world that told them their love/selves were shameful. one becomes the prophet, the other the performer; one wants to be owned by meaning, the other wants the thrill of ownership. together they create a gestalt that feels like destiny, and that gestalt lets them do what they otherwise couldn’t. like Leopold and Loeb, Nigel and Alex are not just “monsters” born outside society; they’re an effect of exclusion, fantasy, and the terrible lengths people will go to when they can’t survive as themselves.

and yes, the movie is coy about whether the director actually used the case as a blueprint, but not the point. the point is that the film invites the comparison because the director wants you to trace the map: internalised shame + social exile + fantasy-bound dominance/submission = catastrophe. read the breadcrumbs. They led us here. two boys, one shared delusion, and the rest is a ruin they made together.

“Yet their desire to do it, and their desire to do it together, contributes to their decision to commit murder and therefore their downfall.”

that sentence could be the whole film. (it’s also the whole case.) ends with a scream, but a very quiet one.

AND THATS A WRAP. done nothing but write/obsess over this all day. obviously this is just my read, not the definitive “truth” of the movie or anything, but it made the whole thing click together for me in a way it hadn’t before. also again, huge thanks to @laurelwen for planting the seed in the first place... seriously would not have gone down this rabbit hole if not for that, so blame/credit goes there.

‎‎‎ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤ ‎──       𝐿𝒾𝓀𝑒 𝑀𝒾𝓃𝒹𝓈   🍂 ‘   2006  ’

Edits ── #murderbfs

Theories ── #psychosis but make it academic

HCs ── #clinically tested to be considered normal over like minds 

Memes ──  #not your average bromance

ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤ follows from @nakaharasknife

ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤ"ᴘʀᴀʏ ꜰᴏʀ ᴍᴇ. ᴘʀᴀʏ ꜰᴏʀ ʏᴏᴜʀꜱᴇʟꜰ."

‘    We are not templars with god-given rights, there are no holy wars to fight, Nigel. Who are the enemy now? We are, because we wanted more from life than what it had to offer. ’