Apt Pupil
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Apt Pupil (1982) is a novella by Stephen King.
Plot summary
Todd Bowden is thirteen and a smart kid with good grades. He and a friend rummage around in the friend's garage looking for comics. Instead Todd finds old war magazines with stories from the Nazi concentration camps and is fascinated by them. He begins to read everything he can get his hands on about World War II and the camps.
One day Todd sees an old man on the bus that he recognizes. After several weeks of discreet surveillance, he goes to the man's house and rings the bell. The sign on the door says "Arthur Denker", but when the door opens Todd addresses him as "Kurt Dussander". He has recognized him as the commandant of the (fictional) Nazi concentration camp at Patin. At first the old man denies everything, insisting that his name is Denker and that he is a retired factory worker. As Todd presses him with more and more details of his life, however, he finally admits to being Kurt Dussander.
After the fall of the Nazi regime, Dussander fled Germany and lived under various identities in Europe and South America. He entered the US on false papers provided to him by the Mafia. Since then he has lived comfortably, if not extravagantly, off some stocks that he bought just after the war. The man who (unwittingly) helped him with the investments was Andy Dufresne, one of the main characters in Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption.
He finds out that Todd isn't out to expose him (although he threatens to do this if Dussander doesn't do what he wants) and he's not interested in money (his family is pretty well-off and he has an allowance and a paper route). What he wants is to hear "all the gooshy stuff" about the camps. Dussander is reluctant, but finally caves in to Todd's threats of exposure.
Todd spends many afternoons with Dussander listening to his stories, telling his parents he reads books and newspapers to "Mr. Denker" to save the old man's failing eyesight. In the first escalation of the story, Todd brings Dussander a present. It turns out to be an SS Oberleutnant's uniform. Todd forces Dussander to put it on and then to march around on command.
As Todd's time with Dussander cuts into his study time, his performance at school begins to slip. Todd also begins to have nightmares about the camps and his grades slip further. After the first confrontation with his father about the grades, he modifies his report cards before giving them to his parents to hide the decline in his grades.
Eventually, Todd's concentration deteriorates to the point that he's in danger of flunking several courses, and is given a letter to his parents requesting an appointment with Edward French, the school guidance counsellor. Since his parents have no idea of what's happening (although they are getting a little bit concerned about the amount of time he spends with "Mr. Denker", and also that he's becoming thin and having bad dreams) and Todd does not want them to find out, he takes the letter to Dussander, who concocts a ruse: Dussander, posing as Todd's grandfather, Victor, goes to the appointment with the counsellor. He presents a story about Todd being upset about his parents who are on the verge of a divorce. French falls for it - perhaps not surprisingly, since Dussander has built his entire life on a foundation of lies - and agrees to give Todd one more chance to pick up his grades before contacting his parents.
By now Dussander tells Todd that he is as deeply entrenched in problems as he himself is. Todd knows that Dussander is a wanted war criminal. Dussander on the other hand knows that Todd has been doctoring his report cards and knowingly socialized with a war criminal for several months without telling anybody.
Since Dussander now has power over Todd he sees a way to avoid having to recount old stories about the concentration camps (he has been experiencing horrific nightmares as well). He now forces Todd to spend time at his house studying. With great effort, Todd is able to pick his schoolwork back up to the point where Ed French's concerns are sufficiently ameliorated. Since he no longer has any use for Dussander, Todd resolves to kill him in his home and make it look like an accident.
Todd has earlier claimed to have given a letter with facts about Dussander to a friend if anything should happen to him. Before Todd can carry out his murderous intent by pushing the old man down his basement stairs, Dussander now claims that he has written down what has happened and put in a bank deposit box, so that it will be found upon his death. This is also a lie, but Todd falls for it.
After school ends for the year, but before taking off on a trip to Hawaii (a reward by his parents for his good grades) Todd goes out and stabs a homeless alcoholic to death. He finds that this somehow pushes his nightmares away.
Years pass and Todd's visits to Dussander become much less frequent, and as he progresses through high school, his athletic and academic performance is good enough to win him both high marks and a college scholarship. He loses his virginity, but finds the joys of sex with a willing partner unsatisfying compared to the release he gets from killing homeless men. When circumstances do not allow him to do that, he picks a concealed spot overlooking the freeway and aims at people in passing cars with his hunting rifle.
Dussander, suffering from his own nightmares, has also taken to killing winos, but he invites them home, gets them drunk, kills them and buries them in his basement. Dussander does this for essentially the same reason as Todd - it eases the nightmares. Despite this psychic link between them, Dussander and Todd are not immediately aware of each others' exploits.
One night when Dussander is digging a grave for his latest kill, he has a heart attack. He manages to get to the phone to call Todd, who comes over and cleans up the mess of blood that the wino has left all over the house. Todd also buries the corpse in the basement before finally calling an ambulance. At the hospital, Dussander shares a room with Morris Heisel, an elderly Jewish man recovering from a broken back. Heisel thinks that he recognizes "Mr. Denker", but he cannot remember from where.
Todd visits Dussander in the hospital. Dussander tells Todd that his threat about the letter in the bank deposit box was a ruse, just as Todd's threat of a letter with a friend was. Dussander has read about the winos whose murdered bodies have been found by the police, and tells Todd not to get careless. Todd tries to act like he does not know what Dussander is talking about, but Dussander is not fooled. He tells Todd, however, that "we are quits". Todd leaves, somewhat uneasy about the implications of what Dussander has told him.
A few days later, Heisel realizes with horror Denker is Dussander, the commandant of the Patin camp that he managed to survive, but where his wife and daughters died in the gas chambers. Soon after Heisel has left the hospital, a Jewish war criminal-hunter named Weiskopf turns up at Dussander's hospital bed telling him that he has been found out. After Weiskopf leaves, Dussander steals some drugs from the hospital dispensary and commits suicide.
In the morning, Todd's parents find pictures of "Mr. Denker" along with a picture of Dussander as commander of Patin in their morning paper with a large heading screaming "War Criminal". Todd is able to convince his parents that he didn't know about Dussander's identity or the corpses buried in his basement. A few days later, Weiskopf, accompanied by a police detective named Richler, comes and talks to Todd, and isn't as convinced of Todd's story.
Sometime later, a bum named Hap visits Lieutenant Bozeman, a colleague of Richler, and identifies Todd (his picture was in the local paper when his baseball team won a championship) as the person last seen in the company of one of the winos whose deaths Bozeman has been assigned to investigate. Bozeman, realizing the similarities between "his" murder cases and the Dussander killings, decides to compare notes with Richler, but we are not told what happens as a result.
Meanwhile, Ed French has paid a visit to Todd's real grandfather since he happened to be in Victor's hometown for a conference. He mentioned their previous meeting and was of course met with incomprehension. Naturally, he becomes suspicious and starts investigating Todd's old report cards and finds out that they have been tampered with. Later, he sees a newspaper article concerning Dussander's death and identifies the photograph as being the man who had met with him concerning Todd's grades.
Now convinced that something is wrong, Ed goes to visit Todd, who is alone in his garage, cleaning his rifle. Ed asks Todd for an explanation. Todd replies "Well, you know, one thing just led to another. As stupid as it sounds, that's what happened. One thing...just led...to another." Then he shoots him. He then takes his rifle and goes to the spot above the highway where he has been aiming at drivers previously, but this time he brings all the ammunition he has. It is five hours before the police take him down.
Gendered analysis
In Sadomasochism, Sexual Torture, and the Holocaust Film: From Misogyny to Homoeroticism and Homophobia in Apt Pupil by Caroline Joan (Kay) S. Picart and Jason Grant McKahan analyze the Apt Pupil within a queer theory framework:
- "The dominant criticism of sadomasochism in media and popular culture has been articulated by feminism. According to critics such as Laura Mulvey, sadism is the ruling perversion in cinema, which is complicit with the male gaze. Women are thus controlled within the diegesis by male sadism (investigation/punishment) or sadistic fetishism, “fetishistic scopophilia.”
- Gaylyn Studlar notes that what is left out of this model is masochism and proposes an alternative model in which visual pleasure is not sadistic, but rather masochistic. Hence, visual pleasure is related to pre-oedipal pleasure of oral merger and fusion with the mother as opposed to separation and identification with the father.[12]
- However, Linda Williams questions the “either/or oppositions” of Mulvey and Studlar’s models by emphasizing the pleasure of sadomasochistic fantasy in its non-fixed, interrelated, oscillation “between masculine/feminine, active/passive, sadistic/masochistic and oedipal/preoedipal” positions." [1]
