Prince Charming is a Sociopath?

I watched Disney’s Frozen last night. I’ve wanted to see it because everyone was raving about it, and rightly so. It’s well done. But Disney takes a bit of a different approach with its villain this time. Usually you can’t miss the malevolent expression and awesomely terrifying LBED (little black evil dress) on Snow White’s Maleficent. You know that special evil gleam in the eyes of Jafar and Captain Hook. When Gaston starts waxing poetically about his glorious muscles, we were all with Belle in realizing he couldn’t be trusted. Even in Tangled, you know Mother Gothel was the evil antagonist right away. But that’s not the case in Frozen.

In my opinion, Frozen is one of those movies that goes against the natural norm of what you would expect from a movie studio. To describe the film, Frozen is a deconstruction of the usual Disney film. It's a fairy tale in which reality ensues. Since this was a Disney film, Anna was a firm believer in love at first sight. I mean, why shouldn't she, considering that she's in a movie where this trope is played nearly all the time with Disney? And it seems that her philosophy is correct, because she meets the gentlemanly Prince Hans who seems to really like her too. And they seem to have absolutely everything in common; a matched pair.

In a dramatic twist (which is to say, SPOILERS), the handsome prince who sweeps the princess off her feet in the course of a single day turns out to be a bad guy who is only pretending to love our heroine to get his hands on her inheritance. Just when we think he is going to save Princess Anna, he reveals himself to be a greedy, throne-usurping would-be killer. Hans leans in, about to give her that kiss…then he sneers, “Oh, Anna, if only there were someone who loved you.”

But there is more to it than that. It seems our evil villain is more evil than we could have thought. Hans didn’t seem like the evil guy, but for me, he’s the scariest Disney Villain, because he is the bad guy you won’t see coming.  He’s the person you trust, the one who seems so kind and helpful and loving.  You let him into your life, into your heart and you think everything is okay, not knowing he’s manipulating you, not knowing he’s leading you into a world of hurt. Prince Hans seems to be a bit of a sociopath/psychopath. Disclaimer here: I am not a psychologist or psychiatrist and from the little I’ve read thanks to the Internet, these two terms are sort of interchangeable and that’s what I am going with. What especially chilled me after seeing Frozen was the article “10 Ways to Know Very Quickly IfYour Man is a Psychopath” and how many can be applied to Hans. Seriously, it’s horrifying. There’s no tell, no obvious sign that he’s a Bad Guy and the Scary Thing is that’s how it is in Real Life.