Freudian Excuse/Films

"Dr. Lecter: Look for severe childhood disturbances associated with violence. Our Billy wasn't born a criminal, Clarice. He was made one through years of systematic abuse. Billy hates his own identity, you see, and he thinks that makes him a transsexual. But his pathology is a thousand times more savage and more terrifying."
 * In Days Of Being Wild a film by Wong Kar-wai: The main character Yuddy/York (played by Leslie Cheung) is a self-centered playboy who mistreats/manipulates women by making them fall for him and breaking their hearts. It is strongly hinted in the film that this is because his biological mother deserted him when he was younger and having a troubled emotionally distant relationship with his foster mother.
 * Played straight in the 2010 version of The Killer Inside Me. The camera pans over the main character's bookshelf, lingering prominently on a volume of Freud. He immediately takes a bible off the same shelf, opens it, and finds forgotten photographs of his mother's sadomasochistic sex life.
 * Inverted in a scene on the couch in Funny Games in which the two villains "Peter and Paul" come up with various reasons why they're doing what they are to the family.
 * Anakin Skywalker was raised as a slave on a hellish backwater planet, as Yoda pointed out in the very beginning. Then his mother gets killed by Tusken Raiders.
 * Oddly, he seems to have been a fairly happy child. Probably would have cut his master's throat in the night if he'd made it to adolescence on Tatooine, though.
 * Psycho even gives us a psychiatrist at the end of the film to give us an explanation of how the Freudian Excuse applies in this specific case.
 * 8mm has a character who goes out of his way to subvert the trope, blatantly declaring, "Mommy didn't beat me. Daddy didn't rape me. I'm this way because I am." The idea that some people are just twisted is a core idea of the film.
 * This is subverted in the made for TV film Intensity, where the sadistic, sociopathic spree killer Edgler Vess, after being accused of abuse causing his current state of mind, proudly proclaims that his parents were extremely loving and that he was truly a sadistic person from the start (in fact he murdered his loving parents).
 * The new remake of Halloween attempts this with Michael Myers.
 * The original Halloween, while appearing to be a shallow motiveless-serial-killer movie at first, it is notable for how it stresses just how strange Myers' behavior actually is. Behind the scenes, Nick Castle (the man behind the mask) reportedly tried to figure out just what would drive a serial killer like Myers and act accordingly, but Carpenter specifically insisted on the "soulless killing machine" approach. One of the main characters, Dr. Loomis, is an experienced psychiatrist who is both baffled and terrified at the seemingly causeless evil lurking behind Myers' eyes. The overall idea is that, by any realistic standard, there should be a reason for someone to be anywhere near as warped as he is.
 * The Ring: Sadako Yamamura and her American counterpart, Samara Morgan, have a particularly tragic one.
 * In the David Cronenberg movie Spider, with Ralph Fiennes, a variety of flashbacks start to illustrate just what has turned Fiennes into a demonic version of Mr. Bean. It turns out that . It is top be noted his character   So he really could not help it.
 * Turned on its head in the Korean film The Host. The hero gets a Freudian Excuse for his lethargy and occasionally carrying the Idiot Ball . He didn't get proper nutrition as a kid.
 * Subverted in the 2008 Batman movie The Dark Knight Saga. The Joker explains what seems to be the source of his insanity when he reveals the origin of his smile-scars, involving an abusive alcoholic father who wanted to know why he was "so serious"--after killing his mother right in front of him. But later in the movie, he eagerly reveals the origins of his scars again, totally changing his story to one involving a wife who wanted him to smile more, who was disfigured to pay for her gambling debts, and taking to self-mutilation to make her feel better. Chances of both stories being outright lies (or at best delusions) suddenly look pretty good.
 * Subverted in Simon Birch, where despite extreme neglect by his parents, Simon appears to be the nicest person living in a town full of assholes.
 * In Gladiator, Commodus explains, prior to killing his dad, that all he wanted was a little love and a warm hug...and what he would have done to get it.
 * In Ip Man, Rival Turned Evil Jin defends his actions, which include beating on all of Foshan's kung fu masters and robbing the factory of Ip Man's friend, by saying that he experienced poverty at a child and never wanted to starve again.
 * The live-action movie of How the Grinch Stole Christmas gave The Grinch a lot of exposition explaining his Grinchiness. In both childhood and in a present-day incident in the film, he very nearly comes to enjoy Christmas, but something goes horribly wrong that just reinforces his view that it's a selfish, materialistic holiday. It's only after seeing Christmas still celebrated even after removing all material possesions from the equation that the Grinch comes around.
 * In the Tim Burton remake of Charlie and The Chocolate Factory, Willy Wonka's dentist father forbade him from eating sweets, and his obsession with candy was borne of rebellion.
 * In the backstory of Audition, Asami was physically and sexually abused as a child.
 * In Raising Arizona, the brutal biker and bounty hunter who kills furry animals for fun has a tattoo reading "Momma didn't like me".
 * In 9|Nine, the robot that kills all living things on the planet was made by a scientist for peace, but as the military of the country were he was made (is not clear in what country the story of the movie happen) tear him away from his master, he seems to reach out as a child being torn from his mother. He then goes mad and tries to kill his oppressors. After being forced to make machines of mass destruction, he is sickened by humanity and orders the robots to slay everything that lives.
 * In the 1995 version of A Little Princess, Sara realizes that Miss Minchin's father didn't tell her that "all girls are princesses," which we are led to believe is the reason for Miss Minchin's loveless, horrible personality.
 * This is actually subverted a little when you remember Minchin and Amelia are sisters. Whatever daddy issues she had, Amelia's kind personality (even after being put down so often by her sister) suggests that that alone couldn't have been the cause for the way Miss Minchin turned out.
 * Regina of Mean Girls: slightly different in that rather than a bully, her mother is a mindless drunk who is so desperate to be seen as young, hip, and her teenage daughter's best friend that she has become a willing slave that Regina treats with total contempt - the suggestion being that her total ineffectiveness and lack of parenting is what created her daughter.
 * Subverted in Phone Booth when the villain, while on the phone with Stu, starts sobbing and tells him that he had an unhappy childhood... then when Stu starts to believe him, he laughs and tells Stu that he actually had a very happy childhood.
 * Everybody in The Breakfast Club, villain or not... Bender's parents despise him (and they burnt his arm with a cigar for spilling paint in the garage), Claire's parents pamper her to get back at each other, Allison's parents ignore her, Andrew's dad is a Stage Mom who is obsessed with his winning, and Brian's parents coddle him too much and are obsessed with him getting good marks to the point that he considers committing suicide because he got an F.
 * Subverted and parodied hilariously in Monsters vs. Aliens, in which the Big Bad claims he is about to tell the heroine his life story... but he's strapped to a machine that stamps him into the ground every few seconds, so you never hear exactly what he's trying to say; only fragments that skip most of the crucial information!
 * On the sled symbolism in Citizen Kane, Orson Welles remarked: "It's a gimmick, really, and rather dollar-book Freud."
 * This is at the heart of one of the better parts of Star Trek Nemesis. Shinzon, a clone of Captain Picard, insists that he is what Picard would have grown up to be if he had lived his life. Picard tries to turn his "mirror" metaphor around on him, which Shinzon brushes off, but later admits that the idea has gotten under his skin. Data disagrees and (drawing a comparison to the "B-4" prototype he has been dealing with) sees a major difference: That in spite of their wildly different lives and experiences, he, like Picard, aspires to be better than he is, something Shinzon and B-4 seem to lack.
 * In American History X this comes off as heartfelt rather than trite.  Derek had resisted buying into his father's racial stereotyping, instead looking to his high-school English teacher (a black man) as his mentor. It was only after   that Derek started to think: "Gee, maybe Dad was right all along."
 * The murder of his mother by his father (on the urging of his grandmother and his father's concubines) is used as a partial excuse for why the King becomes so unhinged in The King and the Clown.
 * The Silence of the Lambs. Hannibal Lecter profiles the serial killer Buffalo Bill.

"Debbie: My parents, Sharon and Dave. Generous, doting, or were they? All I ever wanted was a Ballerina Barbie. In her pretty pink tutu. (slide change) My Birthday. I was 10, and do you know what they got me? MAL-I-BU Barbie.
 * In Iron Man 2, we learn that not only is Ivan Vanko driven to "avenge" his father, Anton, but that Anton spent the last 20 years of his life in Siberia in a "Vodka-fueled rage". In Nick Fury's words, not a good setting to raise a child - except Fury's tone definitely says "yeah, that sucks, but there's nothing we can do about it and you've still got to stop him."
 * In the same movie, Tony describes his father as emotionally distant, "calculating", and not given over to displays of affection or love. This might help explain some of his present-day problems.
 * It's suggested in The Public Enemy that Tom Powers (James Cagney) grew up to be such a violent Jerkass because he got spanked a lot when he was a kid.
 * In Despicable Me, there are flash backs where it suggests Gru got an inferiority complex issue from his mother's lack of enthusiasm for his achievements, including building a fully functional rocket at a young age. Although he otherwise had a healthy relationship with his mother.
 * In Silent Hill, Sharon/Alessa Gillespie is revealed to have had a very troubled past, involving her being ostracized by her classmates, sexually assaulted by a janitor, and eventually burned alive.
 * In the 2010 Centurion film, the Pict scout, Etain was raped and had her tongue cut out and had to watch her parents being murdered by Romans.
 * Serial Killer Colt Hawker in Visiting Hours grew to loathe women after witnessing his Domestic Abuser father being attacked by his mother.
 * In Addams Family Values, psychotic Debbie explains it was her parents getting her the wrong Barbie that caused her psychotic break. In the form of a slide show.

Morticia: Malibu Barbie.

Gomez: The nightmare.

Morticia: The nerve.

Debbie: That's not what I wanted! That's not who I was. I was a Ballerina, graceful, delicate! They had to go.

(Next slide shows their house on fire.)"

"Erica: You get fucked two days after your fourth birthday, you tend to not care about anything much."
 * In Red White & Blue, Erica, when confronted about her cavalier attitude about having unprotected sex with practically every guy she meets and not bothering to tell any of them that she's HIV positive, reveals that she lost her virginity at age 4 to her mother's boyfriend.

"Iky: Ya'see, you're like me, Mr. Mc Elroy. You're a sky-high-etrist, I'm a sky-high-etrist. See, I always knew I'd be a drug dealer, even when I was a kid. I saw me dad hit me mother, me mother hit me brother, me brother hit me sister, and me sister fuck me father. So I suppose it's inevitable, really. I mean, you'd have to be on drugs just to live in that madhouse, wouldn't you?"
 * Daido Katsumi/Kamen Rider Eternal, the Big Bad of Kamen Rider Double: A-to-Z, the Gaia Memories of Fate, tried to turn Fuuto into a city of the undead and his excuse given in the film was that he Came Back Wrong. However, later it's explained in W Returns: Eternal that was only a part of a much more solid excuse.
 * Half Past Dead centered around a group of mercenaries or whatever trying to get a location on stolen gold from a death row inmate by taking a group of hostages. One woman asks the leader what his motivation was, to which he insinuated he was beaten by his father and raped by his mother. Though he never actually admitted this to be true, he subverted the trope by claiming it had nothing to do with his actions as he's simply a sociopath motivated by greed. Earlier it was revealed that he suffers from Gulf War Syndrome and may suffer from Post Traumatic Stress as well, which may actually play the trope straight.
 * Played for laughs in Formula 51 with the drug dealer Iky.


 * Lampshaded in Grosse Pointe Blank. The main character, hitman Martin Blank, comments that it is very likely being raised by an alcoholic father and insane mother influenced his career choices. Blank doesn't treat his childhood traumas as an excuse, merely an explanation, and takes full responsibility for his own actions.
 * Scar's desire to rule over Pride Rock, even killing his brother Mufasa and attempt to have Simba killed as well, becomes somewhat understandable after reading some prologue books for The Lion King that revealed that Scar (then known as Taka) was pretty much neglected by his own father, such as his father revoking a promise regarding teaching him to hunt. His earlier inability to be taught how to hunt might also explain why his unified hunting policies also resulted in Pride Rock being turned into a literal wasteland during his rule.
 * Wreck-It Ralph's titular character had his home paved over by some callous individuals in order to build a hotel. Trying to destroy a building in which innocent people live isn't the most heroic action ever, but observers are already sympathizing with his plight, which is good, because he's trying to be a good guy in order to be well-liked.
 * At one point in The Emperor's New Groove, Yzma mentions while on a rant for being fired from being Kuzco's advisor that she was the one who practically raised him, which implies that a lot of Kuzco's... personality and problems are a direct result of her influence.
 * In Thor, the titular Norse deity's brother Loki is revealed to actually be  This combined with Odin's clear favoritism of Thor contributes to Loki becoming , as illustrated throughout the rest of the movie and in the subsequent The Avengers.