‘Hit Man,’ a movie in which personality is on the move
Acting 'would make it so'
Can a bashful, introverted philosophy lecturer change his personality? Can a leopard change its spots?
Netflix’s comic romp “Hit Man” tells us it was developed from real-life events. But it’s also developed from real-life social science. Our protagonist, Gary, is a demure middle-aged man, divorced, living with a cat. He says he’s happy; no, content. Early in the film he gives a talk on the works of Friedrich Nietzsche. His lecture ends with a plea for his young students – 18, maybe 20 years old – to seize control of their lives, and live. So far, so Will to Power. So far, so Thus spake Zarathustra. One student smirks to another: Thus speaks a man who drives a Honda Civic.
Gary Johnson (played by Glen Powell, who co-wrote the script) has a side interest in technology, however. To earn a little extra money, he helps detectives at New Orleans police department work their IT. He listens to wiretaps, monitors cameras, rigs microphones for surveillance activities. One day, when an undercover detective is suspended from duty at the start of a new operation, Gary is ordered to take his place. He must pretend to be a hit man – a contract killer – and he is particularly ill-suited for the task.
That’s the beginning, and much murder, mayhem and romance follows. The plot challenges the premise that personalities are more or less fixed by the time we reach maturity, certainly before our mid-forties. In psychology, it’s long been thought that the so-called “Big Five” personality traits become fixed by our mid-twenties, not much older than these students are. And a decade or two younger than their teacher.
The Big Five, sometimes called the OCEAN model, are measured in scales, from high to low:
Openness
Conscientiousness
Extroversion
Agreeableness
Neuroticism
We’ve known about them for a long time. The five-traits theory emerged in the 1950s. But the idea that personality is based on traits that endure through the rest of our lives has been around for about 150 years, almost as long as scholars have studied psychology. In the late 19th century, the philosopher William James, who was also Harvard University’s first professor of psychology, wrote: “It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again” (James, 1887).[1]
Somewhere near the middle of the film, however, a character tells our protagonist that the recent research says that’s not entirely true. We can will ourselves to act in ways we would not normally act – against our “traits.” By acting that way repeatedly, we reshape our traits and become what we were not. Nietzsche – a contemporary of William James – would approve.
The movie isn’t an academic treatise. It’s a comedy and good fun, with an implausible ending that (surely!) defies the movie’s promise that it is based on the events in the life of the real Gary Johnson (or does it?). But I was intrigued by this unsourced idea and went digging. And it’s true, at least in part, and at least as far as we can claim to have identified the “truth” of anything.[2] Four of the Big Five seem to be mutable, according to a large, multi-country study with a lot of participants and over a long time (Graham et al., 2020). The British Psychological Society’s account gives a layperson’s guide to the findings.
Extroversion and conscientiousness are “pro-social” traits; they involve putting others first. They decline over time, as social commitments wane. Neuroticism takes a U shape, decreasing as we age and settle, before rising as we grow anxious of illness and death. Openness, another pro-social trait, seems stable but then falls off in old age. Only agreeableness is constant.
The study concludes, “people change differently on different traits, personality is not stable for everyone across the lifespan (but is for some people), and accounting for or explaining these changes is difficult.”
What the study doesn’t say – and perhaps couldn’t, because of its design – is whether we can will ourselves to have a different personality, as “Hit Man” suggests. Perhaps other studies have done. Perhaps the movie is a call for further, explanatory research. The idea sounds plausible.
But you don’t need to be a closet philosopher or psychologist to enjoy the plot, characters and setting. And the acting. And the writing.
This “true” story may not be true in every detail. But act as if it is. Willing might make that so, not merely wishing. “Hit Man” is a hit.
Graham, E. K., Weston, S. J., Gerstorf, D., Yoneda, T. B., Booth, T., Beam, C. R., . . . Mroczek, D. K. (2020). Trajectories of Big Five Personality Traits: A Coordinated Analysis of 16 Longitudinal Samples. European Journal of Personality, 34(3), 301-321. doi:https://doi.org/10.1002/per.2259
James, W. (1887). The Laws of Habit. The Popular Science Monthly, XXX(VI), 433-451. Republished as James, W. (1914). Habit. New York: Henry Holt & Co. https://archive.org/details/habitjam00jameuoft/page/n5/mode/2up
James, W. (1890). Principles of Psychology (Vol. 1). New York: Henry Holt.
James, W. (1902). Principles of Psychology (Vol. 2). New York: Henry Holt.
Nietzsche, F. (1885/1980). Also sprach Zarathustra. Stuttgart: Reclam.
Nietzsche, F. (1901/1968). The Will to Power (W. Kaufmann & R. J. Hollingdale, Trans. W. Kaufmann Ed.). New York: Vintage.
Popper, K. F. (1935/2002). The Logic of Scientific Discovery. London: Routledge.
[1] James wrote what are said to be the first textbooks on psychology (James, 1890, 1902). He was also brother of the novelist Henry James, whose many stories explore personalities.
[2] Karl Popper (1935/2002) argues that truth is what we haven’t yet falsified.