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“
You have no idea what I'm capable of.
„
~ Todd's most famous line.
Todd Bowden is the villainous main protagonist of Apt Pupil by Stephen King and the subsequent film adaptation.
He was portrayed by the late Brad Renfro in the film.
Todd is a teenage sociopath who takes pleasure in torturing animals, and fantasizing about graduating to murder one day. Todd is especially fascinated by the Holocaust and Nazism in general. After discovering that his elderly neighbor "Arthur Denker" is in reality former Nazi officer Kurt Dussander, Todd blackmails him into telling him about life as a Nazi during the Holocaust. Callous and violent, Todd is also anti-Semitic and often fantasizes about raping Jewish women.
A proud Social Darwinist, Todd believes that homeless people are useless failures, and as such deserve to be murdered.
Biography[]
Novel[]
The book opens in 1974, with Todd Bowden confronting his neighbor Arthur Denker and revealing that he knows of his past as a Nazi war criminal. He then blackmails the old Nazi into telling him detailed stories of his war crimes and part in the Holocaust, also buying him a Nazi SS uniform that he forces the old man to wear. Todd is darkly fascinated with the Holocaust and Nazism in general, and takes great pleasure in ordering Dussander around and forcing him to do what he wants.
However, as the months go by and Todd spends more and more time with Dussander, his grades in school steadily slip. Dussander goes to meet with Todd's guidance counselor disguised as the man's grandfather, fooling said guidance counselor and promising to improve Todd's academic performance. He blackmails Todd into going along with it, as Dussander wishes for Todd to actually succeed academically. Todd thus steadily improves his grades under Dussander's guidance, but also decides that he doesn't need Dussander anymore and so secretly plans to kill him and make it look like an accident. However Dussander claims he has a document revealing Todd's guilt that will be read in the event of his death, so Todd backs down.
Over the next few months, Todd (and Dussander), murder homeless people, and Todd for his part also loses his virginity, but finds sex unsatisfying compared to murder, from this concluding that his girlfriend's being Jewish is the reason for his sexual impotence. When he is no longer able to keep up his murders of homeless people, he takes to dry-firing his rifle at passing cars from a concealed spot overlooking a freeway. Later, when Dussander has a heart attack burying the body of one of his murder victims, he summons Todd to help him, and Todd does so (having earlier believed that Dussander had dirt on him when the old man was in fact bluffing). Dussander is hospitalized, admits to Todd that he was bluffing, and tells him not to see him again (and also warns him to not get careless where his murders are concerned).
After Dussander commits suicide and is outed as the Nazi war criminal that he was, Todd manages to convince his parents that he did not know about Dussander's true nature, but the police detective Richler and Nazi hunter Weiskopf are not as convinced when they question him. Worse for Todd, a vagrant recognizes him as the last person who was seen with several of the murdered homeless people, and tells the police as much. Similarly, the guidance counselor from before meets Todd's real grandfather and similarly realizes that he has been duped. He confronts Todd, who violently murders him, takes his rifle and ammunition to his hideout by the freeway, and goes on a shooting spree that ends with his death at the hands of the police 5 hours later.
Movie[]
In the movie, the overall story is the same, save that most of the murders are cut, as are Todd's rape fantasies. Also, the film depicts Todd blackmailing the guidance counselor into keeping quiet, rather than killing him, and Todd is still alive and believed innocent at the end of the film.
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