The film As Good As It Gets focuses on the character of Melvin Udall, a successful romance novelist who is also a bitter, lonely sixty-two-year old male. Melvin is also an obsessive-compulsive personality whose dominant trait is being rude. As he says to a Jewish couple taking longer to eat lunch at the only table at which he will sit, “How much more you got to eat? Appetites aren’t as big as your noses, huh?” (Brooks 1997). According to Weiten (1989), “Personality refers to an individual’s unique constellation of consistent behavioral traits” (431). Melvin Udall’s personality traits and behavior are typical of the obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. Obsessive-compulsive personality disorder is one of eleven personality disorders defined by the DSM-IV (1994), a member of the anxious/fearful personality cluster. Obsessive-compulsive behavior is described as a “preoccupation with organization, rules, schedules, lists, trivial details; extremely conventional, serious, and formal; unable to express warm emotions” (Weiten 1989, 543).
Incapability of expressing warm emotions is Melvin’s chief defining trait. He is rude as a matter of purpose. He throws his neighbor’s dog down a garbage chute, he routinely insults every one in his path, and he is obsessive about details and rigid order. He tells his wheelchair-bound homosexual neighbor after he is viciously attacked, “Don’t worry, you’ll be back on your knees in no time” (Brooks 1997). When he introduces the only waitress he will let wait on him, at the only restaurant where he will eat, at the only table he will sit, where he brings his own plastic utensils, to his neighbor he says, “Carole the waitress, Simon the fag” (Brooks 1997).
Insensitive to the feelings of others to say the least, Melvin also has little idea how others perceive him. When he is finally thrown out of the only place he will eat, the other patrons applaud on ...