Since the time of “Saucy Jack” the interest in mass murders of this type has grown, becoming a genre of film and novels unto itself, with probably dozens of each produced and published each year, from teen slasher films to art films like “Man Bites Dog”. The subject warrants multiple Wikipedia pages and hundreds, if not thousands, of “fan sites” dedicated to either specific serial killers or to serial killers in general.
One of the interesting things about serial killer representations in popular culture is how plastic they are. That is, the character of a serial killer, beyond having some specific technical similarities (ritual, emotional disconnection from victims, lack of guilt, etc) can fit almost any mould.
There is the award-winning Showcase series, Dexter, about a serial-killer-as-boy-next-door-slash-vigilante-superhero. We all love Dexter because we don’t see anything wrong with executing bad people. He’s a working class, lower tech, less ridiculous version of Batman. And he’s just so huggable.
He’s like you and me. Hell, if you were Dexter, wouldn’t you kill that murderer, those heartless and brutal smugglers of illegal immigrants, or that nurse with an enthusiasm for euthanizing patients? Dexter, the mass murderer, ironically, satisfies our desire to overcome that sense of powerlessness we all feel towards one of the greatest bogeymen of our time: random killers specifically and criminals more generally. We become the mass murderer, in a sense, through our identification with him.
In this way he’s not so very different from the more monstrous and more aristocratically charming character of Hannibal “The Cannibal” Lector. If Dexter is Batman, Lector is Lucifer, the fallen angel. His ultimate history, in many ways similar to Dexter’s – and all superheroes – is one of childhood trauma that marks him indelibly, followed by a struggle to understand and control his special powers. Hannibal Lector is reminiscent of Magneto, the vengeful Jewish mutant from the X-Men series who seeks to destroy all non-mutants as a result of his experiences in World War Two.
These aspects of the serial killer - his/her plasticity and their kinship superheroes/supervillains and supernatural figures – vampires also come to mind - is worth exploring further. All of them say something about our culture more generally that could be valuable in unearthing the origins of our society’s pathologies.
TOMORROW: Part 2, Death Cult Nation
1 comment :
Interesting Redbedhead.
Ernest Mandel wrote a very interesting book on crime fiction called "Delightful Murder: A social history of the crime story" which I have just read as I've been exploring crime fiction.
Although I have not seen Dexter yet the fact he works for the police department and becomes a vigilante would seem to reflect a powerlessness that individuals feel about the corruption of the justice system and police which allows the real criminals to walk untouched among us. It's interesting to note the legitimisation of a cop who is a serial murderer completely subverts the idea of justice as something that is administered blindly and cooly. And the only way to restore order is to work from within the system as an individual following your own moral code. Who cares that the person eliminating the baddies is a psycho cop. It the ends that count, not the means. I see this same idea repeated when the use of torture by the US and UK is defended and how the discourse by bourgeois liberals reorders and makes possible a defence of torture which 20 years ago would have been unthinkable in the west. Now that we are doing the torturing it's no longer a crime but something unpleasant and necessary that we hate to do but must do to protect society from evil.
This problematises Dexter's role as a cop. He is not even a revenge seeker as he is merely following his warped inclinations brought about by some traumatic incident that happened to him as a child. That neutralises his function as an avenging angel and also allows the drama to avoid addressing the socio-economic causes for why society throws up messed up individuals like himself and those he murders. That he is encouraged to channel his own murderous instincts into coldly killing criminals by his adopted father who is a policeman subverts the moral code seen in earlier police dramas.
It's interesting to witness the transformation of policemen in bourgeois literature from the 1800's on. Early crime fiction tended to portray the police in a negative light as plodding low intellect individuals just blindly carrying out the state's work. At the time plenty middle class and petty bourgeois individuals filled debtor's jails. As the debtor's law was dropped and jails started to fill with working class individuals the character of the policeman subsequently changed to reflect the altered relationship of the bourgeoisie to the policeman.
He was now a tool of the bourgeoisie and began to become a more heroic character fighting crime on the streets and keeping people safe from the hordes of working class and underclass criminals.
There was a turn away from heroes like Raymond Chandler's Marlowe who single-handedly solved crimes prevalent after WWII. Heroes that expressed something of the disillusionment they felt after returning from war to a society that had promised them the American dream and which they recognised now as broken. Marlowe and film noir offered readers and cinema goers something more gritty, realistic and mature.
This gave way to the crime story centred on policemen and lawyers fighting crime and restoring order.
Crime stories basically uphold the moral order and their heroes must be seen to restore it or maybe there's some ambivalence about the moral order. As Dexter implies. I think we can trace that directly to our social milieu.
Just some thoughts your piece inspired me to share.
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