Newsflash
I read an article with the best title today. “Newflash: Serial Killers Are Not Cool.” This appeared in The Age and is about our society’s fascination with serial killers. I have to admit, I’m one of these people who find them fascinating. I prefer to think that’s because that the behavior is so aberrant and disgusting that it is necessary for me to understand how people could possibly do that. I don’t know. I’ve often thought that it is very odd that our entertainment consists of people getting murdered and raped and the more violent and unusual, the better.
The author of American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis, has a theory that serial killers are so empty and soulless that the only way they can feel anything is to kill in some vile way. And readers read about them to fill the same void. This is creepy, but I think true to some extent. If you’ve ever read American Psycho, you know that the book’s main character is an extremely violent freak. The things he fantasizes about and does, and how he feels about it, are so disgusting. It’s everything the killers from Criminal Minds are except in extreme detail.
It’s repulsive, but we keep wanting more of it. So many tv shows and movies are about seriel killers, a lot of books are. Our culture is saturated with the mystique of the serial killer. Middendorp talks about the paintings of John Wayne Gacy in his article. This is the ultimate symbol of our fascination with depraved killers. Gacy raped and killed 33 boys and young men. He also happened to finish a few oil paintings in his lifetime, and these are astoundingly in-demand. Actor Johnny Depp even boasted of having one. If that isn’t sick, I don’t know what is. But at the same time, I can kind of understand it.
Jonathan Davis of Korn wanted to open his own serial killer museum. He has Gacy paintings and the very disturbing clown suit that Gacy used to dress up in. He even has Ted Bundy’s VW, with which Bundy picked up women he later killed. When I first read this, I was thinking “What a freak. Who would do this? Who would collect serial killer memorabilia and open a museum?” But then I thought, “Yeah, I’d go.”
The author of this article, Chris Middendorp, points out the popularity of shows like CSI, Criminal Minds, and Bones, and movies like Silence of the Lambs. He writes that the “serial killer has replaced Satan as the ultimate symbol of evil.” Our ultimate fear isn’t of demons and supernatural forces. It’s of other people.
Middendorp also discusses the huge numbers of serial killers that populate tv and movies:
If we are to accept the bombastic premise behind popular TV crime shows such as CSI, Bones, Waking the Dead, NCIS, Wire in the Blood, Criminal Minds, Law & Order and many others, there’s some kind of debased homicidal predator lurking on every second block. If there really were as many serial killers as these shows would have us believe, the world population explosion would clearly not be an issue; we’d be more worried about population shrinkage.
Ok, so there aren’t really serial killers lurking in all of our bushes waiting to attack, but we still like to hear about them. Maybe because they’re NOT in our bushes or likely to kill the average citizen?
It’s nothing new that our culture likes to watch and read about the most disgusting members of society. If it’s because we identify with them in some way or have absolutely no idea how they operate, I don’t kow. I don’t think it’s likely to change soon, though that’s what Middendorp would like to see. The articles parting words:
None of this is useful or healthy in an era that desperately needs to establish harmony between people and cultures. What does it say about us that accounts of grotesque depravity are one of our favourite forms of entertainment? Our serial killer fixation is a measure of a culture’s dislocation and it is imperative we do something to remedy this.
It’s just possible that if we improve the quality of the stories that entertain us, we’ll improve the quality of our society too.
Maybe that would work, but I don’t see it happening.
January 8th, 2008 at 4:15 pm
I think there is irony in these articles about society and killers.
In a Criminal Minds episode, Reid explains that one of the worst things we did as a society was ‘Stranger-Danger’ taught to school children in the 80’s, when in truth it is the people a child knows and trusts that is almost always the abuser. The idea that it is the stranger to or in our personal tribes that is the danger is as old as time and mentioned frequently in the Old Testament. Yet, we are supposed to neutralize the unknown ‘visitor’ with a warm welcome and the finest hospitality; this duality is because the visiting stranger might actually be an emissary of God, sent to bless us. Many biblical figures had such visitations, from Sarah to Mary and Moses to Jesus. Whether they are angels sent to battle with you for your soul or strangers that enter your grounds to kill you is part of the human experience and mythology.
I was at the University of Florida when Speck and Bundy were active. I remember the resistance the police projected when the inference was that girls were not safe on campus, until they could no longer deny that it was just the ‘bad’ girls out late and stoned or drunk who were preyed upon. When Criminal Minds and the Law and Order, shows that I watch, show the victims, they are equally unknown to the predators.
And, as in reality, this is the case. Excepting child crimes, most victims are strangers to their attackers. They are also perpetually of interest to us, as most ‘outsiders’ are interesting. One only has to look at the rhetoric these days about immigrants and how they are being attributed with obscene and unrealistic numbers regarding crime to see our ‘societies take’ on blaming the outsider for our own endemic problems.
“It’s always the quiet ones”, is a common statement when suburban crimes happen perpetrated by a fellow suburban member. I watch the crime shows to see this ‘quiet one’ gone off his rocker and wreaking havoc in someone else’s neighborhood. It has the effect of making me feel both safer and wiser, to be so informed by my entertainment.
Lociloco
April 21st, 2008 at 9:54 pm
I can’t speak for everyone, but one of the reasons I get pulled into crime shows like Bones and CSI is seeing the “good guys” figure it out and catch the “bad guy.” For me it’s more about seeing justice served and the ability and intelligence to reason out the hows, whys and who’s of the crime than having an interest in the psychopaths that commit the crime in the first place.
I also can’t help but think that some of our fascination with serial killers and the like is the forever unanswered question of what happened? What happened to them to make them crack - what in their life was so terrible that they became this thing, this creature of death and destruction? The psychology of it is fascinating, and therefore their actions take on the same fascination.
Just a thought…
April 23rd, 2008 at 6:40 am
For me, I definately have an interest in why the people commit the crimes in the first place. I like that Criminal Minds focuses on that. I think a lot of the fascination comes from the thought that these criminal arent’ monsters and their actiosn are understandable - not excusable. It makes it harder to look at things in black and white.