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Content Making Monsters: Jeffrey Dahmer and the Social Construction
of the Serial Killer
by
Richard Frank Tithecott
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
(English)
May 1995
UMI Number: DP23203
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This dissertation, written by
Richard Frank Tithecott
under the direction of h ..i$.. Dissertation
Committee, and approved by all its members,
has been presented to and accepted by The
Graduate School, in partial fulfillm ent of re
quirem ents for the degree of
B
TGil
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Dean of Graduate Studies
Date i?,. 1995..
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
ii
Contents
A Prelude: Jeffrey and Hannibal 1
Introduction 7
Part 1: Policing the Serial Killer 21
1. Defining the Monster: Serial Killing and the FBI 24
2. Investigating the Serial Killer: The Seeking of Origins 53
(i) The Serial Killer and the Idea of the Individual 53
(ii) "Are You Raising a Jeffrey Dahmer?" 64
3. Investigating the Serial Killer: Seeking the Unspeakable 78
4. Jeffrey Dahmer: Gay, White Cannibal 106
Part II: Dreaming the Serial Killer 144
5. The Horror in the Mirror: Average Joe and the Mechanized
Monster 146
6. The Confession: Hearing/Speaking the Unspeakable 157
7. Cops/Killers, Keepers/Monsters 171
8. The Monstrous Self: Fantasizing the Real/Realizing Fantasy 188
9. Sanity, Satan and Sanitized Evil 215
10. Fantasies of Power 227
(i) The Serial Killer and the Powers of Intelligence 230
(ii) The Serial Killer as Warrior KnigAt 239
(iii) A Man's Man: Jeffrey Dahmer and the Dream of
Masculinity 247
Conclusion
Bibliography
268
288
1
A Prelude: Jeffrey and Hannibal
Vanity Fair describes an interview in its November 1991 issue as
an "unsettling real-life scenario akin to The Silence of the Lambs"
(183). The "scenario" is the questioning of a convicted serial killer in
the hope of shedding light on a serial killer still out there in the
dark. Brian Masters assumes Jodie Foster's role of FBI trainee Clarice
Starling, while Dennis Nilsen, killer of fifteen, is rewarded for his
troubles by being cast as the connoisseur of killing, Hannibal Lecter.
In the movie, Clarice seeks the identity and capture of "Buffalo Bill."
For Vanity Fair, Buffalo Bill is Jeffrey Dahmer. But Masters seeks not
Dahmer's capture (already accomplished by the time of the magazine's
publication) but his mind, or as the article's introduction puts it,
"the key to the killer's psyche."
Nilsen is a natural. Evoking Anthony Hopkins' Lecter, Masters
describes him as having "a penetrating gaze and dark sense of humor"
(184), as "well-spoken, intelligent, and very persuasive" (185). The
prisoner is "an assertive man, bristling with confidence and swagger,
amazingly relaxed as he slouched with an arm over the back of his chair,
totally in command and behaving as if he were interviewing me for a job"
(185). Nilsen, however, has claims to the role of Dahmer too. Having
confessed to killing and sometimes eating his gay lovers, he is
Britain's Dahmer. His role in the article is a fused Hunter and Hunted,
Self and Other, Seer and Seen: a compelling role to read about, watch
and, no doubt, perform.
2
With our help, however, Brian puts in a good performance too.
Donning Clarice's cheap shoes and expensive hand-bag, (s)he passes
"through several guard stations and steel doors" (264), finally reaching
Nilsen who "stands apart" (264) in the visiting room. Corresponding with
Lecter's teasing of Clarice's frequent visits - "People will say we're
in love" (Harris 1991, 216) - Nilsen moves his chair opposite Masters
because he doesn't "want anyone to get ideas" (264). But Masters plays
not only Clarice. In the movie, while watching Clarice through night-
vision glasses after she has pursued him into his basement, Buffalo Bill
dreams of wearing her "glorious" golden hair. As he dies, "Starling
[hears his] ghastly voice, choking: 'How...does...it feel...to be...so
beautiful?'" (Harris 1991, 334). If we really want to re-live the movie
we should interpret Masters in female garb as an enactment of Buffalo
Bill's fantasy. If we really want a real-life movie scenario, Brian,
Clarice and Bill must merge into a multi-faceted role, a role in which
questions of who is playing whom disappear, a role which we might say
allows reality to be fiction, and vice versa.
And where are we in all this? With Brian playing Clarice? With
Brian playing Bill playing Clarice? With Bill playing Clarice playing
Brian? Or with Dennis playing Hannibal or Jeffrey? And Jeffrey? who does
he play? Perhaps Hannibal. But there's lots of competition for that
role. What better way for viewers of the 1992 Oscar ceremony to feel at
one with the host, than for Billy Crystal to be wheeled onto the stage a
la Doctor Lecter, complete with restraining suit and hockey-mask? Billy
playing Hannibal receives the kind of adulation Jeffrey must have dreamt
3
about. For a few precious minutes Crystal plays the man with power over
language, over death, and especially over his audience. He plays the
psychiatrist who eats his patients and who intends to eat his former
jail-keeper, a prospect that brought cheers and high-fives in my local
cinema. Despite the competition, however, Jeffrey has his chance. If he
wanted to play with us by playing Hannibal, we let him join our fun for
a while. People Weekly reports him "confined to a cell with a glass
front much like the fictional madman Hannibal Lecter in the film The
Silence of the Lambs" (3 Feb. 1992: 78). Geraldo Rivera introduces a
show entitled "Jeffrey Dahmer: Diary of a Monster" (Geraldo: 12 Sept.
1991) with "It's a real-life Silence of the Lambs, they say...It's
unbelievable"; while a New York Times editorial notes that "It's as
though The Silence of the Lambs has suddenly burst from flat-screen
fiction into inescapable 3-D reality" (6 Aug. 1991: A16). The role has
guaranteed fan-appeal. Anne E. Schwartz notes that while Dahmer awaited
trial, her fellow reporters admitted to thinking about "getting Dahmer
to scribble his name next to [their] bylines", and that "Several
[police] officers decided to ask Dahmer to autograph a newspaper with
the headlines blaring about death and dismemberment" (Schwartz 137). She
quotes one of the officers: "I saw Silence of the Lambs, so I knew
enough not to give him the whole pen. So I took it apart and stuck just
the ink cartridge through the bars" (137).
Serial killers have a penchant for role-playing. The troupe can
include John Wayne Gacy as a clown, the "Zodiac Killer” dressed as an
executioner, and Dennis Nilsen (in the Grand Guignol?) pretending to be
dead while propping his dead victims alongside him. And now the new-boy,
Dahmer, who, before accepting work in our re-creations of Demme’s movie,
starred in his own version of Hellhound Hellraiser IT; played the
emperor in Return of the Jedi (buying yellow contact lenses in order to
increase the resemblance, his Defence Attorney tells us); and ran
through the trance-routine from Exorcist 111 "like he was wanting to be
the character in the movie", as Tracey Edwards, who witnessed the
performance before escaping from the set, put it. The Silence of the
Lambs is Dahmer's biggest break, but while those Milwaukee police
obviously think he deserves Lecter's role, he mostly finds himself cast
as Buffalo Bill. And the reason is his putative sexuality. People
Weekly's John Tayman is typical in his confusion of homosexuality with
failed transsexuality: "Jeffrey L. Dahmer may have more in common with
Lambs' other nightmare man, the skin-stitching Buffalo Bill - a furtive,
gender obsessed character who was less mad genius than helpless
psychopath" (12 Aug. 1991: 36). It is a confusion which we can repeat
when watching the movie, when we conflate transsexuality, transvestism
and homosexuality in order to construct a recognizeable Bad Guy. In our
eyes, Dahmer mostly assumes Bill’s role because we're choosy when it
comes to serial killers. We can laugh at the Oscars' host playing
Lecter, but wouldn’t see the joke if he played Buffalo Bill. Mike
Kinsley can get away with referring to his co-host of CNN's Crossfire,
Robert Novak, as Harris's more popular and more powerful monster -
"Hannibal Lecter and I will be back in just a moment" (Crossfire: 31
Jan. 1992) - but presumably would not if he implied there were a
resemblance between Novak and the monster we commonly perceive as
4.
gender-confused, helpless and impotent. Newsweek's Alex Prud’homme can
compare and contrast the "brilliant mass-murdering psychiatrist in The
Silence of the Lambs" (my italics) to the "creature" from Milwaukee (5
Aug. 1991: 26). It is the mad but heroic genius we love, not those with
abnormal sexualities, not those types who love poodles and have a speech
impediment, not those whose drag-attire makes us think of Death's Head
moths in Insect Zoos, their "wings trailing like a cape" (Harris 1991,
252). We can love those who covet Clarice from a courteous distance (or
who flirt with the idea of consuming her), but to want to be her is just
plain sick.
The movie’s Bad Guy wants to give up his manhood, cut it free, and
that's what can make him not only bad but scarey (at least to men), for
he can represent a masculinity which is not permanent, vulnerable to
fantasy and the knife. His crime is not only the murder and torture of
women but his attempt to meddle with gender. Along with Bill's demise,
however, is the idea that gender identity may not be fixed in nature
after all. The evil is defeated, the evil, that is, of those who have a
"fluid notion" of the model of gender "outside the logic of the binary"
in which gender "becomes a kind of costume or masquerade", a model which
struggles "through violence to be born" (Young 14). Those like Ed Gein,
who similarly used the flesh of his female victims as "sewing material,
fashioning vests, belts, and even a face mask made from a real face"
(Davis 163) and then proceeded to dance around his house wearing his
made-to-measure outfit. Opposed to Buffalo Bill's and Ed Gein's
6
unspeakableness is Hannibal Lecter, an acceptable face of evil, a man
whose identity transformations leave his gender, as well as his speech
and social standing, relatively untroubled.
The Silence of the Lambs can be (and is) framed as a good old-
fashioned heterosexual story between two star-crossed lovers, separated
by class, by prison-bars and finally, by the restraints of courtesy. At
least it can be if one plays that old trick of translating sexual
ambiguity on the part of our heroes and heroines (or a lack of overt
sexuality) as heterosexuality, or if one, in the manner of Norman
Mailer, is prepared to confer heterosexual status on those who have
clearly struggled with their homosexuality. Clarice is our heroine for
tracking down Buffalo Bill; Hannibal our hero for his cultured
sophistication, for his Quest to consume all the indignity in the world.
Eating people is not necessarily wrong. It depends on who's doing the
eating and who's being eaten. It depends on table manners. While Lecter
reads cookery books for connoisseurs, Dahmer apparently compares human
flesh to "filet mignon” (Newsweek. 10 Feb. 1992: 31). But while Dahmer
managed to obtain hero-status for some - sales were brisk for a poster
issued by the Oregon Citizen's Alliance that read "Free Jeffrey Dahmer:
All he did was kill homosexuals" - to land a role like Hannibal's
requires a few "basic" and "natural" characteristics that can't (so the
story goes) be easily imitated. To assume the powers and
responsibilities which go with the role of "serial killer", one must
first establish credibility with a demanding public.
7
Introduction
Geraldoz Jack, in the old days were there many of these guys
- many Jack the Rippers out there? Or is this a modern-day
phenomenon?
Jack Olsenz There was Jack the Ripper and hardly anybody
else. It is a modern phenomenon and it's an American
phenomenon for the most part. The FBI feel there's more than
three hundred of them going at any given time.
Geraldoz Right now?
Jack Olsenz Yes, caught and uncaught.
Sandra Londonz I think it depends on your definition. If we
look back in history we had the gunslingers who would be
called serial killers today. Dan Rollins likes to go back to
the knights of old when a man was revered for his prowess
with a double-sided sword.
Geraldoz Danny was quite a chivalrous fellow.
(Geraldoz 29 Mar. 1993: "Inside the Mind of Serial Killers
and the Women Who Love Them. " Jack Olsen is author of a book
on Arthur J. Shawcross, convicted of killing ten
prostitutes. Sandra London has written on - and, at the time
of the show's airing, was the fiancee of - Dan Rollins, "The
Gainesville Killer")
Although society has always produced for itself a plentiful supply
of monsters to choose from, it seems to me that contemporary monstrosity
assumes its most compelling form for us as the serial killer. Whether or
not the number of people who kill repeatedly has risen in recent years,
the idea of the serial killer seems to be increasingly important to the
way we perceive our world. Whether or not our contemporary construction
of the serial killer is a new way to represent an old phenomenon, or
whether it represents a new reality, it is one with which we seem
particularly fascinated, one which seems to require continual re-writing
or - in a period which has seen the release of The Silence of the Lambs,
Jennifer Eight, Candyman, Jeffrey Dahmer: The Secret Life, Man Bites Dog
(a Cannes festival award winner), Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer,
Three Rivers, Sliver and numerous other serial killer epics - re
screening. It is our construction of the serial killer, the construction
of ourselves as audience to that spectacle, and the relationship between
spectacle and audience which are the subjects of this dissertation. The
figure of the serial killer I draw is blurred: a figure conflated with
an image of its representer.
Several commentators support Jack Olsen's claim that serial
killing is All-American. For Robert Ressler it "has become something as
American as apple pie" (in Davis 166), for Deborah Cameron and Elizabeth
Frazer serial killing is "the (as yet) specifically American phenomenon"
(Cameron and Frazer 27), while Jack Levin and James Alan Fox sub-title
their book, Mass Murder (1985), "America's Growing Menace." However,
while we may begin with an idea of serial killing as being specifically
a part of American or American-influenced culture, or even, in moments
of deepest cynicism, as being an American Dream come true, the more we
talk about it the more we want to universalize it, to describe it in
ways which imply that that mysterious, conveniently indescribable thing
we call "nature" is really what's behind it all. Noting that "In the
last twenty years the United States, with only five percent of the
world's population, has produced seventy-five percent of the world's
serial murderers" (19), Joel Norris in Serial Killers suggests that "As
the influence of American culture spreads to less developed countries,
the fear is that, unless checked somehow, the disease of serial murder
will spread as well" (19). While Norris can hear Bundy, Berkowitz and
Gacy humming the Star-Spangled Banner as they work, fears that our
value-system might be connected to the kick of killing are assuaged by
9
putting such behavior on a par with a viral infection. With other
diseases we're quick to provide a social context, but here we're quite
happy to allow nature free play. We'd rather not ask why the "disease"
infects, for the most part, only that dominant, or once-dominant social
nexus, white men. While the FBI tell us that "over the years, it's
become clear that most [serial killer] offenders are white males”
(Newsweek 2 May, 1991), we fail to explore correspondence between the
meanings we give to serial killing and the meaning of masculinity and of
whiteness in modern America. In his book on Dahmer, Norris notes that,
serial killers "represent an attack on the entire moral structure of a
community" (Norris 1992, 264). My project is in part to make the point
that they are represented as such, that that representation has a
history, and in the process I hope to give room to the possibility that
a part of that moral structure might be continuous with, not opposed to,
the phenomenon.
The social construction of the serial killer is, I suggest, built
on the denial of such a possibility. When it is stated that "some
researchers estimate that since 1980 murders with unknown motives have
increased by 270 percent" and that "official statistics" confirm that
"in 1988 as many as 4,859 murders were committed in the United States by
someone with an unclear or unknown reason" (Sears x), how much are the
terms "unknown motive" or "unknown reason" indicative of a refusal to
make sense of such violence in a way which would associate serial
killing with some of society's dominant values? Dahmer, the killer of
mostly blacks, of mostly gays, is sometimes perceived as a "hate
10
killer", as a homophobe, as a racist, but he is represented more often
as something else and something more, a fully fledged serial killer, a
figure imbued with mystery and power. The serial killer has hate within
his soul, but it is hate whose source is perceived as asocial, not of
the world we know.
Sometimes denial takes the form of distancing ourselves from the
killer by exaggerating the macabreness of his acts. Sometimes it takes
the form of silence, of figuring him as inhabiting a world of the
ineffable, beyond language, beyond culture. When the latter occurs the
killer who emerges is one endowed with power, for power is something we
like to imagine belonging above and beyond our worlds and our words. And
with the Gothic identified as a space ruled by the power beyond, we find
it natural to place our heroes within familiar Gothic narratives. Among
Hollywood's favorite ways to tell a story, such narratives are, S.L.
Vernado suggests, propelled by "the numinous": "the non-rational factor
in the idea of the divine and its relation to the rational" which
informs "man's underlying sense of supernatural fear, wonder, and
delight when he is confronted by the divine" (Varnado 58). Hearing about
Jeffrey Dahmer building a temple of self-worship out of body parts,
experimenting in divinity, regarding himself as a numen, we're not slow
in dreaming him up as the embodiment of the irrational to our boring
rationality. If it is estrangement it is estrangement accompanied by
wonder and delight. The serial killer, both repulsive and attractive,
verges on the sacred.
11
Like all sacred beings, one of his greatest assets is his
invisibility. For the serial killer "on the loose", this is what
separates him from the average murderer. It is invisibility which gives
him the status of being "lost", of being threateningly "free." In an age
in which the value of images perhaps exceeds the value of words, the
search for the serial killer is the search for visual identification
rather.than explication. However, when he is caught, we cannot look at
him for long. We feel the need to turn away. He is taboo. His image says
everything and nothing. For it is "normality" which stares back at us.
The brief glimpse we allow ourselves is enough to tell us what we want
to know, enough to frighten and delight us. It is ourselves we see. The
serial killer is inscribed with the power of unspeakableness, of meaning
suspended, unheeded. Refusing to read the signs, we return them. The
serial killer construction is polysemous, shining brightly with meaning
returned to its source.
Here I wish to write a history of the serial killer’s empowerment.
It is a history which has correspondence with the histories of gender,
race and class. Our failure to disempower the serial killer can depend
upon our failure to question what power means to us. Discussing The
Silence of the Lambs' Hannibal Lecter, Dennis Nilsen says: "He is shown
as a potent figure, which is pure myth. It is his power and manipulation
which please the public. But it's not at all like that. My offenses
arose from a feeling of inadequacy, not potency. I never had any power
in my life” (quoted in Masters 1991, 185). Contrasting with Nilsen's
serial killer is our potentate, constructed in part with the help of the
12
term "serial killer" itself. Nilsen suggests that the term is misleading
because of the implied intention to repeat: "Each one seemed to be its
own last time...You might as well call Elizabeth Taylor a serial bride."
Kicking sand in the faces of the impotents that Nilsen sees is our man
on a quest. Why should we inscribe the figure of the serial killer with
power, and what relation might that construction have with culturally
acceptable meanings of power? What relation might there be between that
inscription of power and the fact that the majority of serial killers'
victims are those commonly perceived as weak, as lacking cultural
presence: single, unemployed "drifters", prostitutes, or women in
general?
If we believe a psychologist called to the witness stand, Dahmer's
collecting human heads, limbs and genitals was a re-enactment of a
benign and familiar role. While noting that "It was very, very bizarre
behavior...", the witness added that considering that hunters display
animal heads without being considered psychotic or paraphiliac it was
also a "pretty realistic way to keep trophies" (quoted in ullman 30).
Similarly, Wilson and Seaman argue that serial killers who retain
certain body parts do so "for much the same reason as the big-game
hunter mounts the head and antlers taken from his prey" (68). When we
find ourselves conflating images of serial killers with roles created
by, among others, Ernest Hemingway in order to find the former legally
sane, perhaps it is time to find ways of foregrounding what it is we
consider normal. Instead of interrogating Dahmer's past (and especially
his childhood) in our search for, say, the "key" to his motivation,
13
perhaps we need to examine the relation of dreams of violence, of racial
or sexual purity, of closure, of death, to our dominant culture and its
dreams.
In Madness and Civilization Foucault claims that he is writing a
history of the Other, positing Madness as outside the spheres of (and
separate from) Reason (which oppresses Madness and thus forces it to the
margins). But in The Order of Things, Foucault advances the amended
argument that the histories of the Same (the Self) and the Other are
inextricably implicated and interpenetrated: "the history of the order
imposed on things would be the history of the Same - of that which, for
a given culture, is both dispersed and related” (xxiv). Part of this
dissertation will be spent looking at or looking out from the
representations of Dahmer in order to see how neatly or uncomfortably
they lie in our histories of the Other or of the Same. I will discuss
the roles that the serial killer plays for us, and those that we play,
the roles we play for him. Suggesting that all the roles - his, ours -
are unstable, get confused (and not, necessarily, accidentally), I will
argue that in certain instances our representation of the serial killer
makes redundant the opposition Same/Other, that "civilization" not only
depends on "perversion", but that the "perversion” which the serial
killer can represent can be said to be the fulfillment of what goes for
"civilization", the fulfillment of normative expectations. Another way
of saying this, is that "normality" and "perversion" exist together on a
dynamic continuum, rather than as separate entities, however
14
interpenetrated, or as oppositional structures giving each other
meaning.
Wilson and Seaman suggest that "Perhaps the most frightening thing
about [Ted] Bundy's account of himself is the description of how he
descended into sex murder by a series of almost infinitesimal steps"
(263). As well as contradicting the presumption of "evil" from the
beginning, the idea of a gradual descent (as opposed to one giant leap)
helps to destabilize the idea of a secure divide between self and other,
between normality and the abnormality of the serial killer. Such an idea
may appear not too discordant with an approach to crime which considers
beastliness and criminality to be a latent quality of all of us. From
such a perspective self control is that which marks the civilized from
the savage: "...there will always be a dark side of human nature", says
a Milwaukee psychiatrist in one of the books on Dahmer, "The dark side
is the motivation for us to master and grow with it, managing it the
best you can. There will always be mass murderers." (Davis 265). But the
need for "other control" can be expressed as fervently as the need for
"self control." For Halloween director John Carpenter, "liberal" horror
movies, those which say that "the evil is within our tribe and inside of
us", contrast with the "conservative" ones like the science fiction
movies of the fifties, those which say that "the evil is outside of us
and our tribe - demons we have to fight off" (People Weekly. 1 Apr.
1991: 70). I hope to exclude myself from both approaches to crime (hope,
in other words, to mess up that all-inclusive binary) by removing nature
from the equation. Without nature, without the sense of inevitability it
engenders, we are left with uncertainties, with a world which we have
created, with a world which only we can change. In other words, without
nature it all comes back to us, to ourselves, to our perception of the
self and of the other. And if we remove nature, perhaps we also reduce
the criminal's perceived power (and therefore attraction), or at least
the power which comes from being perceived as enduring, true. A
possibility I explore is that this partnership of nature and crime has
been, in effect, a partnership in crime, that there is a connection
between the naturalization of the criminal and the expectancy and the
reality of victimhood.
"With the new year", writes Don Davis, Dahmer "was about to send
his awful scoreboard into double digits" (126). We like to talk about
serial killing in terms of sports. It gives us a framework in order to
assess just how important a serial killer should be considered: "can you
give us some indication as to what would be a range, a ball park figure
as to what crimes this individual has likely committed? ” asks the Chair
in the House of Representatives Hearing on Serial Killing (House of
Reps. 71). Helping to make those sport metaphors seem more appropriate,
and concurrent with the recent glut in baseball-player trading cards is
the availability of serial killer trading cards. As well as offering the
illusion of possessing and controlling our favorite monsters, the fun of
collecting serial killer cards, just like any other trading cards, is
comparing statistics. Listed on the Jeffrey Dahmer card would no doubt
be the following data: born in 1960; white male; seventeen male victims;
16
victims killed in Wisconsin and Ohio between 1978 and 1991; victims
mostly gay, mostly black or Hispanic; had sex with, mutilated and
sometimes ate his victims. (Information which would not make it is that
he "came from what might be construed as a typical, all-American middle-
class family", that he "apparently did not come from an impoverished or
deprived background", that he "had family in Milwaukee and had lived
with family while he was committing the first murders" (Norris 265)). In
order to offer some answers to the questions mentioned in this
introduction, or at least in order to find some more questions to ask, I
have focused on our representation of the man who will no doubt prove to
be one of the most enduring of serial killing super-stars. I discuss how
books, movies, magazine and newspaper articles, jokes, afternoon network
talk-shows, as well as those trading cards, all contribute to the
construction of the Dahmer myth. Also considered are the ways we have
perceived other serial killers of the last decade or so, and how we have
previously read or created the idea of monstrosity. I pay attention
particularly to Thomas Harris's Hannibal Lecter novels and their movie
versions which, perhaps more than any other contemporary texts, provide
for us the opportunity to drool over and get turned on by repeat
murderers.
As I have suggested in this introduction, in Dahmer' s
representation there are both elements of denial (denial that the serial
killer has any connection with normality), and of celebration (of the
serial killer's perceived transcendence of normality), a release from
that denial, the expression of those repressed dreams, so to speak. The
structure of the dissertation - if we can stretch this mind-metaphor
just a moment longer - might be read as inducing a move from the assumed
safety of conscious denial to those subconscious spaces which inform our
collective fantasy life. Part I is a discussion of the "forces" of that
denial, of the police and the police mentality which simultaneously
constructs and polices abnormality (as a means of exonerating
normality) . In chapter one I will suggest that the FBI has appropriated
from the psychiatry profession the power to define for us the meaning of
contemporary monstrosity. The importance of the monster who emerges lies
in its function as ultimate-referent to policing discourses, in its
naturalizing the power of those discourses and in its justifying
increased policing powers. In the remaining chapters of Part I, I will
describe discourses which cloak investigative policing with the
benignity of investigative journalism, discourses we all speak without
questioning their values and assumptions. I aim to examine their
centers, their constructions of unspeakableness, and identify what they
mystify. The unspeakable, I will suggest, does not stay silent.
In Part II I describe the different ways we construct the serial
killer in our own image. I suggest that we are both thrilled and
horrified by what we see, that we exist in a kind of horror-movie which
we write and perform for ourselves daily. While the jury rejected the
argument of Dahmer's attorney that Dahmer "became enamored, overwhelmed,
caught up in the character in Exorcist III” (Los Angeles Times. 31 Jan.
1992: A4), we're often unable to distinguish between observation of and
involvement in teleworld or movieland. In an age in which collective
18
dreams seem more easily realizable, more likely to surface, the nature
of those dreams becomes all the more important. The blurring of
particular fantasies (fantasies of power, and especially male power)
with reality (or in other words, the realization of those fantasies) is
contextualized, I suggest, by what Margaret Morse calls this "cultural
shift away from the forms of realism, literacy, and objectivity which
have been dominant in Western culture since the Renaissance and the age
of industrialization" (Morse 76). The connection between fantasy and
behavior, between, for example, pornography and sexual violence is of
course a contentious notion. Wilson and Seaman argue that "for the
sexual criminal, the most important step is the one that bridges the gap
between fantasy and actuality" (261). My comments in Part II turn on the
idea that the bridging of that gap is perhaps made a little easier when
we regard real-life killers as characters in a fantasy-world, when our
representations of real-life killers are indistinguishable from movie-
heroes. In the concluding chapter to Part II I describe in more detail
how the serial killer figure and its others are constructed in relation
to ideas of power and weakness. The intention is to suggest how that
opposition can be de-familiarized.
Some readers will no doubt feel offended by the assumption of
their participation in the discourses under discussion, an assumption
expressed by the constant use of the term "we." It is a term whose
meaning will shift considerably. Sometimes it will refer to "we men",
those of us whose sense of self is constituted in part by the history
of, by expectations of, masculinity. Sometimes it can signify "we white
men and women." At other times it can refer to those of us who consider
ourselves or who are considered "heterosexual", or "educated" or
"middle-class." And of course it will refer at times to a combination of
these and other ways we define ourselves. I haven't needed to pass
through a swing door in the back of a used-book store, or to subscribe
to an obscure cable channel in order to find the quotations I use in
this study. Mostly they have been taken from magazines with large
circulations, from newspapers claiming national status, from television
shows with the highest ratings. When I read The New York Times or watch
The Oprah Winfrey Show I read and watch with the assumption of belonging
to a readership or viewing audience who possess a semblance of common
beliefs and understanding. I feel I am one of a crowd. "We" will signify
that crowd or that illusory crowd, that mass readership or mass viewing
audience to which I imagine the words I read and hear are addressed.
I write for the possibility that those who see themselves as
wholly outside of my representation might feel momentarily that it
resonates with their perception of normality, that they will at times
pass over that "we" unquestioningly. And yet perhaps I construct for my
self a privileged position. I may open The New York Times or switch on
to Oprah and be a part of mass culture but I allow myself the belief
that I am able to locate my position within "the mass." I assume powers
of self-reflexivity. The serial killer I see haunts his common
representation. He is the monster within, or rather he is monstrous
normality within the monster of serial killer mythology. Perhaps I
20
should confess, Frankenstein-like, that he is my monster, my creation,
that I write the serial killer and I write my self.
21
Part I: Policing the Serial Killer
We even told [the investigators] where [a suspect] would
live and the type of dogs he would have. In this case,
Doberman pinschers or German shepherds. The only reason we
said that - not that we have anything against Doberman
pinschers or German shepherds - is it is just that we
believed he was a paranoid individual. (An FBI officer
explaining the benefits of personality profiling at a House
of Representatives Hearing on Serial Killing, House of Reps.
22)
Reflecting on his previous work, Foucault in Power/Knowledge
remarks: "My problem was to ascertain the sets of transformations in the
regime of discourses necessary and sufficient for people to use these
words rather than those, a particular type of discourse rather than some
other type, for people to be able to look at things from such and such
an angle and not some other one" (211). In chapter one I will suggest
that we are using different words to describe criminal monstrosity. Our
dominant policing discourses describe a world threatened more by
inexplicable horror than by various forms of medically- and legally-
defined insanity.1 If madness is evoked, it is madness without method,
1 The majority of States, including Wisconsin (the state in which Dahmer
committed the majority of his crimes), apply the test for insanity
established by the American Law Institute in 1962. According to Section
4.01 of the Model Penal Code: "A person is not responsible for criminal
conduct if at the time of such conduct as a result of mental disease or
defect he lacks substantial capacity either to appreciate the
wrongfulness of his conduct or to conform his conduct to the
requirements of law."
22
one which cannot be treated, and consequently imprisonment or execution
(as opposed to hospitalization) are percieved as the state's only
suitable response. Central to such discourses is the idea of evil, the
widespread acceptance of which, I suggest, allows those who protect
society from its monsters to once again assume an aura of priestly
authority.
Many of the discourses' terms are those favored by and indeed
first used by the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime.
This FBI service is located at the FBI Academy in Quantico and is run by
agents of the Behaviorial Science Unit. In 1984 its establishment was
formally announced by President Reagan who gave it the primary mission
of "identifying and tracking repeat killers." It is responsible for the
creation of systematic personality profiling techniques known as the
'Criminal Investigative Analysis Program’. NCAVC is the center to which
Wilson and Seaman refer when they state that "clearly, there [is] only
one oracle to consult" on the problem of serial killing (117), and the
center whose members Wilson and Seaman call the "FBI's renowned 'A
Team'.'' It is also home to the The Silence of the Lambs' Jack Crawford
and Clarice Starling.
The policing discourses I describe are, I suggest, gaining in
influence in the sphere of the judiciary at the expense of psychiatric
discourse, and are also becoming dominant in "the media" (not always
distinguishable from the judiciary when trials are televised).
Increasingly they are spoken by those presented by television as experts
on serial killing, or by those cited in magazine articles. And in an age
23
in which the concerns of entertainment are the concerns of the police,
in which representations of the police dominate our mass media, and in
which many of our television and cinema heroes are "real" or "fictional"
members of "elite" police chapters, the particular ways we construct
criminal monstrosity indicate, I argue, an intensification of what might
be called a cultural "policing mentality."
In the remaining chapters of Part I I will discuss some specifics
of this policing mentality: processes of individualization upon which
dominant policing discourse relies; the construction of "family" and
"childhood" as origins to the serial killer phenomenon and consequently
as spaces which can and should be policed; and the simultaneous
investigation of and construction of "the unspeakable."
24
1. Defining the Monster: Serial Killing and the FBI
For years the Marquis de Sade has been an object lesson in how a
monster ought to behave. Bataille uses the term "volupte" in reference
to the wicked Frenchman, a term Jane Gallop explains:
...is characterized by the exceeding of a certain
quantitative level. The prevalence of quantification and
categorization and the vast number of victims in Sade's text
account for Sade's unprecedented success in doing violence
to humanistic notions of man's dignity and individuality.
The Sadian hero appears as someone with an insatiable quota
to fill, someone with a heroic task which does not afford
him any simple pleasure. (Gallop 30)
In Downtown Milwaukee, Jeffrey Dahmer, or "The Man Who Could Not Kill
Enough" as Anne E. Schwartz describes him in the title of her book, does
his best to emulate the aristocrat of murder and mayhem. Or so the story
goes. Never mind Dennis Nilsen's assertion that the term "serial killer"
is misleading on the grounds that each murder is intended to be the
last. Our monsters are on an (anti-)heroic quest for the biggest score
possible. For the Sadian monster, this task is mingled with everyday
life, a combination which constitutes his monstrosity: "the intensity
which is the seriousness of volupte becomes intolerable by being
deflected onto everything, onto the innocent little pleasures of
everyday life. The result is not pure violence, but the violently
impure" (Gallop 33). On one level Dahmer's life seems to have been the
pursuit of the simple pleasures of everyday life. But he always managed
to mess up, get it wrong somehow. Sharing a beer with friends would have
been fine until one of them opened the refrigerator. Lunch with his
colleagues at the chocolate factory would seem like a nice way of
breaking the monotony. Only Jeffrey has to spoil it all by filling his
sandwiches with leftovers from the night before. Jeffrey can be the
Sadian "monster within": the perverse within the mundane, the unnatural
within the natural, the animal within the social, the anti-heroic within
the unheroic. He is the archetypal figure of impurity, the
representative of a world which needs cleansing.
If Sade is too aristocratic or too foreign, then there are models
to be had much closer to home, namely those familiar monsters of the
nineteenth century novel. Dahmer is "the average-looking man" (Schwartz,
picture caption) , a "former tennis player, the son of middle-class
parents" (Davis, cover) who has the appearance of being "a nice guy"
(Norris 1992, 1). But Dahmer, the boy-next-door, is also he who emitted
"wolflike howling" and "demonic screams" (Norris 1992, 8) when he was
arrested, and when we read that "Many witnesses quoted in the press have
attested to his extraordinary Jekyll-and-Hyde transformations when
drinking" (Masters 1991, 266) we have little trouble in constructing
Dahmer as the latest descendant of Stevenson’s character(s). When it
comes to telling stories about our monsters, we like to imply that evil
is everywhere, only hidden from view, concealed within. The figure of
the serial killer is "violent impurity" personified, a construction
necessitating figures of violent purity to confront it. The expelling of
the perverse from the mundane, the unnatural from the natural, the
animal from the social are heroic tasks, and the heroes who perform them
26
need to be mirror images of the men who threaten man' s dignity and
individuality.
Mary Douglas has written extensively on the involvement of the
opposition pure/impure in the way we classify the world around us. She
notes that "reflection on dirt involves reflection on the relation of
order to disorder, being to non-being, form to formlessness, life to
death" (Douglas 5). Describing oneself as an agent of cleanliness is a
tried and tested way of justifying one's actions. Having a crack at
appealing to our sense of order, the self-proclaimed "Streetcleaner",
Peter Sutcliffe, explains: "The women I killed were filth, bastard
prostitutes who were just standing round littering/the streets. I was
just cleaning the place up a bit" (quoted in Beattie 81). Historically,
to be designated society's Mr. Clean has been a good way of gaining
state-sanctioned power. With reference to nineteenth century Britain,
Stallybrass and White note that ''the discursive elision of disease and
crime suggested an elision of the means with which to cope with them:
like crime, disease could be policed" (Stallybrass and White 133). "The
policemen and soap" thus become "analogous: they penetrate the dark,
public realm” (Stallybrass and White 134). In our own society Jack Henry
Abbot identifies such an elision of disease and crime and sees it as
instrumental in the production of "the policeman mentality" that makes
us believe "there is such a thing as a relentless enemy in human society
that requires eradication and cannot ever be reconciled with human
society" (Abbot 61). Represented as a new form of beastliness, the
serial killer seems to invite existing policing/purifying powers to
27
redefine themselves or concede to discourses for whom the new beast
functions as ultimate-referent. For Joel Norris:
Not really a traditional form of murder...this crime is
actually a form of disease. Its carriers are serial killers
who suffer from a variety of crippling and eventually fatal
symptoms, and its immediate victims are the people struck
down seemingly at random by the disease carriers. It is the
disease of serial murder that is rapidly becoming an
epidemic in American society today and one of the patterns
of violence that the office of the U.S. Surgeon General has
called one of the top-priority issues of public health.
(Norris 1988, 12)
Before the serial killer, society had plenty other diseased and
dirty beasts to deal with. Foucault identifies the homicidal maniac as
the monster who sustains and justifies the power of nineteenth century
psychiatric discourse. Homicidal mania is:
...a necessity... linked to the very existence of a
psychiatry which had made itself autonomous but needed
thereafter to secure a basis for its intervention by gaining
recognition as a component of public hygiene. And it could
establish this basis only through the fact that there was a
disease (mental alienation) for it to mop up. (Foucault
1980, 202)
Foucault dramati2es the psychiatry profession's reasoning thus:
...how can it be proved that madness constitutes a danger
except by showing that there exist extreme cases where
madness, even though not apparent to the public gaze,
without manifesting itself beforehand through any symptom
except a few minute fissures, miniscule murmurings
perceptible only to the highly trained observer, can
suddenly explode into a monstrous crime? (Foucault 1980,
202)
At the end of the twentieth century the FBI are more than willing to
agree with, among others, Joel Norris who says that the serial killer
28
"is an entirely different criminal" (Norris 1988, 17) from any that came
before. It is a change which makes the beast less detectable to the old
diagnosticians, lessens the ability of psychiatry to figure itself as
society's agent of cleanliness, and one which increases the dominance of
the police mentality, increases the powers of law-enforcement and
specifically, the FBI. The disease of serial killing as constructed by
the FBI is one which does not adversely affect the mental state of those
it strikes. It is a disease which can be recognized by particular
biographical facts. It is one which, in the void left by the absence of
insanity as a credible judicial concept, can assume the appearance of
that age-old and most flexible of estrangement tools, evil.
A Milwaukee journalist remembers: "When a local Baptist minister
and his wife went to Dahmer' s apartment and performed an exorcism,
complete with speaking tongues and guttural growls as the evil spirits
filled them, we watched on television" (Schwartz 140). We watch the
exorcism of Dahmer's apartment and don't flinch when we hear his
attorney telling the jury that Dahmer's favorite movie was The Exorcist
and that he showed it to some of his victims before drugging them. When
he is charged in court he wears an orange prison jump-suit with a black
T-shirt underneath: "Halloween colors. They suited the mood" reports the
Washington Post (7 Aug. 1991: Bl). When his trial begins one of its
headlines promises "Ghoulish Details" (31 Jan 1992).
The language of good and evil is one which transcends the barrier
between "serious" and "tabloid" journalism, and it is prevalent in
29
Dahmer's own version of the events which led to his arrest. He tells
police before the trial:
I have to question whether or not there is an evil force in
the world and whether or not I have been influenced by
-it.. .Although I am not sure if there is a God, or if there
is a devil, I know that as of lately I've been doing a lot
of thinking about both, and I have to wonder what has
influenced me in my life, (quoted in Schwartz 200-1)
Dahmer's pre-sentence apology begins with "It is over" and ends with a
quotation from Timothy:
Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners - of whom I
am the worst. But for that very reason I was shown mercy so
that in me, the worst of sinners, Christ Jesus might display
his unlimited patience as an example for those who would
believe in him and receive eternal life. Now to the King
Eternal, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and
glory forever and ever, (quoted in Schwartz 219)
Dahmer talks of "the doctors [who] have told me about my sickness"
(quoted in Schwartz 217), but it is a sickness which we inscribe with
satanic overtones. One of the doctors Dahmer might have spoken to is
Joel Norris, "renowned psychologist and expert on serial killers" as the
cover of his book on Dahmer describes him, a cover dripping with
embossed blood. Cameron and Frazer note that despite there being few
serious writers who "would care to admit to an explicit belief in
original sin", we are able to put "a Freudian gloss" on the supposition
of everyone's potential for evil. Unconcerned with even a Freudian
gloss, Norris's Serial Killers: The Growing Menace includes images of an
individual sliding "into his trolling phase" (Norris 1988, 21), and is a
book described by the author "as the mirror of the fine line that
separates each one of us from yielding to the primal, instinctual,
animal behavior that lurks beneath the veneer of psychological self-
control and social convention" (Norris 1988, 6). In Dahmer's story of
Good and Evil, the Devil is defeated and Dahmer offers himself to and
asks forgiveness from God. But it is an apology we don't want to hear.
We are happier for our monsters to remain evil. So rigid is our division
of the world into good and evil, normality and monstrosity, that the man
who putatively beat Dahmer to death with a broom handle can be placed on
our side. "I hope there will be no economic returns or celebration as a
folk hero for the man that killed Jeffrey Dahmer", says Milwaukee County
District Attorney, E. Michael McCann (The New York Times. 29 Nov. 1994:
Al), fearing "A Just Dessert" to be society's reaction to the man-eating
monster's violent end.
Our new beast is less the madman and more the sane and evil
monster. The disease he carries is beyond the reach of biological or
psychological investigation. Though sane, the evil serial killer can be
imprisoned or capitally punished and estranged from the rest of us. It
is a construction which allows us to condemn at the same time as giving
his acts the appearance of intelligibility (the acts of a sane man). The
cause, while inexplicable, is named (as evil), but unlike insanity the
notion of evil-as-cause negates the legal problems arising from the
possibility of the suspect lacking control over his actions, lacking
responsibility, lacking guilt. The serial killer is consequently a
figure who frees society from the labyrinth of legal and medical
31
discourse from which Foucault remarked we were struggling to emerge, the
labyrinth, that is, that arose from the notion of homicidal mania:
The more psychologically determined an act is found to be,
the more its author can be considered legally responsible.
The more the act is, so to speak, gratuitous and
undetermined, the more it will tend to be excused. A
paradox, then: the legal freedom of a subject is proven by
the fact that his act is seen as necessary, determined; his
lack of responsibility proven by the fact that his act is
seen to be unnecessary. (Foucault 1978, 11)
That we are still inclined to believe that we can only condemn when we
are able to construct causal intelligibility is the worry of a National
Review editorial on the Dahmer trial (2 Mar. 1992: 17-18) entitled: "So
Guilty They're Innocent." But the writer need not have worried. The
concept of evil enables us to be reasonably sure of the criminal' s
culpability, enables us to legally condemn, and also enables us to
differentiate own monster's sanity from our own.
The struggle with evil elevates the FBI to a community service,
above politics. As fighters of evil, the FBI can assume the powers of a
priesthood: that is, the power of being both attached to the law and
above it, the power of the confessor, the power of possessing the right
to regard an individual as a battleground between Satanic and Godly
forces. In contrast to psychiatric discourse - that to which the serial
killer and his attorneys can turn in order to negate questions of
culpability - is the discourse of the FBI, that which has the power to
distinguish right from wrong. In contrast to psychiatric discourse -
that which has itself become unsanitary, one which contributes to the
creation of an environment in which the serial killer thrives and is
32
protected - is the purity of FBI discourse. Underground in a former
nuclear bunker at Quantico, entry to which is controlled by key locks
and cypher, members of the National Center for the Analysis of Violent
Crime work in an environment atmospherically controlled to protect their
computers. This is sanitized policing:
Once signed in and tagged with a badge, visitors are
escorted along a corridor and down by elevator to the
Behavioral Science Investigative Support wing, a futuristic
high-tech beehive of a crime-fighting center, the only one
of its kind in the world. Its business is the analysis of
violent crime, not the physical arrest of violent criminals.
There are no cells here, no interrogation rooms, no 'Most
Wanted' posters; only desks and computers. (Wilson and
Seaman 118)
The new disease of serial killing is fought with sterilized efficiency.
And in order to justify the higher status of FBI discourse compared with
that of psychiatry, the disease of serial killing is one whose carriers
must be perceived as more of a threat than their monstrous forbears. The
empowerment of the serial killer serves to validate the exalted
discourse of the FBI, while the exalted discourse of the FBI empowers
the serial killer.
The conflict between the FBI and the psychiatry profession is
above all a conflict over language, over the meaning of words, over
which words have relevance. It is a conflict described by the FBI for
the House of Representatives Hearing:
Police are going to these people, these psychiatrists and
psychologists for the profiles, for the assessments, and
they are not too good. These other profilers are using terms
such as paranoid schizophrenia, manic depressive psychosis,
and paranoia...What do these terms terms mean to law
enforcement? It doesn't mean anything to us...So we
33
developed our own terms, and back in 1980 Roy Hazelwood and
myself in an article we wrote on the 'lust murderercame
up with terms called organized and disorganized...What we
mean by organized and disorganized is that the crime or the
crime scene reflects organization or it may reflect
disorganization. What do [we] mean disorganization? Well,
disorganization could be caused by the youthfulness of the
offender, or that the subject at the time of the offense was
under the influence of alcohol or drugs so that’s why it
appears disorganized, or appears disorganized because of
some mental defect on the part of the subject. (House of
Reps. 3)
Compared, then, to the debased and parochial language of psychology,
compared to what the FBI call "psychological jargon" (House of Reps.
22), is the clarity, purity and universality of the language spoken by
the FBI.
Purity, at least for the metaphysicist, is often associated with
truth. In order for the FBI's construction of monstrosity to gain
credence it must also be inscribed with the mark of truth, and as
Foucault will tell us, in the West "discourses having the status and
function of true discourses" means scientific discourses (Foucault 1980,
210). The creators of the personality profile are celebrated in the
Serial Killing Hearing thus: "What they have achieved in being able to
develop the actual science that they have and the expertise, the level
of it, is something that is quite a milestone in the law enforcement
profession" (House of Reps. 8). Elsewhere in the Hearing, as the
credibility of psychiatry's role in crime is questioned, psychiatry's
medical metaphors are appropriated:
The task of the investigator in developing a criminal
personality profile is quite similar to the process used by
clinicians to make a diagnosis and treatment plan: data is
collected and assessed, the situation reconstructed,
34
hypotheses are formulated, a profile developed and tested,
and the results reported back. (House of Reps. 28)
As the FBI seeks to give its discourses an aura of scientific
truthfulness, the psychiatry profession loses public confidence in its
scientific credentials. Reporting on Dahmer's insanity trial, Charles
Krauthammer, in a Washington Post article entitled "The Insanity Defence
on Trial" (7 Feb 1992: A25), suggests that "people react with disgust"
at the "trivialization" of the law by "pseudo-psychiatry." Reacting with
disgust is CNN's Sonya Friedman in an edition of her show entitled 'The
Criminal Mind' (Sonya Live. 1 Mar. 1993). After making her guest,
psychiatrist Richard Kraus, feel at home with "Three psychiatrists often
have four opinions", she throws in an aside guaranteed to needle the
most hardened of talk-show shrinks: "hardly a science."
We're growing tired of hearing that our criminal monsters may be
suffering psychologically. One of Geraldo Rivera's guests who has
studied and written on serial killing notes that in each of the fifty-
two cases she has studied there was an "element of multiple personality
present" (29 Mar. 1993). Our impatient host cuts her short, not wanting
"to get off on that." Compared to the possibility of inconspicuous and
inexplicable serial killers being everywhere, the exploration of
paranoid schizophrenia, manic depressive psychosis or psychopathology
doesn't seem to entertain us much these days. Now it is not minds we
want to hunt, but persons, or rather personalities. And seeking,
presumably, to justify such a shift is our (sometimes confusing)
differentiation of personality disorders from psychological ones: "Most
experts now agree that serial killers suffer from severe personality
35
defects but are not apt to have such mental disorders as schizophrenia",
says a Newsweek article on Dahmer (5 Aug. 1991: 41). With such
diagnoses, serial killers are bound for imprisonment or execution
because personality disorders disallow the possibility of an insanity
defence.
With regard to the validity of its involvement in the law, the
psychiatric profession itself is beginning apparently to doubt itself.
On a CNN 'Crossfire' (whose subject, in the wake of Dahmer's decision to
plead guilty but insane, was the insanity defence), Richard Vatz
(psychology professor and associate psychology editor of U.S. Today)
argued that in 1983 the American Psychiatric Association in its
statement on the issue of legal insanity "disavowed the ability of
psychiatrists to ascertain whether people could control their behavior”
and stated "that the ability to discern between an irresistible urge and
resisting the urge is the... difference between twilight and dusk”
(Crossfire. 31 Jan. 1992). Richard Ratner, forensic psychiatrist,
generally speaking in defence of psychiatry's involvement in the law,
noted that "insanity is not a psychiatric term, it's a legal term." If
psychiatry is to leave the court-room, FBI-speak may well take its
place. In Dahmer's "insanity trial" the above described FBI system of
categorization came close to being employed in what would traditionally
have been extra-judicial territory preserved for psychiatry. Defence
Attorney Boyle attempted to persuade the jury of Dahmer's insanity by
calling as a witness Robert Ressler of the FBI's Behavorial Science
Unit, who was prepared to say Dahmer's actions fitted the pattern of a
36
"disorganized killer." Judge Gram agreed with the Prosecutive Attorney
McCann that "Ressler's expertise in helping police to identify unknown
serial killers did not apply in the case of a known serial killer such
as Dahmer" (Washington Post. 1 Feb. 1992: A8).
But while the influence of the FBI's creation of categories to
describe society’s dangerous individuals was denied in the case of
Dahmer’s insanity trial, FBI discourse does seem to have gained
"definitional leverage" (to use a phrase of Eve Sedgwick's) beyond the
boundaries of the law-enforcement community, gained, that is, the power
to define society's monsters. It is the FBI definition which matters,
one which, at least according to a Dr. Radecki (a psychiatrist who heads
the National Television Coalition on Television Violence), should inform
our view of monsters from pre-Quantico days: "serial killers are
relatively new phenomenon. Jack the Ripper, at the turn of the century,
wouldn't meet the FBI definition for a serial killer, because you have
to kill at least six people. This is a new phenomenon" (Oprah Winfrey. 4
Sept. 1991). In an age in which the drama of law enforcement plays an
increasing role in our lives, in our entertainment, the use made of
FBI's definitions of crime and crime scenes has had the effect of
discrediting psychiatric discourse per se. Contrasting with the common
representation of FBI detectives involved in the tracking-down of serial
killers as hard-nosed and street-wise, is the portrayal of the
psychiatrist which, as Anthony Clare notes, frequently figures the
psychiatrist as "eccentric or weird, certainly as disturbed as his
patients, reflecting the widespread public assumption that one has to be
37
a little mad to become a psychiatrist in the first place" (The Sunday
Times. 8 Aug. 1993: 9:8). And in the spirit of the movie Dressed to Kill
and a True Police Cases cover headline which enquired "Did the Shrink
Psych Himself Up For Murder?" (Aug. 1992), is Thomas Harris's Hannibal
Lecter, a character who no doubts contributes to the idea that
psychiatrists are not only mad but criminally so.
When purifying and policing are the same in our minds, then
psychiatry, figured as an impediment to law enforcement, taints the
justice system with its complications, explanations, extenuations. If
psychiatry coddles the suspect, the FBI takes paternal control. The
conflict over ways of dealing with criminal monstrosity and how to
define it can also be figured in gender terms, or more specifically, as
a conflict between male and female parent roles, with the victor
assuming the fatherly role. Joel Norris remarks on the difficulty of
writing about serial killers in a way which is considered neither
patriarchal or "motherly" (that is, overly forgiving, sympathetic): "in
the glare of media publicity that made multiple killers larger-than-life
characters the issues of prevention and motivation got lost and were
replaced by demands for vengeance and retribution. It was easy to see
why no academic or political figure would stake his professional
livelihood on a program that might be perceived as 'coddling killers'"
(Norris 1988, 22-23). That Dahmer's attorney describes the doctors he
called to support his client's 'guilty but insane' plea as "courageous"
(Larry King Live. 17 Feb. 1992) is indicative of the concept of
insanity's current status. In CNN's "Crossfire’ Robert Novak appeals to
38
a Richard Ratner, forensic psychiatrist and defender of psychiatry's
involvement in the law, to "be one of the regular guys for once" and
agree that John Hinckley, for example, "was just a bad dude." A sister
of one of Dahmer's victims, Eddie Smith, describes her opposition to
Dahmer's plea of guilty but insane: "All of us want him to go to prison
and take his justice like a man" (Jet. 3 Feb. 1992: 18). Remarkable in
our culture is the power of those discourses which seek the death or
imprisonment of the convict by appealing not necessarily to justice but
to (masculine) vengeance. Equally remarkable is the labelling of those
who seek to explore the possibility of medical treatment for society's
others as emasculated or unheroically feminine. The association of the
desire for knowledge with weakness and of retribution ("no questions
asked") with power is expressed in a caller to a 'Geraldo' show focusing
on "cannibal killers": "Could it be that the saying that the world is
getting weaker and wiser is beginning to come true?" (Geraldo. 12 Apr.
1992).
Foucault argues that the judiciary needs a father-figure in the
form of an extra-judicial element in order to conceal its own authority:
...what is odd about modern criminal justice is that,
although it has taken on so many extra-judicial elements, it
has done so not in order to be able to define them
judicially and gradually to integrate them into the actual
power to punish: on the contrary, it has done so in order to
make them function within the penal system as non-judicial
elements; in order to stop this operation being simply a
legal punishment; in order to exculpate the judge from being
purely and simply he who punishes. (Foucault 1979, 22)
39
As I have suggested, in recent years the psychiatry profession as one of
those extra-judicial elements has been seen as failing to do its job as
"advisor on punishment" by sending people to hospital and not to prison.
As Lincoln Caplan notes, much of the media covering the Dahmer trial
treated the insanity defence as "a cause and a symbol of various social
ills" (The New Republic. 30 Mar. 1992: 19). Instead of regarding the
insanity defence as giving criminal law its "moral authority", as a
"narrow exception" which strengthens a system "rooted in the idea of
individual responsibility", society, says Caplan, commonly regards it as
a symbol of lawlessness. When instances of disorder seem to have
increased to the extent that the normality of order is threatened, when
instances of, in this case, insanity apparently rise to an extent which
questions the normality of sanity, it seems to make sense to clear the
way for a new system of categorization, to re-demarcate self from other.
Fox and Levin quote studies suggesting, however, that most people
overestimate the number of persons indicted for felonies who obtain
verdicts of not guilty by reason of insanity2 and note that:
At the heart of the public's distrust for the insanity plea
is its perception that criminals.. .will 'get off' on an
insanity verdict and spend little time incarcerated. To the
contrary, statistics actually reveal that offenders judged
legally insane generally do not stay for shorter periods of
2 A 1991 report in the Bulletin of the American Academy of Psychiatry
and the Law by Policy Research Associates under the direction of Henry
Steadman says that less than one percent of all felony cases involve an
insanity plea and seventy-five percent of those are rejected.
40
time deprived of their freedom than if they had been found
guilty. (Fox and Levin 204)
And despite the view prevalent amongst legal experts and psychiatrists
that if Dahmer had been found insane there would have been virtually no
chance of him ever being released, much attention was given to the
possibility that if found insane Dahmer could seek parole within a year
and "walk", thus playing on those fears which perhaps go some way in
preparing the mind to "understand" the vigilante violence of, say,
Charles Bronson movies. Similarly playing on such fears, the FBI has
stepped in as new, more "realistic" punishment advisors to maintain the
idea of the criminal justice system as a "community service" and as
being "above politics and dispensing 'justice for all' irrespective of
class, race, sex, or religion" thus legitimating "the state and those
whose interests it wittingly, or otherwise, furthers" (Deleuze and
Guatarri 13-14).
Our different definitions of monstrosity affect both our notions
about what should be policed and our notion of "punishment." The
figuration of serial killing as a disease can be a way of reassuring
ourselves that its origins lie outside the social body, or at least in
regions of society which are considered parasitical to mainstream,
healthy America. The same reassurance is given when serial killing is
perceived as being related to a particular abnormality of an individual,
physical body. "Doctor Is Allowed to Scan Dahmer's Brain" reads a New
York Times headline (11 Nov. 1991: All) while on CNN's 'Sonya' attention
is given to Arthur Shawcross1s XYY chromosomes and possible zinc-
deficiency (Sonya Live. 1 Mar. 1993). "To a very large extent", says
Roger Depue, administrator for the FBI's National Center for the
Analysis of Violent Crime at Quantico, "crime adjusts to the
environment. We've become a highly-transient, stranger-to-stranger
society. Criminals are going to take advantage of that" . (Marchaud 41).
Depue brings good news to those whose business is the policing of crime:
crime and the criminal are an ever-present; a "criminal element" in
society is inevitable: only its nature will change. Depue's reasoning
can lead one to the opposition of society on the one hand and those
indelibly marked with the disease of crime on the other. The serial
killer, Depue can imply, is not related to the fundamental values of
contemporary society; it is its parasite. Serial killing is one of the
ever-present criminal's latest reactions to society. For Depue, the
serial killer is the latest manifestation of The Criminal, a figure
adjusting to a changing historical situation, one who has exchanged
financial profit and other rewards of criminal behavior for the pleasure
of killing strangers.
We are finding it necessary to once again inscribe extreme
realizations of the dark side of human potential with permanence, that
quality which we like to consider as the mark of nature. In the
previously cited Washington Post article, Charles Krauthammer notes that
"post-Hinckley" the "irresistible impulse" is in decline and "unless
Dahmer succeeds in reviving this defense, we may soon return to the
wisdom of the eighteenth century English test that exculpates the
defendant if 'he doth not know what he is doing no more than...a wild
beast" (7 Feb. 1992: A25). Dahmer "admits having acted like a wild beast
42
up to and including eating his prey", says Krauthammer, but "what he
must prove is that he was as unknowing of the nature of his act as a
Bengal tiger." The "wisdom" of that eighteenth century test seems to
have been on the mind of the Prosecution in Dahmer's trial. In his final
argument Michael McCann helps to win the day with his rhetorical
question to the jury: "Do you think that was...a wild-eyed madman?"
(quoted in Washington Post. 16 Feb. 1992: A21). Dahmer, says an expert
witness in the trial, demonstrates his sanity by "remembering to reach
for a condom" before copulating with his dead victims. Dahmer, says
McCann, demonstrates his sanity by selecting his victims on the basis
that they have no car and therefore are less easily traceable. To be
found mad is to be found animalistic. To be mad one must be visibly so.
One cannot look normal and be insane. One must be raving. Once madness
becomes a permanent condition and not an illness the life of the science
to which it relates inevitably declines. Mental illness, an idea that
can imply temporary disorder and possible recovery, is too messy. Mental
illness suggests a continuum on which we can all belong much more
forcefully than the idea of evil or humanity's animalistic nature, and
it seems we are growing tired of these subtle shades of mental illness
and psychological conditions from which we could all potentially suffer.
While evil is perceived as potentially within us all, it is a potential
which more easily allows for individual condemnation and therefore
imprisonment. The construction of the sane and evil monster is the
latest sign of our desire to seek a language of condemnation which
43
brings closure, of the desire for the distinction of our selves from our
others to be complete and lasting.
"We don't get hung up on why the [serial] killer does the things
he does. What we're interested in is that he does it", says FBI agent
Roy Hazelwood (Porter 50). Faced with "motiveless" crimes we (and the
police) ask ourselves "If the crimes are motiveless, why should we be
concerned with motive"? The serial killer has brought a change (or is
the product of) a shift in our policing mentality: the disregard for
motive. The desire for more reactive policing is expressed by a dominant
conservatism which associates explication with sympathy. As Jack Levin
and James Alan Fox's sensitivity demonstrates in their introduction to
Mass Murder: America's Growing Menace, to do anything else but condemn
our monsters in the most facile of ways is to run the risk of being
interpreted as being in league with them: "We hope this study will help
us to explain - not condone - what has seemed incomprehensible" (7). To
question the serial killer construction is to speak the language of the
serial killer. If I write the serial killer, I find myself writing my
self. Instead we must play one big game of ' Clue' , where the only thing
that matters is finding where, how and who, not why.
The "motivelessness" of our latest monster's actions allows us to
turn away from uncomfortable questions. Greg McCrary of the "elite 'A
(for analyst) Team'" at Quantico tells us "As it happens, most serial
killers are white. No-one knows why, but the statistics show it to be
so" (Wilson and Seaman 119). The statistics only matter in terms of
aiding the detection of a criminal who has already committed his
crime(s), not what they might tell us about how our society is put
together. The "nature" of the serial killer we identify, that which
makes him "tick", is figured as a mystery and for the most part it is
one that we are content to leave as such. Without "motive" but with
Douglas's and Hazelwood’s terms - "organized" or "disorganized" -
becoming part of everyday discourse (used in articles without quotation
marks, used with no reference to their origins, used as part of a
discourse which is self-evidently "scientific and true"), our
construction of the serial killer becomes an inhuman figure, an
automaton who is either out of control or one which follows a program
whose writer is non-existent. "It" is either in control or it is not,
either adult, sober, non-drug using, and sane, or some or none of the
above. According to Douglas and Hazelwood, the terms have the merit of
de-mystifying the serial killer. But they also have the effect of
mystifying, the same effect which comes from any other either-or
categorization with no acknowledgment of shades of difference in
between, from any attack on the plurality of difference, or indeed from
staying silent. As one of our most respected authorities on serial
killing, Hannibal Lecter, notes in an exchange with Starling (having
read Douglas and Hazelwood's comments? having attended the Hearing,
disguised? or having been invited?), the categories tell us very little:
They're dividing the people who practice serial murder into
two groups - organized and disorganized. What do you think
of that?
It's...fundamental, they evidently -
45
Simplistic is the word you want. In fact most psychology is
puerile, Officer Starling, and that practiced in Behavioral
Science is on a level with phrenology... Organized and
disorganized - a real bottom-feeder thought that. (Harris
1991, 18-19)
They are antithetical terms whose oppositional nature can easily be
threatened. Dahmer, says Robert Ressler, displays both 'organized' and
'disorganized' behavior: "All the buzz words apply to him, but from both
sides of the house...He would lure victims to his apartment, get people
into his clutches, then he will go into bizarre rituals such as
cannibalism and necrophilia that are not normally found in your
organized type of offender" (Davis 169) . As the only two categories
which the FBI allow themselves merge and cancel each other out, the
image of the serial killer blurs and then fades from view.
Chesterton's Father Brown asks: "What do these men mean...when
they say detection is a science?...They mean getting outside a man and
studying him as if he were a gigantic insect; in what they would call a
dry impartial light, in what I would call a dead and dehumanized
light...It's pretending that something familiar is really remote and
mysterious" (quoted in Porter 50). The discourse we use to describe our
monsters, inscribed with the truth associated with the discourse of
science, mystifies the criminal, constructs him above all as something
different, alien. For Don Davis, Dahmer should be regarded "not only as
a prisoner, but as a specimen to be studied by experts" (Davis 280). An
edition of ABC News' Day One, devoted to Dahmer's "story", concludes
with an image of Dahmer in court framed in black. As the frame begins to
fill the screen Dahmer's image shrinks. It is an image which can serve
46
to represent both our objectification of the serial killer and his
objectification of his victim. Both are ways of denying connections
between observer and object.
Our mystification of the serial killer is accompanied by
mystification of his "rivals", elite members of the FBI whose job it is
to track him down. As I mentioned earlier, the discourse which proceeds
from Douglas’s and Hazelwood’s terms is figured as a purity with which
to combat both the impurity of the serial killer and of the psychiatric
discourse (that is, a discourse which has become stagnant through lack
of relevance to the real world, a discourse which infects manly clear-
thinking with convolution and tortuosity) . The FBI sees the serial
killer as existing "on a different plain", a plain on which traditional
thinking on crime has no meaning. We respond to this figure by
discounting language, by elevating the NVAVC onto that different plain,
above and beyond mere mortals. The FBI we read about can resemble Thomas
Harris's characters, Jack Crawford (The Silence of the Lambs) or Will
Graham (Red Dragon). As Graham's colleagues expend their energies on new
theories and new plans to catch their man, he spends his time in moody
silences, in trying to leave the world of his family, of society, of
discourse. That different plain he seeks is the site of super-cops and
super-killers and no big words. It is a site requiring a special vision,
not a special language: the horror of the serial killer is above all,
the serial killer appearing from nowhere. Starling and Graham are
successful in their detection the moment they dispense with the logic of
language and are able to see what the serial killer sees. According to
47
the serial killer myth, purity describes our monsters and the men
designated to capture them. The place they meet is characterized by it
being free of the trivialities of everyday living. It is the place where
the serial killer metamorphosizes from an archetypal figure of impurity
to a figure pure in his transcendence of normal thinking, normal
language, normal people; a figure who is a worthy adversary of our
super-cops.
That special place high above the confusing, amorphous, messy
place we call society, is one psychiatry could never reach, for
psychiatry is a world of words. Psychiatry belongs to where there's
always at least two sides to every story. Our construction of the serial
killer could never be defined or "captured" by psychiatric discourse
because he exists beyond words, evades all but the most general
categories. It is a construction that has a destructive effect on the
perception of the world as ultimately controllable (by words, by
reason). Dr. Ken Magid, clinical psychologist, sees "the serial killer
and the severe psychopathic personality disorder as being the AIDS of
the mental health community, that is, we don't have a cure for those
people" (quoted on CNN's Murder by Number). For the mental health
community, the serial killer represents a problem which needs to be
solved not only for its destructive effect on society, but on the status
of its discourse. And it is an image of impurity which the FBI help
engender. Meaninglessness and motivelessness are key concepts in the
struggle between psychiatry and the police, and are figured in terms of
disease in different ways. For the psychiatry profession, the
48
meaninglessness of serial killing is a problem to be overcome, the
unspeakableness of the serial killer represents a void of understanding
which has to be filled with discourse. For the police it is a natural
condition, a problem which is showing signs of reaching epidemic
proportions, which requires ever-more vigilance, ever-more policing, and
the power to exterminate.
For Park Dietz, a forensic psychologist who works for the
Behavioral Science Unit, serial killers "capture the public imagination
because the risk seems so uncontrollable to most people" (CNN's Murder
by Number). In the House of Representatives Hearing on Serial Killing
the FBI refer to "behavioralists and futurists and other criminal
scientists who believe that in the 1990s we are going to see an ever-
increasing violent crime wave" (House of Reps. 22). The way we usually
justify the use of exterminatory powers is by regarding ourselves as
threatened by a form of uncontrollable nature, and it is our figuring
the serial killer in this form which gives power to contemporary
policing discourses. And if serial killers are animals, apparently the
reverse can be true: "These days [Nanse] Browne heads a new support
group for mountain lion victims, calling the wild cats 'serial killers'
that should be systematically thinned out by state wildlife officials"
(Los Angeles Times. 3 Apr. 1995: 1+) . With this application of the
concept of "violent crime” to the animal kingdom we can more comfortably
regard the police and the courts "thinning out" the "wildlife" amongst
us.
49
The construction of our contemporary monsters as the embodiment of
uncontrollable nature represents, as Cameron and Frazer note, what
previous monster constructions did for "early liberal political
theorists: anarchy, brutality, chaos, horror." And that
uncontrollability can also function by justifying an increase in the
FBI's powers, by making people feel more dependant upon the state for
protection. In order to deal with an increasingly mobile and transient
killer who can strike anywhere at anytime, it makes sense to have a more
mobile police force which can move unchecked from state to state, city
to city, which has increased powers of surveillance and entry. In
Conrad's The Secret Agent Vladimir explains to Verloc how stronger
measures of law and order can be consciously incited, how society can be
manipulated in this way by "effective" terrorism, that which cannot be
explained away easily, that which will make society feel threatened for
that reason: "A bomb outrage to have any influence on public opinion now
must go beyond the intention of vengeance or terrorism. It must be
purely destructive...The attack must have all the shocking senselessness
of gratuitous blasphemy" (Conrad 66-67). The construction of the serial
killer is terroristic in the manner described by Vladimir, and has the
same effect. Dahmer is "A Human Time Bomb" (chapter title, Norris 1992,
102) whose primer remains a mystery.
In the discussion about the construction of homicidal mania and
its relationship to the discourse of psychiatry in Power/Knowledge,
Millot remarks to Foucault: "You define here something like a strategy
50
without a subject" and then asks "How is this conceivable?" (Foucault
1980, 202). In response, Foucault plays down the idea of conspiracy;
I would be tempted to say that there was, in fact, a
necessity here (which one doesn't have to call an interest)
linked to the very existence of a psychiatry which had made
itself autonomous but needed thereafter to secure a basis
for its intervention by gaining recognition as a component
of public hygiene. (Foucault 1980, 202)
However, in the tradition of criminal ethnomethodology (praised by
Stephen Pfohl for questioning "the uncritical use of official statistics
on crime and deviance as reflective of crime itself" and suggesting "the
production of official statistics suggests more about the organizational
work of control agencies than it does about the activities of deviants"
(Pfohl 30)), a CNN 'Special Report' offers the possibility that the FBI
are knowingly involved in the exaggeration of the serial killer
phenomenon. In a letter to a 1983 Senate sub-committee, former FBI
director, William Webster, pointed to the growing number of unsolved
crimes and suggested that they were evidence of the work of serial
killers. Using Webster’s statistics, crime writer Ann Rule, who also
testified at the Senate sub-committee, arrived at a figure of five
thousand deaths per years which could be attributed to serial killers, a
figure Professor of Criminology, Philip Jenkins, described as
"ludicrous" and which Professor Eric Hickey suggested lacked the support
of empirical research. The show argues that that estimate "became the
basis for funding" the unit at Quantico to study and analyze serial
murder. Following a study commissioned by CNN discounting the FBI
51
statistics^, the FBI admitted they might be wrong, and pointed to the
fact that their information was collated in part from the media.
The CNN study can evoke the serial killer figure functioning for
the FBI as a kind of ultimate-referent for their procedures, their level
of funding, and their discourse. As such, he must be, to some extent, a
figure of mystery. The threat posed by the serial killer to society is
as mysterious as the figure itself. In chapter three I describe in more
detail our investigative procedures constructing the unspeakable. But
while the nature of serial killing is figured as mysterious, we are
nonetheless keen to identify its symptoms. While its nature may be the
secret of unworldly deities, we do our best to identify signs of its
earthly manifestations. We look for and find those signs in spaces whose
relation to society as a whole can go unnoticed. Policing the serial
killer safeguards the idea of social order by identifying the serial
killer's "asocial" origins. Since Freud we have figured childhood as the
3 CNN claims that according to the official summary made by FBI
Behavioral Sciences and Investigative Support Units "since 1977 there
have been 331 serial murderers and nearly 2,000 confirmed victims" but
"after removing duplicating cases, the total number of serial killers
listed in the FBI's own supporting data is only 175 cases. After adding
in serial murderers missing from the FBI data, the total number of known
serial killers since 1977 is only 191. The actual number of confirmed
victims - just 1007 - is slightly more than half the number of victims
the FBI has claimed until now."
52
great origin of adult behavior, an origin easily framed as a space
somehow belonging to nature and outside the realm of society. In the
next chapter I suggest that explanations of serial killing rarely go
beyond "individuality” (that is, "individuality" figured in opposition
to society) and/or "childhood", states whose relationships with dominant
cultural concerns and values can be obscured.
53
2; Investigating the Serial Killer: The Seeking of Origins
(i) The Serial Killer and the Idea of the Individual
The human and social sciences have accustomed us to see the
figure of Man behind every social event, just as
Christianity taught us to see the Eye of the Lord looking
down upon us. Such forms of knowledge project an image of
reality, at the expense of reality itself. They talk figures
and icons and signs, but fail to perceive forces and flows.
(Mark Seem. Introduction to Deleuze and Guatarri, xx)
...self-attachment is the first sign of madness, but it is
because man is attached to himself that he accepts error as
truth, lies as reality, violence and ugliness as beauty and
justice. (Michel Foucault 1988, 26)
'17 Killed, and a Life Is Searched for Clues' says the headline of
a New York Times article on Dahmer (4 Aug. 1991: Al). Even following the
serial killer's capture and arrest policing proceeds unabated. It is not
capture which brings the illusion of closure, only that which we really
seek: origins of the story of his violence, origins which we figure as
belonging solely to the individual, to a life. Our discourse of
detection continues by reconstructing the history of the individual
serial killer as a case, as something to be solved, as something whose
center begins (and usually ends) in the unspeakable. Like Victor
Frankenstein, we build a monster, only to peel back the skin and see
what's inside. And sometimes we do it in a manner which makes
distinguishing ourselves from those under study not always an easy task:
"We shall attempt a dissection with surgical precision" (Leyton 31) is
Elliot Leyton's pep-talk to the readers of Compulsive Killers, before
mentioning in the main body of the text, in his discussion of the
54
descendants of the most infamous surgeon of them all, Jack-the-Ripper,
the number of medical titles attached to the names of the nineteenth
century's serial murderers ("Dr. William Palmer, Dr. Thomas Cream, Dr.
Marcel Petiot, and many others").
In The New Republic Lincoln Caplan notes that "it's fashionable to
argue that Americans now take less responsibility for their actions than
they once did. Insanity defendants are sometimes portrayed as emblematic
of the trend, because they are seen as seeking an undeserved dodge" (30
Mar. 1992: 20). Perhaps in response to the common perception of the
criminal too ready to blame society for the crime, the eighties and
early nineties has seen a questioning of the existence of society
itself, has seen a renaissance of the Individual at the expense of
Society to the extent where the self is perceived as the only or at
least the main form of reality. It is a renaissance important to the
FBI's construction of monstrosity. In a climate of respect for "the
individual", "the individual" is also the means by which estrangement
proceeds. In our dominant policing discourses, difference has less
meaning in reference to "special" social groups and more to
special/strange individuals. The world as constructed by the FBI is a
world of individuals and one made impure by the presence of criminal
individuals, of a criminal element. Violence in the name of sex is given
the body of an individual. A distinction is made unquestioningly between
the individual and his social context, and the latter fades from view.
For Simone de Beauvoir, Sade is "quite right in cutting through
sophisms and exposing the inconsistencies of a society that protects the
55
very things it condemns, and which, though permitting debauchery, often
punishes the debauchee" (Beauvoir 67). Like In Cold Blood's Officer
Dewey who finds it difficult to understand "how two individuals could
reach the same degree of rage, the kind of psychopathic rage it took to
commit such a crime" (82), who fails to consider the possibility that
such a "meaningless" crime could be shared, communal, social, we see
only individual rage, see monsters but are blind to monstrosity. We
might think social groups but we see individuals. For Don Davis, "Many
people killing many other people is one thing...; one person killing
many people can be terrifying" 167). An edition of ABC's Day One opens
with the screen filled with a close-up of Jeffrey Dahmer's eye and a
voice-over telling us: "His name has come to mean simply murder" (18
Apr. 1993). From what can begin as a shock to the social consciousness,
giving voice to meanings of our shared world which have gone without
saying, the representation of the serial killer can evolve into the
loading of all that unspeakableness onto a name, a body. Figured as
acultural, isolated from a cultural context, the serial killer is the
spectacle whose brilliance dazzles us. Focused on him, we fail to see
beyond.
Observing a culture which celebrates radical individualism, the
authors of Habits of the Heart wonder "whether an individualism in which
the self has become the main form of reality can really be sustained"
and argue that "Philosophical defenders of modern individualism have
frequently presumed a social and cultural context for the individual
that their theories cannot justify" (Bellah et al 143) . The main concern
56
of Bellah et al is that individualism "may have grown cancerous - that
it may be destroying those social integuments that Tocqueville saw as
moderating its more destructive potentialities, that it may be
threatening the survival of freedom itself" (vii). Philosophical defence
of individualism - a defence which more often than not perceives the
conflict as between illusory abstraction and tangible manliness - is
redundant in an age whose currency is personalities. On a 'Geraldo' show
entitled 'Jeffrey Dahmer: Diary of a Monster', the host highlights our
separation of personalities from social and political issues:
The conduct of the Milwaukee Police Department in this case,
as you all know, is under intense scrutiny right now. Was it
the fact that they thought this as a gay thing that made
them so disinterested? Was it because most of the victims
were minority people? What was it that caused them to
essentially downplay or ignore these cries for help?...Our
story, though, is not that story. Our story is the human
aspect of this and coming up, you'll meet more people whose
lives were touched by Jeffrey Dahmer. (Geraldo. 12 Sept.
1991)
The "human story" we mostly hear is one which is celebrated as
transcending less tangible "social questions." It is a story in which
lives "touch" and which is given the quality of being "more real.” While
Dahmer's goal is, according to Masters, to make "depersonalised
person[s]" (Masters 1993, 97) of his victims - and perhaps a
depersonalised person of himself - his "success" brings to him the
reality of "personality", one which, as a former class-mate of Dahmer
suggests, can matter above all else: "I'm not surprised he made it to
the cover of People magazine - in some way he was living up to (his home
town's] high expectations" (Martha Schmidt. Day One, ABC. 18 Apr. 1993).
In the world of the serial killer, making "personality" more real,
more relevant (as compared to the unreality, the abstraction, or the
trivialization of those spaces without "personal reference") is the
FBI's "personality profile." They list "age, race, employment, grooming
habits, level of education, arrest and military history (if any),
pastimes, marital status, socioeconomic status, type of residence and
home environment, with whom he is residing" (House of Reps. 35) as some
of the characteristics upon which they particularly focus in
constructing profiles of the likely identity of an uncaught serial
killer. The personality profile can be indicative of a shift in the
direction of law enforcement, away from the policing of a particular act
and towards a particular type of person. Already the authority of the
personality profile is such that it gives the police unprecedented
powers of entry: "Profiling concepts have been used in search warrants
in several instances where we have done a profile, and that has been
used as part of the search warrant, part of the probable cause to search
a particular individual or search an individual's property" (House of
Reps. 10-11). And it is also the means with which the police extend
their influence beyond law enforcement and into the justice system:
We sometimes assist in the development of prosecutive
strategies of the district attorneys. Pre-sentence, parole,
and commutation opinions based on data base research - we
have assisted in counseling Governors and in counseling
other individuals who are dealing with the issue of parole
and commutation of a particular individual who is
incarcerated for a serial violent crime. We have testified
in pre-sentence hearings. (House of Reps. 11)
58
"What, after all, is crime or the criminal but the exercise of the
power of the state to control certain behaviors or people believed to
have a certain criminal identity within particular historical
circumstances?" asks Stephen Pfohl (Pfohl 33). Cynics like Pfohl might
argue that mis-used, or used to its full advantage, the personality
profile can be instrumental in the production and reinforcement of
criminal stereotypes, that is, the connecting of personal
characteristics to criminal behavior. And it is a production located
within the FBI. Potential dangers of policing based on the assembling of
statistics, I suggest, are that common knowledge of the "likely"
characteristics of, in this case, a serial killer can lead to a common
belief that the relationship between those characteristics and behavior
is causal. The personality profile can be the basis for what amounts to
a legal inscription of personal abnormality (as well as, of course,
normality). Having figured serial killing as a parasitical disease
afflicting our social body, or as an evil which manifests itself only in
individuals, having safeguarded the idea of our normality, we may feel
exonerated and safe in pursuing a course of eradication of all things
that our serial killer "represents." And when this mood is accompanied
by a way of seeing the world with which we see nothing but individual
bodies, we may feel not uncomfortable about the selection of individual
"characteristics" or "lifestyles" as targets of eradication. Dreams of
the cleansing of humanity feed off the belief in a causal relation
between individual characteristics and behavior. The extent to which the
FBI’s increase in powers of surveillance over "deviant" individuals is
59
perceived as justified depends on how entrenched the idea of policing as
purifying has become in our common psyche. As well as being an aid to
detective work, and supposedly a way of improving the efficiency of the
police^, the personality profile can be also a useful tool in the
policing of values, and the policing of and construction of criminal
"types."
While we fail to see beyond, beyond personality, beyond individual
types, Dahmer, we tell ourselves, takes his self a little too far away
from the rest of us. His putative selfishness, his inability to relate
to others socially (enabling him to regard them as objects, things)
corresponds with psychology's definitions of psychopathy. According to a
New York Times article headlined 'Brain Defect Tied To Utter Amorality
Of the Psychopath* (7 July 1987 : Cl-2) , "the term refers to someone
with...the apparent incapacity to feel compassion or the pangs of
conscience”(1). Despite the headline's focus on the possible biological
cause or relation to psychopathy (a possibility pursued with much vigor
in the case of Dahmer, with teams of psychiatrists and psychologists
searching for genetic disorders, neurological impairments and
biochemical imbalances), many of those quoted in the article figure
psychopathy as something which does not so much originate in the
The FBI talk of the personality profile being a "cost-effective way
and a more efficient way to reduce... investigative man-hours" (House of
Reps., p.10): important qualities to advertise, no doubt, when one is
attempting to secure increased federal jurisdiction.
60
psychopath but rather circulates socially. It is noted, for example,
that "The detachment may be partly due to problems in moral and
intellectual development that can be dealt with through behavioral
treatment" (1). It is also noted that in recent years psychopathy seems
to be on the rise: a fact which if true is less likely to be explained
by neurological changes than by social change. Criminologist Jose
Sanchez argues that:
The young criminal you see today is more detached from his
victim, more ready to hurt or kill...The lack of empathy for
their victims among young criminals is just one symptom of a
problem that afflicts the whole society. The general stance
of the psychopath is more common these days; the sense that
I am responsible for the well-being of others is on the
wane. (2)
Psychologist Robert Hare notes that if the official psychiatric
diagnosis of psychopathy is used, fifty per cent of prisoners fit the
definition; but he and other psychiatrists argue that "the diagnostic
criteria focus too much on criminal misbehavior - because they were
developed through the study of psychopaths who got caught - and too
little on the underlying personality problems" (2). In a world described
by Christopher Lasch in Culture of Narcissism as one of radical
individualism engendering a narcissistic preoccupation with the self, we
(in the manner of Freud, who contemplates the problem of diagnosing a
society neurotic without a context) are unsure about our methods of
diagnosing psychopaths within what can appear a context made up in part
by psychopathy. If Freud were alive to today he might consider us
61
presumptuous for allowing the burden of proof in an insanity trial (as
is the case in Wisconsin law) to fall on the defence.
If the ability to estrange with the use of psychopathy is made
difficult by a context of social psychopathy, the idea of evil helps us
out (once again) by giving momentum to our individualizing procedures.
The need to individualize is described by Foucault: "Along with the
edifice of the Penal Code, the punitive machine of the prison...could
function effectively only if it operated at the level of the
individuality of the individual, the criminal and not the crime”
(Foucault 1980, 202). Such an operation requires that the soul be "the
prison of the body" (Foucault 1979, 30). Jack Henry Abbot testifies that
such an assessment is still relevant in the modern America jail: "They
go for your mind in prison today - where before, it was all physical
suffering" (Abbot 20); "I have never accepted that I did this to myself.
I have never been successfully indoctrinated with that belief. That is
the only reason I have been in prison this long" (15). The confession we
want to hear is one which originates the crime wholly with the
confessee. Judith Halberstam notes that our common perception of evil is
that it "resides in specific bodies, particular psyches. Monstrosity as
the bodily manifestation of evil makes evil into a local effect, not
generalizable across a society or culture" (Halberstam 37). With our
condemnation of Dahmer as evil we say, simply, he happenedi there is no
need to explain the crime, to speculate about context, only to deal with
him, the criminal. Unlike insanity, a concept which requires continual
re-writing, substantiation, evil has a relatively unchanging history,
62
has a history of going without saying, and is something which can lead
us to the safety of silence instead of the risk of further explication.
While we, with religious zeal, can condemn Dahmer as evil, we have
no time for the idea that evil forces took possession of him, that evil
has an external source. It is an irony of which Dahmer is apparently
aware: "Is it possible to be influenced by spirit beings? I know that
sounds like an easy way to cop out and say that I couldn't help myself,
but from all that the Bible says, there are forces that have a direct or
indirect influence on people's behavior" (quoted in Masters 1993, 112).
Evil is a concept of which only the prosecution can make use. When
Dennis Nilsen was tried in 1983 the jury, split on the question of
Nilsen's legal insanity, sought help from the judge who consequently
declared that "a mind can be evil without being abnormal." While a judge
can be taken seriously (at least by the jury) in condemning Dennis
Nilsen, for example, as evil, and while the notion of evil functions for
society as a whole as a means of condemnation, a defendant's references
to such notions generally are rejected. While Dahmer's attorney is happy
to note on Larry King Live (17 Feb. 1992) that "you could just in two
minutes know how evil [Dahmer] was", and while Dahmer is quoted as
saying he "felt his life was driven by evil", such references are widely
interpreted as attempts to "shift the blame" from Dahmer. Halberstam
argues that "modernity has eliminated the comfort of monsters because we
have seen, in Nazi Germany and elsewhere, that evil works often as a
system, it works through institutions as a banal (meaning 'common to
all') mechanism" (Halberstam 37). But our current preoccupation with
63
individualizing by use of the term "evil", with creating monsters and
ignoring monstrosity, is perhaps an indication of our nostalgia for the
pre-modern, for the comfort that those old monsters offered us.
Individualization and our serial killer construction are
interdependent, naturalize each other, give each other meaning.
Threatened by an unknown number of unidentified violent individuals,
respectful of policing powers of surveillance, we argue the need for
"the assignment to each individual of his 'true' name, his ’true' place,
his 'true' body, his ’true' disease" (Foucault 1979, 198). And in the
process we fail to provide a cultural context which may enable us to
identify normative expectations which both our heroes and our monsters
can be figured as fulfilling.
64
(ii) "Are You Raising a Jeffrey Dahmer?
She continued to suffer from long bouts of nausea; but now,
a more serious form of rigidity developed, one which none of
the doctors who saw her was ever able to diagnose exactly.
At times, her legs would lock tightly in place, and her
whole body would grow rigid and begin to tremble. Her jaw
would jerk to the right and take on a similarly frightening
rigidity. During these strange seizures, her eyes would
bulge like a frightened animal, and she would begin to
salivate, literally frothing at the mouth. (Lionel Dahmer
describing his then wife, Joyce, carrying Jeffrey; Dahmer
33-34)
Phone-in Caller: We certainly haven't heard much about
Jeffrey Dahmer's parents. Can you tell me if you see any
connection between his upbringing and the crimes he’s
committed?
Mr. Boyle (Dahmer1 s attorney): My job would have been a lot
easier if I had found that there were some problems with his
upbringing. The opposite was true.
{Larry King Live. 17 Feb. 1992)
The idea of the family does not contradict individualism but
complements it. Bellah et al describe a culture in which "The family is
the core of the private sphere, whose aim is not to link individuals to
the public world but to avoid it as far as possible1 ' (Bellah et al,
112). They suggest that "the tendency of our individualism to dispose
each citizen to isolate himself from the mass of his fellows and
withdraw into the circle of family and friends, that so worried
Tocqueville, indeed seems to be coming true (112). In the late twentieth
century, families are individuated not extended, and the idea of
"family”, like that of "individual", is constructed, and indeed
celebrated, as an "asocial" entity. "Family values" - a highly fought-
2 Title of The Oprah Winfrey Show 9/4/91.
65
over phrase in the 1992 presidential election and in the politics of the
early nineties - are presented as the panacea to social ills by their
making redundant the need for society and its institutions altogether.
If the crimes of a serial killer cannot be neatly and completely
figured as originating in the criminal's individual identity, his family
can function by mopping up the remaining meaning, leaving the rest of us
untainted. 'Clues to a Dark Nurturing Ground for One Serial Killer'
(that strange, redundant "one" indicative of an out-of-control desire to
individualize?) reads the headline for a New York Times article (7 Aug.
1991, A8) which figures Dahmer as growing up in a self-contained plant-
pot of an existence called Family. The struggle between the
acknowledgement and the denial of there existing a relation between
society and Dahmer' s actions is played out in an edition of Oprah
entitled "Are You Raising a Jeffrey Dahmer?" (4 Sept. 1991) where, in
response to the suggestion by one of Dahmer's classmates that Dahmer's
actions may have been related to cultural homophobia and racism, an
audience member says " I think that' s up to his family to take care of
that, and the people that are around him when he's growing up. That's
not the whole society in general." The classmate's assertion that
"families don't exist in a vacuum" (7) has little meaning in the world
in which the mythical serial killer exists, one composed of only family
units, dysfunctional family units and individuals lacking an assigned
familial role. For Larry King an obvious question to ask Dahmer's
attorney is whether "the victims' families show any anger towards
[Dahmer's] parents?" (Larry King Live. 17 Feb. 1992). An answer came two
66
years later when the parents of Steven Hicks, Dahmer's first victim,
sued Dahmer's parents, alleging their negligence contributed to the
death of their son (People Weekly. 28 Mar. 1994). (And if there is no
family to blame, the neighbors will do. Dahmer's neighbors complain of
hate-mail, threatening phone-calls, shootings from passers-by and bomb
threats (Dvorchak and Holewa 238)).
Foucault notes that homicidal mania was abandoned shortly before
1870 and one reason was "the idea of degeneration" (Foucault 1978, 11)
which made it no longer necessary "to make a distinction between the
great monstrous and mysterious crimes which could be ascribed to the
incomprehensible violence of insanity and minor delinquency" (Foucault
1978, 11)- In consequence there existed "a psychiatric and
criminological continuum" which provided "a causal analysis for all
kinds of conduct, whether delinquent or not, and whatever their degree
of criminality" and which also "permitted one to pose questions in
medical terms at any level of the penal scale" (Foucault 1978, 12). A
comparable continuum is identified by the Behavioral Science Unit,
enabling the potential for being a serial killer to be identified in
childhood. The connection between a "dysfunctional" family background
and the phenomenon of serial killing is described in The House of
Representatives Hearing on serial killing. After noting that "Certainly
our society is more mobile. We are hearing, and perhaps we are just now
discovering these instances of child abuse, the type of chaotic
childhood that you are talking about. We have more working parents today
and latch key kids and all that goes with it", Chair English asks his
FBI guests, "Does that, on a per capita basis, lead you to believe - the
FBI to believe - that we will see more of this phenomenon as these young
people grow up and mature." To this, this question of there existing a
continuum between "working parents" (presumably he means working
mothers), "latch key kids" (and "all that goes with it") and serial
killing, the FBI responded positively: "I think very well we will"
(House of Reps. 53). And the continuum of which the serial killer is a
part also apparently includes "peeping Tom." "Is there a pattern to at
least give some hope of identifying these individuals in the future? In
other words, do they go from, say, being a peeping Tom to assault, to
rape, to murder? Is there a pattern that fits in there in which we can
predict that this person is a likely candidate to be a serial murderer?"
asks English. Again responding positively, FBI Officer Douglas talks of
the need to identify "these young children at school age years" (House
of Reps. 54).
In the Hearing a constant theme is the physical, social and
economic mobility of the serial killer: a mobility which makes the
serial killer difficult to identify. It is a stable familial role which
especially gives him meaning, renders the individual visible, immobile .
In answer to English's question: "Is there some key that would indicate
- that would trigger this type of phenomenon?" (House of Reps. 53),
Officer Douglas replies: "That's a very good question...In our research
with serial murderers, we found that, for example, the backgrounds,
without exception, everyone had a chaotic early childhood, a lot of
68
mobility, a lot of transientness in their family, abusive parents,
absent parents..." (53). Stallybrass and White refer to Mayhew's
definition of nomads as possessing habits which are not "domestic" and
who "transgress all settled boundaries of ' home'... simultaneously
mapfping] out the areas which lies beyond cleanliness" (Stallybrass and
White 129). They see his definition as "a demonized version of what
Bakhtin later defined as the grotesque" (128). Notwithstanding the fact
that murder is more likely to come from within the family unit than from
without - "Compared to the most frequent type of murder - domestic
killings - the number of victims of serial murder remains relatively
small" (Wilson and Seaman 305) - our policing discourses describe a
world divided between families and non-families, fixity and
transientness, non-criminality and criminality, meaning and non-meaning,
cleanliness and dirt: oppositions which are frequently conflated.
Conflating several is Anne E. Schwartz: "The state of Wisconsin,
specifically Milwaukee, has become a welfare magnet, since neighboring
states have drastically cut their welfare benefits. In 1991, Milwaukee's
record year for homicides, police say the victims and perpetrators are
not local but from Illinois, Michigan, and Indiana. They flock to
Wisconsin because of our lucrative welfare benefits" (176). The image
Schwartz draws is a twentieth century version of Mayhew's. After quoting
Mayhew referring to "pregnant and pestilential diseases, and whither all
the outcasts of the metropolitan population seem to be drawn",
Stallybrass and White remark "That last phrase is troubling, implying
that the 'filthy' are drawn to the filth" (132). Schwartz conflates the
poor with transiency and with criminality and figures them, like Mayhew,
as beings who unconsciously are drawn to, attracted to, flock to things
and places which satisfy their animalistic urges. And as Stallybrass and
White note, once such metaphoric relations have been established, they
can be reversed: if transients or, in the case of particular
representations of Dahmer, failed transsexuals (or indeed most other
embodiments of transgression) are criminals, then criminals are those
who lack fixity in the way which is perceived by, among others, English
and Douglas.
We identify a link between "abnormal family" backgrounds and
serial killers and we conclude that that link is causal. To come to that
conclusion we ignore other possibilities. When we spot an "abnormality"
in a serial killer's family background we, like Douglas, seem to forget
the majority who come from what we would consider normal family
backgrounds, find it easy to ignore Westley Allan Dodd's remark that "I
was never abused. I was never sexually abused. I was never physically
abused. I wasn't neglected. The family had plenty of money, owned our
own house, two cars, a trailer. I had a happy childhood" (quoted on
CNN's Murder by Number). We ignore the majority of those who suffer
child-abuse and never go on to commit crimes such as Dahmer's and we
ignore the possibility that "victims of abuse are just as likely, if not
more likely, to grow up and become ruthless businessmen and victimize
unsuspecting consumers for pleasure - not just for profit - as they are
.to grow up to become serial killers" (James Alan Fox, quoted in Schwartz
145) . We prefer not to consider the possibility that the causal link we
identify can prove troublesome to certain individuals of whom society
expects the worst. In Sonya Friedman's previously-mentioned show, "The
Criminal Mind" (Sonya Live. 1 Mar. 1993) - possessors of criminal minds
being, according to Friedman, "career criminals" who start "very young"
- one of the show’s guests describes the pressure exerted by a society
expecting those from violent homes to become violent adults, those who
were abused as children to become adult abusers. Lorenzo Carcaterrra,
whose book describes growing up in a violent and abusive home dominated
by a father who had murdered his first wife, calls the idea of "the
cycle of violence" an "unfair burden" and says "one of the reasons I
wrote the book is people who grow up like I did are labeled that
[potentially criminal], that we're going to do that, we're going to
repeat that." We ignore the possibility that with the reduced demand for
reproduction on the part of consumer capitalism, a decreasing need for
kinship in a more mobile society, and the declining importance of gender
roles in the division of labor - all factors which helped naturalize the
idea of the traditional family - the "collapse of traditional
values...are in a sense the result of the very success of the capitalist
societies these value systems had helped engender" (Altman 1982, 90-91).
Fetishizing detection and surveillance, we largely disregard such
possibilities and prefer to channel our energies into "identifying these
young children", a decision based on the conclusion that "we will see
more of this phenomenon [of serial killing] as these young people grow
up and mature" (House of Reps. 53).
Births and origins go together naturally enough, and when we trace
the origins of a particular serial killer we can find ourselves dwelling
on the image of the new-born with its mother. If we can find no familial
trauma our stories can begin and end with this image. "So many of us
wanted to believe that something had traumatized little Jeffrey Dahmer,
otherwise we must believe that some people simply give birth to
monsters", writes Anne E. Schwartz (39). She would have rested a little
easier if she had watched an Inside Edition in which Jeffrey's father
and step-mother, Shari, told the interviewer that his natural mother,
Joyce, took medication for her bouts of anxiety depression while she was
pregnant with Jeffrey, medication which, we are informed by Joel Norris,
can have "an adverse effect on the nervous system or the brain of an
unborn child" (Norris 1992, 59). In their books on Dahmer, Norris and
Brian Masters both dwell on Joyce's mothering of little Jeff. In
Norris's account it is suggested that Jeffrey suffered from a condition
caused by his mother's medication, prescribed to alleviate that most
"feminine" of ailments, anxiety depression. He also notes that Joyce was
"a very 'hyper' person" (Norris 1992, 62): another "feminine trait"
according to patriarchal myth? Masters notes Joyce's decision not to
breast-feed and, while mentioning that "thousands of mothers in the
Western world decline to feed their offspring at the breast", suggests
(a touch patronizingly, perhaps) that "the mother...may not reflect that
by denying her breast to the infant she is placing self before
benevolence.” Masters continues by arguing that the lack of breast-milk
can explain Dahmer's sense of loss throughout his life: "Jeff's early
72
emotional development is naturally not recorded, yet it is noticeable
how often, as an adult, he has said that he is not good at coping with
disappointment" (Masters 1993, 28). But Shari fails also to escape being
connected with the actions of her step-son. In response to Geraldo
asking someone introduced as a "Friend of the Dahmer Family” whether
Shari is "a wicked stepmother?", the friend replies that Shari Dahmer
"is the epitome" of one. While on the same show claims are made that
Dahmer when he was eight years old was molested by his father, ^ it is
our monster's mothers or stepmothers which usually receive the most
attention. Typical of the attention given to Dahmer's origins (and
typical, perhaps, of small-town America's desire to connect itself with
national concerns, however tenuous or befouled the link maybe) is a
front page headline of the Chippewa Herald Telegram (25 July 1991):
MOTHER OF ACCUSED MASS MURDERER LIVED HERE.
As I read In Cold Blood, struggling to identify the meaning of the
killer's acts, I find myself interrogating the killers in the manner of
Detective Church, insisting they "tell us something about [their] family
background" (Capote 217). Once there, in that mysterious originator of
life's meaning, we tend to give a disproportionate amount of attention
to the mother and not the father (at least, not his presence). The
mother of Church's interviewee is quoted as saying "people are looking
3 a notation in Dahmer's probation files refer to a conversation with
his father who says Jeffrey was abused by a neighbor's boy. Dahmer has
denied being abused by anyone (see Dvorchak 35).
73
at me and thinking, Well, she must be to blame somehow. The way I raised
Dick. Maybe I did do something wrong" (Capote 287). The dysfunctional
family unit is largely figured as a place lacking the father. With
patriarchy absent, matriarchy rules, and the results are perceived as
monstrous:
Serial killers are almost invariably found to have
experienced environmental problems in their early years. In
many cases they stem from a broken home in which the parents
are divorced or separated, a home with a weak or absent
father-figure and dominant female, sometimes a home-life
marked by a lack of consistent discipline. (Wilson and
Seaman 40)
With the family figured as the originator of the meaning of our lives,
the amount of structure to our lives is dependant on the type of family
from which we come. And we have come to expect that to defy the law of
the father is to disperse meaning, that matriarchally produced narrative
is inevitably chaotic. Like Dahmer, whose life in the words of Oprah
Winfrey "spun out of control" (Oprah. 4 Sept. 1991), the individual
growing out of a female-dominated family (Dahmer lived with his
grandmother after his parents were divorced), is commonly perceived as
an unpredictable figure whose actions appear motiveless.
A woman who knew much about both narrative and monsters is Mary
Shelley. Refusing the idea of the writer as Great Originator, she agrees
to her publisher's request for an account of "the origin of the story”
of Frankenstein on the grounds that her "account will only appear as an
appendage to a former production" (introduction, 1831 edition). Making
the analogy between text and monster, she ends her introduction by
74
bidding her "hideous progeny go forth and prosper." Without origins
anterior to texts and monsters, without a moment of miraculous and
mysterious conception, where do texts and monsters come from? Shelley,
weary of people asking her how "she came to think of and to dilate upon
so very hideous an idea", might tell us not to locate the truth of a
monster in his mother. Shelley's anxiety anticipates that of the mothers
of our monsters, mothers who are figured as the origins to their son's
stories, potential mothers-to-be like Anne E. Schwartz whose nightmare
is to give birth to something akin to what she represents: "I wondered
if I would give birth to a two-headed child someday, to serve as a
constant memory of the biggest story of my life" (Schwartz 15).
Do we fathers or potential fathers-to-be feel anxious about the
possibility of fathering a monster? According to common wisdom, if we do
it should be because of our absence, not our active participation. While
Lionel Dahmer feels guilty for not spending enough time with his son,
masculinity's involvement in the "creation" of Jeffrey is represented
negatively, as a "good" force not implemented. From the perspective
which sees men as the originators of structure, of a sense of place, of
visibility, the serial killer, the archetypal purveyor of
meaninglessness, can only be product of femaleness. The struggle between
our law-enforcers and the serial killer is represented as the struggle
between the law of the father and the disorder of the mother, between
post-Oedipal language spoken by the police and heard nightly on crime-
shows, and pre-Oedipal language spoken by the killers, by "mummy's boys"
who never grew up to be real men. Conflicting with our policing
discourses, implied to be and valorized as masculine, is feminine
discourse, discourse lacking motive and logic. It is a conflict we
perceive as pertinent to the case of Dahmer. With homosexuality
associated with the feminine, those little men, those mummy's boys -
like "the homosexual mass murderer" Dean Corll, who "had become a
mother's boy” (Wilson and Seaman 271) because of his father's absence -
are people we like to figure as naturally tending towards homosexuality
and criminality or rather a criminality inscribed with homosexuality, or
homosexuality inscribed with criminality. Possible links between the
serial killer and patriarchy and masculinity are effaced by our tendency
to originate his story in terms either of his individual asocial being,
or his dysfunctional family, a family deemed dysfunctional by the
absence of the father and by the presence of the mother. Within this
apparatus, detection of the serial killer becomes the detection of all
that is perceived as weakening the structure built in obeyance of the
laws of the father; investigation and policing of ideas about the
individual and the family are naturalized; and the dependency of the
meaning of those ideas upon ideas of mainstream society and culture is
negated.
With the psychiatry profession being commonly perceived as failing
in its (fatherly) duties of punishing the suspect, the FBI has stepped
in to carry out those duties as an extra-judicial * element in the penal
system, and to naturalize the simile "child as potential criminal" by
its figuration of serial killing as originating in pre-adulthood. In the
process serial killing's prevention is restricted to the policing of
76
childhood, an activity which is instrumental in the construction of our
idea of childhood, that is, as a space to be policed. Discussing The
Silence of the Lambs, Elizabeth Young argues that the success of
Clarice's "coming-of-age as an FBI agent means that she is now fully
trained to enforce the power of the state through modes of invasion,
surveillance, entrapment, discipline and punishment that not only
parallel but literalize, as Foucault's work helps to remind us, the
operative modes of psychoanalysis itself. This plot development, in
other words, twins psychoanalysis, that metaphoric FBI of the psyche,
with the FBI, that literal enactment of psychoanalysis" (Young 25). In
originating serial killings' origins in childhood, our policing
discourses (those that we speak as fluently as the FBI) re-enact the
simultaneous investigation of and construction of the space with which
psychoanalysis has been especially pre-occupied. However, I suggest that
we are happy also to reverse unquestioningly the simile's terms, to
regard the relationship between police and criminal as father to child,
a move which can help to normalize the inscription of all us who are not
part of the "law enforcement community" as children/potentially criminal
and to normalize the idea of members of that "community" as apolitical
patriarchs. Foucault notes that corresponding to the notion of a
criminal continuum was the development of a "literature of criminality"
including:
...miscellaneous news items (and, even more, popular
newspapers) as well as detective novels and all the
romanticized writings which developed around crime - the
transformation of the criminal into a hero, perhaps but,
equally, the affirmation that ever-present criminality is a
77
constant menace to the social body as a whole. The
collective fear of crime, the obsession with this danger
which seems to be an inseparable part of society itself, are
thus perpetually inscribed in each individual consciousness.
(Foucault 1978, 12)
Much of our news and entertainment, and especially much of what bridges
the divide between news and entertainment, has built on that literature
of criminality to continue and intensify the police mentality described
by Foucault, and it has done so in a manner which originates violent
criminality in the family home, in the individual family unit, a
consequence of which is the further intensification of that mentality by
the association of policing with apolitical (male) parenting. The
stories we tell about serial killing have the effect of sustaining the
mystique of patriarchal/police power, and can be indicative of a
"childish" trust, a "childish" respect for that power.
3: Investigating the Serial Killer; Seeking the Unspeakable
78
He's an extraordinary looking man, yet I really can name
nothing out of the way. No sir; I can make no hand of it; I
can't describe him. And it's not for want of memory; for I
declare I can see him at this moment. (Richard Enfield
describing Mr. Hyde)
Patterns of murders committed by one person in large numbers
with no apparent rhyme, reason or motivation. (The subject
debated by a 1983 Senate Judiciary committee formed to
discuss the impact of serial killing on American society)
Cameron and Frazer note that "the coverage of killers, especially
serial multiple killers, has become essentially a coverage of the hunt,
with the police and other hunters as major figures in the story" (41).
The hunt for a serial killer is frequently described in Gothic terms,
and especially as a Gothic quest for knowledge of the "beast." Guy Le
Gaufey refers to the vogue in the nineteen century for vampire novels in
which "the aristocracy is always presented as the beast to be destroyed”
and in which "the saviour was a bourgeois" (Foucault 1980, 1). The
saviours/detectives in the serial killer myth can represent a similar
anti-elitism: the FBI rejecting those big words of the psychiatric
profession; Clarice Starling as cheap, white trash made good. But the
stories of Dahmer generally lack heroic saviors. Instead they recount
the inability of the police "to do their job", or the failure of over-
tolerant or naive psychiatrists and/or councillors to identify Dahmer's
potential for violence. Dahmer is figured as "slipping through the
cracks": presumably those cracks appearing in the once hard and stable
society, the less liberal, less wordy and safer society of old, a
society defended by recognizable protectors.
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An exception is the story told by Anne E. Schwartz. In the her
book on Dahmer she acknowledges: "The men and women of the Milwaukee
Police Department, whose cooperation with a reporter has always been at
considerable risk to their jobs: You are my heroes and I grateful to
your trust" (ix). Her book begins with some of these heroes assuming the
aura of chivalric manliness: "For cops on the beat, the sweat would
trickle down their chests and form salty pools under their steel-plated
bulletproof vests" (2). Presumably of the Teutonic Order is Officer Rolf
Mueller, "of German origin", who "sported a mass of perpetually tousled
blond curls on top of his six-foot frame" (1). Playing opposite such
heroes, is the story's heroine. The author tells us that while other
reporters are sleeping with their answering-machines switched on she
(wearing "black underwear under white shorts" (6) we are informed
helpfully) was among the last people "to leave [Dahmer's] apartment
alive" and that "the experience of seeing the apartment and witnessing
the horror of the residents that night was [hers] alone" (11).
The lonely heroine confronting (male) horror is a familiar subject
of the Gothic. But in Schwartz's case, the villain has already been
arrested, and presumably wouldn't have been interested in her anyway.
And while we have grown accustomed to the idea of such villainy
disguised as respectability, Schwartz, unlike Clarice - who seems as
much at risk within the confines of Quantico or at a funeral surrounded
by police than on the streets chasing serial killers - finds nothing
creepy in the ranks of the law enforcement community: villains are
villains and cops are cops; heroes and heroine, police and journalist,
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are as one. The discourse reproduced by the book is one of benign
policing: part journalese, part police jargon, a discourse of detection
which seeks only to re-affirm existing notions of what constitutes
social order.
The Gothic, that place where we play with the fear of the text's
extra-textuality, of its unspeakability, is where we find it natural to
place the serial killer, he about whom we can't stop talking and he who
leaves us speechless. It is in the Gothic novel where ideas central to
the way we perceive ourselves and our society seem particularly
threatened, and where language itself seems vulnerable to an impending
silence. In Poe, Death, and the Life of Writing, Gerald Kennedy explores
Poe's responsiveness to the relation of writing with this potential
abyss of meaning:
Poe sounded the abyss not simply through existential motifs,
through scenes of annihilation and expressions of dread. In
less obvious ways he interiorized the void of
meaninglessness as a problem of writing and explored through
his own practice the emergent relationship between the new
death and the act of inscription. He sensed a momentous
cultural transition and projected this awareness in texts
which reflect the desperate situation of a subject striving
through an always inadequate system of 'mere' words to give
coherence to unspeakable fears. (Kennedy 185)
If in Poe we can read an acknowledgement of language’s lack of
certainty, of its voids which destabilize its meanings, our particular
use of the Gothic is invariably to maintain that aura of unspeakability,
to hint at what may lie within the closet but to keep the door closed.
Our Gothic tales are generally without the moral questioning, without
the "shattering of the protagonists' image of his/her social/sexual
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roles" which another commentator says is characteristic of that
tradition (Gross 62). If the tales appear to spring from "fears and
uncertainties arising from instabilities in personal, social and
political realities" (Graham 261), they are blind to the pontential
disorderliness of order.
One of the novels to which Dahmer is referred frequently is
Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Andrew Jefford has written on the
opposition of speech/the unspeakable in Stevenson's novel. He
identifies, on the one hand, the cosy world of well-lit interiors, of
hearths, of speech, and then the cold, dark world of the unspeakable on
the other. For Jefford, "Hyde's realm is essentially that of signifier,
and his effectiveness in the narrative is reliant upon the free movement
of that signifier: evil" (62). "Hyde's real crimes", says Jefford, "must
always be other, and elsewhere" (63). Jekyll describes the matter of
Hyde as "one of those affairs that cannot be mended by talking" and asks
Utterson to "do one thing...respect [his] silence." Utterson (his name,
as Jefford notes, "speaks of speech"), the lawyer, and his associates
Lanyon (a doctor) and Enfield ("man about town") form a band of
respectability to which Jekyll belongs. When they discover a monster at
the heart of their world their language becomes less prosaic: "they
become", in the words of Nabakov, "artists", finding themselves
confronted by a shock to their well-ordered lives. Dahmer is our latest
version of the monster of violence secreted behind outward
respectability: "Like many people before them, [Dahmer's victims] were
bamboozled by the courteous Dr. Jekyll side of Jeffrey Dahmer's
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personality" (Davis 76). But ours is a figure whose duality is rarely
questioned, one whose violence is never respectable. It is one who
invariably fails to inspire us to end opposing sanctioned
heterosexuality with unspeakable homosexuality, one which does not alert
us to the possible connections between that which is condemned as
unspeakable and the discourse which condemns it.
"I always covered up for that 'inner me' that I loved. He just
acted and I had to solve all his problems in the cool light of day. I
could not turn him in without also destroying myself. In the end he
lost. He still lies dormant within me", says Dennis Nilsen (quoted in
Masters 1991, 265). According to John Wayne Gacy, his crimes were
committed by an evil part of himself called Jack (Wilson and Seaman
262), while Ted Bundy's Mr Hyde was "the Hunchback" (Wilson and Seaman
262). The 'Jekyll and Hyde' scenario we construct is reproduced by
serial killers themselves. At other times their acts "just happen."
Dahmer speaks of "compulsion" (quoted in Masters 1991, 266); Nilsen
says: "My sole reason for existence was to carry out that act at that
moment. I could feel the power and the struggle of death...of absolute
compulsion to do, at that moment, suddenly” (quoted in Masters 1991,
266). Dahmer describes waking up to find the dead body of Stephen Tuomi,
with no memory of actually killing him - "Where that rage came from or
why that happened, I don't know. I was not conscious of it" (quoted in
Masters 1993, 109) while Nilsen, accroding Brian Masters, "claimed he
had no power of responsibility at the time, and that, afterward, he was
inhabited first by fear, then by 'a massive and suppressed remorse'"
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(quoted in Masters 1991, 266). The idea of sudden, inexplicable violence
(sometimes given the name of evil) can not only exonerate society but
also the serial killer, or at least the Dr. Jekyll half of him. "It just
happens" says "it" happens to me or to us and there’s nothing one can
profitably say about "it." Figuring their selves as a struggle between
competing personalities or forces is a move we dismiss as an attempt to
have serial kilers' actions excused. Dahmer's "confession" (spoken by an
actor for ABC’s Day One. 18 Apr. 1993) that he "made [his] fantasy life
more powerful than [his] real one" was widely interpreted in this way.
But whereas we condemn the serial killer for this apparent attempt to
avoid culpability, for this neat divide between his self and other, we
strenuously attempt to maintain such an opposition, continue to
differentiate between his unspeakability and the normality which is his
outward appearance, continue to place him in turn within, but separate
from, normal society. While a serial killer's own references to evil are
regarded as an excuse, for us the idea of evil is a way of estranging,
the means with which - when our monsters are found legally sane, legally
responsible - we distinguish our sanity from theirs. Perhaps estranging
the serial killer as evil helps us to avoid the idea that, in the words
of Criminologist Steven Egger, "[serial killers] enjoy it - it’s as
simple as that” (quoted on CNN's Murder by Number) or that they "do what
they want to do” (Jack Levin on Geraldo. 4 Dec. 1991): helps us to avoid
the possibility, that is, of their actions being the result of "human
desire." And when unspeakableness has a direct correspondence with
dominant culture, our language becomes a little more strained in order
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to cover the gaps, the silences. The actions of the "heterosexual"
killer cannot be figured in sexual terms - his sexuality is left
unspoken - and what is left unsaid by our maintenance of the opposition
speech/unspeakability continues to haunt our language. Like Nilsen, when
"it" just happens we have difficulty in turning "it" in without
destroying our notion of our selves, without unravelling discourses
which structure them.
Brian Masters begins The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer with the words
which Dahmer's Defence Attorney uses at the start of his opening
statement at the trial: "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you are about
to embark upon an odyssey" (Masters 1993, 1). In his article for Vanity
Fair, Masters, constructing his trip as a descent into the unknown,
journeys into Dahmer1s neighborhood, an area which "contrives to feel
dislocated, apart", one whose houses "stand like ghosts of a happier
time", one in which you do not walk "without listening for footsteps"
behind you" (Masters 1991, 184). Fellow questers, Robert Dvorchak and
Lisa Holewa, describe Dahmer's 25th street as "getting more down-at-
heels" and then, presumably by way of explanation, note that "In the
past ten years, the neighborhood had changed from 37 per cent black to
69 per cent black" (Dvorchak and Holewa 15). Meanwhile, Ann E. Schwartz,
the first journalist to enter Dahmer's cryptic crypt, Apartment 213,
Oxford Apartments, and for whom "foul smells are as much a part of the
inner city as crime" (Schwartz 4), finds what she is looking for in the
smell of death. The smell of death is above all the smell of mystery:
"Ask a veteran cop what death smells like and he or she will say, "Once
you've smelled it, you'll never forget it. There’s nothing else like
it...I have smelled death on a number of ride-alongs with the police
department, and they are right" (7). But the "stench inside Dahmer's
apartment" is apparently even more mysterious, even more threatening. It
signifies "something more, just as those killed there were not merely
murdered but had their lives unspeakably ended" (7). The construction of
that "something more" is familiar in our representations of serial
killers. It is a space into which we can place all that we are not or do
not want to be. Not that such mystification can be sustained for long.
The smell of death which for Schwartz is like nothing else is later
compared, less mysteriously, "to meat left to rot in an unplugged
refrigerator" (7).
Schwartz's quest for knowledge of what that "something more" might
be, leads her down to Downtown Milwaukee and the city's gay bars. Her
story is of the descent from her "neighborhood of manicured lawns" (6)
to where the underclass live, to a world peopled by Dahmer's
"facilitating victims" (114; see chapter four). Here, presumably, is
where the "criminal mind" is formed and is allowed to express itself
freely. If the construction of society's monsters reflects upon the
fears and anxieties of a particular historical period, the period in
which I write is especially nervous about threats to the ideologies that
constitute what we like to call "middle" America, that "condition" which
has been central to idea of America itself, so much so that discussion
of social-class is often perceived as inapposite. It is a space which
financial status, social stability, family structure, sexuality and
still perhaps race all define.1 While the crimes of middle America go
unspoken, it is a space placed antithetically to the criminally
unspeakable. Noting that British criminal law "defines only some types
of avoidable killing as murder: it excludes, for example, deaths
resulting from acts of negligence", Stephen Box argues that "we are
encouraged to see murder as a particular act involving a very limited
range of stereotypical actors, instruments, situations, and motives"
(Box 9). Likewise, in America, while the perpetrators of murder, rape,
robbery and assault are "focused on by state officials, politicians, the
media, and the criminal justice system", the other "avoidable crimes",
mainly committed by white, middle-class males, are represented in the
abstract, are faceless, colorless, genderless, sexless.
Perhaps above all, middle America sees itself as domestic. Harold
Schechter suggests that the serial killer represents "the savage force
roaming in the dark, as the nuclear family huddles terrified inside the
home" (quoted in Los Angeles Times. 3 May 1992: Calendar 49). Schwartz
reminds us (as well as noting she writes for a "family newspaper" (8))
that, prepared to leave the relative safety of that family, prepared to
fight that savage force and enter neighborhoods full of "drug dealers,
prostitutes and the unemployed mentally ill" were, police officers like
1 In the next chapter, with particular reference to the representation
of Jeffrey Dahmer, a representation in which questions of sex and race
overlap, I will describe dominant or middle American culture's
construction of the serial killer in the context of sexuality and race.
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Rolf Mueller who nevertheless "could not wait to go home" and was
"anxious to see his wife and daughter" (2). Contributing to the fear and
bewilderment of the nuclear family, and contributing to the present
inscription of meaninglessness to the serial killer's crimes is the
inability to explain them with reference to financial gain: "for crimes
against persons (murder, rape, assault) we have no theory as the value
of such offenses, and hence no theory as to what would affect the
returns from such crimes" is Andreano and Siegfried in The Economics of
Crime (14) blanking out at the prospect of actions being motivated by
anything other than money.
But, as any psychoanalyst will tell us, that blanking out can also
say something about ourselves. What is the horror in the horror stories
we tell? For Elliot Leyton it is that middle-class success depends on
other's suffering, and that the failed will come back and haunt the
successful. Describing the serial killer as a "product of his age” he
notes that "the pre-industrial multiple killer was an aristocrat who
preyed on peasants; that the industrial era produced a new kind of
killer, most commonly a new bourgeois who preyed upon prostitutes,
homeless boys, and housemaids; and that in the mature industrial era, he
is most often a failed bourgeois who stalks university women and other
middle-class figures" (Leyton 269). A study of the backgrounds of
thirty-six serial killers might suggest, however, that we could describe
the serial killer as an archetype of bourgeois success instead of
failure: "Almost all were white males, usually the oldest child, in a
home with a stable source of income that provided a self-sufficient
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economic level" (Dvorchak and Holewa 136). In his apparent ability to
sustain two lives, in his familiar form of outward success and inner
failure, the serial killer, like Jekyll, is representative of a society
which seems prone to secrets concealed behind respectability: the
brothel-visiting banker, the transvestite vicar, the broker whose
interest in stocks is as much sadomasochistic as financial.
If the serial killer construction is anything to go by, in a
middle-class society in which, naturally enough, meaning is equated with
middle-classness, it is the possibility that the way we make sense of
the world actually depends on what is constructed as non-sense, that our
certainties depend on uncertainty, that proves horrifying. In discussing
the shock incited by the murders described in In Cold Blood, Sol Yurick
notes that our particular meaning of meaning is central to our
definition of "middle-class":
It is the middle class which is responsive to and outraged
by that violent dislocation, by that apparent unmotivation
of certain acts which it is stylish to call irrationality or
absurdity in literature. The very words argue the exception
that tests a pervasive condition, an everyday state of
being. And after all, it is the middle-class which has
created a social medium whose very nature is shored up by an
ideology that stresses volition, cause-effeet, reason,
logic, historicism. (Yurick 80)
And Yurick notes the fear that that which is presented as antonymous to
middle-class meaning actually lurks within:
Anything that appears to violate this order is shattering,
outrageous, deserving of the death penalty; the very
presentation, the very special pleading, of In Cold Blood,
implies the unusualn&ss of the murderer's act and so becomes
diversion, entertainment in case history, and tries to
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persuade us that what are in fact common patterns of
behavior are aberrations. (80)
We are intent on persuading ourselves that serial killers' patterns of
behavior have no relation with the dominant ideologies of the day, that
the apparent randomness and motivelessness of their violence is not
nurtured by a violent culture characterized by urban anonymity, that
their transientness - that which the FBI seem to fear most - has no
correspondence with a society that requires a highly mobile labor force.
In the case of Dahmer, the task of such persuasion can seem a
little easier. With Dahmer, the killer of mostly single, poor, non
white, gays, the nuclear family is more likely to express moral outrage
than fear. He whose victims are without cultural significance is robbed
of some of the mythology which informs our perception of other serial
killers. As Don Davis notes: "no one in Milwaukee even knew that a
serial killer was on the loose" (108). Essential to the idea of the
middle-class is naturalization of heterosexuality, and the moral of
Dahmer's story can be to re-affirm much of what constitutes middle-class
ideology. Our stories of questers "descending" from positions elevated
by those ideologies can correspond with Gross's reading of John Rechy's
novel, City of Night. Gross says Rechy "shapes the imaginative vision of
urban gay life to Gothic form. An example of this style is the
narrator's description of a prototypically decadent gay/Gothic
party... Count Dracula is the evening’s host and the dead, soulless
guests the leftovers from the bar and bath set" (62-3).
Those who wouldn't be seen dead at such parties, those who may
nevertheless be somewhere in attendance, are those regular guys at the
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head of that nuclear family, those still struggling to keep it together.
Cameron and Frazer note how the representation of a crime as
"meaningless" helps to obscure the link between fantasies of power and
masculinity, benign or otherwise: "The FBI clearly recognizes, despite
the language of 'persons', that serial killers are men, but the
discourse of serial murder downplays the gender factor, perhaps because
commentators prefer to stress the meaninglessness of the crime, relating
this to what is seen as the increasing alienation of the individual from
society, especially modern North American society" (158). The world
created by the tabloids is, Cameron and Frazer say, "stalked by
motiveless 'fiends' whose 'brutal lusts' remain for ever unspecified,
their connection with masculinity somehow obvious, yet unexplained"
(44) .
Although Cameron and Frazer note that "we just have not been able
to find any women who fit our concept of a sex-killer" (23), since their
study was published (1987), there have been several instances of women
who fit the concept of a serial killer. But their pointing out of the
existence "of a disproportionate volume of material about murders
committed...by women" (23) is still relevant today. Despite there being
only one female serial killer, Christine Falling, discussed in the first
part of CNN's "Special Report", 'Murder by Number', it is her image with
which the program begins and the impression given in the show is that
serial killers can with equal likelihood be men or women (or indeed be
white or black). Presenter Richard Roth's way of evening up the odds for
all of us is by telling us that "Serial murderers come in all varieties
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- short and tall, black and white, men and women" without mentioning
that black serial killers and female serial killers are the exception
rather than the rule. Roth plays our particular version of 'Clue', a
version that I suggested in chapter one we designed with the help of the
FBI: the identity of the killer being potentially that of any character,
any one of us, anywhere and everywhere. (But, as I argue later, it can
be a game in which we like to think super-cops or super-killers like
Lecter hold all the clues, have possession of that little black
envelope).
The failure to make the connection between the meaning of
masculinity and serial killing is demonstrated in a Psychology Today
article which describes the growing number of what it calls
"inexplicable" violent crimes: "Overwhelmingly, the victims of bizarre
murders are women or children; the killers are almost invariably men"
(Porter 46). "Bizarre” crops up rather frequently when the fact that
most serial killers are men is mentioned. Jack Levin, author of Mass
Murder, notes on an edition of Geraldo (the focus of which, in the wake
of the Dahmer story, is cannibalism) that "eighty-five percent of all
homicides are committed by men and when you look at the really heinous,
bizarre crimes, the number gets to be up to ninety-nine percent." He
concludes that "Men, for one reason or another, are simply more violent
than women” (Geraldo. 4 Dec. 1991). Meanwhile in Serial Killers Colin
Wilson and Donald Seaman note that:
...many 'motiveless murders' involve rape or other forms of
sexual violence. At first this sounds like a contradiction
in terms until we recall that most 'motiveless murders'
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involve boredom and resentment. The murder of Bobbie Franks
is a case in point. Leopold and Loeb had originally meant to
kidnap a girl and rape her. Yet even if they had done so,
the murder would still be classified as a motiveless crime,
since the motive was not sex, but a desire to prove
themselves 'supermen.' (Wilson and Seaman 16)
Ignoring the history of male dominance being expressed through sex (that
is, making an unprovisional distinction between sex and power), Wilson
and Seamen contribute to the mystification of this desire for
omnipotence, this desire which elsewhere we generally associate with
masculinity, this desire to prove oneself a super man. Later in their
study they talk of the "apparently motiveless murders being committed
nationwide: 'motiveless' in the sense that there was no apparent
connection between killer and victim" (86). Here, the lack of a personal
connection between killer and victim is enough to warrant use of the
term 'motiveless'. To use the term here is to deny the possibility of
connections existing on a non-personal level, connections between
individuals which are formed by cultural expectations, connections which
guide us how to behave with people we do not know. Just as there is a
connection between a lecturer and his anonymous audience, or a prison
guard and a new prisoner - connections which inform if not dictate the
form of relationship when personal contact is made - there are
connections between killer and anonymous victim which can, I suggest, be
described, which need not be entered into the realm of the great
unspoken.
Judith Butler sees gender as an identity gained over time, an
identity which coheres from a process of repeated performance: "Gender
ought not to be construed as a stable identity or locus of agency from
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which various acts follow; rather, gender is an identity tenuously
constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized
repetition of acts" (Butler 140; author's italics). The idea that
Buffalo Bill might be seen as enacting a "violent version" of Butler's
conception of gender is suggested by Elizabeth Young in her essay on The
Silence of the Lambs (Young 16). The idea that serial killers kill
repeatedly as a way of dealing with severe anxieties about their gender
is common. About Peter Sutcliffe, the killer of female prostitutes, Joan
Smith says "the most compelling explanation is that he had a compulsion
to destroy the thing he feared in himself; fearing the pronounced
feminine side of his character, he projected it onto women and ritually
destroyed it, time after time" (Smith 2). In a similar vein, Joel Norris
argues that "John Wayne Gacy killed male prostitutes because he was
extremely homophobic, and he was killing the hated homosexual part of
himself" (quoted in People Weekly. 12 Aug. 1991: 36). The motivation of
serial killers is frequently explained in terms of the need to expel: to
expel the feminine, to expel the homosexual. The idea that serial
killers kill repeatedly in order to demonstrate their manhood (and its
associate, heterosexuality) is expressed in the negative, that is, they
are represented as attempting to destroy manhood's "opposites(s)." Such
maneuvering allows masculinity to be literally silent. In a Time article
("The Mind of the Mass Murderer." 27 Aug. 1973: 56-57), psychiatrist
Shervert Frazier suggests that among the common traits found among the
sixty five murderers and serial murderers he analyzed was that they did
not "know how to be men" because many had grown up in fatherless homes
or suffered "repeated brutalization by a father who was inconsistent or
unpredictably violent." In a world of binaries, if they didn't know how
to be men then what they did know would presumably have more to do with
our perception of the feminine than the masculine. The question (and the
problem) becomes not masculinity but femininity, or rather femininity's
invasion of masculinity. The serial killer becomes someone who attempts
to overcome his insecurities about his gender by killing what he
perceives as a threat to his manhood. It is an act we find easy to
condemn, but what escapes condemnation or at least critique are the
meanings we give to the term masculinity. It remains the untouchable,
the unkillable, the eternal, the natural. It is never the "hated” part,
the part to be killed. We know that Buffalo Bill is a failed
transsexual, desires the removal of his penis, his masculinity, that his
killings are the consequence of his failure to legally transform his
masculine image into a feminine one. We know that his female victims are
the means to an end: the destruction of his masculinity which the state
has denied him. And yet what we see is not serial murder as the result
of a failure to expel masculinity, but the "evil" of femininity having
invaded a masculine realm, an evil which is perhaps best represented by
the image of Buffalo Bill, having concealed his penis between his legs,
flashing open his Dracula cloak or Dark Messenger's wings to proudly
display his "vagina" to the camera.
"The serial murder doesn't simply go back to pumping gas," says
Alfred Regnery, administrator of the federal Office of Juvenile Justice
and Delinquency Prevention, "a senseless murder is not just committed
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once" (Time. 14 Nov. 1983: 47). We are more than willing to attribute
meaning, a recognizable motive to single murders. Once they are
repeated, however, once they might suggest a pattern, murders are more
likely to be entered into the world of non-sense. Elizabeth Young
identifies the serial killer as a figure who makes explicit the
connection between the isolated and individual misogynistic act and the
misogyny which permeates society as a whole:
For the particular creepiness of The Silence of the Lambs
is that it locates the way in which, when a male killer
strikes against women again and again, in secret and at
random, his actions seem to carry the threat of a single act
of violence to its logical conclusion: serial murder. At the
same time, this conclusion is itself without conclusion,
since its very repeatability suggests that there is no end
to misogynist murder, but rather an endless stream of such
crimes spilling not only from film to film but beyond the
borders of all film, to the non-film 'real world' itself.
(5-6)
There being "no end" to the story of misogynistic murder makes the
telling of that story problematical. As I described in chapter two, we
are keen to give beginnings to that story, but they are beginnings which
lead nowhere, at least nowhere we are willing to go. The absence of a
definite ending disrupts the idea of a definite beginning, and like most
things we deem inexplicable, the serial killer becomes a figure of
nature. Brian Masters' article for Vanity Fair is entitled ''Dahmer's
Inferno" and in it he describes Dahmer "as disconcertingly ordinary,
even unremarkable, until the secret dissolution of his personality
finally erupted upon the world" (Masters 1991, 184). Masters reproduces
the image for The Shrine of Jefffrey Dahmer: "Every human being has
dark, shameful, nasty impulses - the combined inheritance of the
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species...In Dahmer's case, the constraints failed, the inhibitions
collapsed, and Dionysus broke loose" (Masters 1993). The metaphors that
most frequently come to mind when we attempt to describe the serial
killer figure him as a natural disaster, beyond the knowledge, the
words, and the control of man. Nature is where things just happen.
The idea of violence just happening, just happening naturally, is
often accompanied by reference to the aggressor's fantasy world.
Describing a particular serial killer, an FBI Officer says: "Often
killing at random and in a senseless manner...this individual is a human
predator seeking out his prey to fulfil his fantasy and kill" (House of
Reps. 5). "Senselessness" is often associated with fantasy and desire,
and in the process they can assume the stature of irreducibility.
Barbara Ehrenreich, for example, remarks that:
As a theory of fascism, [Klaus Theweleit's] Male Fantasies
sets forth the jarring - and ultimately horrifying -
proposition that the fascist is not doing 'something else',
but doing what he wants to do...The reader's impulse is to
engage in a kind of mental flight - that is, to 'read' the
murders as a story about something else, for example,
sex...or the Oedipal triangle... or anything else to help the
mind drift off. But Theweleit insists that we see and not
'read' the violence...What is far worse, Theweleit forces us
to acknowledge these acts of fascist terror spring from
irreducible human desire. Then the question we have to ask
about fascism becomes: How does human desire - or the
ceaseless motion of 'desiring production', as the radical
psychoanalytical theorists call it - lend itself to the
production of death?" (my italics; from the foreword to
Theweleit 1987, xi-xii)
Reading Capote's In Cold Blood can be to experience this pull between
the notion that violent criminals are "doing what they want to do" and
the notion that they are "doing something else." While Dick is
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apparently "convinced that Perry was that rarity, a 'natural killer' -
absolutely sane, but consciousless, and capable of dealing, with or
without motive, the coldest-blooded deathblows" (Capote 55), we might
share Tony Tanner' s view of Capote' s text as a gathering together of
"groups and clusters of related facts so that the sudden bout of blood-
spilling is retrieved from its status as an isolated fact and provided
with a complex context in which it becomes the focal point of converging
narratives" (Tanner 98). The book's narrative can help us deny the act's
isolation, motivelessness. It can interrogate the book's title. And
reading the book can replay the choices we face in representing the
serial killer. In accord with Theweleit's perception of the German
Freikorps, I suggest that serial killing should not be explained away as
"something else", but that the serial killer is "doing what he wants to
do", making his fantasies tragically true. But to figure the violence of
the serial killer and/or the fascist as the result of "natural" dreams
or Ehrenreich's notion of "irreducible desire" is another act of denial,
another failure to take responsibility. It is a failure to take
responsibility for those dreams, fantasies and desires, and perhaps it
is a way of authorizing them.
In the House of Representatives Hearing, Representative Jim
Lightfoot says "I think it is hard to believe that those individuals
could both develop a desire to commit such violent crimes and also get
away with as many as they did before they were apprehended" (3).
Lightfoot's remarks can imply that such a desire means lack of control,
that desire means incomprehensibility, that desire of this sort "takes
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over" like Hyde taking over Jekyll. This association of desire with a
loss of control has its uses in the legal defence of sex-murderers and
rapists - with victims figured as inciting that desire, as originating
the narrative of the crime - but it can also be factor in our failure to
take responsibility for collective fantasies, for the fantasies of a
violent society. Park Dietz, Forensic Psychologist, believes serial
killers learn to enjoy murder, that "what motivates Jeffrey Dahmer or
Ted Bundy are not delusional beliefs. They are personal preferences -
preferences for what kind of things are sexually stimulating. And that's
learned - learned in the same way that men become breast-men or leg-men
by exposure during critical moments of development." Supporting Dietz's
suggestion is Westley Alan Dodd who says "I wasn't sure I could kill so
in my mind I had to make that exciting. I had to fantasize about it. To
be able to kill, I had to make that thought exciting, and in a matter of
just a couple of weeks, I was able to do that and I was ready to kill"
(quoted on Murder by Number).
The idea that murder can be exciting is not a strange one. Perhaps
we can learn from Dennis Nilsen who, while on the one hand says that he
had no control over the "compulsions" which overcame him, on the other
seems to imply that they were of his making:
The need to return to my beautiful warm unreal world was
such that I was addicted to it even to the extent of knowing
of the risks to human life...The pure primitive man of the
dream world killed these men...These people strayed into my
innermost secret world and they died there, (quoted in
Masters 1991, 265)
Here is something of a shift from denial to an acknowledgment of
responsibility: they are his dreams which caused the deaths. Perhaps we
should similarly examine our fantasies, our fantasies of power, of
transcendence, examine what it is we dream of transcending. Perhaps we
can tease out meaning from the most "bizarre" of occurrences, and
acknowledge the reality and the presence of real men and real women who
get caught up in those fantasies. But mostly we reassure ourselves that
such desires are a natural mystery, beyond our knowledge and control. We
may suggest serial killers enjoy what they do, that "it's as simple as
that", and then we tend to leave it at that. On CNN's 'Murder by Number'
Richard Restak responds to the argument that serial killers must be
crazy because of the nature of their actions by arguing that the
argument is "a way of eliminating or, should I say, refusing to look at
the outer limits of human freedom and even human evil if you will."
Restak is correct, I suggest, in acknowledging the denial of the
possibility that these men are doing what they want to do, but his
comments are indicative of the way we figure these actions as the
epitome of freedom, as proof of transcendence, of power, of the way we
naturalize the lust for murder.
The proponents of stricter censorship of television frequently
argue not for a reduction in violence and/or violence-oriented sex, or
for a reduction in violence on the one hand and nudity and/or sex on the
other, but simply for a reduction in "sex and violence" per se. The
history of sex being represented as an act of violence is naturalized by
this easy pairing-off, by this failure to disentangle "non-violent"
sexual images from violence. If desire in general is deemed irreducible,
sexual desire is especially so. Something, apparently, which just is, is
sex being essentially violent. That destruction of the desired object is
an unsurprising consequence of desire is presumably an assumption behind
the following from an FBI official: "What is the motivation of these
serial killers and killers in general? And often times you can't just
look at the attractiveness or unattractiveness of a victim" (House of
Reps.18). We deny that violence against women or the idea of women can
be an expression of a culturally-inscribed masculine power by framing
that violence as a natural phenomenon, by especially framing it as an
expression of a male sexuality grounded in nature. It is a manoeuvre in
harmony with Bataille who says regretfully "that life, the register of
the possible, necessitates comprised sexuality" whereas the fiction of
Sade "makes possible the revelation of the 'true nature of sexual
attraction, that is, violence, which in life remains hidden behind the
fog of affection" (quoted in Gallop 32). The figuring of rape and/or
rape ending in murder (or, in some of the cases involving Dahmer, murder
preceding genital penetration) as "sexual" - whether homosexual or
heterosexual - helps to blur the distinction between (a "natural")
desire for the other and domination of the other, helps to obscure the
killings as acts of hierarchical domination, of the expression of power
which is gendered male. Obscured is the possibility that the actions are
related to the particular way we perceive power: that is, as the
presence of masculinity achieved by the absence of femininity (an
opposition which is, as I suggest in chapter four, as relevant to the
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construction of "homosexual" serial killers as "heterosexual" ones).
Sometimes the idea of sexually is protected: we may just as well talk
about "murderously-oriented sex" than "sexually-oriented murder", a
phrase which foregrounds the "murderousness" of the act over the
"sexualness.” But generally we say that our bodies and our minds are not
always our own, that sometimes nature takes over, and nature is a
violent place. Unimpressed, Winifred Woodhull contends that rape should
be de-sexualized by figuring it as a crime of power: "rape should be
seen as a logical outcome of political, economic, and social processes
that generate and foster men's domination over women in every cultural
domain" (Woodhull 170). Perhaps unknowingly supporting Woodhull' s
contention that rape should be figured as an expression of power and not
of apolitical sex, not of sex distinct from power, representatives of
the FBI note that: "There is often a progressive pattern that takes
place, that while at the early stages, there may be more rapes, the
longer this individual commits these kind of crimes, the more likely it
is that murder will be also involved" (House of Reps. 72). Such
"progressive patterns" might indicate that rape belongs to a narrative
ending not necessarily in ejaculation for the aggressor, but in
destruction of the victim. The idea of progression figures an escalation
in violence not only as that performed by someone whose sense of
responsibility has apparently diminished with every unpunished previous
rape, but as a "purification" of the violent act, a purification which
ends in final closure, death. It is a conclusion which occurs when those
we construct as powerful have their way.
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But even when we de-sexualize the violence, nature is prone to
linger in the equation, for the histories of power and nature
intertwine. Wilson and Seaman in The Serial Killers quote Ernest Becker
- "We are all hopelessly absorbed with ourselves...In childhood we see
the struggle for self-esteem at its least disguised...His whole organism
shouts the claims of his natural narcissism" - before linking this
"natural" self-love to the "urge to heroism" and "self-assertion" which,
they say, when frustrated can turn to resentment and finally to murder
(20). For Wilson and Seaman here the acts of the serial killer have
nature as their origin. For them serial killers belong to the "dominant
five per cent", an elite which nature apparently constructs in other
species:
Observations of zoologists like Lorenz and Tinbergen
indicated that this applies to all animal species: five per
cent are 'dominant'. A psychologist named John Calhoun made
an equally interesting observation: that when rats are
overcrowded, the dominant five per cent becomes a criminal
five per cent. Overcrowded rats express their dominance in
behavior in ways completely uncharacteristic of rats in
natural conditions: for example, in rape and cannibalism.
(Wilson and Seaman 226)
If rats can be criminals (as opposed, presumably, to being law-abiding)
then it is only natural to figure our most serious criminals as those
who are sufficiently strong and independent to escape our rat-race. For
Wilson and Seaman, Ted Bundy was a member of that dominant elite "who
need success as much as they need food and drink” and as such Bundy is
someone deserving of commiseration: "it is difficult to imagine anything
more frustrating than a dominant male (or female) stuck in a position
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that allows absolutely no expression of that dominance" (282). The view
that the serial killer's acts originate in nature is often supported in
studies on the serial killer by reference to Abraham Maslow's theory of
human motivation, the "hierarchy of needs", presented in Motivation and
Personality. Wilson and Seaman, suggesting it can be applied to the
"history of criminality over the past two centuries", summarize it thus:
"if a man is starving to death, his basic need is for food...If he
achieves his aim, then a new level of need emerges - for security, a
roof over his head... If he achieves this too, then the next level
emerges: for love, for sex, for emotional satisfaction. If this level is
achieved, the yet another level emerges: for self-esteem, the
satisfaction of the need to be liked and respected” (14). The acts of
the serial killer are thus figured as continous with the craving of
food, as one of the more recent and extreme examples of man fulfilling
his ever-changing needs.
The CNN "Special Report" on serial killing, 'Murder by Number', is
prefaced by the presenter warning "what you are about to see is a
difficult subject to talk about" and by his suggestion "the number of
serial murderers is low, but the impact is like that of other unlikely
tragedies: a plane-crash, a bolt of lightning. It appalls us, it plays
on some primeval fear. We are obsessed, fascinated and it seems more so
all the time.” How much easier it is to comprehend the serial killer as
akin to a bolt of lightning than as something whose origin lies within
histories we can write for ourselves. Having constructed a barrier
between nature and our culture, a barrier whose position depends on the
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absence and the presence of language, depends on those things we feel we
can talk about and those that we cannot, we expel the unspeakable serial
killer to the natural world. How much easier it is to live with
ourselves by finding him difficult to talk about. Condemning all our
ideas of otherness to the unspeakable, we attempt to negate plurality,
that which problematizes the idea of ourselves by complicating the
process of defining what we are not. In our representation of serial
killers we feel the need to create others to colonize, to investigate
various "dysfunctional" families, or various gay communities. As we
enter each unfamiliar family structure and describes it in the same old
paradigms, as we homogenize each homosexual world, difference is
obscured, except for the difference which separates the colonized from
the colonizer's. Our quests for knowledge invariably take the form of
transferring our own unspeakability, our own secrets onto others or
other worlds, worlds where words do not reach. The mysteries we
encounter on our Gothic quests remains mysteries. The life represented
in the movie Jeffrey Dahmer - The Secret Life remains a secret. Content
to spread an epidemic of unknowing, we ask open-ended questions without
the anticipation of answers. Unwilling to pursue very far questions of
motivation, we fall back on the tangibilities of capturing the serial
killer. Capture becomes the visualization of he who is mythically
invisible, becomes all that matters. Replacing the world in which the
serial killer is at large, a world of meaning permeated with
meaninglessness, use polluted by uselessness, is the indisputable fact
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of the individual's presence. Against the certainty of vision, abstract
questions of why have no importance.
But when we are being reasonable we know also that the
unreasonableness we see is ours in the making. As Freud tells us, denial
and unreason go together. The idea of nature conserves and conceals
meaning, can account for the crypticness of our language. Encryption is,
however, redundant. We know that language is not only surrounded by
silence and nature, but is punctuated by them. We know that they are of
language, and conceal and mark our secrets. Silence and nature do not
conceal our unspeakableness, but are its signs. Our serial killer
provokes the speaking of the unspeakable, the voicing of silence. We
signify that unspeakableness with words. We go on talking about how
unspeakable it is. We figure him beyond the pale of language only to
discover that he is merely beyond the language that comes naturally. We
are left with a figure of monstrosity whom we are unable to comfortably
condemn to unspeakableness, who stubbornly remains of language. We are
left uncomfortably with only language, language with no other.
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4: Jeffrey Dahmer: Gay, White Cannibal
Why should bodily refuse be a symbol of danger and of power?
Why should sorcerers be thought to qualify for initiation by
shedding blood or committing incest or anthropophagy?
(Douglas 120)
Been surviving on McDonalds. Need to start eating at home
more. (Jeffrey Dahmer, in a 1990 home video shown on
Dateline, NBC; quoted in Entertainment Weekly. Mar. 1994:
47)
While not mentioned in the criminal complaints (assuming within
the law the aura of the great unspoken), Dahmer*s cannibalism, described
by Geraldo Rivera as his "macabre snacking" (Geraldo. 12 Sept. 1991),
was the most sensational aspect of his case, that which separated him
from other serial killers. In The Silence of the Lambs Starling tries to
map out the norm regarding serial killers by suggesting that "most
serial killers keep some sort of trophies from their victims.” Lecter,
distancing himself from that territory (as well as picking holes in the
FBI's attempts at categorization), counters by noting that he for one is
an exception to Starling's rule. Starling response of "No, you ate
yours" concludes an exchange which corresponds with A New York Times
article on Dahmer, similarly demonstrating an apparently irreducible
desire to distinguish normality from abnormality. There are, apparently,
your average repeat murderers, and then there's Jeffrey Dahmer: "'The
trophies [souvenirs of victims] are usually identification cards or
pieces of clothing. But few, Dr. Dietz said, are driven by their
loneliness to keep pieces of their victims' bodies. An ordinary serial
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killer would have the sense to try to mask the smell’, Dr. Dietz said.
'It's awfully careless not to'" (my italics; 7 Aug. 1991: A8).
The regarding of the body as something that can be hoarded, re
assembled, consumed is a form of abnormality with which currently we
seem particularly fascinated. The early nineties has witnessed the
discovery of cannibalism's marketability. In the same year (1992) that
The Silence of the Lambs won five Oscars, Francis Ford Coppola's Bram
Stoker's Dracula was released. In the following year Disney's Touchstone
Pictures released Alive, the story of how survivors of a plane-crash in
the Andes managed to eat in the middle of a snowy wilderness. 1994's
offering in the category of human consumption was the film-version of
Anne Rice's Interview With the Vampire. In court Dahmer holds up a copy
of the Weekly World News bearing a headline stating that he had eaten
one of his cellmates. The masthead, however, is replaced by Dahmer with
that of The Milwaukee Journal (reported in The New York Times. 15 Feb.
1992: 10:1). If the switch is an ironic comment on the distinction
between "serious" and tabloid journalism, Dahmer has a point.
Exaggerating Dahmer's claims of cannibalism (he confessed to eating part
of one of his victim's arm muscles), Courtland Milloy tells us via the
Washington Post that "by his own admission, Dahmer befriends you, then
cuts your heart out, then snacks on it after eating your brains" (1 Aug.
1991: C3). Despite Milwaukee Police Chief Philip Arreola telling
reporters early in the investigation that "the evidence is not
consistent" with Dahmer's contention of cannibalism, cannibalism was
perhaps the major focus of most of the Dahmer stories. Dennis Nilsen
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speculates that claims of Dahmer's cannibalism were probably "wishful
thinking" (quoted in Masters 1991, 268), and perhaps it is as much
wishful thinking on our part as his. The intensity of speculation can be
an indicative of a cultural demand for cannibalism exceeding supply. Is
there an argument to be made about a contemporary cultural fascination
with cannibalism, a fascination big enough to turn the disputed
contention of an individual we regard as either sick or evil into one of
the unquestionable truths of his being? If so, why? Would it be improper
for me to suggest that we are finding cannibalism rather sexy at the
moment? What function might the putative presence of cannibalism in our
culture serve?
While Joel Norris seems to regard Dahmer's cannibalism as an act
of nutritional replenishment - Dahmer, he says, eats "the vital organs
of his victims to refortify himself with iron and vitamins that had been
depleted through his alcoholism" (Norris 1992, 39) - it is generally
perceived as being motivated by the desire for "spiritual empowerment."
Dahmer's attorney, Gerald Boyle, explains his client's cannibalistic
behavior thus: "He ate body parts so that these poor people he killed
would become alive again in him" (Schwartz 195). The connection between
cannibalism and empowerment is also present in Dennis Nilsen's
assessment of Dahmer. In a letter to Brian Masters, Nilsen suggests:
[Dahmer'sj unfolding aberration escalates in accordance with
to what degree he is detached from reality (for example,
what is termed NECROGRAPHY is an extreme example of extreme
detachment). This is manifested in 'going all the way' in
eating the heart of one’s victim/spouse. (If you have the
power to eat a man's heart this demonstrates your extreme
power to possess and his extreme passivity). The painting
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and display of the victim's skull is a constant reminder of
one's potency, (quoted in Masters 1991, 186)
Is this idea of empowerment a delusion restricted to the imagination of
a "sick" individual, or might it have currency in a cultural context?
How do we attempt to estrange someone whose cannibalizing we explain an
an attempt to empower himself, when cannibalism is perhaps not only a
current fetish of dominant culture but is seemingly being invested with
a kind of power by that culture?
There are differences in the way we perceive Lecter's cannibalism
and Dahmer's, and the differences seem to be related to the differences
we perceive in their sexuality. In this chapter I will discuss the
correspondence between Dahmer's supposed cannibalism, his putative
sexuality and his color, a correspondence that also hints about the
relationship between cannibalism and mainstream culture, a culture which
likes to think itself essentially heterosexual as well as white. In
particular I will discuss with reference to Dahmer's representation our
attempts to conflate oppositions such as civilization/cannibalism,
self/other, heterosexuality/homosexuality, and the difficulties we get
into when we do so. That Dahmer is perceived deviant in more than one
way complicates and sometimes impedes our essentializing notions of
civilization, of heterosexuality, of our sense of self, and of what are
perceived to be their opposites. The plurality of his deviancy, I
suggest, might be the cause of an apparent unease about how to represent
Dahmer, about this moment when the words do not come naturally, when
openings seemed to have appeared in what Barthes would call the
logosphere. Before the openings are smoothed over again I hope an
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exploration of the construction of "civility" will yield more questions
about our obsessions, fears and desires.
The language used to represent Dahmer can often best be described
as "anthropological." Our representation of his putative homosexuality
and the "homosexual world" he inhabits has the air of an investigation,
the gaining of knowledge about what the New York Times describes as "the
fringes of society" (4 Aug. 1991; 30), those blurred areas on our
horizons where transsexuality fades into homosexuality and where both
are synonymous with transiency. In The Man-Eating Myth Arens says: "In
ordering the material on other cultures, anthropology... serves as a
medical category between us and them, represented by those who have
lived in the two worlds and therefore claim to understand both the
savage and the civilized mind" (169). As I have noted previously,
medical metaphors are common in the representation of serial killers and
their detection. With the moral integrity of a physician we begin our
quests for knowledge, make our entry into the mind of the killer, or, as
in the case of Milwaukee journalist, Anne E. Schwartz, his neighborhood;
"I hopped into my brown 1979 Chevy Caprice and, pushing the accelerator
to its limit, drove from my neighborhood of manicured lawns into the
bowels of the city to my reporting beat of darkened tenements, burned-
out streetlights, and wary looks from the locals" (6)- Clearly the
natives aren't friendly, and those bowels need a good colonic
irrigation.
Helping us see how our predecessors saw the colon in colony,
Stallybrass and White, referring to Victorian England, say: "At one
level, the mapping of the city in terms of dirt and cleanliness tended
to repeat the discourse of colonial anthropology" (Stallybrass and White
130). For Kenneth Lynn, it is a discourse which, in its American form,
takes on a distinctly Christian quality. Expressing an ambivalence
towards the city - the city constructed as, on the one hand, a place of
"glittering amusement and technological marvels and on the other hand of
social exploitation and spiritual degradation" (Lynn 137) - the
discourse, prevalent in American literature and folklore from "all
centuries of our history, all sections of the country" signifies "a
familiar American concern, at heart a religious concern, with the
question of whether honor, charity, and other traditional values of
Western civilisation [are] capable of surviving in the modern city"
(137). The city, so the story goes, is where we find our most extreme
examples of unnaturalness and criminality, qualities which the zoologist
Desmond Morris, cited in Wilson and Seaman’s The Serial Killers,
obviously associates with homosexuality: "Morris remarked that cities
are 'human zoos', and added: 'Under normal conditions, in their natural
habitats, wild animals do not mutilate themselves, masturbate, attack
their offspring, develop stomach ulcers, become fetishists, suffer from
obesity, form homosexual pair-bonds, or commit murder" (Wilson and
Seaman 227). When, following news of Dahmer, maps of gay cruising areas
are produced by a local ABC affiliate as part of a four-part series on
gay-life in Milwaukee, 'Flirting With Danger', contempory versions of
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the speakers of colonial anthropology find their way to downtown
Milwaukee, home to the city's gay bars which form an area that Dvorchak
and Holewa tell us was recently known as the "gay ghetto" (70). And when
claims of cannibalism are heard we find justification for our fancy-
dress combo of pith helmets, white coats and dog-collars.
Arens reflects on the tendency to seize upon and exaggerate claims
of reputed savagery: "The obvious preference runs in the direction of
transforming those suspected of being cannibals into confirmed ritual
endocannibals and, in the twentieth century, into gustatory exocannibals
on a grand scale. The Aztec case is a classic example of this trend,
which took on momentum without the accumulation of additional evidence
on the act itself. The idea and image of cannibalism expands with time
and the intellectual appetite" (165). The anthropological discourse
present in Dahmer's representation can serve "as a reviver and
reinventor of the notion of savagery” (Arens 66) and, especially when
medical and medicinal in tone, can naturalize the need to eradicate
(like a disease) the types of people or lifestyles we figure the serial
killer as representing. With the reinvention of "savagery" being an
essential part of the trouble-free evolution of the concept
"civilization", the desire to change the concept of savagery can be
indicative of a fear that "civilization as we know it" is threatened.
But with Dahmer, as Courtland Milloy indicates, our traditional method
of constructing savagery goes out of the window: "When I was growing up
television shows frequently portrayed Africans as doing that kind of
thing - turning some Great White Bwana into a happy meal. At least ten
of Dahmer’s victims were black. Police suspect that Dahmer hated blacks.
But here is this all-America-looking white guy sucking on black people's
bones like they were pork knuckles" (Washington Post. 1 Aug. 1991: C3).
Dahmer, in case we forget, is white. He is, according to racist
ideology, the embodiment of a contradiction in terms: the white savage.
And while, as Anastasia Toufexis notes in an article on the insanity
defense, "Juries are more likely to send blacks to prison, whites to
hospitals" (Newsweek. 3 Feb. 1992: 17) - while in other words we are
more willing to attempt to civilize white savages than black, more
willing to perceive white criminals as erring only temporarily (their
crimes the result of their white bodies and white minds being only
temporarily out of control), more willing to perceive black criminals as
beyond redemption, requiring punishment not therapy - Dahmer is rather
too much beyond the pale, beyond, that is, being someone whom we can
reasonably allow this side of the border separating paleness from
otherness.
When we see Dahmer - this white boy with a privileged background,
from an industrious, well-educated family - how do we re-define
savagery? civilization? What or whom is being defined as
savage/uncivilized? In the representation of Dahmer the coloring as
uncivilized is not restricted to the perpetrator of the crimes. An
appendix to Anne E. Schwartz's book on the Dahmer case lists his
victims' criminal records along with their age and race. In the main
text she says: "All of Jeffrey Dahmer's victims facilitated him in some
way, which is not to say that they deserved to die, but rather that
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their life-styles and unnecessary risk-taking contributed to their
deaths. That many of Dahmer' s victims had arrest records was also a
characteristic of a victim who was instrumental in his own demise"
(114). Her comment follows reference to a Masters Thesis written by a
Milwaukee police lieutenant, Kenneth Meuler, in which he identifies four
types of victim: "innocent non-participating victims” ("Neither their
life-style nor their actions immediately preceding their death attracted
the killer"); "innocent facilitating victims" ("Law-abiding people who
made it easier for the killer"); "criminal facilitating victim" ("People
whose death was the direct result of being involved in some criminal
activity"); "criminal precipitating victims" ("People who were the first
aggressor"). Schwartz implicitly identifies Dahmer's victims as
belonging to Meuler's third category: "criminal facilitating victims."
And it is their "life-style" which warrants this description:
Many of Dahmer1s victims went to a stranger's apartment
because they wanted to make a few bucks by taking off their
clothes and posing nude. The youths who left gay bars with
men they didn't know were leading lives full of risks and,
in the end, were killed as a result of their own negligence
and recklessness. They were looking for nameless, faceless
sex. (115)
The same theme is replayed by police-union lobbyist David Orley, quoted
in the Wisconsin Light (a Milwaukee lesbian and gay newspaper): "These
gays all choose the life-style which gets them killed” and by a
Milwaukee radio-show host, Mark Belling, who says on air "You can't
reject the notion that [the gay] life-style, at is most extreme and
i
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deviant, doesn't produce this kind of behavior" (cited in The Advocate.
10 Sept. 1991).
To his neighbors, Dahmer explained the stench emanating from his
\
apartment as "a sewer problem.'” Schwartz, Orley and Belling, holding
their noses, describe the whole scene they encounter in downtown
Milwaukee in much the same terms. As Milwaukee State Representative,
Polly Williams, notes, such a morality can be expensive: "because of the
conditions here, we have our black men now that will fall prey to this
kind of stuff because they don’t have jobs, they don’t have money. So if
somebody comes and offers them a hundred bucks to pose for a picture,
they'll take it, because they need to live" (Nightline. 7 Aug. 1991).
And, countering the type of claims Schwartz makes, someone who managed
to escape from Dahmer's apartment tells Newsweek that "[Dahmer] was
coming on as a friend and a nice guy. You could hear this man crying for
help - that was my weakness" (3 Feb. 1992: 46). By stating Dahmer' s
mostly non-white victims were partly to blame for their deaths, the
traditional method of defining savagery that we initially rejected can
be re-employed. This is especially so when we invoke the myth which
associates "sexual deviancy” with "racial deviancy" (and whiteness with
heterosexuality), the myth evident in a question posed by Don Davis in
his book on Dahmer: "how did Jeffrey Dahmer, a white man, work so
smoothly with gays and minorities?" (255).
On a different tack we might play down the fact that Dahmer is
white by playing down the factor of race altogether, by playing down the
fact that Dahmer's victim's were mostly black or Asian. Thus Dahmer is a
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gay killer or a "homophobic stalker" (Norris 262) but never a "white
monster" or rarely a "black killer." Dahmer's possible racism is much
more of a taboo subject than his putative sexuality, and that taboo
helps to shield the partnership of whiteness with civilization. But it
is a partnership protected not only by silence, but by the inscription
of his victims with incivility, by Dahmer figured not as the white
killer of blacks but the white man tempted by and lost in a black,
savage world. It is a world whose inhabitants speak a language which
apparently requires translation: "And I, you know, I ain't got no
quarter on him [she did not know who he was], I just seened him" is how
Schwartz reports part of a neighbor's phone-call to the police telling
them of Konerak Sinthasomphone fleeing from Dahmer's apartment.
We can only wonder about much energy would have been spent
tracking down criminal records of the victims if they had been white and
heterosexual, or how much attention the sexuality of a heterosexual
victim or the race of a white victim would have received. Such attention
in the representation of Dahmer implicitly links the victim with the
killer, places him in "the world of serial killers", a "netherworld", an
uncivilized world where anything goes, and of course a world distinct
from ours.
For Milwaukee psychiatrist, Asok Bedi, Dahmer's sexuality is a
sign of abnormality: "His personality disorder, the alcohol addiction,
the pedophilia, the necrophilia, his ego and homosexuality, all were
layers of his dysfunction" (quoted in Davis 264). In an edition of
'Sonya Live', the host notes that "Jeffrey Dahmer and [John Wayne]
Gacey...were sexual sadists when it came to males. Ted Bundy and
[Arthur] Shawcross, sexual sadists when it came to females" and asks her
expert guests "Was that just spurious, something that just happened, or
is there something in the background that leads one in one direction or
the other?.” In response, Richard Kraus, forensic psychiatrist, says
that "the Gacey and Dahmer cases revealed a lot of sexual orientation
disturbance" whereas Shawcross "had something to prove, mainly that he
was potent in a heterosexual world" (Sonya Live. 1 Mar. 1993). The
distinction Kraus makes between the "homosexual" killers and the
"heterosexual" killer is representative of the way the acts of the
former are perceived as a consequence of something gone wrong (that is,
the individual had a sexual orientation "disturbance" and began to like
men) and the acts of "straight killers" are perceived as a consequence
of a desire which is considered normal, which others have and most
others putatively fulfill. Gacey's and Dahmer's homosexuality is framed
as unnatural, the result of something gone awry, whereas Shawcross's
"problem" is not his sexual orientation but his sexual inpotency.
The move to identify monstrosity and savagery in homosexuality is
a familiar one in the representation of other "gay killers." In Mass
Murder, Levin and Fox describe Dean Corll ' s murders in Houston:
"...twenty seven bodies of young boys were excavated in Houston, Texas,
after Elmer Wayne Henley confessed to his part as an accomplice in the
homosexual rituals of Dean Corrll" (my italics; 20). "The macabre
British homosexual serial murderer" (28) is how Elliot Leyton manages to
infuse and confuse homosexuality (not to mention the murderer's
nationality) with other-worldliness. Like the actions of "gay killers",
those of "straight killers" are considered the result of an inability to
control themselves sexually, but because heterosexuality is naturalized
it is the (individual) killer's inability to control himself which is
condemned, not the killer's sexuality and not the "lifestyles" which are
considered as essential to that sexuality. The heterosexuality of a
putatively heterosexual killer mostly goes without saying. In the List
of Illustrations in Wilson and Seaman's The Serial Killers two separate
groups are discernible. There are "types", those whose particular
"perversions" are named - those who are identified as "a necrophiliac
lust killer", "a psychopath described as 'an accident of internal
wiring'" and John Wayne Gacy, "a homosexual serial killer" - and then
those who glory in sobriquets, those who have earned the right to be
nicknamed, those who are supposedly heterosexual: the 'Boston
Strangler', 'the Night Stalker', 'Son of Sam'. When, as in the case of
Ted Bundy the victims and killer are assumed to be heterosexual, our
tendency is not to group victim and killer together and exclude them
from us, but to figure the victim as representative of our world, our
civilization, and to figure the killer as a senseless monster from
without or below. In such a case our tendency is not to explain the act
by talking in terms of varying degrees of "victim facilitation" in the
crime, but to mystify the act, describing the killer as striking
motivelessly, and striking at innocence.
To mystify or not to mystify, to regard as senseless or to find
explanation. We are faced with many choices. For a heterosexist culture
the Dahmer case represents an opportunity to explain acts of savagery by
referring to his putative homosexuality, to confuse homicidal with
homosexual tendencies, confuse "sexual homicide" (Norris 1992, 255) with
homo sex. Speculating on Dahmer's motivation for cannibalism, Brian
Masters suggests that it is "possible that Jeffrey Dahmer dimly feels
some kind of 'shared' tragedy with the victims, as if they have all
suffered from indifference and neglect and united in this dramatic
denouement" and that "the desire to identify with the victim, to be at
one with him, to share his fate, cannot in the end be more graphically
expressed than by eating him" (Masters 1991, 266). In those
representations of Dahmer which similarly describe his life as "tragic",
a major flaw of Dahmer's, to put the tragedy in Aristotlean terms, is
his homosexuality. While a Time article on the Houston murders (27 Aug.
1973: 56) takes seriously the idea that what it calls "aberrant sex" is
"causally related to mass murder" before generally rejecting the idea
(quoting a Harvard Medical School "expert on multicide" as saying that
there is "no connection between homosexuality and murder per se"), two
decades later plots which construct murder and/or serial murder as
event(s) arising from homosexuality are not only of the sub-plot
variety. On an edition of Geraldo we hear of Dahmer with a potential
victim being "homosexual or freaky or whatever" (12 Sept. 1991). The Los
Angeles Times describes Gerald Boyle, Dahmer's attorney, conjuring up
for the jury an image of Dahmer who, when as a fourteen year old,
"realized he was a homosexual and first fantasized about having sex with
a corpse" (31 Jan. 1992). And Masters, apparently inspired by Dahmer's
120
guilt about his sexuality, presents us with an image of homosexuality as
a harmful influence taking hold of the young, innocent and heterosexual
Jeffrey:
Before the trial he started to have fitful dreams...They
were pleasant homosexual dreams accompanied by feelings of
warmth and calm, with no violence or stress. Even these he
distrusted, however, and declared his intention to free
himself from them. First, the Bible forbade homosexual
behavior, and he hoped he would in time be able to banish
homosexual thought. Second, it was the homosexuality in him
which led to his becoming a murderer. Had he not encouraged
it, none of this might have happened...It was possible, at
least, that in the depths of his being his orientation was
not homosexual at all, but that it had been diverted onto
that path by his extreme social awkwardness as a child.
Dahmer's rejection of his homosexual dreams may have
reflected a subconscious wish to rediscover his earliest
self. (Masters 1993, 219)
Conspicous by their absence are speculations about heterosexuality
descending like a cloud on the young selves of "heterosexual" serial
killers. Rather than a suffering of "indifference" to use Masters' term,
perhaps a more accurate description of the gay experience of
heterosexist culture is a suffering of difference. I have in mind Eve
Kosofsky's Sedgwick comment that "...the nomitive category of 'the
homosexual' has robustly failed to disintegrate under the pressure of
decade after decade, battery after battery of deconstructrive exposure -
evidently not in the first place because of its meaningfulness to those
whom it defines but because of its indispensableness to those who define
themselves as against it" (Sedgwick 1990, 83). Evident in the
representation of Dahmer is a connecting/confusion of the construction
of savagery with that of homosexuality as a means of defining
heterosexist culture against "Jeffrey Dahmer, homosexual."
121
The history of how we define uncivility is full of different
versions of the "homosexual." Jeffrey Weeks comments that "In the
mythology of the twentieth century, the homosexual is the archetypal-
sexed being, a person whose sexuality pervaded him in his very
existence" (Weeks 107). The mythology is revived in Dahmer' s
representation. After quoting a former paramedic who says that ninety
five per cent of the homes of gays he visited had a "strange odor" of
"exotic perfume", "animal odors" and the like, Don Davis in Milwaukee
Massacre discusses the police's unwillingness to get involved in
disputes between gay couples and mentions the claim of police who "go
into the homes of such people" that "pornographic books and pictures are
the norm" (10). For the writers of a Newsweek article, "Secrets of a
Serial Killer", Milwaukee's gay bars "line up like tarts in the nights"
(3 Feb. 1992: 45). And according to Rick Bowen, director of Jeffrey
Dahmer: The Secret Life, homosexual desire overrides everything: "gays
are going to love [the movie] because I treat the love scenes
sensitively. Besides, we used cute guys" (quoted in The Advocate. 3 Nov.
1992: 93).
The myth described by Weeks can arise in more subtle ways. Ideas
that homosexuals are "less choosy", that homosexual relationships are
much more easily available than heterosexual relationships, that
heterosexuality is something one moves towards as one becomes more
civilized are the bases from which we can make sense of a quotation from
Ashok Bedi, included in Davis's book: " [Dahmer’s] is what I call a
defensive homosexuality. It's a retreat to homosexuality because these
men or women have not evolved the art to connect with heterosexual
encounters and reach across the sexual lines. So they connect with a
group that will respond to them promptly" (my italics, 262). Comforting
to a white heterosexual audience is the idea that Dahmer is prey to his
sexual desires, is his sexuality's victim. It is an idea implicit in the
term "homosexual overkill" that officials and press borrowed from the
earlier case of Joachim Dressier. Robert Dvorchak and Lisa Holewa
paraphrase Milwaukee County Medical Examiner Jeffrey M. Jentzen's
testimony about the term as something that "is done by a man with deeply
repressed homosexual feelings or a homosexual who acted in a frenzy
against a gay lover" (Dvorchak and Holewa 209). Joel Norris notes that
an "expert from a local university" commented at the trial that cases of
homosexual overkill "usually involved torture or mutilations of the
sexual organs" (Norris 1992, 45). "Overkill" was also the title of a CBS
television-movie about Aileen Wuornos, depicted in the press as the
lesbian, man-hating and "first female serial killer." The idea of the
savage homosexual is an anti-gay myth satirized in the following excerpt
of an imaginary exchange between two Milwaukeans written by journalist
Joel McNally in a piece pulled by editors of the Milwaukee Journal:
"Give me good old normal heterosexuals anytime. They kill people just
the right amount" (quoted in Schwartz 129). Unlike those of a
heterosexual killer, Dahmer's putative sexual desires render him out of
control.
Weeks also notes that the mythological homosexual "threatens to
corrupt all around him and particularly the young", and that "the most
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pervasive stereotype of the male homosexual was as a "corrupter of
youth'." This aspect of the mythology seems pertinent to one of the
most highly publicized aspects of the Dahmer case. After a naked and
bleeding fourteen year old Laotian boy, Konerak Sinthasomphone, was seen
pursued by Dahmer on the street outside of Dahmer's apartment, neighbors
called the police and then checked back later:
Caller:
This
Officer:
Officer:
Caller:
flagged
minutes ago
Officer:
Caller:
my
done
Officer:
Caller:
Officer:
Caller:
Officer:
Caller:
Officer:
Caller:
even
with
Officer:
Caller:
Officer:
care
anything
I wondered if this situation was being handled,
was a male child being raped and molested by an
adult.
Where did this happen?
She was transferred to another officer.
Hello, this is the Milwaukee Police.
Yes, there was a Squad Car No. 68 that was
down earlier this evening, about fifteen
That was me.
Yeah, uh, what happened? I mean my daughter and
niece witnessed what was going on. Was anything
about this situation? Do you need their names or
information or anything from them?
No, I don't need it. No, not at all.
You don't?
Nope. It's an intoxicated boyfriend of another
boyfriend.
Well, how old was this child?
It wasn't a child. It was an adult.
Are you sure?
Yup.
Are you positive? Because this child doesn't
speak English. My daughter had, you know, dealt
him before and seen him on the street, you know,
catching earthworms.
Yeah - no, he's - it's all taken care of, ma'am.
I mean, are you positive this is an adult.
Ma'am. Like I explained to you. It is all taken
of. It's as positive as I can be. I can't do
about somebody's sexual preferences in
life.
(Excerpts of transcript released by the Milwaukee Police
cited in The New York Times. 2 Aug. 1991: A10; Geraldo. 4
Dec. 1991; and Davis 47-51)
After having been persuaded by Dahmer to allow the boy to be returned to
his apartment, where the boy was killed minutes later, one of the
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officers who had been called to the scene sent the by-now infamous
messages to the dispatcher: "The intoxicated Asian naked male [laughter
heard in background] was returned to sober boyfriend and we're ten-
eight" ...[officers sent to a battery complaint]..."Ten-four. It'll be a
minute. My partner's gonna get deloused at the station [laughter]"
(cited in Schwartz 93) . We can of course only speculate as to whether
the officers involved truly believed the boy to be an adult and we can
only speculate how they would have responded to a naked, bleeding
fourteen-year-old white girl or boy being pursued down a suburban
street, or if Dahmer was black, or if the women complaining had been
white. But the mythology that surrounds the "netherworld", that space
inhabited by non-whites and non-heterosexuals, that space which if
entered requires one to be de-loused, might explain in part what
Milwaukee Police Chief Arreola described as "inexplicable." We all know
that vision is not a passive quality, and from the point of view of a
culture which attempts to lump together all its others, the sight of a
"self-confessed" homosexual with a naked Asian fourteen year old might
appear "normal", might appear as if it belonged to a world in which law
and order and reason did not and need not apply. Certainly it seems not
to have applied when the officers left Dahmer with Konerak without
filing a report or making a computer check which would have revealed
Dahmer was on probation because of a conviction for molesting Konerak's
then thirteen year old brother.1
1 This apparent association of homosexuality with natural disorder is
125
"Did you buy the judge's explanation today that this was a kind of
a repressed homosexuality which caused the acts when [Dahmer] took them
in his house, because of the shame?" Dahmer's Attorney is asked on Larry
King Live (17 Feb. 1992) following the trial's conclusion. The Milwaukee
Journal refers to Dahmer as a "gay misfit" in one of its headlines. The
connection between Dahmer's homosexuality and the killings and putative
cannibalism is made with reference to the "in the closet"/"out of the
closet" construction of gay experience. In contrast to a former lover of
Dahmer who stated that Dahmer was "an active member in the gay community
in Milwaukee" and not a "homophobic gay person" (Donahue. 23 Sept.
1991), much media attention was given to Dahmer feeling guilty about his
homosexuality. The comments of James Alan Fox are representative of such
diagnoses:
If he at all feels uncomfortable about his own sexual
orientation, it is very easy to see it projected onto these
victims and punishing them indirectly to punish himself...He
hated anyone who was more gay than he. This was his method
of punishment. He could be attracted to these people and
then feel extremely horrible about it, and he lashes out at
them as opposed to himself. So it's a combination of his
hatred for these victims, mixed in with some racial hatred,
combined with fantasies that do involve this idea of cutting
people up. (quoted in Schwartz 148)
David Van Leer, among others, has argued that to a heterosexual audience
"coming out" is often a confession to the guilt of one's sexuality, that
not peculiar to the United States. London's gay community in 1993
complained of the police's lack of monitoring of the murders committed
by Colin Ireland, (see Joan Smith).
to be homosexual, is to be guilty. In much of Dahmer' s representation
homosexual existence is seen as a secret world of guilt and self-hatred,
and conspicuously lacking is the idea that that guilt is mis-placed. The
idea of the closet, that structure created by or created because of a
homophobia, is made tangible in Dahmer's representation. His sexual
closet, a world of guilt-ridden fantasies, is conflated with the closet
which is his apartment, his "lair" (Davis 134), his "chamber of horrors"
(Geraldo. 12 Sept. 1991), his "den of death" (Davis, cover) which we
discover to be full of the stench of rotting corpses. This cryptic
closet is presumably the reason why Dahmer's voice, as he attacks Tracey
Edwards with a knife, "sounded as if it came from the bottom of a tomb"
(Davis 24). Every new killing is seen as the result of the 'in the
closet'/'out of the closet' structure temporarily turned inside out. And
it is homosexuality which is figured as being "turned out", as something
which can lie invisible within the heterosexual body, as something which
fulfils its destructive capabilities when it is exposed to air, as
something which is ultimately self-destructive, for once robbed of the
body on which it has fed, it turns on, desires itself.
In a culture in which the guilt for one's homosexuality is
naturalized, murders by (self-hating) homosexuals are figured as the
natural consequence of homosexuality. And perceiving Dahmer's acts as
homophobic - as caused by a violent repression of homosexuality - is
another way of individualizing/ aculturalizing the crime, of concealing
the possibility that Dahmer's actions could be related to homophobic
culture. Jonathan Dollimore notes how gay homophobia is usually figured
127
in subjective, psychical terms rather than as something which circulates
culturally (Dollimore 245), the consequences of which encourage "a way
of thinking whereby the aggressor in homophobic violence is somehow
identified with his of her victim: both are homosexual, the one
repressed, the other overt” (242). Helping to localize the crime to
homosexuality is the term "gay killer", used to refer to both Dahmer and
Colin Ireland. Does the term mean the killer is gay, or that his victims
are gay? Or both? The confusion contributes to the depiction of a "gay
world" characterized by violent criminality. It is a world depicted as
excluding heterosexuality, not as something constructed by heterosexist
culture's homophobia. It is a world in which sex and hate mingle:
Dahmer's crimes are presented as either sex crimes - crimes which are
the expression of homosexuality - or as hate crimes, with that hate
perceived as an enduring presence within homosexuality.
"He kind of talked and told me what he was - you know, what he
wanted me to do." "And then he started acting like that, you know?"
Tracey Edwards, "The Only Surviving Victim of Serial Killer Jeffrey
Dahmer" as the Donahue show titled him, re-condemns homosexuality to the
world of "the unspeakable", a world which can include all kinds of
indescribable phenomena. We cannot say what is there, but what it is "we
know. ” But we also like to make it clear that this knowledge is not
intimate. Heterosexuality's appropriation of culture (as opposed to
individuality) - that is, appropriation of the idea of the social body,
that body from which homosexuals are excluded because of their
uninvolvement~'in recognized kinship systems - helps to protect the full
128
cultural presence of heterosexuality (a presence, that is, untainted
with homosexuality) from the idea of a homosexuality "within", from a
homosexuality which is fundamental to, not parasitical to, heterosexual
structures. Homosexuality is figured as something which effects
individuals, something individuals either assert, or have to come to
terms with, or repress; heterosexuality, on the other hand, is the bond
which unites culture.
Norman Mailer's thoughts on homosexuality often resonate with the
representation of Dahmer which sees him killing to assert his
masculinity, as a homosexual wanting to be somebody, to gain peer
recognition, to be in other words, heterosexual (synonymous in this view
with masculine). Dollimore notes Mailer's opinion "that anyone who has
succeeded in repressing his homosexuality has earned the right not to be
called homosexual" (Dollimore 46; the view cited in Altman's Homosexual
Oppression and Liberation). For Mailer, repression is an heroic act, an
act one struggles to achieve alone, but one which if achieved allows one
to be initiated into society and obtain cultural recognition for one' s
efforts. It is the history of the struggle from slavery to freedom.
Perhaps anxious about the possible instability of oppositions
heterosexuality/ homosexuality and civilization/savagery, Mailer in
Advertisements for Myself states that to understand "the ills of the
homosexual. . .one had to dig - deep into the complex and often foul pots
of thought where sex and society live in their murderous dialectic"
(Mailer 199). The construction of the repressor of homosexuality as the
129
repressor of pre-civilization wildness is identified by Joan Mellen in
the movie Deliverance:
In the primal event of the film Ed ([played by Jon] Voigt)
and Bobby ([Ned] Beaty), but not Louis ([Burt] Reynolds),
are captured by two rural degenerates, men primitive enough
to act out those forbidden sexual impulses 'civilized' men
like our heroes repress and deflect into more acceptable
manifestations, such as hunting animals or contact sports.
Ed is tied to a tree. Bobby, a fat, ineffectual man, is
ordered to drop his pants and is raped. Both men are
threatened with having their 'balls cut off', whether or not
they cooperate. The terror evoked is not just that of being
violently mutilated by degenerates but of being forced to
express latent homosexual feelings, and in a passive,
vulnerable, receiving manner...As if in shuddering reaction
to what has been seen, the film now turns to an advocacy of
male force, in contradiction of its earlier irony toward
Louis's macho flaunting of his strength. Now homosexual need
and male eroticism for other males are associated with dark,
savage, and primitive needs properly repressed by
civilization. If civilization limits us, going native means
that the dark forces of the id, symbolized by the ghoulish
hillbillies, as malevolent as gargoyles, will overtake us.
Deliverance is, in sum, a Freudian fable of the dangers of
our instinctual life. If the price of civilization is the
curbing of male vitality and release, the consequences of
going back are surrender to the savage animal world of rape
and violation of the weak by the strong. (Mellen 318-19)
In a commonly heard story, Dahmer similarly goes on a journey into his
psychic self. Revolted by what he finds, he attempts to destroy it. He
fails, however, in his quest for deliverances the beast will not die.
According to Michael McCann, District Attorney in the Dahmer trial,
Dahmer gave in to sexual impulses. During cross-examination, McCann
asks Doctor Wahlstrom, a defence witness: "Wouldn't we all be in trouble
if we followed all our sexual desires, regardless of what those desires
were?" (The New York Times. 9 Feb. 1992: A23). For McCann we all have
the potential for evil within us, and it has a name: sex. Sex is
naturally something that will get us into trouble. (It is an idea also
130
put foreward by Camille Paglia in Sexual Personae: "Sex is the point of
contact betwen man and nature, where morality and good intentions fall
to primitive urges" (quoted in Masters 1993, 97)). Sex, according to
McCann, if not Paglia, needs controlling. But it's homo-sex which needs
especially to be kept in check. Time and time again, repaying savagery
with savagery, Dahmer attempts final destruction, final closure. But it
is a cycle only broken by his arrest. Dahmer proves his weakness, his
"emasculation" by his failure to conquer homosexuality. And if we fail
to question the association of homosexuality with savagery, perhaps our
fascination for his story comes from the nightmarish possibility that
his struggles are potentially ours, that deep within our notion of
civilization we hear echoes of that which we define as civilization's
other, that Dahmer's closets turn out to be our own. The perception of
heterosexuality as the means by which homosexuality is repressed,
engenders a worrying opposition for "heterosexual civilization": a
constraining heterosexuality versus the natural "freedom" of
homosexuality.
We see, then, in Dahmer's representation and its stress on
cannibalism a continuation of the colonizing of homosexuality by
heterosexist culture, the conflation of heterosexuality with
civilization and homosexuality with savagery. The homosexual, like all
those colonized, is figured as both alien to and dependant on the
parent culture. Dahmer, says Don Davis, "claimed to have killed
seventeen of the most vulnerable members of Milwaukee's citizenry -
children and homosexuals" (Davis 164-65). Davis's inscription of gays
with weakness is representative of a paternalism (from a presumed
vantage point of heterosexuality) which has less benign manifestations.
Homosexuality is seen as dependant on heterosexuality for its tolerance
- it is, so the story goes, a disease worthy of eradication - and for
its civilizing qualities. Unless they are made of the stuff Mailer
admires, however, the colonized can rarely cross the barrier separating
the colonized from the colonizer. Brian Masters notes in his article how
it is "suggested that [Dahmer] is a homosexual by default - that his
sexual orientation was not a preference but a compensation for the
impossibility of having a relationship with a woman" (189). Such a
suggestion might lead to the uncomfortable conclusion that Dahmer's
sexuality should be named as "hetero", that his actions were the
consequence of a frustrated heterosexuality. Masters rejects the
suggestion and calls Dahmer a "genuine homosexual." On the edge of the
heterosexual empire, colonizers understand how Dahmer would want to be a
real man, but an unreal man dressed in real men's clothes fools nobody,
especially genuine heterosexuals.
Downplayed is the dependence of the colonizer on the colonized.
The idea of the dependency of heterosexuality on homosexuality is
central to one of Eve Sedgwick's deconstructive arguments in
Epistemology of the Closet. The analytic move" her argument makes, she
says:
...is to demonstrate that categories presented in a culture
as symmetrical binary oppositions - heterosexual/homosexual,
in this case - actually subsist in a more unsettled and
dynamic tacit relation according to which, first, term B is
not symmetrical with but subordinated to term A; but, second
132
the ontologically valorized term A actually depends for its
meaning on the simultaneous subsumption and exclusion of
term B; hence, third, the question of priority between the
supposed central and the supposed marginal category of each
dyad is irresolvably unstable, an instability caused by the
fact that term B is constituted as at once internal and
external to term A. (Sedgwick 1990, 9-10)
Having blamed Dahmer's actions on homosexuality, there is need on the
part of heterosexist culture to repress the possibility that, to use
Sedgwick's structure, homosexuality is internal to heterosexuality (and
heterosexuality internal to homosexuality) which brings a frantic effort
to stress homosexuality's externality or the need for that externality.
I have suggested that one result is the extreme figuration of "The
homosexual as cannibalistic savage" and that, however, the structure is
not fully stabilized by this figuration. For the same move can be made
to demonstrate that the opposition civilization/savagery exists in the
same unstable state as heterosexual/homosexual and that savagery is both
internal and external to civilization. The result is the simultaneous
displacement of homosexuality within heterosexuality on to the savage
other, and the displacement of savagery within civilization on to the
homosexual other: an unresolvable practice of re-definition.
Of course oppositions can always be shown to lack intrinsic
stability. Theoretical demonstrations of their instability as a means of
refuting essentializing arguments or de-naturalizing oppressive
ideologies have been perhaps the major and most useful recent activities
of English departments. However, I suggest that the apparent
contemporary cultural fascination with savagery and especially
cannibalism can indicate that questioning the relationship of civility
133
and uncivility has been as much the concern of what those English
departments might call "dominant culture" as the departments themselves.
Historically, the nature of the relationship has always relied on
context. In the absence of oppositions which are essentially different,
estrangement relies on context. Context has always protected the idea of
civilization from acts which appear savage, and we have never been able
to state convincingly that cannibalism is essentially wrong. The
particular circumstances in which the plane-crash survivors found
themselves meant that few people condemned the cannibalism portrayed in
the book Alive, and its movie-version. For the New York Times, Piers
Paul Read's book was "a classic human adventure" (quoted in Davis 173).
While we know that cannibalism, as Brian Masters notes, "has a long
history among some civilizations and has often been considered honorable
by those tribes which have entertained it as a noble ritual" we may also
like to dwell on the idea that "a strong echo still exists in our
society, for what is more symbolically cannibalistic than the sacrament
by which Christians take the body and blood of Christ into themselves?"
(Masters 1991, 267-8). We've always known cannibalism, only, up till now
we've done our best to deny it by calling it something else. Perhaps our
current preoccupation with it shows us to be intrigued by the
possibility that it is not the likes of Hannibal Lecter who straddles
the histories of civilization and savagery but cannibalism itself. Is
our confession not a healthy self-examination? A first-step in
acknowledging that some of our prejudices have no reasonable foundation?
As we root around civilization in order to see how it works, to
examine its internal circuitry, we’re finding things which delight us,
things which we do not find the need to displace onto others, homosexual
%
or otherwise. "Civilized", we discover, has a prefix which has always
been there, only hidden from view. And we're not too concerned about
context, that which can "excuse" certain acts. Our attraction to the
story of Alive seems at least as much to do with our identification of
savagery within our fellow civilians as an acknowledgment that context
"legitimized" the cannibalism, made it less the behavior of savages and
more that of the desperately hungry. After journeying into the recesses
of our psychic selves, ours is a confession which exhilarates us. In the
context of Christian sacrament, Masters says "it is interesting that
Nilsen (who never admitted to necrophagy) frequently uses words like
'purification' and 'sacred' and 'this almost holy feeling' when
describing his behavior towards those who died at his hands. Of his last
victim, he wrote, 'Here in this cell he is still with me. In fact I
believe he is me, or part of me" (Masters 1991, 267-8). What we take
great delight in seeing within us is not that which dilutes our powers
of estrangement but that which gives us sacredness, holiness, mystery,
that which connects us with the unspeakable force of nature. What our
current fascination for cannibalism can indicate is our desire to
appropriate those powers we previously ascribed to the savage. Nilsen,
as I mention in my introduction, remarks on the degree to which the
figure of the empowered serial killer is a function of culture, and that
he himself never had any power in his life. Until, it seems, he gained
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some kind of spiritual and social power, the power that comes from
consuming others, a power which makes sense in the language with which
he, Lecter and Dahmer are represented, the language with which we are
all familiar.
That language, as I have suggested earlier, can be the language of
the anthropologist, or rather the anthropologist who has gone too far,
whose sense of identity is hopelessly, madly confused: the civilized
savage, the savage civilian. It is the language of he who has "lived in
the two worlds and therefore claim(s) to understand both the savage and
the civilized mind" (Arens 169), he whose certainties have been lost
through such knowledge. We're not sure how to estrange Mr. Hyde and not
too sure whether we want to. And perhaps this instability increases our
sense of power. Occupying a no-man's land where sanity is
indistinguishable from madness, culture indistinguishable from non
culture, we have a great vantage point, able to see (and have power
over) the mysteries of both sides. Discussing the medieval custom of
expelling madmen in ships which became known as the "ships of fools",
Foucault in Madness and Civilization says that:
...if [the madman] cannot and must not have another prison
than the threshold itself, he is kept at the point of
passage. He is put in the interior of the exterior, and
inversely. A highly symbolic position, which will doubtless
remain his until our own day, if we are willing to admit
that which was formerly a visible fortress of order has now
become the castle of our conscience. (11)
Perhaps we have alleviated our conscience by assuming that highly
symbolic position ourselves.
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But then there are indications that we don't feel unstable at all,
that ours is an anthropology which does not move, which does not enter
into discourse. Perhaps the powers we have appropriated can mean simply
more of the same. Or that with our appropriation of the savage, we are
"merely" inscribing practices fundamental to our existing sense of self
with mystery, with nature. Thus the Lecter we see at the end of the
movie strolling down a street in what appears to be an Afro-Carribean
country receives our adulation not only because he is about to dine on
the despicable Chiltern, but that, once again, he demonstrates that his
consumption knows no bounds. In the context of the movie, eating
Chiltern might be excused as taking a bite out of mysogyny. But, as I
have suggested, context can be neither here nor there.
Postulating that "cannibalism is the elementary form of
institutionalized aggression" and that "all subsequent forms of social
aggression are related to cannibalism in some way" (Sagan 109), Eli
Sagan in Cannibalism: Human Aggression and Cultural Form argues that
"the desire to kill and eat has been sublimated into the desire to
dominate and oppress. Any form of domination and oppression is an act of
aggression on the part of the oppressors. Cannibalism, aggressive
warfare, and conquest have been replaced, in the internal affairs of
civilized society, by subtler forms of domination: slavery, racism,
religious oppression, and capitalism" (106). Perhaps the sexiness
Hollywood identifies in the cannibalistic serial killer is not or not
only akin to the sexiness Barthes, for example, sees along the whole
length of the border where we perceive culture and non-culture meeting,
that "non-site" where he seeks to control "the contradictory interplay
of (cultural) pleasure and (non-cultural) bliss" (Barthes 62). Perhaps
it is the sexiness which Roland Barthes for one writes against, the
sexiness we ascribe to the special form of power we respect. Might not
our contemporary construction of the empowered cannibal correspond with
the normality we ascribe to forms of domination and oppression? When we
hear Dahmer on Dateline NBC explain that he needed to live in a world in
which "I could completely control a person - a person that I found
physically attractive, and keep them with me as long as possible" (cited
in People Weekly. 12 Dec. 1994), should we estrange him by placing him
in opposition to normality or should we perceive him at the edge of a
normality in which sex is control and love is possession? Masters notes
that while Dahmer has "been consistent in admitting that control was his
aim, he has never said that he enjoyed the act of killing, and the image
with which he has left us is that of a lover choking his unconscious
mate before wrapping him in his arms" (Masters 1993, 200). When Dahmer
literalizes the idea of love as possession, literalizes the idea that
bodies can be possessed and controlled by regarding his victim's bodies
as "momentos of conquest" as Dvorchak and Holewa put it, do we perceive
that literalization as in accord with or in discord with the idea? And
if we bother to answer such questions we shouldn't forget to bring race
into the equation. For one aspect of normative power which both Dahmer
and Lecter can be said to embody is that of racial power. As cannibals
they are figures of power constructed in part with reference to race, to
our inscription of power to the white man. As we speculate on The
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Silence of the Lambs'a afterlife (or on an imaginary sequel: plans for
Touchstone to make a second killing at the Box Office - perhaps followed
by a third killing, a fourth, a fifth? - having now been dropped), the
final image we have of Lecter is as a white cannibal among black
natives. The acceptable face of cannibalism and serial killing is white.
Lecter is the white man who represents the powers of civilization and of
the appropriated powers of the savage. And these powers are reinforced
by "that most tired of Hollywood racist conventions" as Elizabeth Young
puts it: the final scene being of "fully realized white characters set
against an undifferentiated backdrop of 'local color'" (Young 26).
To talk about the delights of a consumption that knows no bounds
may appear strange to all but Sadean scholars. In an essay prefacing a
collection of Sade's writings, Simone de Beauvoir notes that:
Eating can be a substitute for erotic activity only if there
is still some infantile equivalence between gastrointestinal
and sexual function....[Sade] sees a close bind between the
food orgy and the erotic orgy...To drink blood, to swallow
sperm and excrement, and to eat children means appeasing
desire through destruction of its object. Pleasure requires
neither exchange, giving, reciprocity, nor gratuitous
generosity. Its tyranny is that of avarice, which chooses to
destroy what it cannot assimilate. (Beauvoir 37-38)
While the idea of cannibalism's attractiveness may not lie happily in
all our minds, we have few problems with the idea of the consumption of
either sex or food. The terminology relating to both naturalizes a
relationship with the object based on its destruction rather than on
exchange or rejuvenation, naturalizes closure instead of positivity and
plurality. Like Sade, Dahmer is perceived as confusing the food orgy and
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the erotic orgy, the common link perceived as being the act of
consumption. Laura Mulvey says "Sadism demands a story" and Judith
Halberstam suggests that that story "is the Gothic story embedded in the
heart of a consumer culture and the realistic story embedded deep within
Gothic culture" (46). How distant are we from confusing the consumption
of food and sex in the manner of Sade as identified by Beauvoir?^ How
keen are we to "rediscover" stories essential to consumerism? Sex (as we
keep telling ourselves) sells, and it is hardly surprising that as a
consumer society we should should sexualize consumption - or rather,
when the maintenance of that society depends on consumers always wanting
more, that we should sexualize the act of unfulfilling consumption.
Beauvoir says: "If Sade's heroes commit endless massacres, it is because
none of them gives full satisfaction" (42). Likewise, Dahmer - he who,
as Don Davis notes, goes on "one-stop shopping" (122) trips to the mall
to pick up victims - is figured as the archetypal consumer. He is, as
Anne E. Schwartz reminds us, 'The Man Who Could Not Kill Enough’. It is
a figuration which can turn his victims’ bodies, like the bodies of
Buffalo Bill's victims which lie on "littered riverbanks amid the
outboard-oil bottles and sandwich bags that are our common squalor"
2 Peter Greenaway's vivid cinematic exploration of, among other things,
our fetishization of food, The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover ,
might be a good illustration of a society finding "infantile equivalence
between gastroitestinal and sexual function".
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(Harris 1991, 70), into no more than waste from an unfulfilled
consumerism.
A Newsweek article on Dahmer (who learned his butchering skills in
the Army Catering Corps) notes that "In one study of thirty serial
killers, seven were involved in the food business, as cooks, bakers or
owners" and adds "experts have no explanation" (5 Aug. 1991: 40). Our
cannibalistic serial killers seem to be spelling out for us a connection
between their acts and consumption in the same way that George Romero's
Dawn of the Dead, the plot of which involves zombies terrorizing a
shopping mall, can depict "the worst fears of the culture critics who
have long envisioned the will-less, soul-less masses as zombie-like
beings possessed by the alienating imperative to consume" (Modleski
159). The nature of that connection is a matter for debate. Mark Seltzer
suggests that "the question of serial killing cannot be separated from
the general forms of seriality, collection, and counting conspicuous in
consumer society and the forms of fetishism - the collecting of things
and representations, persons and person-things like bodies - that
traverse it" (94). But should we be identifying analogies or causal
relations between consumer society and serialized killing? Or what?
Referring specifically to the "repetitive ways of mass cultural
representations" (93) and our addictions to them, Seltzer notes that
accounts which:
...posit a pathological addiction to representation as the
cause of violence... implicitly understand such media
representations as impinging on the subject 'from the
outside'" and that the addiction to representations "would
consist then in the contagious relation of the subject to
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imitation, simulation, or identification, such that
identification brings the subject, and the subject's
desires, into being and not the other way around. (93-94)
"Society made me do it" is the (mostly) vain cry of the defendant
figuring himself diseased by culture's depravity. But while we are quick
to dismiss such claims and to ask our criminals to take their punishment
like a man (a request with which, as I noted in chapter 2(ii), most
serial killers are more than happy to comply), we should be wary of
taking "culture" out of the equation. The celebrity-status of Dahmer,
killing apparently to satisfy an insatiable appetite, depends in part on
his victim tally, and a culture which boasts of its levels of
consumption has difficulty not only in estranging his putative
conflation of sex and food but also in finding strange its methods for
determining who deserves celebrity-status and who should not.
Feminism has argued that patriarchy normalizes male sexuality as
having more to do with consumption than creativity, more to do with a
negation of difference than exchange. Dahmer's "tragedy" is explained is
precisely these terms. But the tragedy is represented not as the tragedy
of consumerism or of patriarchy but , as I mentioned earlier, of
homosexuality. Dollimore notes that:
The homosexual is significantly implicated in both sexual
and cultural difference, and for two reasons. First because
the homosexual "has been regarded (especially in
psychoanalytic theory) as one who fears the difference of
the 'other' or opposite sex, and, in flight from it,
narcistically embraces the same sex instead. Difference and
heterogeneity are sanctified, homogeneity is distrusted. The
eminent Kleinian psychoanalyst, Hanna Segal, has recently
declared the adult homosexual structure to be inherently
pathological, disturbed, and perverse, and this because of
an inbuilt, narcissistic desire for the same. (Dollimore
249)
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Diana Fuss describes the position Segal takes thus:
The signification of ’homo' has been linked to the politics
of the phallocratic 'same', whereas the meaning of 'hetero'
has been associated just as insistently with the more
respectable politics of 'Difference.' When pushed to its
extreme, Derrida's conviction that 'phallocentrism and
homosexuality can go, so to speak, hand in hand' posits the
determination of phallocentrism within homosexuality (here
coded as male); from this perspective, heterosexuality
operates as the apotheosis of 'heterogeneity' and functions
to displace what is perceived to be the more conservative,
reactionary, effects of the practice of 'homogeneity.' (Fuss
111)
From the perspective which associates homosexuality with homogeneity,
the repetitiveness of the ''homosexual" serial killer's acts (unlike the
repetitiveness of a "heterosexual" serial killer whose acts, as I
suggested earlier, are denied correspondence with heterosexuality) can
be a sign of his homosexuality. From such a perspective the desire for
more of the same is constructed as a sexual desire, as homosexual
desire. But estranging homosexuality by associating Dahmer's cannibalism
with this "homosexual" desire for the consumption of the other (desire,
in other words, for the Same) can run into difficulties, especially when
we flirt with, are intrigued by the possibility of cannibalism's
presence within the history of the "civilized" self. While patriarchy
will openly walk hand in hand with a consumerism that eroticizes food
and the act of unfulfilling consumption, its relationship with
homosexuality is still a closeted affair, and the confusion about how to
represent Dahmer's cannibalism can be "resolved" by the unhappy axiom:
cannibalism is either (hetero)sexy or it is savage. Our fascination with
Dahmer is perhaps related to this inability to settle on how we are to
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depict him, to our inability to unproblematically conflate the
oppositions heterosexuality/ homosexuality with civilization/savagery.
The latter, I have suggested, is under question: a fact illustrated by
(and perhaps in part owing to) the reception of Hannibal Lecter:
civilized and savage, putatively heterosexual (or at least presumed
heterosexual by his flirting with Clarice) and cannibal. Like Lecter,
Dahmer is placed on a threshold of cultural constructions. Dahmer's
monstrosity is arguably more horrifying, more of a spectacle, because of
our positioning him at the meeting point of, for example, sanity and
evil, and because of the destructive effect it has on the conflation of
sanity/insanity, good/evil. But while we ascribe a demonic power to
Dahmer, popularity is reserved for only heterosexual demons.
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Part II: Dreaming the Serial Killer
Wilson and Seaman suggest that the "ritual aspect" of the serial
killer's crime - that which is "conceived of fantasy, and endlessly
rehearsed in the offender's mind before he kills for the first time” -
is his "mark" or "signature.” For the FBI, Ted Bundy "personifies this
ruthless breed of serial killer who leaves a perceptible signature at
the crime scene" (House of Reps. 5). The serial killer's signature
connects random events. It tells us what to read. The connected events
become text produced by an unnamed author hoping to be read, become a
mystery whose solution lies in identifying its author. And yet it soon
becomes much more. It teases the reader, challenges the reader to
identify why such events are connected. It locates the burden of
constructing meaning with the reader. The reader is forced to "write"
the text, to assume authorship in order to anticipate what comes next.
The signature is both a sign of the author's existence and an invitation
into the mind of the serial killer which we show few signs of wanting to
refuse.
The serial killer who leaves his mark and invites us to see things
from his perspective, knows that what we see will not necessarily catch
us all completely unawares. In the first chapter to Graham and Gurr's
Violence in America, Richard Maxwell Brown identifies the denial of a
dependency on violence as a central component of America’s cultural
psyche: "We have resorted so often to violence that we have long since
become a trigger-happy people. Violence is clearly rejected by us as a
part of the American value system, but so great has been our involvement
with violence over the long sweep of our history that violence has truly
become part of our unacknowledged (or underground) value structure"
(Brown (1] 41). A central theme of Part II is that the writing of serial
killer mythology is increasingly contextualized by that "underground"
value structure surfacing, of it going public, becoming central to the
public spectacle.
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5: The Horror in the Mirror: Average Joe and the Mechanized Monster
To Randy Jones, one of Dahmer's neighbors, Dahmer seemed "like the
average Joe" (Newsweek. 5 Aug. 1991: 41). For Anne E. Schwartz, Dahmer
in court is an "average-looking man" (picture caption). According to his
attorney, Dahmer "is a very gentle man" and "that's what makes it so
absolutely intriguing and unbelievable to see how a fellow like that you
saw in court today could have done all these horrific acts" (Larry King
Live. 17 Feb. 1992). And to make it even more intriguing, as a
Washington Post columnist notes, Dahmer is not from one of the "nation's
urban areas with more of a reputation for coldbloodedness", but
Wisconsin, "America's heartland" (1 Aug. 1991: C3) . As I noted in
chapter three, we repeat "appearances are deceptive" again and again,
article after article: "concealed amongst all this normality lies
dormant evil." Like the surrealists, from the banal we see, and perhaps
like to manufacture, something extraordinary.
Average Joe comes in very handy. To Tracey Edwards, whose escape
from Dahmer's apartment led to Dahmer's arrest, Dahmer "seemed like a
normal, everyday guy" and, presumably in order to justify that
characterization, agrees with Geraldo Rivera's suggestion that he and
Dahmer were out to "hustle some chicks" (Geraldo. 12 Sept. 1991). Often
Average Joe has a story to tell about himself and his friends that
questions his claim to his title. This celebrated embodiment of middle
America is often hiding something. Time and again we like to remark on
the illusionariness of his normality. But as we look and appear to see
ourselves, perhaps for moment we experience a more horrifying and/or
thrilling possibility: the monster that appears to be, is actually,
Average Joe, that what is unspeakable turns out to be not impossible to
put into words because it is so extraordinary but because it is so
ordinary. Thus, a twist to the fear expressed in The Return of Martin
Guerre: not an intruder in the guise of familiarity, but familiarity in
all its glory. It is a possibility Hannah Arendt describes in Eichmann
in Jerusalem: "[The prosecutor] wanted to try the most abnormal monster
the world had ever seen...[The Judges] knew, of course, that it would
have been very comforting indeed to believe that Eichmann was a
monster... The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like
him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they
were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal" (Arendt 276). The
"trouble" with Eichmann is the trouble with our serial killers, both new
and old. "I shall clip the lady's ears off...wouldn't you?" asks Jack
the Ripper in a letter to his fellow man. As Martin Tropp suggests, the
writer "speaks directly to his readers, implying by his words and
literacy (despite the [possibly intentional] misspellings) that he is
one of them" (113) and that this is why he is so difficult to catch.
Halloween director John Carpenter, commenting on the success of
The Silence of the Lambs remarks: "I think we're all frightened of the
unknown and also of the repressed people in our society. There's a
duality that touches off sparks in all of us" {People Weekly. 1 Apr.
1991: 70). Those sparks are theorized by Jonathan Dollimore thus:
"since, in cultural terms, desiring the normal is inseparable from and
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conditional upon not desiring the abnormal, repression remains central
to identity, individual and cultural" (246). We often figure the serial
killer as failing to repress the desire for the abnormal. Joan Smith,
for example, figuring identity in hydraulic terms, says: "The otherwise
inexplicable actions of a serial killer...can...be understood as a
survival mechanism, a means of coping with intolerable stress. The fact
that they commit such terrible crimes enables them to function normally
in the periods between their crimes" (3). Our desire for normality, our
fetishization of Average Joe, inevitably means abnormality is
constructed as something that needs to be repressed, something that
inevitably becomes desirable, mysterious, sexy. As it comes into focus
our depiction of the serial killer "letting off steam" is also a
picture of Average Joe who has given in to his deeper desires. Our
monster turns out to be not something monstrous disguised as Average Joe
in disguise but Average Joe who has let it all hang out.
Attempting to satisfy our hunger for horror, we revert sometimes
to what John Carpenter says is indicative of fifties' conservatism, the
cheap scare: our monsters, more animal than human, spring at us from
behind bushes, prey on us, return to their lairs far from everyday,
familiar society. At such times we might, like Dahmer's neighbor, John
Bachelor, compare Dahmer to Friday the 13th's Jason (Los Angeles Times.
24 July 1991: A14) - Jason, like Lecter, a hockey-mask wearer - or, like
Robert Dvorchak and Lisa Holewa, describe Dahmer's reported "wailing"
and "screeching” when he is arrested as "all those forces seething
inside him erupt[ing] to life" (Dvorchak and Holewa 8). But we are
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generally movie-literate people, and to truly scare ourselves we want
sometimes to be a little more subtle, to show that we can write and
speak a little more fully, a little more knowingly about those "forces."
At these times, our monsters must be able to be mistaken for us. Or us
for them. We must build a house of mirrors.
And if we are white, scaring ourselves in this way is a little
easier. Average Joe is white, and so is Average Joe, the serial killer.
Average Joe has power, the power of being average, of being a
representative of middle America. And so does Average Joe, the serial
killer. The sister of one of Dahmer’s many black victims is curious
about why her fellow guest on The Maury Povich Show should be so
fascinated with Dahmer that she regularly attends his trial: "Did you
want to read about the man [Joachim Dressier] that sat up there and cut
up 11 people in Racine. Did you want to read about him? No, see, you
don't even remember him. But he was - came from an insane place. But
see, that's not big news. This white man that killed almost all
minorities he is big news" (Maury Povich. 4 Feb. 1992). And the chances
are that he is going to be around to be the subject of news for a long
time after he is convicted: "We are much more likely to use the death
penalty...when the victims are white as opposed to black" (Jack Levin on
Geraldo. 4 Dec. 1991).! Not that the whiteness of a serial killer
1 Jet magazine pointed out the disparity in the treatment given to
Dahmer and Mike Tyson following their almost concurrent convictions:
Dahmer, rarely seen wearing handcuffs, is perceived to be in control of
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becomes an issue. But his "normality" does. We not only place the white
Dahmer or the white Bundy or the white Gacy on the covers of magazines
we give them the power to look back at us. And that's a thrill.
Looking at our monsters is a good way of finding out who we think
we are, or who we think we might be, or even who we want to be. They can
be figures who have realized our frightening or fantastic potentials.
The trick is to identify how subtle we are being. Take, for example, the
representation of Dahmer as automaton. Seizing on class-mates' memories
of Dahmer' s ritual walk to the school bus - four steps forward, two
back, four forward, one back (Masters 1991, 267) - we deal with his lack
of feeling towards his victims by constructing an image of Dahmer as
boy-machine who develops into something which when arrested "looked so
emotionless, so harmless, as if he were a robot being led away” (Norris
1992, 41). In court his face is "passionless" (Geraldo. 12 Sept. 1991),
his eyes "almost vacant" (Newsweek. 3 Feb. 1992: 45) while for the
Washington Post, Dahmer, "his face...pale and impassive”, "walked with
the near-drop pace of a zombie" (7 Aug. 1991: Bl). People Weekly
magazine counters the claims of his lawyer that he was in a "state of
anguish" with: "but Jeffrey Dahmer was impassive in court as he was
charged with first-degree murder" (12 Aug. 1991: 32). While defence and
state attorneys differ in their assessment of Dahmer's responsibility
his immediate surroundings while Mike Tyson, convicted of rape, was
frequently "shown handcuffed after being manhandled, frisked and
fingerprinted” (Jet 4/13/92).
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for his actions, their portrayal of him as unfeeling, inhuman, machine
like are indistinguishable. Dahmer's attorney, Gerald Boyle, describes
him in court as a "steamrolling killing machine", "a runaway train on a
track of madness, picking up steam all the time, on and on and on",
while Michael McCann for the prosecution describes Dahmer as a "cool,
calculating killer who cleverly covered his tracks" (New York Times. 16
Feb. 1992: 24).
Such estrangement can be of the unsubtle variety, a case of
"pathologizing and thus disavowing the everday intimacies with
technology in machine culture" (Seltzer 98), but it can also indicate
not so much a disavowel as an expression of anxiety on our part about
modern humanity or, more specifically, modern man in "machine culture."
While Klaus Theweleit describes the masculine self of members of the
First World War German Freikorps as "mechanized through a variety of
mental and physical procedures: military drill, countenance, training,
operations which Foucault identified as 'techniques of the self’"
(Rabinbach and Benjamin in Theweleit 1989, xvii), Mark Fasteau, among
others, describes the stereotype of the contemporary male self in
similar terms, a stereotype which we are still struggling to outgrow. In
The Male Machine Fasteau describes the ideal image to which the title
refers as:
...functional, designed mainly for work. He is programmed to
tackle jobs, override obstacles, attack problems, overcome
difficulties, and always seize the offensive...He has armor
plating which is virtually impregnable. His circuits are
never scrambled or overrun by irrelevant personal signals.
He dominates and outperforms his fellows, although without
excessive flashing of lights or clashing of gears. His
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relationship with other male machines is one of respect but
not intimacy; it is difficult for him to connect his
internal circuits to those of others. In fact, his internal
circuitry is something of a mystery to him... (Fasteau 1)
Fasteau's 'male-machine' is a frightening but familiar image. It seems
to correspond with the way we figure most of our monsters: "If there's
anything monstrous about (Dahmer), it's the monstrous lack of connection
to all things we think of as being human - guilt, remorse, worry,
feelings that would stop him from hurting, killing, torturing" (Davis
Silber in Dvorchak and Holewa 141). It corresponds with the way we
represent our mostly male psychopaths who can be diagnosed as such by
demonstrating, among other things, "a shallow understanding of the
meaning of words, particularly emotional terms” and by not showing "the
surge of anxiety that normal people exhibit" when they are about "to
receive a mild electric shock" (New York Times. 7 July 1987: C2). And,
apparently keen to confer buddy-status on as many of society's others as
possible, Fasteau's male ideal corresponds with necrophiles -
"Necrophiles are difficult to recognize, but according to Erich Fromm's
findings they often have a pallid complexion, and they speak in a
monotone... They are fascinated with machinery, which is unfeeling and
antihuman" (quoted in Masters 1991, 266) - as well as schizophrenics: in
In Cold Blood examiners of Lowell Lee Andrews produce a diagnosis of
"schizophrenia, simple type", and by "simple", Capote tells us, "the
diagnosticians meant that Andrews suffered no delusions, no fake
perceptions, no hallucinations, but the primary illness of separation of
thinking and feeling' (Capote 315). How different are our killing-
machines from our male-machines? While we are familiar with and still
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sometimes valorize the male machine, how sensitive are we to the idea
that it is logical for such machines also to regard their others as
mirror-reflections of themselves, as unfeeling, interesting only as
mechanical objects? (While Dahmer the schoolboy explains to a classmate
his reason for cutting up the fish he catches - "I want to see what it
looks like inside, I like to see how things work" (Dvorchak and Holewa
41) - the adult Dahmer confesses to the police "in the uninflected
language of an affidavit" (Newsweek. 5 Aug. 1991 : 40) that he
disassembles his human victims "to see how they work"). Our construction
of the serial killer resembles a figure of masculinity, or rather a re
assembled figure of masculinity, who has turned on all that frustrates
masculinity either within himself or without. When we represent serial
killers, necrophiles, psychopaths, schizophrenics and a male ideal in
similar ways sometimes we refuse to identify links between them, but
sometimes we allow the representations to merge, to form an almost
conflated image in which the other is seen through the familiar self,
the familiar self seen through the other. An uncanny effect, as Freud
might say.
What Freud does say is that the uncanny hints at "nothing new or
foreign, but something familiar and old established in the mind that has
been estranged only by the process of repression" (Freud 47). In the
same essay he mentions the uncanniness of mechanization:
Jentsch has taken as a very good instance [of the uncanny]
"doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive;
or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in
fact animate"; and he refers in this connection to the
impression made by wax-work figures, artificial dolls and
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automatons. He adds to this class the uncanny effect of
epileptic seizures and the manifestations of insanity,
because these excite in the spectator the feeling that
automatic, mechanical processes are at work, concealed
beneath the ordinary appearance of animation. (Freud 31)
A Newsweek article on Dahmer "describes serial killers as "taking their
cues from some deranged script" (5 Aug. 1991: 40) and concludes with a
quotation from Park Dietz: "These people are the most controlled people
you can imagine" (41). While Dahmer was found to be in control, not out
of it, his actions perceived to be those of a man who knew what he was
doing, he is also represented as someone/something being controlled. The
figure of the killer as unfeeling, programmed machine - the writer of
the program remaining a mystery - is one with which the Gothic and our
representation of serial killers is particularly occupied. And
contributing to our sense of the uncanny is the defining characteristic
of the serial killer, the repetitiveness of the killing act. For Freud
"repetition-compulsion" is "based upon instinctual activity and probably
inherent in the very nature of the instincts - a principle powerful
enough to overrule the pleasure-principle, lending to certain aspects of
the mind their daemonic character..."(Freud 44). In other words,
"repetition-compulsion" can signify oxymorons such as "mechanized
nature" or "natural machine."
With Freud's understanding of the uncanny in mind, the
mechanically-repetitive serial killer is a construction which can
suggest for us the power of "natural instinct", an instinct whose
naturalness we may, or may not wish to question. But whether we see the
power of "mechanized nature" or of a "natural machine", our particular
representation of the body-machine complex can have the appearance of
both a powerful fantasy and a fantasy of power. Mark Seltzer, who argues
that "the matter of periodizing persons, bodies, and desires is
inseparable from the anxieties and appeals of the body-machine complex"
(my italics; Seltzer 98), refers to the type of fantasy which "projects
a transcendence of the natural body and the extension of human agency
through the forms of technology that supplemented it" (99). And just as
dreams about technology can reflect more than just our anxieties, our
construction of mechanized monsters, as I mentioned earlier, can tell us
more than just our worries about humanity's "naturalness" or its future
in a technological age. Gilles Deleuze says: "Types of machines are
easily matched with each type of society - not that machines are
determining, but because they express those social forms capable of
generating and using them" (Deleuze 6). Reinventing Deleuze's comment,
one might say that rather than our constructions of automative monsters
indicating what we fear machines are doing to us, they can indicate what
kind of a culture is "capable of generating and using them" (my
italics), and perhaps, what kind of a culture is being dreamt-up.
In the mythology of modern America the serial killer' is a
character able to both scare and thrill us in unsubtle and subtle ways.
He can be monstrous, but he can also demonstrate a monstrosity which is
familiar. The figure of the mechanized serial killer - the serial killer
as automaton, unable to stop - can offer us a version of familiar,
"natural", and to some extent, "appealing" behavior, "that has been
estranged only by the process of repression." In Part I I described how
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various other forms of the serial killer's "familiarity" are repressed,
or policed. In the remainder of the dissertation I will suggest that we
are also showing signs of not only acknowledging that familiarity, but
that our acknowledgment is infused with a kind of honor, a kind of
veneration.
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6: The Confession: Hearing/Speaking the Unspeakable
Dear Mr. Fleming,
As you may know I am Lionel and Shari Dahmer's agent, and I
am in receipt of your fax of May 6th to the Dahmers.
Regretfully, what you propose would conflict with our
current Hollywood plans, and we must therefore respectfully
decline your offer.
Yours, Joel Gotler.
(Letter to Patrick Fleming, whose documentary film To Kill
and Kill Again, focuses on a model developed by California
State University to represent the relationship between
physiological, psychological and cultural factors involved
in the "making" of a serial killer)
A psychologist working for the Wisconsin Department of Corrections
says: "There may be some psychological dynamics to [Dahmer's]
confessions. There could be some relief in being caught. Whatever pain
he had is finally over. Or there could be some charge for him for all
this confessing" (quoted in Schwartz 150). Whether Dahmer experiences
relief or a charge from his "confessions", it is clear that we, as his
confessors, experience the latter as we replay his story time and time
again. And for readers of the magazine True Police Cases it can be read
for less than fourteen bucks. An advertisement selling "The Jeffrey
Dahmer Confessions" (copied, it says, from official files of the
Milwaukee Police Department) notes how the product will tell "how he
lured, drugged, killed, had sex, and dismembered their bodies" and that
you can"Order your copy for ONLY $13.95" (Aug. 1992).
Confession can be good business for confessor and confessee alike.
And sometimes the act of confessing seems more exciting that what is
being confessed. Suddenly everybody seems to have something to confess,
to have, in other words, one of the things it takes to acquire celebrity
status. But Dahmer has one of the best and biggest stories of them all.
His attorney is confident Dahmer's 169-page confession is "the longest
confession in the history of America" and suggests that "this is a man
who wanted to rid himself of this after he was arrested" (Larry King
Live. 17 Feb. 92) . If Dahmer rids himself of his story, where does it
go? "Dahmer could be making everything up or saying things in an
'eagerness to please'" (Los Angeles Times. 4 Aug. 1991, A22) says John
Liccione, a psychologist at the Milwaukee County Mental Health Complex.
What is it Dahmer could say that would please his listeners? When
Dahmer's neighbors in a poor Milwaukee community are offered fifty
dollars for interviews by television networks and three hundred by
national tabloids (The Washington Post. 7 Aug. 91: B2) , there must be
pressure to get the story right, to satisfy the particular demand. And
of course, like Dahmer's neighbors, we have no trouble in describing the
nature of that story, in describing what it is we like to hear.
Henry Lee Lucas knew what that was. The Texas "drifter" confessed
to killing 360 people across the country and was believed, without
forensic evidence or witnesses to support his story. "The greatest
serial killer of all time" (Confessions of a Serial Killer), the subject
of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, now says he only killed one and
made up the rest in consultation with the Texas Rangers: "Every time
they brought a murder case in...I accepted it" (Confessions of a Serial
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Killer)Demonstrating a reversal of the traditional relationship
between police and criminal, Donald Leroy Evans of Galveston confesses
to killing more than sixty people and police "are still attempting to
prove his claims" (Davis 169). Dahmer insists on telling his story, one
which the police can only partially verify: "The accounts of Jeffrey
Dahmer's deeds come from his own mouth. There are no known witnesses,
and in some cases there is no physical evidence to verify the statements
written down by police" (Dvorchak and Holewa 77). The FBI tells us that
serial killers are "very cooperative during the interview. You just
can't shut these guys up. They just want to talk about their crimes"
(House of Reps. 22). And we are good listeners. There is power in
confessing, in having a good story, so much so that for some it is
apparently worthwhile to own up to things one didn't do. The confession
spree gains as much fame as the killing spree.
1 Twenty Twenty Television's Confessions of a Serial Killer tells the
story of Lucas's confessions and of Attorney Viz Feazell who detailed
discrepancies in Lucas's version of the murders. After challenging the
Texas Rangers and the FBI for their dealing of the Lucas case - he
alleges that they ignored evidence which proved Lucas could not have
committed the crimes - Feazell found himself charged with committing
various crimes including murder. He was found by the court to have been
framed by the Rangers, and after filing a libel suit against a Dallas
television station was awarded $58 million.
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Lecter's deal with Starling is that she tells a story to match
his. Watching the movie we may see that everything and everyone is
connected, that none of us are completely innocent. As we cheer both
Lecter's cannibalizing of Chiltern and Billy Crystal's impersonation of
our favorite serial killer we may, for a moment or two, forget ourselves
and acknowledge that he is one of us. But what follows the
acknowledgment? A desire to identify and estrange our discourses which
celebrate the serial killer? Or a taking pleasure in the power he
represents?
Alain Grosrichard notes that "in most of the manuals for
confessors or dictionaries of cases of conscience" there is "an article
on 'morose delectation' which treats of the nature and gravity of the
sin that consists in taking a lingering pleasure (that's the morositas)
in the representation, through thought or speech, of a past pleasure",
and asks "how is one to lend one's ear to the recital of abominable
scenes without sinning oneself, that is, taking pleasure oneself?" (in
Foucault 1980, 215). It is a sin Hannibal Lecter makes no attempt to
hide. Probing into the mind of Clarice, seeking an insight into her
emotional psyche, he seeks images to get turned on by, words to fashion
into pornography. We needn't ask ourselves how we give the appearance of
not taking pleasure in hearing of Dahmer's atrocities. For us the
discourses of the confessor and confessee have merged long before the
monster has been arrested and interviewed. Our investigative discourses
seek the truth of that which they investigate and find it within
themselves.
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In Madness and Civilization Foucault refers to the Lisbon
Temptation in which Saint Anthony sits facing the gryllos "born of
madness, of its solitude, of its penitence, of its privations" (20).
Foucault remarks that "it is exactly this nightmare silhouette that is
at once the subject and object of the temptation; it is this figure
which fascinates the gaze of the ascetic - both are prisoners of a kind
of mirror interrogation, which remains unanswered in a silence inhabited
only by a monstrous swarm that surrounds them" (20). The gryllos is
"madness become Temptation; all it embodies of the impossible, the
fantastic, the inhuman, all that suggests the unnatural, the writhing of
an insane presence on the earth's surface - all this is precisely what
gives the gryllos its strange power. The freedom, however frightening,
of his dreams, the hallucinations of his madness, have more power of
attraction for fifteenth century man than the desirable reality of the
flesh" (20-21). Constructing the figure of the serial killer as a seer
and possessor of super-human powers, we, like Clarice, dare ourselves to
sit opposite him, ask ourselves and are asked what it is we see, ask
what it is he sees. Sometimes, as we watch the televised court
proceedings, Dahmer's eyes, like those of Lecter, seem to look straight
through us: "He ambled into the Milwaukee County Circuit Court...his
eyes drilling fearful holes in some of the camera lenses, as if he could
see through the film and into the heart of anyone who gazed at him"
(Davis 208). And the power we ascribe to him is the power of the
gryllos, that transcendence of earthly matters, that ability to move
freely "above" society, "above" language.
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Hearing the serial killer's confession we marvel that his/our
words can't match his actions, that his actions escape words' reach. He
exists extra-textually. Words, like flesh, can complicate things. We
like to hear him talk, but we like his silences just as much. They speak
volumes. Like St. Anthony surrounded by silence, the world in which we
find ourselves reflected in and through the eyes of the serial killer is
surrounded by silence, a silence in which we can dream of action without
words, of action without meaning. The silence with which we shroud the
serial killer shrouds us too. For words are the enemy. The serial killer
seeks that which does violence to language, that which wrecks language,
cannot be expressed by language, that which renders language silent. The
confession purports to tell the truth, and yet we know it says nothing.
Or rather, its silences say everything. Dahmer can tell us "I knew I was
sick or evil or both. Now I believe I was sick. The doctors have told me
about my sickness..." (quoted in Schwartz 150), but his words are, as he
says, the words of doctors and we don't allow the words of doctors to
ensnare our monsters anymore. His actions are beyond the reach of
language. There in his silence, in his unspeakableness, is his secret.
Perhaps we can see it, but rarely do we dare recount it. There's a power
to his story-telling. He has a hold over us. And yet his power is also
demonstrated by his ability to "escape" his story. He remains
unrepresented, hidden from view. In the darkness he seems to ask us as
many questions as we ask him.
The confessor, concealed in darkness behind his inquisitor's lamp,
sees but is not seen. Identifying closets and demanding their
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encryption, he hides within his own closet. Freud hides behind the
couch. The confessor is also the voyeur, and he is one of our most
celebrated embodiments of power. His is the power the state exerts over
its confessees. The FBI's powers of surveillance - literalizing
psychoanalysis's modus operandi - are conferred to the prison system:
before his trial Dahmer "is confined to a cell with a glass front, much
like the fictional madman Hannibal Lecter ...Guards there record his
movements in a log every five minutes" (People Weekly. 3 Feb. 1992: 78);
the Columbia Correctional Institution in Portage, Wisconsin, where
Dahmer resided before his death has "a glass-enclosed central-command
station with twenty-eight video views of the facility" and offers
wardens "the greatest ability to observe" (Newsweek. 3 Feb. 92: 50). But
we all like seeing in the dark, like the power of being fully present
and invisibly so. It helps explain our loyalty to omniscient narrative,
explains perhaps the attraction of books like In Cold Blood. The book’s
title can refer to the murder and its representation, both acts
"committed" without the appearance of an emotional involvement. About
Capote’s "non-fiction novel" Tony Tanner asks: "Isn't it...that behind
the mask of the dispassionate reporter we can begin to make out the
excited stare of the southern-gothic novelist with his febrile delight
in weird settings and lurid details...?'' (Tanner 101). He sees the
"truthfulness" of Capote's material giving the illusion of "art laying
down its tools as helpless and irrelevant in front of the horrors and
mysteries of life itself" (101). Inconspicuous, the "artist" and the
reader lie low, listen, watch. In their search for the closet of the
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confessee, they feel the need to conceal themselves within their own
closet, that space from which they peer out, all-seeing, all-knowing.
Seeing without being seen is a way we gain knowledge about our
selves and especially each other. Its also a way of having fun -
something the movie-business has known for years. And when we go to the
movies to get scared, the monsters we find there can see in the dark
too. It's as though they might be sitting next to us. Cinema's serial
killers observe (with us) potential victims through night-vision
glasses. It's a power symbolized in The Silence of the Lambs by the cat.
(Catherine Martin greets her cat before being attacked and driven away
by Buffalo Bill, a scene we watch alongside our silent, nocturnal, all-
seeing friend. And it is a cat which Starling - described by Lecter as
having eyes the color of a tiger (22) - meets as she explores the house
of Buffalo Bill's first victim, Fredrica Bimmel). When Clarice shoots
Buffalo Bill - when we see him lying on his back, insect-like, his
glasses still strapped to his face like extended eyes - we can beleive
that by slaying this monstrous embodiment of the male gaze she has
managed to escape from the victimhood that that power had created for
her, managed to disconnect herself from the narrative which makes the
visual objectification of women continuous with their murder. The
shooting of Buffalo Bill can be a shot in the eye for all those who had
previously eyed her lecherously, including fellow FBI trainees,
/
passengers at the airport, Tennessee police and of course Doctor
Chiltern. But the celebrations following her graduation from the FBI are
interrupted by a reminder of the constancy of men's vigilance. Lecter
calls, assuring her that he has no intention of harming her. He declines
her invitation to name his location. He could be anywhere. But he'll
still be watching. No wonder that the novel ends with Clarice holidaying
on the Chesapeake shoreline with a man who has defective vision. The
Silence of the Lambs may be self-reflexive in its use of photography to
portray murderous voyeurism, but even if we, Clarice and Lecter all know
that what he sees is (only) a construct, the power relation between
observer and object can stubbornly remain and the Lecter who exists in
our collective consciousness - fashioned out of Anthony Hopkins'
portrayal, the Lecter used as referent in representations of real-life
serial killers, and our common perception of what a serial killer ought
to be - retains to the end of the movie and beyond the power of the
voyeur, the power of the silent confessor.
The discourse of our confessees becomes indistinguishable from
those of the confessor. Imprisoned in a kind of mirror interrogation,
both serial killers and their representers seem not unhappy about their
confinement. But there are moments when, seeking confessions from our
daily talk-show parade of strangeness, we feel the need to deny our
voyeuristic tendencies. Consuming television's stories of other people's
lives or images of other people's bodies, uncomfortable perhaps with the
idea that we are as imprisoned by such an existence as much as
television's critics tell us we are, we may not wish to understand the
parody that Elizabeth Young says Lecter performs: "with his gourmet
taste in human flesh and his leisured life in a prison cell, the
character of Dr. Hannibal Lecter enacts an extreme and extremely literal
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parody of the lifestyle of the film's intended viewers: our interest in
what the Sunday New York Times calls 'arts and leisure'" (Young 27).
Tired of hostility from a 'Maury Povich* audience, Jan Mullany, creator
of trading cards featuring serial killers, points to possible hypocrisy
on the part of his condemners: "Why is this show having me on? Why is
there fascination with this? Why is the [Dahmer] trial being televised?"
(Maury Povich. 4 Feb. 1992). Povich's response - "the show is having you
on for one reason is to try to convince you not to do it" - should be
heard perhaps in the context of his condemnation of the movie Jeffrey
Dahmer - The Secret Life, the subject of another of his shows: "But just
how explicit does the Hollywood move get? When we return, we're going to
show you a scene that might make you shiver" (28. Sept. 1992). Geraldo
Rivera can spare us the details of what Dahmer did to his victims
because he does not "want Mom [the show's guest and whose son was
murdered by Dahmer] to even hear what he did" and then proceed
immediately with a re-run of a previous show in which a man who had
escaped from Dahmer describes pictures he had seen of Dahmer's victims:
"...mutilated bodies, people handcuffed, you know, like he had been
eating on them or something like that" (Geraldo. 4 Dec. 1991). On
another edition of Geraldo - whose subject the host describes as "inside
the mind of serial killers and the women who love them"(29 Mar 1993) -
details of serial killer case-files are intercut with shots of the
younger, prettier female members of the audience squirming at what they
hear. We can call what occurred in Dahmer's apartment as an
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"unimaginable horror" (People Weekly. 12 Aug. 1991: 32) and then do our
utmost to imagine it, demand to know every detail.
The pattern of denial followed by fulfillment of voyeuristic
pleasure - a pleasure dependant in part or wholly on the denial - is, as
Judith Halberstam notes, reproduced in The Silence of the Lambs: "Prior
to the autopsy, the camera has protected the viewer from close-ups of
photographs taken of victims' bodies. Similarly, when Starling is being
taken to Lecter, she is shown a photographic image of what Lecter did to
a nurse...In the autopsy scene, the camera reveals all that it had
promised to spare us: it lingers on the green and red flesh, the decayed
body with two regular diamonds of flesh cut from its back" (42). But
after such lingering, there is another stage. When Starling looks at a
photograph and sees something in the victim's throat "the corpse finally
becomes object, thing": "The camera has framed the victim in much the
same way as Buffalo Bill does as he prepares his lambs for the
slaughter...And the camera also enables Starling to turn the corpse into
a case" (43). Like Dahmer's camera recording every stage of the
dismantling of his victims, Clarice's camera becomes a means to consume,
cannibalize the body. For our confessorial/policing selves, the
construction of "the case" depends on the objectification of the victim
by the detective/viewer. For our real-life crimes to become transformed
"believably" into a series of "cases", each shaped into a recognizable
format, we must believe in the fictionalization of the victim’s body.
Seeking the truth of the serial killer we find it in the discourse
which with we seek it. Sisters of two of Dahmer's victims complain that
Dahmer makes the covers of magazines while their brothers are largely
forgotten. For them their brothers' lack of presence in the media
amounts to their being condemned to meaninglessness, to an unreality,
whereas Dahmer's celebrity-status gains him the power of presence:
"...they could put these boys on the front of Newsweek, Time and
everything to show that these boys were real. If it wasn't for these
boys, he wouldn't even be existing" (Maury Povich. 4 Feb. 1992).
Dahmer's presence, or existence, is gained, as the women suggest, by
their brother's absence, in reality and in the representation of the
crime. While the proposal of Dahmer's attorneys "that the victims be
referred to in court by numbers instead of their names" (los Angeles
Times. 21 Jan. 1992: A10) was rejected, the makers of Jeffrey Dahmer -
The Secret Life, claiming sensitivity, remark that they did not "use the
names of the victims, there were [only] composite victims" (Maury
Povich. 28 Sept. 1992). These anonymous, made-up victims are opposed by
the unmistakable and named presence of Jeffrey Dahmer. "Why should we go
to the families for truth?" asks Carl Crew, the writer and "star” of the
movie. While the Dahmer character appears "real" in this cinematic
blurring of fact and fiction, the makers of the movie can defend claims
from Shirley Hughes, mother of a Dahmer victim, that they seem to have
made no attempt to represent the reality of her son by asking "Is your
son starring in this movie?" and "Do you think that you're any more
special than the other families of other victims that have been killed
by other serial killers that have had movies made of them?" The
possessors of power as perceived by dominant culture win the right to be
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named, to have presence, and have claims to the new reality created from
the debris of the old: the reality of celebrity. For Shirley Hughes,
Carl Crew (who Maury Povich reminds us bears "an uncanny likeness to the
real thing" and who, the show's host informs us, was once "an embalmer
at a mortuary"), "is no better than Jeffrey Dahmer." In the
representation of the serial killer the presence of the "powerful" and
the absence of the "weak" reproduces what Dennis Nilsen believes to be
the aim of the serial killer: the creation of a fully present self
defined as such by the violent erasure of the other.
"You try to understand what makes a person a murder victim" says
FBI Special Agent John Douglas (People Weekly. 1 Apr. 1991: 64).
Families of victims complain that the inscription of the victim with
victimhood - that quality which, in the words of Douglas, makes a person
a murder victim - represents a second death. It can be the death
incurred by a body figured as inhuman. Wilson and Seaman, for example,
describing the ease with which Jack the Ripper found potential victims,
note that "whores were as thick on the ground in the East End at night
as were fleas in their doss-house bedding" (39). It can be the death
incurred by a body reduced to an object. Speculating about why the
Victorian collective imagination associated its monsters with doctors,
Martin Tropp argues that in the "popular mind" there was "a common
denomitator linking the activities of doctors, vivisectionists,
pornographers", namely that of reducing "another body to an object and
gain[ing] pleasure in subjecting it to the will" (118). Our embodiment
of the serial killer contrasts with our disembodiment of his victims. In
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portraying the serial killer in super-human terms while objectifying his
victims we construct our own dehumanizing, pornographic fantasy. And
when we judge victims of violence as they tell their stories on
television, when we identify the "faults" in their behavior or their
lifestyles which we perceive as leading to their victimization, we are
part of that process of victimization. Placing ourselves in the position
of the rapist, of the serial killer, we empower ourselves at his
victim’s expense. Our discourse becomes that which Roland Barthes
defines as the discourse of the powerful: one which "engenders blame,
hence guilt, in its recipient" (Barthes 1982, 428). The object of
interrogation as confessor and confessee face up to one another can
prove to be neither of the two participants.
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7: Cops/Killers. Keepers/Monsters
He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby
become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss,
the abyss gazes into you.
(Nietzsche. Beyond Good and Evil. 1886, ch.4 no. 157)
I was real close to Sheriff Boutwell: we were like father
and son. Me and [Texas Ranger] Prince were like brothers,
tfe'd go places, we'd do things, we'd do anything, anytime.
It didn't matter what time it was, day or night. (Henry Lee
Lucas. Confessions of a Serial Killer)
The FBI are aware that serial killers often identify with instead
of against the law enforcement community. (For police officer Gerald
Schaefer, the killer of twenty or so men and women, such identification
evidently proved relatively easy). In the House of Representatives
Hearing on serial killing an FBI officer notes that when the FBI
interviewed convicted serial killers in order to construct personality
profiles "a majority of offenders viewed us as associates who had
interests (crime) but only from different perspectives" (26). It is also
noted that "They look like you and me. They are gregarious, they are
outgoing. Almost without exception they are always police buffs. They
never could make the grade, so they do the next best thing. They may
seek an occupation close to the periphery of law enforcement. It could
be as a security guard, a private detective, or as a volunteer in a
hospital where they would drive an ambulance" (20). And apparently "the
next best thing" after that periphery is violent crime.
The idea of there existing a continuum between law enforcement and
law breaking, instead of that relationship being oppositional, is one
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around which the "Lecter novels" of Thomas Harris play. In Red Dragon
Will Graham is teasingly asked by Lecter: "When you were so depressed
after you shot Mr. Garrett Jacob Hobbs to death, it wasn't the act that
got you down, was it? Really, didn't you feel so bad because killing him
felt so good? ...Think about it, but don't worry about it. Why shouldn't
it feel good? It must feel good to be God - He does it all the time, and
are we not made in His image?" (Harris 1990, 270-271). Graham's
detective technique is to re-create the killer's mind, share his
desires, reconstruct the crimes from the killer's perspective. The novel
traces Graham's flirtations with madness, his difficulty in
distinguishing between reality and fantasy and between the world of
detection and the world of criminality. When the two worlds meet and
sometimes conflate the result is a world of loneliness, of asociability,
of (two) loners: a monster within a detective and a detective within a
monster.
In The Silence of the Lambs defender and monster are not only
joined in their efforts at detection, but the monster assumes command.
In the novel, when FBI agent Crawford - Lecter's counterpart in
knowledge of the serial killer, and Buffalo Bill's counterpart in terms
of decorating his room with photographs of mutilated women - seeks
information on applicants to the John Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic, he
says to one of its doctors: "You think nuts don’t apply to the FBI? We
get 'em all the time. A man in a Moe hairpiece applied to St. Louis last
week. He had a bazooka, two rockets, and a bearskin shako in his golf
bag." The doctor's response - "Did you hire him?" (Harris 1991, 174) -
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echoes a common view of the police as desiring the thrill of shooting
weapons, of the chase, of powers of entry and control, for their own
sake. We have grown accustomed to stories of the pursuit of justice, of
the arrest of the criminal and of his crimes, taking the form of
conflicts between rivals, conflicts involving mimetic gesture, conflicts
which can correspond to manly rivalry mythologized in the cinema and the
novel, conflicts, in other words, which do not threaten the underlying
bond between combatants. And in our stories of serial killers, of their
crimes, and of the chase involved in their capture, the identification
of the person doing the chasing, the controlling, the weapon using, can
lose relevance. As Elliot Leyton notes, "The Son of Sam was not so very
wrong when he thought the public was urging him on during his killing
spree, for the media chronicled his every deed in a state of mounting
excitement" (Leyton 24). In "fictional" representations, problems of
narrative are solved invariably through the use of violence. The story
can become a perpetual cycle of the shifting of power and what we seem
to find thrilling are these expressions of power for their own sake. If
a movie were to be made based on Dahmer' s own version of events - Larry
King asks Gerald Boyle whether Dahmer will write a book as a way of
raising funds for his victims' families (Larry King Live. 17 Feb. 1992)
- how strange would it appear to us for the "drama" to be dependent on
Dahmer's pursuit of victims as well as the police’s pursuit of Dahmer?
The continuum between law enforcement and violent crime evidently
identified by serial killers is commonly translated in our
representation of cops and killers as a rivalry for the same kind of
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power, a rivalry which transgresses boundaries between "civilization"
and its other.
The "nuts" who become serial killers after failing to join the FBI
- or in Dahmer's case, after failing to become a military policeman -
are able to assume a position of power within law enforcement once they
are convicted, by supplying information about the psychology of
unconvicted serial killers. Hannibal Lecter's promotion to official
expert repeated Ted Bundy's in 1986:
We just interviewed Theordore Bundy approximately two weeks
ago. He wants to assist the FBI in our research project. He
doesn't want to talk to anyone else. He has read some of our
research. He likes what we came up with, and he wants to
help us, he says, on the Green River case. (House of Reps.
20)
After Dahmer is convicted he is similarly praised for cooperating with
police with regards to his own crimes, for solving "unsolvable crimes"
(Larry King Live. 17 Feb, 1992). Meanwhile Westley Allan Dodd, convicted
of murdering three boys, two of which he raped, writes articles from
jail offering advice for children on how to escape sex attacks (Murder
by Number). The FBI's taking pride in the fact that Bundy respected
their research, and that they alone would be in communication with him,
can be symptomatic of a reverence we have for the Bundys, Dahmers and
Lecters of this world, a reverence which is related perhaps to the
particular type of knowledge they are perceived to possess, the
knowledge of (and therefore power over) madness and death.
It is a knowledge and power which we ascribe to some of our police
heroes too. Together, serial killer and inquisitor can seem almost
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united by a special bond of knowledge and mutual respect. (We are told
that, like most serial killers - and,.presumably, unlike other types of
criminals, Dahmer "behaved graciously" in his interviews, how his
interviewer was "used to having defendants in jail or prison who curse
at [him], spit at [him], take a punch at [him], threaten [him]", and how
the interview felt like a "joint search" (Day One. 18 Apr. 1993)).
Police and criminal monsters, existing together in their asocial world,
are possessors of super-vision: able to see into the minds of each
other, as well as the rest of us. Like the all-seeing Lecter, the FBI's
Behavioral Science Unit, from their desks in Quantico, Virginia, are
able to view a murder scene in any part of the country (a scene at which
the regular murder squad detectives are floundering) and all but name
the murderer. Or so the story can go. In their chapter 'The Profilers'
Wilson and Seaman describe New York cops getting nowhere with the murder
of schoolteacher Francine Elveson in 1979. The appearance of the FBI -
"Enter special agent John Douglas" (92) - is reminiscent of a scene from
either Hollywood's or Nietzsche's version of Superman. D.A. Miller
describes Balzac's agents de police, Peyrade and Corentin, as
"privileged seers" (Miller 23) but says that such powers of vision are
appropriated by "the narration that renders them", that "Balzac's
omniscient narration assumes a fully panoptic view of the world it
places under surveillance" (23). However, our vision of the privileged
seers we construct in our Cops/Killers stories is not so strong as
Balzac's narrator. Sometimes we are allowed to see only the seers, not
what is seen, not the possibility that what lies deep in the soul of the
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killer and cop alike may also lie concealed in the values that structure
our world.
It is this omniscience among other things which elevates the
serial killer to a transcendent being "above the law": having broken one
or more of society's most precious laws, having witnessed at first hand
a dream of omnipotence fulfilled, the killer, physically imprisoned, is
figured by society as a seer, able to transcend physical barriers and
look deep into the soul of fellow monsters and police alike, and
consequently to be perceived, like Lecter, as a potential defender of
society, a protector of it from further violence. Those who so obviously
disregard the law, those who are figured as existing in a world beyond
the reach of the law, exist on the same plain as the law-makers, those
who disregard previous laws and establish new ones, those in authority.
Ascribing authority to the convicted serial killer might appear strange
until we remember that to transcend the law is to be in power. In The
Serial Killers Wilson and Seaman argue that "In the past, only two
groups of men were in a position to behave [as tyrants]: men in
authority (which includes men like Gilles de Rais whose wealth seemed to
place them beyond the law) and men who regarded themselves as 'outside
society' - bandits and outlaws” (260). But the figure of the serial
killer can belong to both groups. He is both out of the law and in
authority ("beyond" the law). Transcending the law in both cases, there
is no contradiction.
While Foucault argues that "It's the characteristic of our Western
societies that the language of power is law, not magic, religion, or
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anything else" (Foucault 1980, 201) the language of what might be called
"the law transcended" might be described as being equally powerful,
equally evocative in the West, and especially in America. And it can be
spoken by police and criminals alike. Discussing British police crime,
Stephen Box notes that in the context of the criminal justice system
being "presented as a slow bureaucratic machine which possibly provides
too many protective civil rights to criminals" police crime is generally
justified as "good and necessary police work" because it "effectively
administers and achieves justice (albeit rough)" (Box 85). In the
mythology surrounding the elevated world of the super cop and super
criminal, breaking of the law by the FBI is justified by that which it
seeks: the serial killer is, as the description goes, someone who
manipulates and transcends the law to escape capture and punishment.
Our representation of the police can suggest their increased
powers of vigilance should be allowed, when necessary, to become the
powers of the vigilante, powers unconstrained by law, by society's
interference, powers justified on the premise of ends justifying the
means. Richard Maxwell Brown argues that a profound respect for
vigilantism characterizes Americans' relationship with the law:
The key to the apparent contradiction between our genuine
lawfulness and the disregard for law emphasized by Lincoln
lies in the selectivity with which Americans have approached
the law. . .Perhaps in the long run the most important result
of vigilantism has beent he subtle way in which it has
persistently undermined our respect for law by its repeated
theme that the law may be arbitrarily disregarded - that
there are times when we may choose to obey the law or not.
(Brown [2] 178)
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Our acceptance of an arbitrary disregard for the law might explain the
popularity of movies such as Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry. Joan Mellen
says: "Neofascist to the core, these films would substitute for the Bill
of Rights a strong leader with absolute authority, making it clear that
rights consist in allowing the strong leader to work his will against
the unruly. It is thus for us to choose - and our survival is at stake.
Nor is there ever any ambiguity about criminality. Guilt is instantly
apparent to all; hence legal rights are but a pretext for tying the
hands of the defenders of the good" (Mellen 307). The mythology of the
super-cop and super-killer is contructed with reference to the tradition
of the vigilante, constructed with reference to the familiar figure of
the detective who defeats not only the criminal but the legal system,
who fights for a higher justice, a justice founded on principles of an
individual's right to assert power in the face of tainted society, on
principles based on the purity of the individual. For the authors of
Milwaukee Massacre, Dahmer's story disturbs because of "the absence of
an heroic figure" (Dvorchak and Holewa xi), because of the unheroic
society in which he lived, made up of neighbors not complaining loud
enough about the smells from his apartment "to force someone to discover
human carrion" (xi) and of policeman not doing, or rather not being able
to do their jobs. The story of Dahmer lacks a lonely, 'heroic' detective
to rival the lonely Dahmer and it is the fault of the law and not the
police: "What emerges is a shocking portrait of a justice system that
failed to stop Dahmer from killing again and again" reads the cover of
Milwaukee Massacre. The language spoken by the FBI belongs to the serial
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killer's world - to capture him, it needs to speak his language - and
conversely, he belongs to its language. It is a language infused with a
distinctively American respect for lawlessness.
Super-killers and super-cops need each other. Jane Caputi notes
that "one of the components of the Ripper formula is the creation of a
felt state of siege, a reign of terror in which the 'monster' is felt to
be the 'master'" (Caputi 39). Such a construction necessitates a rival,
and what is at stake is a power beyond the law: the war will never be
won - the possibility of evil is always present - but the battles bring
fame and good television. And it is a drama in which the police
themselves seem only too willing to act. Joan Smith, describing the
police conference giving journalists details of the crimes committed by
London's "gay killer”, Colin Ireland, notes how Chief Superintendent Ken
John appealed directly to the murderer to give himself up "in the
classic Hollywood tradition of sheriff-versus-outlaw" (Smith 2). It was
a re-enactment of the appeal made fourteen years earlier by the head of
the "Yorkshire Ripper" Squad, George Oldfield, to meet the killer "on
his own terms." For Oldfield, as his book on his involvement in the case
testifies, Peter Sutcliffe (the killer) had become a personal rival, and
the rivalry evolves into a conflict between two individual men
apparently existing on a different plain and speaking a different
language from the rest of us. It is a scene evoked by Wilson and Seaman,
who describe FBI officers from Quantico waging "their unique, solitary
war against serial offenders either from a desk sixty feet
underground...or from a plane or car seat" (111). Increased state-wide
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powers of surveillance are entrusted in the name of individual members
of the police. "I don't march to the same drummer you do", Douglas
Clark, killer of prostitutes in California tells the jury (quoted in
Wilson and Seaman 260), that representative sample of society. But he
might well find himself marching to the same beat as his "adversary."
The mythology of the serial killer and the FBI is the story of
individualized male figures whose rivalry exists in a heroic world
transcending society and all things domestic.
Both society's violators and defenders are at times represented as
the perverse embodiment of a popular and continuing theme in American
culture: the Loner, he who cannot live within society's rules but who is
able to identify and confront the forces which threaten it. Constructing
the serial killer involves empowering the lonely by turning them into
Loners. Contrasting with the common view of Dahmer as someone who kills
to transcend society, as a killer on a quest, is Dennis Nilsen’s view of
him as someone whose killings are a means of creating the illusion of
having a social existence. Dahmer, says Nilsen, needs "a totally
unresisting, passive model of a human being in order to 'cross the
bridge' temporarily into 'society'. (Being human he needs 'fulfillment'
in the human three-dimensional world of real flesh and blood)" (quoted
in Masters 1991, 186). Instead of Dahmer as a powerless and lonely
figure, someone who is, to employ the phrase Masters used as a title to
his book on Nilsen, 'killing for company', the picture of Dahmer we like
to give is that of a loner who succeeds in dislocating himself from
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society. Distancing himself from society, having the ability to see and
not be seen, the Loner possesses the power of the voyeur.^
The difference between our perception of the lonely and of the
loner is our inscribing the latter with power, and part of that
empowerment is achieved by our individualizing of crime (described in
the first part of chapter two). In his preface to Deleuze and Guatarri's
Anti-Oedipus, Foucault says that if he were to turn the book into a
manual, among its points would be: "do not become enamored of power" and
"Do not demand of politics that it restore the 'rights' of the
individual, as philosophy has defined them. The individual is the
product of power" (Deleuze and Guatarri xiv). But the individualized
violent criminal is not only the product of power but is made powerful
by our insisting on his individuality, by our denial, our mystification
of correspondence with him. His crime is his creation, and his alone.
"Crimes possess all the basic factors of a work of art - approach,
conception, technique, imagination, attack, method, and organization.
Moreover, crimes vary fully as much in their manner, their aspects and
their general nature as do works of art. Indeed, a carefully planned
The relationship between radical selfhood and voyeurism is discussed
by Sartre. Murray S. Davis notes how in Being and Nothingness Sartre
demonstrates "how voyeurism heightens an individual's feeling of
selfhood. By expanding one's distance from others, it increases one's
experience of differentiation from them" (Davis 128). See Sartre on "the
look" in Being and Nothingness, 252-302.
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crime is just as direct an expression of the individual as is a
painting, for instance" says S.S. Van Dine's Philo Vance in Benson
Murder Case (quoted in Porter 51). The serial killer is figured as the
doyen of the art of crime. And, despite the death of the author and of
his arty friends, it is within the criminal's genius that his art
resides.
The authors of Habits of the Heart allude to the more conventional
embodiment of the Loner in describing "the hero who must leave society,
alone or with one or a few others, in order to realize the moral good in
the wilderness, at sea, or on the margins of settled society" (Bellah et
al 144). And yet "this obligation to aloneness", the authors note, "is
part of the profound ambiguity of the mythology of American
individualism, that its moral heroism is always just a step away from
despair. For an Ahab, and occasionally for a cowboy or a detective,
there is no return to society, no moral redemption. The hero's lonely
quest for moral excellence ends in absolute nihilism" (146). For us, the
detective, one step away from despair, can belong to the same world as
the destructive lonely figure of its monsters. Our story of the serial
killer is often about the meeting of Loners, those who hunt and those
who are hunted. When detective and criminal combine in the figure of a
Bundy or a Lecter the idea of the loner has its most disturbing (and
fascinating) embodiment.
The construction of the violent loner as the epitome of power can
take various forms. Jack Henry Abbot says, "Dangerous killers who act
alone and without emotion, who act with calculation and principles, to
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avenge themselves, establish and defend their principles with acts of
murder that usually evade prosecution by law: this is the state-raised
convicts' conception of manhood, in the highest sense" (Abbot 13). We
may find it easy to dismiss a prisoner's conception of manhood, but how
distant is the emotionless vigilantism described by Abbot from the
manhood expressed by the characters of Steven Segal, or of Chuck Norris,
or Michael Douglas's character in Falling Down? This language pertaining
to the space above the law is familiar to us. It is the language of
heroes, of John Wayne and Sam Spade, of Thomas Harris's Will Graham. It
is the language of Top Gun’s fighter-pilots who find an untainted and
transcendent existence in the skies and only frustration in the petty
world below. It is the language of the valorized male vigilante. A
National Review editorial on Dahmer's insanity defence wonders about the
random violence that seems to be on the increase: "Each atrocity seems
uniquely evil; but why are there so many of them? We don't know, except
that what we call 'society' is less inclusive than we thought. A
disturbing number of people are spiritually outside it and willing to do
whatever they can get away with" (2 Mar. 1992: 18). To be spiritually
outside of society can be a culturally valorized position, and finds
expression in characters or themes of some of our most popular movies
and television shows. Characterizing the ideologies that dominated
America and Britain in the eighties is the idea that "society" is a
dirty word or a "myth" as Margaret Thatcher so (in) famously put it.
Rugged (manly) individualism is valorized over (effeminate) society.
Elliot Leyton regards the killings of the serial killer as "a kind of
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sub-political and conservative protest" (Leyton 26) . However, he who
Leyton sees as making "a substantial profit of revenge, celebrity [and]
identity" (26), should perhaps be regarded less as a protester and more
the embodiment of a particular form of conservatism taken to its logical
conclusion.
According to an FBI agent, one of the questions convicted serial
rapists are asked in order for the FBI to construct personality profiles
is: "What role, if any, do pornography and/or detective magazines have
in crimes?" (House of Reps. 36). Rather than being placed
antithetically, rather than giving each other meaning by that placing,
certain popular representations of "policing" discourse are
indistinguishable from "monstrous" discourse, and both find meaning
instead in opposition to the powerless. The coupling of pornography with
detective stories in the mind of the personality profiler is indicative
of the way the detection of crime is often presented. Pornography and
the representation of crime and its detection can be two different but
related forms of fantasy. The distinction between the two is blurred in
the increasing number of "true crime" periodicals whose focus is violent
and/or "sexual" crime. Complimenting advertisements for "female
attractants" and other means of improving male sexual prowess placed
inside the pages of Headquarters Detective, Detective Digest, Inside
Detective and Official Detective are the magazines' covers which
frequently include young, semi-naked women, often bound, gagged and
being threatened with a gun or a knife by a male aggressor. Park Dietz
notes that "when we are able to search the possessions of sexually
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sadistic serial killers we find that many of them have collections of
detective magazines or at least their covers" (To Kill and Kill Again).
While the female victim's face shows terror, the attacker's face is
usually hidden from view. Faceless, unidentifiable, he can be any man.
(Dietz notes that when convicted killers speak of the appeal of such
magazines they invariably remark that when the male aggressor is
identifiable the image becomes much less of a turn-on). An obvious
common factor between recognized pornography and detective magazines is
that they both can involve fantasies of power and control. Often in the
true/fantasy crime magazine the re-enactments of crimes - especially
crimes involving the subordination of women - from the perspective of
the criminal are followed by the detection, capture and subordination of
the criminal from the perspective of the detective. Absent are possible
causal factors, character issues, emotional consequences, context
related to the crime. Absent are stories of those killed, or stories of
those who suffer a second death in their victimizing representations. In
the representation of detection as pornographic fantasy, detection
becomes indistinguishable from the construction of and oppression of
"the weak."
In the House of Representatives Hearing Chair English asks the
FBI: "Do you think it possible to put together some kind of crime
manual; things to look for, helpful hints?" (House of Reps. 85). This
follows a response by the FBI to a question about how a particular
serial killer managed to escape detection:
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It is a lot of luck on his part. A lot of expertise in the
art, if you will, of crime. We have recovered items that
indicate that he studied crime, even to the extent of
appearing to study criminal psychology. He researched
stories that are printed in magazines that deal in
publishing criminal stories. These magazines appear to have
been used as almost how-to manuals by this subject. (House
of Reps. 73)
And apparently there are how-to movies: "Henry: Portrait of a Serial
Killer, tells you how to select victims, how to kill them, how to enjoy
killing them, how to dispose of the body" (Dr. Radecki on Oprah Winfrey
9/4/91). It seems we are all reading and writing the same books,
watching and making the same films and television shows, and using them
differently and sometimes not so differently. One person's detective
manual can be another's how-to commit-a-crime manual. Ted Bundy,
however, manages to dismiss altogether this other, this other person, by
writing a pamphlet on rape prevention before raping and murdering scores
of women. One person's detective fantasy is not always easily
distinguishable from another's criminal fantasy and the art of crime is
not always distinct from the science of policing. In an accompanying
photograph to a People Weekly article (1 Apr. 1991: 64) on the "real-
life models" used in the making of The Silence of the Lambs, one of the
Special Agent invited to the House of Representatives Hearing, John
Douglas, does little to help us distinguish the terms of the article's
headline, 'Cops, Killers & Cannibals', and does little to discredit the
idea of the FBI as fulfilling phallic fantasies by pointing his high-
caliber gun straight at the camera. (The caption is the previously
quoted: "You try to understand what makes a person a murder victim").
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Might the popularity of Harris's novels and their movie-
representations be related to our desire to blur the distinction between
criminal fantasy and detection, to our respect for a particular form of
power? We are more than willing to accompany the FBI as they enter "the
mind of the serial killer" - the topic of an edition of Geraldo (29 Mar.
1993) - and very willing to forget the fancifulness of our flight of
fancy. If we become at all uncomfortable, the presence of the police can
help us explain our being there. In our representation of violent crime,
detective, monster and audience can lose their distinctiveness, conflate
into a single figure. And, as I suggest in the next chapter, along with
Graham's, Lecter's and Dahmer's apparent inability to distinguish fact
from fantasy is our inability or lack of desire to do the same. Together
we allow ourselves to dream the dream of omnipotence.
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8. The Monstrous Self: Fantasizing the Real/Realizing Fantasy
See you in Disneyland!
(Richard Ramirez to court journalists after the jury had
recommended that he should die in the gas chamber; quoted in
Wilson and Seaman 116)
I made another world, and real men would enter it and they
would never really get hurt at all in the vivid unreal laws
of the dream. I caused dreams which caused death. This is my
crime.
(Dennis Nilsen; quoted in Masters 1991, 265)
Reality hasn't been real for a long time. With "reality"
television and especially "true-life" police shows increasingly fill
prime-time television slots, reality in the nineties functions more as a
style than as an ultimate-referent point. CBS's "Real Patrol" and "Top
Cops”, NBC's "Law and Order" and "Prime Suspect", Fox's "Code 3",
"America's Most Wanted" and their nightly "Cops" might all be
categorized as "infotainment." The more we stress the reality of our
television - "Real Patrol" presumably exists in the same realm as KCOP's
"Real News" - the more the meaning of "reality" shifts, shifts towards a
parody of its former meaning.
People Weekly, remarking on the connection between The Silence of
the Lambs and their story on Dahmer, headlines an article with "fiction
pales" (12 Aug. 1991: 36). But in comparison to what? Frequently Dahmer
is not represented as being like Lecter: a comparison between them is
not asserted. In the world of infotainment the relationship between
reality and fantasy is less similic than metaphoric: reality does not
re-enact fantasy, it assumes fantasy's identity and renders it
unidentifiable. Of course fiction and reality have rarely been isolated
without a struggle, but whether we are less concerned about maintaining
the distinction or whether we are less concerned about maintaining the
illusion of the distinction, 1992 was a year in which we witnessed a
series of events which questioned more than ever the sense of placing
fiction and reality antithetically. Dan Quayle’s attack on television's
Murphy Brown (because the show's heroine decides to have a child out of
wedlock) was followed by Murphy Brown played by Candice Bergen
responding to Quayle on the show's season premiere, a move which was
considered Page One news. Raymond Williams, among others, has noted that
the television experience is characterized by "flow" and it seems that
such an experience has allowed for a greater sense of fluidity between
the "real" and those things considered its "opposite." Nineties
television can be characterized by shows like Hard Copy and A Current
Affair in which "real" characters can be involved in the dramatizations
of real events, by docu-dramas, by movies inspired by reality, by
reality being the focus of sitcoms and dramas.
Arguing that "the only definition" of realism is that it "intends
to avoid the question of reality implicated in that of art", Jean-
Frangois Lyotard says "Those who refuse to re-examine the rules of art
pursue successful careers in mass conformism by communicating, by means
of the 'correct rules,' the endemic desire for reality with objects and
situations capable of gratifying it. Pornography is the use of
photography and film to such an end. It is becoming a general model for
the visual or narrative arts which have not met the challenge of the
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mass media" (Lyotard 75). Similar to the experience of reading Capote's
"non-fiction novel", unimpeded by a conspicuous presence of a narrator,
watching our "real" television" - the mass media's latest manifestation
- we can lose sense of the situation from which we gain our perspective,
forget that observation can alter the observed, lose awareness of our
history and the history of the construction of that reality, and finally
allow reality's inverted commas to fade away. Infotainment manages to
commodify reality without questioning its own existence, and it might
just meet Lyotard's requirements for being an example of realism if it
wasn't for its continual advertising of its "realness." If it fails to
examine its own construction, we can't help but do so ourselves.
All this can have effect the debate about how the relationship
between "real-life" behavior and the media should be framed. We can no
longer talk unproblematically of "the media" as a separate phenomenon,
separate that is from the "information" it "transmits", and separate
from the "public" to which the "information" is "transmitted." And as my
inverted commas might suggest, no longer free from interrogation are the
terms "information”, "transmit" and "public." Remarking on previous
studies on the relationship between media and society, Joshua Meyrowitz
in No Sense of Place notes that;
...people looked at how media affected real behavior and how
real behavior related to the content of the media, but there
were few models that dealt with both systems of
communicating as part of a continuum rather than a
dichotomy. Most of the concerns were about people imitating
behavior they saw on television, or about the inaccurate
reflection of reality as portrayed in television content -
real life as opposed to the media. Few studies examined both
media and interpersonal interaction as part of the same
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system of 'behaving' or responding to the behavior of
others. Few people seemed to be studying the ways in which
new patterns of access to information about social behavior
might be affecting people's ability to play old forms of
roles, (ix-x)l
The innability to distinguish between the reality and fictionality of a
role effects attempts to provide a "cultural context" to the serial
killer. Attempts to provide such a context usually attract the criticism
that they help to absolve the criminal from the crime. To make sense of
such a criticism is to isolate culture from the individual, and to
isolate the media from the viewer/potential criminal. Just as I could no
longer suggest with a clear conscience that culture in the form of say,
prime-time television and popular movies "produce" serial killers,
hypothetical critics (for they cannot really exist) of such a suggestion
cannot wholly individualize the crime. The serial killer and his
representation are functions of each other to the extent where ideas of
there existing a "relationship" (implying two or more agents) between
the two begin to sound questionable.
1 In the days when we weren't encumbered by words like "infotainment",
T.S. Eliot was saying much the same about literature and "life" as
Meyrowitz does about the media and reality. Among the functions of a
literary review, Eliot wrote in the inaugural edition of 'The
Criterion', is "to exhibit the relations of literature - not to 'life',
as something contrasted to literature, but to all the other activities,
which, together with literature, are the components of life".
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One commentator suggests that the Marquis de Sade "attached
greater importance to the stories he wove around the act of pleasure
than to the contingent happenings" (Beauvoir 18). Dahmer, similarly
attempting to overcome contingency, to re-live, re-invent the moment,
similarly attempting perhaps to achieve an intensification of the
original feeling, photographs his victims in various stages of
dismemberment and/or retains body-parts. But what of the stories we
weave - the re-constructions, the dramas whose structures lead us to
familiar, conventional conclusions, the representations which maximize
suspense and climax?
"They were in awe of him. They parted to let him through and
stared at him like he was some kind of celebrity" (quoted in Schwartz
34) observed one policeman about the response of Dahmer's fellow
prisoners in jail before the trial. Speculating on serial killers'
motives, Elliot Leyton says "what they are all orchestrating is a kind
of social levelling, in which they re-write the universe to incorporate
themselves" (Leyton 295) . If, fed up with being nobody, they kill in
order to become somebody, it is with our help that they become much more
than just anybody. Anne E. Schwartz remembers Dahmer's trial as having
"the air of a movie premiere, complete with local celebrities, groupies
who hounded for autographs, and a full-scale media onslaught - of which
I was a part" (Schwartz 186). Dahmer is one of the biggest celebrities
of the early nineties. He easily made People Weekly's list of "The 25
Most Intriguing People of 1991" (30 Dec. 1991). As Richard Roth noted in
a 1993 CNN Special Report, "Dahmer, or rather his likeness, is doing big
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business" and the "The serial killer is packaged and sold in magazines,
books, even trading-cards" (Murder by Number). Our construction of
Dahmer is a product we take great glee in consuming. Part fantasy, part
reality, it is a role Henry Lee Lucas sees as "being like a movie-
star. ..you're just playing the part...I started staying on television
twenty four hours a day...I got so that I thought I was the biggest
movie-star in this country...I think I even beat Elvis Presley...I think
I even beat...what's his name?...Adolf Hitler" (Confessions of a Serial
Killer). For Lucas, obtaining the role was worth confessing to 360
murders it seems he didn't commit.
While the killers are responsible for the script's details
regarding the crime (except, perhaps, in the case of Lucas), it is we
who help to create the roles guaranteeing fame, we who guarantee the
drama of its "conclusion." And Cameron and Frazer note that just as "the
exploits of sexual murderers [are] being represented exactly as if they
were fictions... fictions [are] treated as if they were flesh-and-blood
realities: Norman Bates in Psycho becomes a reference point in public
discussion of the Boston Strangler; Raskolnikov and Othello are dealt
with in forensic textbooks" (Cameron and Frazer 52-53). While Dahmer
says "I made my fantasy life more powerful than my real one" (Day One
18 Apr. 1993), we struggle to make any distinction between our fantasies
of crime and its realities, and struggle perhaps to avoid our dreams
becoming reality. The questions asked during Dahmer's trial about his
ability to distinguish dreams from reality can seem just as applicable
to his representers. Although the blurring of fiction and reality is not
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only restricted to the discourse of sexual murder and other serious
crime, why should we especially want to represent crime in a manner in
which the distinction between fact and fiction is lost?
The serial killer seems made for television, and especially the
mini-series which, Michael Sworkin notes, is "predicated on the
explicitness of a relationship between seriality and finitude."
Television, he adds, "is always signalling an interruption and an
ending" (Sworkin 180). One of those who have claims to being the first
to use the term "serial killer" is former personality profiler at
Quantico, Robert Ressler, who saw the behavior of those to whom the term
refers as "distinctly episodic, like the movie-house serials he enjoyed
as a boy" (Michaud 41). For Judith Halberstam "serial murders have
something of a literary quality to them: they happen regularly over time
and each new one creates an expectation; they involve plot, a consummate
villain and an absolutely pure (because randomly picked) victim; they
demand explanation; they demand that a pattern be forced onto what
appears to be "desperately random"' (Halberstam 46). Her comments might
lead one to suggest that the serial killer figure is a nightmarish
reality constructed by a crime-obsessed culture seeking the ultimate
mystery to solve. Or, in other words, that the serial killer is a
reality satisfying the demands of fiction (a suggestion which, after
literary and film theory had seemingly removed "reality" from
discussions about the nature of fiction, signals an ingenious comeback
by the troublesome idea). According to Dr. John Liccione, a psychologist
at the Milwaukee County Mental Health Complex, Dahmer's confessions
sounded "like a third-rate playwright script in Hollywood" (Los Angeles
Times. 4 Aug. 1991: A22). It was a script taken up by ABC's Day One with
actors playing the parts of Dahmer and the police officers who
interrogated him (18 Apr. 1993). The show, produced by ABC News,
includes a gay bar scene in which what seems to be a female impersonator
(dressed as Annie Lennox's character in her video for "Why?") provides
the musical background to a Jeffrey Dahmer look-a-like (consciously
impersonating or coincidentally resembling, we're not sure) lighting a
cigarette while eyeing potential pick-ups. If Dahmer sought to get to
Hollywood by writing and starring in his own movie, given the
fictionalized treatment of his actions he more or less succeeded. When a
serial killer is perceived as representing his own actions with the
discourse of entertainment perhaps we should not be too surprised when
real-life horror resembles our fantasies of violence. If we confuse
reality and fiction in the discourse of sexual murder - if we
experience/create a seamless entity of fantasy merged with reality, of
dreams instantaneously realized - are we not in danger of inadvertently
"dreaming-up" real-life killers? When fictitious serial killers are our
heroes, are our fantasy-figures, should we be surprised when real men
and women "stray" into our fantasies?
The possibility that the serial killer construction is a fantasy
figure of dominant culture is perhaps best illustrated in the
speculative attributing of motive. Discussing the British press
coverage of Colin Ireland, Joan Smith remarks that:
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One of the many myths about serial killers is that they are
in some way motivated by revenges the Daily Mail trotted
out the theory that the man ' is targeting gays after
contracting Aids'. Today, by contrast, quoted a criminal
psychologist who suggested the killer may believe he has ' a
divine mission to rid the world of homosexualsSimilar
motives - a 'divine mission' against prostitutes and
contracting a venereal disease from one of them - were
attributed to [Peter] Sutcliffe. (Smith 3)
As she notes, "in fact Sutcliffe selected prostitutes as some of his
early victims because they were willing to accompany him to a secluded
spot. In the [Colin Ireland] case, the readiness of some gay men to
return home with a stranger may have influenced the killer. He may not
be homosexual; even the fact that some of the victims were prepared to
take part in sado-masochistic activities may simply have played into his
hands" (Smith 3). The nature of the quests and missions which we give
our serial killers can be illustrative of our underlying dreams. Might
there be a particular desire on the part of dominant culture to
disregard the sustaining of a reality/fiction opposition when it comes
to particular forms of sexual murder or serial killing? Might Dahmer be
our dream as well as our nightmare?
According to Anne E. Schwartz, the district attorney in Dahmer's
trial suggested "we should recognize the danger of fantasy and that
thinking about anything is a definite precursor to doing it" (Schwartz
216). An (internal) eye for an "I"? Perhaps the D .A . dreams of being
on/in I Witness Video dreaming of a world in which the hum of our minds
running and of our video-recorders is indistinguishable. It is a world
peopled by characters who experience the same kind of uncertainty as
Perry in Truman Capote's In Cold Blood'.
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And just then it was like I was outside myself. Watching
myself in some nutty movie...And I thought, Why don't I walk
off? Walk to the highway, hitch a ride. I sure Jesus didn't
want to go back in that house. And yet - How can I explain
this? It was like I wasn't part of it. More as though I was
reading a story. And I had to know what was going to happen.
The end. So I went back upstairs. (Capote 272)
The "serious new literary form" which my copy says Capote's book
represents, has been taken up and translated enthusiastically by and for
television, which similarly revels in creating suspense and a sense of
climax to stories of real-life murder. Alvin Kernan has argued that
literature is losing cultural influence to television and that with
television-watching on the increase "more and more people derive, quite
unconsciously, their sense of reality and their existential situation in
it from television" (Kernan 147-48). If by culture we mean the ways or
the patterns of meaning by which we attempt to evaluate ourselves, our
television culture is akin to Capote's genre, with our lives becoming
indistinguishable from non-fiction entertainments.
Television's involvement in the creation of such a world is
described by Michael Sworkin who argues that "The erasure of the
difference between broadcasting the news and being the news...between
adjudicating and narrating... is what must be accomplished” by
television. For Sworkin, television is a process of simulation, often
involved with, as Jean Baudrillard put it, "substituting signs of the
real for the real itself" (quoted in Sworkin 164). Its "simulations
serve primarily as an implement for the creation of continuities across
the range of broadcast quanta, to further establish the principle of
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equality among images. Simulation is presently absorbed not with a
structure of certainties but with a radical agenda of destabilization.
It establishes the tenacious problematic of Memorex (is it real or is
it...) as a useful, binding constant" (Sworkin 172). Sworkin uses The
People's Court - a show made up of "real" people who, having filed
complaints in a "real" small claims court, decided to drop their suits
there and have them heard instead on television before a "real" judge -
as an example of television's scrambling of fiction and reality. The
scramble produces a mixture characterized by its smoothness, by plots
which have been rehearsed repeatedly and lacking any of those awkward
unsuspected moments with which real life and real fiction abound:
Nobody really loses in The People's Court. Judge Wapner's
awards are paid by the producers of the show; the only
punishment is humiliation. This delimiting of penalty
engenders an interesting slippage. Justice assumes the
character of a game show, a format in which the worst
outcome is loss of face and a failure to win. On The
People's Court, infraction carries no real risk beyond this.
By restricting justice to the parameters of entertainment,
The People's Court becomes a show trial. It's lip-synch
justice, however exemplary, because a way has been found to
remove risk from uncertainty. The litigants (all of whom
receive scale) become no more than actors in an ersatz real-
life drama. (Sworkin 173)
Jeffrey Dahmer's show trial, the first serial killer trial
televised live, was not heard before Judge Wapner, but it was a big-
budget version of The People's Court. As fiction enters the business of
the law, it seems the law is happy to enter the business of drama, and
play by its rules. Criticized for placing himself in a situation in
which he might be seen to "view his or her docket as material for future
popular exploitation", Dahmer's judge, Laurence Gram, writes a book The
Jeffrey Dahmer Case: A Judge's Perspective which according to Time (18
May 1992: 17) is to be the basis for a film script entitled The Jeffrey
Dahmer Confessions. Agent Lew Breyer is quoted as saying "The judge
doesn't want a horror picture per se. But I have written in one or two
horror scenes that are horrific in describing one of the murders."
"Faction" with the backing of the law? Infotainment inscribed by the law
with a kind of truth whose authority only the law can give? That the
serial killer can be constructed in a manner which best serves. the
entertainment industry can also be the conclusion to be made from Nick
Broomfield's film Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer. Unlike
most convicted serial killers, Wuornos, a former prostitute awaiting the
death sentence for the murder of seven men, rejects her serial killer
identity, claiming she never stalked her victims and that she killed the
men in self-defence after they had raped or attempted to rape her.
Suggesting that it was in the best interests of the police (as well as
the entertainment industry) to have Wuornos convicted and sentenced to
death as "a serial killer", the film tells of two Florida policemen
being transferred from the Criminal Investigation Department and one
resigning after it was found that they had been involved in discussions
with Hollywood about movie rights to the Wuornos case.
With the usually entertainment-minded HBO setting a precedent with
a show on the phenomena of serial killing, the producers of television's
"Entertainment Tonight" obviously thought the Dahmer trial satisfied the
show's directive and covered the media representation of the trial. One
commentator describes the mood of Milwaukee County Courthouse: "As
befits a courtroom which had been set up as a TV studio, Judge Gram's
speech owes much to the Academy Awards ceremony: he thanks his secretary
Vikki, and his stenographer Mary ("How many years have we been together
now Mary? Fourteen?) but first of all he thanks the media co-ordinator
who has arranged matters so that Judge Gram gets more airtime than any
judge before him" (Diamond 45). Back in real life Dahmer's victims and
their families have lost everything, but in Show-Time with a Serial
Killer a game is played in which, while the outcome of the insanity
verdict is uncertain, everybody know's their part and nobody loses.
Dahmer, described by his attorney as "The most unique man in the history
of the world" (Diamond 44), wins a chapter devoted exclusively to him in
the History of Crime. The trial is attended by seventy news
organizations, televised on cable, while WDJT, a Milwaukee radio
station, carries the show live and continuously obtains record ratings.
The New York Times reports on a transparent plastic shield placed
between what it describes as the "spectators" and the "participants" (27
Jan 1992: All). As Paramount Pictures hastily cancel advertisements in
Milwaukee for its new movie Body Parts, outside of Dahmer's apartment
"people climb out of their vehicles, cameras dangling from their neck,
and take pictures like tourists at Mount Rushmore. Indeed, a macabre
sort of cottage industry has sprung up in the neighborhood. Everything
is for sale, from information about encounters with Mr. Dahmer, whom
most people in the building call Jeff, to tours of the inside, for the
right price" (The New York Times. 29 July 1991: A13). Dahmer has put
Milwaukee on the map, a point not lost on Mary Ladish, vice-president of
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Metro Milwaukee Inc, the city’s tourism promoters, who notes "No one in
the US or the world can disagree that this is a catastrophic tragedy.
But I don't think anyone is holding it against Milwaukee” (Diamond 45).
The trial is one of the last episodes of this latest serial killer
serial. On Hard Copy, on A Current Affair excerpts from the trial are
intercut with revelations from other stories, some scandalous and some
not, and as Sworkin puts it: "nothing fashioned from the field of bits
is finally any different from any other selection. The uncertainties are
merely formal, not substantial. By such deprivations of meaning, the
medium renders itself purely aesthetic" (Sworkin 182).
What happens to the idea of perversion in such a world? When we
knew or thought we knew the difference between reality and fantasy we
also thought we could recognize the difference between Self and Other. A
self was real, natural. We deprived our others of identity, cultural
presence, a place in our/the reality. They were of another world which
could impinge on ours but mainly we could only dream about. Freud told
us they might be deep within us, but that they could only be reached
once we left the reality of our conscious selves. Stallybrass and White,
among others, told us we need perversion in order to sustain the idea of
civilization. But as fact and fantasy lose the meaning given by their
antithetical relation, as they become mis-placed (both out of position
and lost) so too perhaps do self and other, civilized and perverse. As
our fantasies enter our realities perhaps our notions of self become
more permeable to our notions of other. And, as Judith Halberstam notes,
also lost is our ability to judge: "It seems to me that The Silence of
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the Lambs emphasizes that we are at a peculiar time in history, a time
when it is becoming impossible to tell the difference between prejudice
and its representations, between the homophobia and representation of
homophobia" (Halberstam 41). In the same essay she says: "We wear modern
monsters like skin, they are us, they are on us and in us. Monstrosity
no longer coagulates into a specific body, a single face, a unique
feature, it is replaced with a banality that fractures resistance
because the enemy becomes harder and harder to locate, and looks more
and more like the hero" (38). And locating the enemy becomes that much
more difficult when you are unsure whether what you are seeing is real
or not, whether it wears a mask (hockey-mask or otherwise) or not,
whether it matters if the mask is there or not.
Our infotainment-existence is subject to the same pressure
suffered by our movie industry: the pressure of going one better, of
finding new things to shock or excite curiosity amongst ourselves who
can turn sensation into boredom with amazing ease. Like Sworkin, Joshua
Meyrowitz in No Sense of Place has argued that as the electronic age has
taken hold we are finding it increasingly difficult to identify
extremes: "The electronic combination of many different styles of
interaction from distinct regions leads to new 'middle region’ behaviors
that, while containing elements of formerly distinct roles, are
themselves new behavior patterns with new expectations and emotions"
(311). These middle region behaviors he connects with our inabilty to be
shocked: "the act of exposure itself now seems to excite us more than
the content of the secrets exposed. The steady stripping away of layers
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of social behavior has made the ' scandal' and the revelation of the
'deep dark secret' everyday occurrences" (311). But then a Jeffrey
Dahmer comes along and manages to up the stakes: his crimes, as social
psychologist Carol Tavris writes, "are a kind that put him in his own
lunatic league" (Los Angeles Times. 9 Aug. 1991: B7). But even he, she
suggests, will soon be subsumed by a media of "one-minute political
commercials, advertisements that posture as news stories, and the
blurring of troubling news reports with amusing tales" which commits
"the real violence to our minds." The following excerpt from an edition
of The Maury Povich Show (whose subject was the alleged glorification of
Dahmer by the media) can illustrate Tavris's point:
Povich: What do you think of this media circus that's
going on here? In fact, why don't you hold that.
We'll be back. We'll talk about how the media is
treating Jeffrey Dahmer. Whether he is indeed being
given celebrity status and much more right after
this.
Voice-over: Still to come, her addiction to Bingo has
put her marriage on the line.
[Commercial break]
[video clip of Jeffrey Dahmer]
(Maury Povich. 4 Feb. 1992)
In Civilization and Its Discontents Freud wonders "If the
evolution of civilization has such a far-reaching similarity with the
development of an individual, and if the same methods are employed in
both, would not the diagnosis be justified that many systems of
civilization - or epoches of it - possibly even the whole of humanity -
have become 'neurotic' under the pressure of the civilizing trends?"
(Freud 1953, 141-142). A problem he encounters is how a society could be
diagnosed as neurotic without the presence of an environment functioning
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as normality. The problem Freud encounters we confront and temporarily
solve repeatedly. Instead of comparing individuals to the norms of
society, we compares ourselves every so often to ever-more extreme
individuals, while simultaneously living out as a fantasy the reality of
those individuals (and negating the realities of his victims). In The
Novel and the Police, D.A. Miller argues that the "novel's critical
relation to society...masks the extent to which modern social
organization has made even 'scandal' a systematic function of its
routine self-maintenance" (xii). Like the newspaper and television
tabloids which in part constitute it, our modern social organization -
one which entertains while naturalizing a policing mentality - is one
which needs to be ever-more scandalous, requires its monsters to be
increasingly monstrous, one in which monsters need to be evermore
extreme in order to win a place in the great tradition of crime, and one
which - incidentally? - simultaneously justifies evermore policing and
surveillance. Perversion has become less that which civilization defines
itself against and more as an arena around which civilization cheers and
feigns horror.
What concerns Carol Tavris is "not only that violence permeates
our entertainment media - our contemporary fairy tales; violence has
always been a part of story-telling" (Tavris 7) but that it is rarely
explained, given meaning. For David Edgar it is this giving of meaning
which can stop representation from becoming promotion: "one doesn't have
to go all the way with Aristotelian catharsis to accept that Shakespeare
and Brenton and Bond do not represent violence in order to encourage it,
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but rather to understand and confront it, and that one of the things
that fiction allows you to confront about wickedness is how attractive
it is" (Edgar 8). For Edgar, Lecter's attractiveness is no more
"propaganda for cannibalism" than Paradise Lost is "propaganda for
Satanism" (8). While Shakespeare, Brenton and Bond may represent
violence in an "understanding" manner it's the meaning we, the reader or
the viewer, give which matters. We can take intention and context or
leave them. In the debate about the portrayal of sex and violence and
its relation to behavior, the divide between what Edgar calls "superior
artists" and "the grimier end of the market" can be misleading. The
understanding and confrontation of the "attractiveness" of wickedness
depends not so much on the medium in which the wickedness is presented
or the "seriousness" of the artist as on our questioning of our
consumption of that presentation. (And when we do so we might also
question the naturalness of "wickedness's attraction"). As I argue
later, we should not be blaming technology, but questioning our use of
it. So what kind of consumers are we? What is the unspoken meaning of
our infotainment existence?
For Sworkin, television's eclecticism limits meaning rather than
increases it, tends towards homogeneity, rather than difference, tends
towards a single meaning, a single reality. For Lyotard, eclecticism "is
the degree zero of contemporary general culture" and the "realism of the
'anything goes' culture is in fact that of money; in the absence of
aesthetic criteria, it remains possible and useful to assess the value
of works of art according to the profits they yield" (Sworkin 76).
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Lyotard's latter comments on contemporary art might just as well apply
to television - such eclecticism surely dissolves barriers between art
and mass culture - and we might say that television's realism or the
only reality of television, is money, dependant as it is on ratings.
However tempting it would be to lay dominant constructions of
monstrosity at capitalism's door (and sneak off into dimly-lit alley
ways) perhaps we should not limit ourselves by questioning our
fetishization of money - after all, that questioning has often seemed
half-hearted: rich pickings are to be had in those dimly-lit alley ways
- but instead look towards another, more dominant reality for which
money might function as an alibi, a reality of which capitalism has only
been a manifestation. You may have guessed that I'm talking of that
which goes by the name of power, that which comes in many guises, but
that which at other times isn't so shy, knows it can safely flaunt its
charms without condemnation. The mythology of the serial killer is, I
suggest, securely fixed by such a reality, and that ours is an age in
which our fantasies of power, or what we think of as power, can safely
surface as realities without fear of disapproval.
Where power is reality, power and its manifestations become
"aesthetic." Sworkin can argue that "by such deprivations of meaning"
television renders itself "purely aesthetic" (182), but if we regard the
history of aesthetics as the history of meaning beyond that pertaining
to the senses (the history of particular dominant meanings which help to
construct the nature of beauty without advertising themselves), then
television, while curtailing polysemy is not without (a) meaning. And no
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longer need aesthetics be limited to the world of art or fiction. In
1987 Cameron and Frazer, noting that "horror today belongs to the domain
of the aesthetic", wrote that "people who rush to the scene of a
disaster for the pleasure of witnessing actual death and destruction are
deemed to have acted inappropriately precisely because they have derived
from reality a thrill which we think should be confined to the realms of
fiction" (52). However, now we can rush live to a scene of a crime or a
disaster via a television camera strapped to an ambulance or police car
without leaving our homes. The sense of inappropriateness has
disappeared. The pleasure of horror, that which was deemed appropriate
only in a recognizable world of fiction, is now something one can
experience (without fear of condemnation) on television framed as
reality. In our creation and consumption of infotainment we have sprung
the aesthetics of horror from fiction. We are able to appreciate the
natural beauty of horror and violence by constructing their aesthetic
value - by locating them, that is, on an amoral plain beyond the reach
of condemnation - and erasing the memory of its construction. Robert
Ressler, President of the Forensic Behavioral Services, says that "the
media, the news, and entertainment media have created the idea of what a
serial killer is, and believe me, he is not Hannibal Lecter. " Our
perception of serial killers as being like or just plain being Hannibal
Lecter - powerful, eloquent, member of a cultural elite - is, however,
relatively clear and untroubled, and we, like Ressler, have difficulty
in naming what it is which is naturalizing that perception. Indicative
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of his mythological status, the serial killer is void of the meaning
central to his construction. He is a figure whose derivation is unclear.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, the suggestion
that our violent fantasies of power are indistinguishable from our
violent realities should not be confused with the suggestion that
violent fantasies cause murder. Such an argument, as well as its
counter-argument, relies on the assumption that fantasy and the reality
in which we locate action or behavior (such as murder) are recognizably
separate. The serial killer who is familiar to us is unable to test his
internal world with reference to a world "beyond”, unable to identify
where the barrier between (individual) fantasy and (social) reality
starts. While, as I suggest in chapter two, we are increasingly
perceiving the world in individualistic and asocial terms, radical
individualism is also perceived as a characteristic of our monsters,
something which makes them monstrous. In this respect, our serial
killers resemble the young Frankenstein. Reflecting on his education,
Frankenstein says: "I confess that neither the structure of languages,
nor the code of governments, nor the politics of various states,
possessed attractions for me. It was the secrets of heaven and earth
that I desired to learn; and whether it was the outward substance of
things or the inner spirit of nature and the mysterious soul of man that
occupied me, still my inquiries were directed to the metaphysical, or,
in its highest sense, the physical secrets of the world" (Shelley 37).
Kenneth Graham notes that:
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The category which is omitted in Frankenstein's education is
the category which embraces encounters with the real world
in its social organization. It is this category which seems
to Frankenstein to hold no interest; to supplant it he turns
to the two extremes, to the so-called 'metaphysical' and to
chronic introspection. In Kleinian terms, we could speak of
problems of introjection. The young Frankenstein is given to
us as a name for a syndrome which abandons reality-testing,
for one reason or another, and which prefers to work on a
direct link between the inner world and the untested
fantasy. But this is a mask for destructiveness; that
ignorance of the real world is also a need to wish it away,
to place it under prohibition, to deal only in the inner
world and the gigantic shadows which that inner world throws
on the screen of experience if we choose to ignore the
checks and balances of external constraint. (Graham 18)
Related to such a figure - the ultimate loner, the autistic being, the
possessor of no social existence - the question of whether the
pornography which putatively informs our serial killer's fantasy world
causes the murders he commits has no meaning, for his fantasy and his
behavior belong to the same, seamless existence. Without a sense of
"social reality" there is only "fantasy." To construct such an asocial
figure, one whose existence in large and busy cities bringing regular
personal contact is not perceived as a contradiction to that
construction, is to evoke the modern nightmare of individuals retreating
to homes coolly lit by television and computer screens, individuals
whose only sense of interaction comes from "participating" in chat-shows
or playing virtual reality games. The abandonment of what Graham calls
"reality-testing" might also describe our apparent lack of
desire/ability to distinguish our fantasies from our realities or our
movie-characters from real-life serial killers, our becoming one
gigantic self lacking a context to underscore the illusionariness of our
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fantasies, our avoiding the contingency of life, the risk of
disappointment. How real, so to speak, is that nightmare?
Clearly, our definition of our selves must take into account our
relationship with, or how we make use of, technology. We might talk of
our "media selves", our selves which participate in (or have the
illusion of participating in) what is commonly referred to as "the
media." In conversation with Stephen Heath and Gillian Skirrow, Raymond
Williams notes that "they say on television now, 'and next week you will
have a chance to take part'. We won't conceivably, if there are millions
of us. But it means, this and this one we'll select: all you. This is a
way of thinking" (Heath and Skirrow 11-12). Heath replies "that's the
creation of the instantaneous mass in relation to which television
clearly works at the moment" (12). Our sense of belonging to a "mass"
audience to which television works is, I suggest, becoming increasingly
important to the way we perceive our selves as a social body and as
individuals within it. And yet what kind of a social existence is it?
Though television promotes itself as being "discursive",2 what is the
value of the presumed dialogue between itself and the viewer? As
2 In using the term here I have in mind Emile Benveniste remarking that
"discourse" is "every utterance assuming a speaker and a hearer, and in
the speaker, the intention of influencing the other in some way. [It
comprises] all the genres in which someone proclaims himself as the
speaker and organizes what he says in the category of person"(Benveniste
209) .
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Williams notes, while a presenter will invite "us" to participate, only
a tiny minority can actually do so. And when he or she addresses "us"
as, for example, "the nation", this idea of all-inclusiveness, "of
people whom we 'recognize', excludes the majority of people of the world
whom we don't recognize and watch on television" (11). Williams adds:
"if the broadcaster believes that he is addressing the nation he starts
talking in certain ways which are bad for him, bad for us. Even if
people get used to it. Because they're false ways in that all he's
really looking at is a camera and people in a studio and all he's
otherwise learned is a convention, usually a false one, in its most
developed form" (11). The lack of interaction television engenders and
the consequential lack of a sense of other is also described by Alvin
Kernan in The Death of Literature: "television viewers do not interact
with others as they would in a localized oral situation of the small
town or village. Their situation as viewers re-enacts the isolation of
the members of 'the loner crowd', the mass society of the urbanized
West..." (149). The sense of belonging we feel from watching television
can be a false one, but as Williams notes, this is not necessarily the
"fault" of the technology: "I think these false images have only been
developed because of certain specific problems in this society, problems
of people knowing where they belong and how they relate" (quoted in
Heath and Skirrow 11). In the "modern nightmare" we rely on the image of
ourselves as belonging to a mass audience for our sense of social
belonging and we are consequently prone to having only our selves for
company, to having no meaningful social reality against which to gauge
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the boundaries of our internal world. While fantasy cannot be described
as "internal" and the act as "external" because the internal/external
opposition has no meaning, the other (to the self) has no meaning, no
reality, and can therefore be treated as an object in a fantasy. The
confusion of reality and fantasy in the "content" of what is transmitted
is re-enacted by an inability or unwillingness to differentiate the self
from its surroundings. The "content" of those transmitted fantasies, the
erasure of the other, reoccurs as a consequence of that failure to
differentiate. And of course in such a nightmare we are unable to
identify the non-reality of that nightmare.
Graham's assessment of the young Frankenstein and Kernan's and
Williams view of the television age can all correspond with the figure
of Jeffrey Dahmer, who, like Frankenstein experimenting with body-parts,
is someone we insist is lost in his own fantasy world. It is a fantasy
world whose outer limits are those of the Self, a Self unable to
consider the reality of the Other for fear of its own destruction. It is
the world of Caligula: where an inability to sense others brings a
nonsensical self, a world of limitless boundaries in which one is both
emperor and magician. Corresponding to familiar representations of
Dahmer is Simone de Beauvoir's assessment of Sade: "It is... a
combination of passionate sexual appetites with a basic emotional
'apartness' which seems to me to be the key to his eroticism" (32).
While Dahmer is rarely perceived as sadistic, the following from Sade
are words we can imagine Dahmer speaking: "If the objects who serve us
feel ecstasy, they are then much more concerned with themselves than
213
with us, and our own enjoyment is consequently impaired. The idea of
seeing another person experience the same pleasure reduces one to a kind
of equality which spoils the unutterable charms that come from
despotism" (quoted in Beauvoir 33-34). The representation of Dahmer is
often a figure who is radically selfish, who knows only his self (and
who consequently has no sense of what that self means) - he is figured
as both someone who is self-obsessed and someone who dangerously forgets
himself - and it is a representation offered by a medium which knows
only itself (and which consequently has no sense of what that self
means). In representing the serial killer in this way we see something
of ourselves: the subject fades, is not only unspeakable, but grows
invisible, indistinguishable from that which represents it. Not
surprising, then, the Gothic forms of representation: the monster there
and here, without and within, something which is both content and form,
something which monstrously unsettles such oppositions. For Nietzsche,
the man of ressentiment "loves hiding places, secret paths and back
doors, everything covert entices him as his world, his security, his
refreshment" (Nietzsche 1969, 38). Such a man, explains Mark Seem,
"needs very much to believe in some neutral, independent 'subject' - the
ego - for he is prompted by an instinct of self-affirmation and self-
preservation that cares little about preserving or affirming life” (in
Deleuze and Guatarri xvii), an instinct "in which every lie is
sanctified" (Nietzsche 1969, 46). Our representation of Dahmer is like
the closet the man of ressentiment constructs for himself, only he
doubts if .‘ there is anything out there, any place to which he can come
out. Like a double-agent who has crossed the border so many times he has
lost any sense of where he is - where he is in relation to the concept
of truth, of lies - we construct secrets and keep them from ourselves.
In Dahmer's representation, Milwaukee is a Gothic castle into which
heroes and heroines go on quests for knowledge, peering into crypts,
bringing back confessions, a place where sex is secret, where murders
are secret; but so too is that representation a Gothic castle, only it
is one in which not only is there no way out but "no way out" has no
meaning, a castle whose walls are lined with a spectacle of mirrors, and
mirrors of spectacle.
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9. Sanity. Satan and Sanitized Evil
[There is] no doubt at this time that he is a Schizoid
Personality Disorder who may show marked paranoid
tendencies. He is definitely SPOOKY!
(From the prognosis of clinical psychologist, Dr Evelyn
Rosen, following Dahmer's conviction for Disorderly Conduct
in 1987 after two boys had reported him to the police for
masturbating by the side of the Kinnickinnic River; quoted
in Masters 1993, 107)
When, as I suggested in the previous chapter, we represent our
monsters in a manner which makes no reference to a distinction between
fact and fantasy, no wonder we lose patience with or don't see the point
in asking whether our monsters can make the same distinction. In chapter
one I described our construction of the sane but evil serial killer. His
sanity re-assures us of his culpability, allows us to legally condemn.
His evil allows us to differentiate his sanity from our own. Our modern
monstrosities are the result of a nostalgia for an era preceding the
science of psychiatry, an era when Satan was the essence of otherness.
But when the serial killer’s evil is represented more in terms of
cartoon mischief than Biblical notions of wickedness, our estrangement
becomes uncertain, half-hearted, and the serial killer who emerges is
one closer to the center of society than to its fringes.
Lecter ridicules the fear of confronting evil: "Nothing happened
to me, Officer Starling. I happened. You can't reduce me to a set of
influences. You've given up good and evil for behaviorism, Officer
Starling. You've got everybody in moral dignity pants - nothing is ever
anybody's fault. Look at me, Officer Starling. Can you stand to say I am
evil?" (Harris 1991, 20). It is a speech re-made by Dahmer: "The person
216
to blame is the person sitting across from you. Not parents, not
society, not pornography. Those are just excuses", he tells an Inside
Edition interviewer (cited in People Weekly. Dec. 12 1994: 129). For
Lecter, to name and confront evil is an heroic act. Likewise, we
contrast the discourse of good and evil to the equivocation and moral
weakness which is considered characteristic of the discourse of
psychiatry, and it is a contrast made more stark by evil being perceived
as something which can be identified in the individual, and insanity "as
a set of influences", of something dispersed socially.
Lecter feels the need to assert his individuality in the face of
behaviorism, but the reception Dahmer receives would have been much more
to his liking. Dahmer is given his moment of glory, is allowed to be
seen as an individualized manifestations of evil, is allowed to be some
body. The story of a shy, eighteen year old Jeffrey being asked to the
prom is turned a decade later into an article headlined HIGH SCHOOL
BEAUTY'S CHILLING PROM DATE WITH THE DEVIL (quoted in Schwartz 41). And
the manner in which he dies is an opportunity to end this story of
personified evil with a dramatic and final scene. Like Newsweek's
article on the killing, People Weekly begin theirs with Dahmer reading
the Book of Revelation - "pages brimming with prophecies of hellfire,
damnation and apocalyptic fury" (Dec. 12 1994: 128) - five days before
o
his journey to hell. Rather than his death being seen as the result of a
prison attack in which two men died, we figure the murder as Satan
claiming his man, a version in which the death of a fellow inmate, Jesse
Anderson, has to be edited out. In contrast to the forceful figure of
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evil - he who "happens" alone, he to which nothing happens - is the
blurred figure drawn by the psychiatry profession, the product of
childhood experiences, familial relationships and encounters with that
fuzzy entity, "society."
As a figure of estrangement the sane and evil monster personifies
power, a power which only those who "can stand" to recognize it can
share. In our rejection of 'mental illness' - in our deriding of
psychopathology and of attempts to discover "the mechanisms of hatred
and loneliness that warp the human soul" as Carol Travis puts it (Tavris
7) - we bring Dahmer into our sane world, but how far do we
simultaneously eject him as representative of the forces of evil?
Dahmer' s uneasy straddling of sanity and evil is an image in which we
invest much curiosity and one which keeps him central to our culture.
Foucault, describing the segregation of the mentally ill in the
nineteenth century, says:
As for a common language, there is no such thing any longer;
the constitution of madness as a mental illness at the end
of the eighteenth century, affords the evidence of a broken
dialogue, posits the separation as already effected, and
thrusts into oblivion all those stammered, imperfect words
without fixed syntax in which the exchange between madness
and reason was made. The language of psychiatry, which is a
monologue of reason about madness, has been established only
on the basis of such a silence. (Foucault 1988, x-xi)
The current redundancy of the notion of mental illness, however, the
making sane and satan of individuals we once would have called mad,
forces us to confront the possibility that there never was much of a
linguistic divide between us and them, but also forces us to construct a
common language which removes any doubt. (And I'm not talking about the
"stammered, imperfect words without fixed syntax" of television's anchor
men, words which Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death suggests are
indicative of America's cultural decay). In order to regard our monsters
as sane we have to build bridges: "I, too, have struggled with sexual
impulses”, confesses State Attorney McCann in Dahmer1s trial (quoted in
Masters 1993, 228). The common language is the language of sanity, and
the nature of that language is suggested by our ideas of what makes
sense and what does not, what is insane and what is not. McCann,
apparently appealing to the shared norms of our culture, argues that:
"Dahmer's drugging men at the gay bathhouses was calculated and no more
insane than men using alcohol to convince women to have sex with them"
(quoted in Schwartz 195). Doctor George Palermo, supporting McCann's
judgment of Dahmer's sanity, declares in court that Dahmer "is an
organized, nonsocial, lust murderer, who killed in a methodical and
shrewd manner. He is driven by obsessive fantasies of power over others"
(quoted in Schwartz 207). And according to a National Review editorial
one month after the completion of the trial, Dahmer, compared to New
York's "senseless killers’ ’, had already been relegated to the realm of
normality: "some murders have a pointless fiendishness about them that
makes one doubt the very humanity of the killers...Maybe the murderers
in these cases killed for fun. We have no reason to believe the only
serial killers are those like Jeffrey Dahmer who obligingly keep the
corpses in refrigerators for easy checking" (2 Mar. 1992). Dahmer and
us, us normal people, evidently share the same language: a language
219
which naturalizes the use of alcohol to take sexual advantage of women,
naturalizes power over others, and naturalizes murder as a form of
acquisition, as a sign of one's consumerism.
And not only do we now share a common language with our monsters,
we allow them to come out of the dark and into our homes. Those that we
estrange now - if that is what we are doing - are much more visible. No
longer do we delegate medical intermediaries to communicate with our
monsters. While access to mental institutions is still limited, we allow
individuals on trial for their insanity to speak directly to us on
televised show trials, for convicted serial killers like Dahmer to speak
to us on 'Inside Edition', and for other others to speak via movies like
Confessions of a Serial Killer. Monstrosity has once again become
spectacle, and while capital punishment has not (yet) become a regular
television event, the visibility of criminals on death row has increased
sufficiently to suggest that so too has its punishment, and that matters
have changed since "only the reading of the sentence on the scaffold
announced the crime - and that crime must be f aceless. . . The more
monstrous a criminal was, the more he must be deprived of light: he must
not see, or be seen" (Foucault, 1979, 14-15). While in early nineteenth
century France "whatever theatrical elements [punishment] still retained
were now downgraded, as if the functions of the penal ceremony were
gradually ceasing to be understood, as if this rite that 'concluded the
crime' was suspected of being in some undesirable way linked with it"
(9), fears that our ritualization of the conclusion of particular crimes
could be somehow linked to the crimes themselves seem distant from our
220
minds. Theatrical elements of execution are upgraded zealously.
Television represented the executions at San Quentin in the summer of
1992 with actors playing an execution's audience. The actual audience
included a large proportion of television journalists who themselves re
created the scene in their respective shows. Fear of revealing a
connection between crime and punishment was also apparently absent in
the execution of Ted Bundy, with many newspapers publishing pictures of
Bundy's corpse. The presenter of television's American Justice, Bill
Curtis, argued that "the public welcomed [Bundy's] death with the kind
of glee he himself might have felt when his victims gave up their
lives."
Noting that although the insanity of William Edward Hickman was
"beyond doubt", Wilson and Seaman suggest that "the horror of the crime
demanded the ritual exorcism in the death chamber" (Wilson and Seaman
174). Repositioning "the eye for an eye" argument, they figure execution
as a repaying of irrationality with irrationality: "The serial killer
has no monopoly on irrationality" (174). For Wilson and Seaman, society
has the right to exercise its powers of unspeakableness, a belief
shared, it seems, by many of those we may wish to see die. Westley Alan
Dodd, serial child-murderer, also uses television to promote the justice
of retribution, a spectacle for a spectacle: "Hang me...because that's
the way Lee Iseli [one of his victims] died...I don't think I deserve
any clean, painless little death" (Murder by Number). Rather than being
deterred by the risk of death, serial killers, according to Jack Henry
Abbot, are aware of the growing spectacle of capital punishment, are
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motivated by the opportunity of a ritualized execution. Abbot speculates
that "Men like Son of Sam are consciously motivated by capital
punishment - "What else do you call their now-standard manner of toying
with the police by leaving clues in the form of riddles and notes to
mock the hangman?" he asks (Abbot 126). Such goading, suggests
psychiatrists, is coupled with an eventual desire to be caught (The
Times. 28 July 1986), to have the true identity of the Night Stalker, or
the Thrill Killer, or the Hillside Strangler revealed, to have the name
connected to a body. The execution of a monstrous criminal is a power
trip in which many of us want to be involved, albeit in varying degrees.
Foucault contrasts the historical period about which he writes
with Greek culture, and notes "the Greek Logos had no contrary"
(Foucault 1988, xi). With the ubiquity of the monster's voice and of his
image, and with his voice and his image being sometimes
indistinguishable from our own, identifying a contrary to our own Logos
can also prove difficult. Echoes of endeavors to distinguish Reason from
Madness are barely audible in an age in which the Word of our others is
our Word. Even the powers of evil "they" represent seem to have been
appropriated, commodified. Hannibal Lecter - his emotional attachment to
Clarice perhaps being the central relation around which we structure the
movie's meaning and which can contrast with the apparent reality of most
serial killers' failure to bond emotionally with others - represents a
sanitized version of the serial killer. But the way we read Lecter is
the way we like to perceive most of our real-life serial killers, and
the sanitized "version” assumes the nature of truthfulness,
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authenticity. Evil is a notion which is tailor-made for our world of
infotainment, and something with which we, having been brought up on a
diet of adventure cartoons and monster movies, have grown familiar and
even quite fond. Anthony Hopkins, explaining his decision not to be
involved in a possible sequel to The Silence of the Lambs, describes
being asked by twelve-year-old children "to do the 'fava bean' scene."
Lecter as cuddly? As a marketable soft-toy?
Our serial killers are recognizable types. Just ask James Fox,
(typical) Criminal Justice Professor: "...typically - the typical serial
killer, as opposed to the stereotypical serial killer, the typical
stereotypical serial killer is very much in control" {Oprah. 4 Sept.
1991). And types suitable for entertainment. Describing television's
wrestler/personality/cartoon character "Hulk Hogan", Michael Sworkin
says:
the image of the Hulk as himself dissolves into the image of
Hulk as cartoon. Higher 'reality' (or lower degree
simulation) dissolves into higher simulation (or lower
reality). The implication is of simulation established not
as reality's mirror but as its microscope. As the power of
resolution is adjusted up and down, the subject becomes,
variously, man as cartoon, cartoon as man, man as robot,
etc. Hulk is not so much dehumanized as he is
conceptualized, rendered isomorphic with his aura. (Sworkin
170)
Notwithstanding his hierarchical construction of the relationship
between the world of cartoons and all that it is not, our construction
of serial killers can resemble Sworkin's description of the Hulk. And
perhaps it is not just a case of denial, a case of dealing with the
reality of the horror by representing serial killers as characters in a
223
cartoon, as figures in a fantasy. The cross-over between serial killing
and the world of cartoons was explicit in the case of Dahmer. Hart
Fisher, publisher of the Boneyard Press, represented the story of Dahmer
as a comic-strip and declared "it's something you can't get anywhere
else - if you like the truth, if you like something a little bit more
fresh, a little bit more bloody, we've got the meat" (Murder by Number).
A complicity between Fisher and Dahmer, an active relationship between
crime and its representation, is hinted at in the show's introduction to
Fisher: "In the underground layer of an upstart publisher the saga of
Jeffrey Dahmer unfolds in the pages of a not-so-comic book." It is a
relationship whose existence we are having increasing difficulty in
denying or one whose existence we are unsure about whether we want to
deny.
Perhaps like the pre-Renaissance period, before the
conceptualisation of madness became scientific, ours is an age in which
man's dialogue with monstrosity takes the form of a "debate in which he
[confronts] the secret powers of the world; the experience of madness
[is] clouded by images of the Fall and the Will of God, of the Beast and
the Metamorphosism, and of all the marvelous secrets of Knowledge"
(Foucault 1988, xii). As we enter an age in which the scientific
categorizing of mental illness is being questioned, the Dahmers of our
culture are likewise inscribed with having secret powers, with super
intelligence, as possessors of knowledge and vision. And according to
Phillip Jenkins, Professor of Criminology at Penn State University, it
is Christianity which supplies the stories of power about which serial
killers fantasize and attempt to re-enact: "The single book which has
probably had the greatest impact on stimulating serial killers, or what
they have used to justify their crimes has undoubtedly been the
Christian Bible and especially the Book of Revelations, the imagery of
which has an enormous appeal" (To Kill and Kill Again). But with images
of the Fall and the Beast having as their reference point Saturday
morning television instead of the Old or New Testament, it seems we're
not sure whether we should take those images seriously. However
"appealing" those images may be, a return to a theocracy does not seem
on the cards. What we have is a world divided neatly, or rather too
neatly, between Good and Evil, the Goody and the Baddy; the extremity of
the polarization having the effect of parodying polarizing procedures.
Contrasting with Dennis Nilsen's assertion that Dahmer's "contrition
after his conviction for molesting a child was genuine enough" (quoted
in Masters 1991, 266) (an implication being that'monsters are not evil
all of the time), is Anne E. Schwartz's interpretation of his contrition
and of the belief on the part of his defence attorney that Dahmer was
sincere: "It is a testament to the cunning and manipulativeness of
Jeffrey Dahmer that he was able to con people like Gerry Boyle"
(Schwartz 67).
Our cartoon-like representation of good and evil might be
expressed by a letter to The Los Angeles Times (9 Aug. 1991: B6) which
complains of demonstrations of forgiveness for Paul Rubens, an actor who
plays the television character, Pee-wee Herman, and who was arrested for
masturbating in an X-rated movie-house: "it is the casual acceptance of
225
this type of porno-house prowling that enabled Dahmer to kill as many
men as he did. Evil is still evil, no matter how much we enjoy it." The
association of Reubens' actions with multiple murder is also made in an
article on Dahmer in the Washington Post". "Look at the picture of Pee
Wee Herman wearing a beard in the Style section of the Washington Post
yesterday. Suddenly, Paul Rubens looks more like a Charles Manson than a
Pee Pee" (1 Aug. 1991: C3). That we prefer to refrain from
differentiating between masturbation and mass or serial murder (or,
considering the connecting of Pee-Wee with Dahmer, between emasculation,
homosexuality and serial murder), that we prefer to leave intact our
all-embracing concept of evil and then like to sit back and "enjoy it"
makes us ideal consumers of violent crime framed as entertainment. When
our "perverts" are increasingly seen as mirror-reflections of ourselves,
it seems we use the idea of "perversion" less as an excuse to alienate
particular individuals or sections of society and more as a ride in a
theme-park.
And inscribing real-life horror with the discourse of Disney
enables us more easily to tell jokes about it. Our explanation for the
desire to tell such jokes usually resembles that of Anne E. Schwartz who
remembers that many of her colleagues at the Dahmer trial told jokes in
order to keep their "sanity" (Schwartz 211). Similarly, a New York Times
editorial (6 Aug. 1991: A16) on serial killer jokes remarks that "there
is a need for people to distance themselves from the horror. " But how
distant do we really like to be? Desensitized not only from too much
exposure to violence but from a blurring of news and entertainment and a
226
consequential inability to identify extremes, we cannot help existing in
the way we commonly perceive Lear's Fool, laughing both at horror and at
those horrified, laughing both at and with our monsters. (How can we
claim to be distanced from our uncaught killers when our speculative
stories about them seem to be designed to strike even greater terror in
the minds of the victims who we imagine to be the killer's target?) Or
perhaps we cannot help existing in the way Foucault tells us the
eighteenth century madman was perceived, as "Different only in so far as
he is unaware of Difference" (Foucault 1973, 49), loading "all signs
with a resemblance that ultimately erases them" (50).
Perhaps we can afford to exist in this way because infotainment
monsters have only infotainment victims. Meyrowitz describes the
homogonizing effect of the new electronic media deconstructing all
oppositions - he offers adult/child and masculine/feminine as examples -
in its wake. But the particular use we are making of technology is
characterized by our doing all we can to realize fantasy in an age in
which fantasies are mostly fantasies of power, and in such fantasies
oppositions and the violent hierarchies they engender are strengthened
not deconstructed. While traditional forms of monstrosity and normality
rediscover a common language, and while we excite ourselves by watching
violent crime and its victims through the eyes of a serial killer, the
opposition self/other is alive and well.
227
10; Fantasies of Power
Every age needs its heroes - and for the nineties, it's the
Serial Killer. (Television reviewer of Confessions of a
Serial Killer. The Daily Mail. 29 Jan. 1993)
...beliefs which attribute spiritual power to individuals
are never neutral or free of the dominant patterns of social
structure. (Douglas 112)
In my introduction I included a quotation from Dennis Nilsen in
which he says the portrayal of Hannibal Lecter as a powerful figure is
"pure myth” and that his own offenses arise "from a feeling of
inadequacy, not potency." In this chapter I want to explore more fully
the ascription of power to the serial killer. It is one way we can
distance ourselves from the serial killer and in the process figure
ourselves as (innocent) victims. But as the later chapters of this study
have shown, sometimes our desire to estrange seems to dissipate, and, our
behavior can be mistaken for awe-struck reverence. Speculating about the
serial killer's motivation, Gregg McCrary of the FBI’s Investigative
Support Unit says, "It's this God-like rush of power over life and
death, it's playing God with these victims, and its that thrill, and its
that same thing that all of these offenders enjoy. It’s that discretion
that they have, this control over life and death" (Murder by Number) .
The idea that serial killers are "playing God" is common in attempts to
explain their behavior - presumably revealing not only what we think of
the serial killer, but of the nature of God. Absent in such comparisons
is a questioning of the "rush”, the "thrill", the "enjoyment” of causing
arbitrary destruction.
The cultural need for the spectacle of power has been discussed by
Georges Bataille, and Jane Gallop notes that "’A thought of the crowd'
is precisely how Bataille describes the function of the sovereign in
ancient times when ' the ancient games would have it that the spectacle
of royal privileges compensated the poverty of common life" (Gallop 27).
"A thought of the crowd" can also, I suggest, describe the function of
our monsters. Ian Brady calls the part of him which tortured and
murdered children the "higher" self (Masters 1993, 198). How far does
our own construction of the serial killer go in similarly figuring him
as a transcendent, elevated being? The serial killer can appear as less
something against which we define ourselves, and more the embodiment of
dominant themes in our cultures, the fulfillment of dreams of
omnipotence. Possessor of power over life and death, super-intelligent,
transcender of barriers between sanity and and madness, ultimate Loner,
sanctifier of violence - he is deserving of eternal fame, of media-
attention on a massive scale, of groupies. What is the function of this
super-human character, one who we can't get enough people (fictional or
otherwise) to play? Roy Norris, murderer of at least six women in
California, suggests that "the rape wasn't really the important part, it
was the dominance" (quoted in Levin and Fox 68). How much effort do we
spend estranging the association of the rape and murder with power? If
the serial killer representation has the characteristics of a dreamt-up
reality, whose dream is he?
Kenneth Lynn might suggest it' s as much the dream of those who
feel their power threatened as the dream of the powerful. Writing on
"Violence in American Literature and Folklore", he says: "When we
consider the humorists of the region between the Alleghenies and the
Mississippi River, which in the 1830s and 1840s was known as the
American Southwest, we are immediately struck by the theoretical
possibility that the literature of violence in America has been written
by losers - by citizens who have found their political, social, or
cultural position threatened by the upward surge of another, and very
different, group of Americans" (Lynn 134). We can make sense of the
serial killer myth by providing a context of a changing social scene to
the changing nature of criminal monstrosity. We can suggest that, in a
culture in which violence and aggression are glorified, not only should
it be unsurprising that a violent white male be perceived as powerful by
a media still dominated by white males, but that it is a perception
formed as the result of the traditionally dominant racial group and
gender fearing the precariousness of their position. But while Lynn
suggests that the humorists of the old Southwest wrote to exaggerate the
crudity and the cruelty of the "enemy", the serial killer myth can have
the effect of exaggerating the power of those threatened, of signalling
revenge upon a changing society.
230
The Serial Killer and The Powers of Intelligence
When I read that with money sent to him by a "young British woman"
the imprisoned Dahmer buys by mail order "books on art and cassette
recordings of Bach, Schubert and Gregorian chants" (The Times. 12 Mar.
1994: 3), I find myself interpreting his shopping as another attempt to
play the role of the serial killer with as much authenticity as
possible. As I have discussed earlier, the figure who has perhaps done
most in recent times to define what is authentic when it comes to serial
killing is the intellectual/connoisseur, Hannibal Lecter, he whose last
name can suggest the imparting of valuable knowledge. Lecter quotes
Marcus Aurelius before butchering his guards (Harris 1991, 217). As we
watch Lecter and Senator Martin stare at each other on the tarmac at
Baltimore airport, we are told that one of them is "extremely bright"
while the other is "not measurable by any means known to man" (190).
Meanwhile, in Brian Masters' re-creation of the movie forVanity Fair,
Dennis Nilsen is described as "highly intelligent...with a penetrating
gaze" (Masters 1991, 184). Our fictionalized representations of the
serial killer mirror a common perception of him as being not only of
above-average intelligence but one of super-intelligence, of philosophy,
of an ability to see the world in strikingly original ways. Sometimes it
is his powers of speech which are remarkable: a New York Times article
on psychopaths - of which Ted Bundy and Angelo Bueno Jr. are given as
examples - refers to "the slippery ease with which psychopaths lie,
twist language and manipulate and destroy people" (July 7 1987: Cl).
231
Contrasting to the higher-class killers/intellectuals like Lecter,
Nilsen and Bundy - Lecter is a psychoanalyst, Nilsen a civil servant,
Bundy a former law student "who once seemed destined for a promising
career in Republican politics in Washington State" (People Weekly. 1
Apr. 1991: 68) and whose self-defence and demonstration of intelligence
in court wins commendation from the judge^ - are killers from (or
destined to belong to) society's "under-class." While their intelligence
is much more of a sneaky kind, not of a kind which makes them deserving
of sympathy, or which allows them to be perceived as "one of us" who
merely went off the rails, they are super-smart nevertheless. Dahmer -
he whose father was a Ph.D and who was enrolled at Ohio State but ends
up, at least as far as the collective class-consciousness is concerned,
in one of Milwaukee' s dodgier areas - is described by Don Davis as a
"near-genius" (56). Presumably in support of his assessment, Davis notes
that Dahmer's former army colleagues were so impressed by his ability to
"devour" books (some of his favorites being "children's classic fairy
tales of trolls and goblins") that they estimated his I.Q. at 145. Why
should we insist time after time that serial killers possess a level of
1 "Take care of yourself, young man. I say that to you sincerely. It's a
tragedy to this court to see such a total waste of humanity. You're a
bright young man. You’d have made a good lawyer. I'd loved to have you
practice in front of me. I bear you no animosity, believe me. You went
the wrong way, partner. Take care of yourself" (quoted in Wilson and
Seaman 282).
232
intelligence higher, often much higher than the rest of us? Is it just
to defend the failure of the police in catching these people? Or, when
intelligence is associated (incorrectly?) with "self-organization", just
to invalidate an insanity plea?
The presupposition of the serial killer's intelligence can
indicate, I suggest, elements of both estrangement and celebration.
Officer Dewey, rejecting the apparent motivelessness of the crimes in In
Cold Blood reasons thus: "The expert execution of the crimes was proof
enough that at least one of the pair commanded an immoderate amount of
coolheaded slyness, and was - must be - a person too clever to have
done such a deed without calculated motive" (Capote 103). Dewey's
reasoning points to a possible motive for this particular form of
representation - namely, that we identify them as intelligent in order
to reassure ourselves there must be a motive. While intelligence is
associated with rationality, and while we deny the possibility that
serial killers belong to certain cultural narratives, the inscription of
serial killers with intelligence serves to shield us from one of the
things we fear most: meaninglessness, a disruption in our models of
cause and effect, the behavioral non sequitur.
But it facilitates denial in another way. The intellectual serial
killer allows us to believe that the motive must be incomprehensible,
nothing we, we who do not read philosophy regularly, could understand.
We are reassured that there is meaning at the same time as being
reassured that we wouldn’t be able to understand it. If with our
inscription of serial killers as intelligent we provide for ourselves
233
the reassuring assumption they have a rationale for their actions (and
in the process enable them to be imprisoned rather than hospitalized on
the grounds that they are sane) we also estrange them by that
inscription, by that mark of "wise guy" (a term the FBI use to describe
Bundy), by the implicit celebration of America’s B- GPA. Jonathan
Dollimore identifies the suspicion of Wilde's commentators as stemming
from the belief that intellectuals have always been weird and prone to
do strange, uncivilized things:
Something informing these descriptions of Wilde and his art
is a fear of degeneration as conceived by writers of the
time. It was not just that degenerates were thought to be
intelligent and gifted; their intelligence manifested one of
the most disturbing paradoxes of the perverse: a vitiating
regression to the primitive from within an advanced cultural
sophistication. For these commentators Wilde represents both
a cultural 'decay' and a resurrection of 'pagan viciousness'
and 'primal errors'...What is simultaneously acknowledged
and denied is that 'wholesomeness' is not invaded from
without so much as corrupted from within. (Dollimore 241)
The gesture of elevating serial killers into the realm of cultural
sophistication - into a contemporary version of the aristocracy to which
the wicked Marquis belonged - can replay the gesture of the nineteenth-
century novel identified by Guy Le Gaufey, namely the figuring of
vampires as aristocrats and their pursuers as middle-class. In other
words, it is estrangement built on the valorization of the middle:
civilization is proud of that GPA and suspicious of those wise guys.
Serial killers are either aristocrats or peasants, but not from that
wide band of mediocrity in between.
However, as I have suggested earlier, from that band of mediocrity
come dreams of its transcendence. Wilson and Seaman note that "Crime -
particularly murder - produces the feeling of being 'beyond the pale'.
Case after case demonstrates that the 'self-esteem killer' copes with
this problem in a manner reminiscent of the Marquis de Sade; by telling
himself that, in the war against society, he is right and society is in
the wrong" (Wilson and Seaman 187). And discussing the case of Melvin
Rees who was executed in 1961, they suggest that "Rees was an
'intellectual' who, like the Moors murderer Ian Brady in the following
decade, made the decision to rape and kill on the grounds that
'everything is lawful'. He may therefore be regarded as one of the first
examples of the curious modern phenomenon, the 'high IQ killer" (188).
Perhaps with the Marquis de Sade and/or Nietzsche in mind, we associate
the desire to set oneself apart from society, to confront society with
one's individuality, to justify one's lawlessness, as a sign of high
intelligence. Deprived of "familiar" motive - sex, money - we assume the
killer must be on some kind of crusade, waging war on society for the
sake of an idea. When we construct the serial killer as someone who
struggles violently with society in order to assert his individuality,
intelligence is presumed. Our construction of the "high IQ killer" can
be a sign of our desire to figure the serial killer above and beyond
society, as someone who attempts to assert his freedom. It makes him
Byronic, or more exactly makes him related to the hero of every
Bildungsroman taught to every child: from Huck Finn to Holden Caulfield.
' The need to free oneself from the speciousness of modern society
strikes R J. Hollingdale, in his introduction to Penguin's edition of
Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ, as a reason to read
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Nietzsche: "everywhere in the active world today intelligence is on the
defensive; it has to fight to survive. For what characterizes the
present age, the present decade? An excess of emotion, a constant
stimulation of the emotions and a desire to have them stimulated
more..." (in Nietzsche 1988, 7). For Hollingdale, intelligence opposes
emotion and is antidotal to the sixties' decadence that surrounds him.2
And it is an opposition which is perhaps alive and well in the nineties,
an opposition which can explain our ascription of power to he who brings
the lifestyle and politics of the soft, sharing sixties to a violent
halt, he who is hard, impervious, above feeling. And when one considers
that traditionally it is a gendered opposition, it can appear even more
natural to presuppose that the male transcender of emotion, the male
victimizer of female "weakness", is of high intelligence, someone who
feels that his manhood/intelligence is threatened by the chaos and
shapelessness of emotion, someone who has "to fight to survive." In the
same way that we may attempt to describe high-brow serial killer movies
as art, we describe high-brow serial killers as the practitioners of an
art, as artists of crime, as thinkers, philosophers. And, aesthetics
being that discipline which confers the natural right of power to the
powerful (the political activity, in other words, of conferring
^ Hollingdale extends his argument that Nietzsche is "a protective
against this dissolution" by noting that "there has never in all history
been so much music ; it sometimes seems as if intelligence were being
dissolved in rhythm" (8).
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apoliticality), it just so happens that the serial killers we inscribe
most often with the powers of the aesthete are white, middle-class men.
A card in the cab of the "Yorkshire Ripper", Peter Sutcliffe, read
"In this truck is a man whose latent genius, if unleashed, would rock
the nation" (quoted in Wilson and Seaman 283). To ascribe genius is to
ascribe extraordinary natural ability, exalted power. It can be a major
factor in the construction of a figure whose power is to be regarded as
naturally ordained. It can explain the existence of the serial killer's
apparent hold over us. The ascription of super-intelligence can be
instrumental in figuring the serial killer as someone of transcendental
power in possession of the world's wondrous secrets. It is a quality
which helps to construct him as someone to be feared and revered.
Lecter's particular intelligence, his ability to see into the lives and
histories of others, amounts to a transcendence of his material
surroundings. This special power of being able to have insight not only
into their own crimes but those of other super-killers whom they have
never met is one with which we seem particularly keen to make a part of
our serial killer construction. In the manner of Vanity Fair (see page
t.
2) two English newspapers (Daily Mirror, Daily Express. 17 June 1993)
- framed the story of the killer of five gay men as a re-enactment of The
Silence of the Lambs, that is, describing police intentions to interview
Michael Lupo and Dennis Nilsen with the hope of providing a unique
perspective on the mind of the killer. (The police discounted the
newspapers' version of events). Once caught, though physically
imprisoned, the serial killer we like to dream of possesses a mind
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enabling him to remain free as long as he has others (or rather their
stories) to feed off, a mind possessing power over matter.
Jane Caputi remarks on the tendency to justify the representation
of the "all powerful, ubiquitous, even supernatural" killer by referring
to his ability to avoid detection. She quotes a reporter covering the
Ted Bundy case as describing Bundy as having a "preternatural ability to
manipulate, a capacity whose effect was akin to magic." "It was this
power", the reporter continues, "that made him such an effective killer
and so impossible to track down" (Caputi 38). Arguing that "Such
assertions only glamorize and mystify the sex killer while distracting
from a realistic assessment of the actual conditions of sex crime",
Caputi brings matters down to earth by noting that "logic suggests that
a lone man moving from place to place and killing only strangers would
leave few clues to his identity and remain well beyond the scope of
traditional detection" (38).
The myth of super-intelligence (and/or supernatural ghostliness),
however, survives. With the ascription of intelligence we confer a sense
of freedom. The serial killer is figured as desiring to free himself
from social constraints, and especially those pertaining to sex, and one
way, for him, for us, to justify that sexual "freedom” is to
intellectualize it. To ascribe powers of intelligence to the serial
killer can have the effect that Gallop sees in Sade's conflation of
pornography and philosophy: "The result of this mixture is that each
undercuts the other. The brute impact of sex and violence is softened,
for they can be taken seriously, can be studied and interpreted, as
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acting out certain philosophical questions (for example: the reality of
the existence of others, the arbitrary nature of morality)" (Gallop 2-
3). Intellectualized as a demonstration of one's disregard for social
norms, as a radical gesture, that which is figured as "sexual freedom"
can be a sign of the intellectual elite, a sign of power. Fidelity is
for the conforming masses. The high IQ serial rapist/killer is
constructed in the context of the myth which associates intellectual
elitism with sexual freedom, a freedom which can be confused with or
take the form of sexual conquering. Haunting our serial killer
construction lingers a Sadean dream in which images of violence and sex
are layered upon each other, a layering justified by the assumed
complexity of the mind behind it.
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(ii) The Serial Killer as Warrior Knight
Perhaps it is to be expected that a culture which celebrates the
beauty and nobility of violence should have among its popular heroes
those who satisfy a nostalgia for a particular version of the warrior
knight: motivated by a higher goal, courteous yet unconstrained by the
court, the perpetrator of extreme violence when he feels his dignity and
rights threatened. The dream of transcendence is often expressed by the
discourse of chivalry, and it is a discourse which is spoken with equal
ease by society's "defenders" and its "others." Elliot Leyton argues
that "with varying degrees of explicitness multiple murderers see
themselves as soldiers: small wonder then that they feel neither remorse
for their victims, nor regret for launching their bloody crusades"
(Leyton 23). For Don Davis, Dahmer' s victims were not murdered but were
"conquered" (Davis 210), and Wilson and Seaman in The Serial Killers,
speculating on the the German Robert Bilden's motive for raping "the
innocent and prudish" Tina Schuster, suggest that the "ultimate pleasure
was to rape a shy virgin" and note that "it must be recognized that this
element of 'conquest' is present in all male sexuality" (156). If serial
killers see themselves as crusading warriors it is a view we share.
References to the warrior knight, or use of language that we usually
associate with him and his world, can be examples of history
"innocently" being used to describe a modern phenomenon, but, like the
use of "man the hunter" to justify man's violent pursuit of what popular
jargon constructs as female "prey", it can have the effect of
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naturalizing and normalizing the serial killer's acts. And in a world
full of role-models for the male loner - the gunslinger, the road-movie
transient hero, the vigilante cop - the warrior knight can represent a
transcendence of all that American vulgarity, can represent a male loner
with class.
Elizabeth Young points out that in a movie in which names resonate
with meaning, Hannibal Lecter's first name can invoke the figure of the
male warrior, the male invader [Young n.28], but it is also easy to make
sense of him by seeing him more specifically as a contemporary
manifestation of the figure of the knight described above. What
separates his violence from that of others, and what separates his
relations with Starling from those of other men - police officers
especially - is his courtliness. His violence occurs in the name of
"courtesy." He is the "killer connoisseur", as People Weekly describes
him (12 Aug. 1991: 36). Sophisticated murderers and cannibals should
apparently be distinguished from their unsophisticated counterparts. The
"sleek and serene" (People Weekly. 1 Apr. 1991: 64) Lecter is the
defender of all that he and we value against "discourtesy", that which
is constructed as vulgar, low-down. He encourages Miggs, a fellow
prisoner, to commit suicide after this prime example of Mailer's
category of "punks and snitcheshas thrown semen over Starling - "I
would not have that happen to you. Discourtesy is unspeakably ugly to
me" (24). Like Ed Gein, supposedly one of the "real-life" killers used
3 a category defined in opposition to the "brave” (see Dollimore 15).
241
as models for the killers in Demme's movie and about whom a neighbor
remembers "X never heard him tell a dirty joke or use a dirty word"
(People Weekly. 1 Apr. 1991: 66), Lecter answers discourtesy with his
own unspeakability, but returns, unaffected to the serenity of his
civilized world and its ordered, well-chosen words.
When Starling first meets Lecter, "Courtesy was implicit in her
distance and her tone" (Harris 1991, 14). Later, after her questioning
momentarily loses her standing in his eyes, he tells her: "You were
doing fine, you'd been courteous and receptive to courtesy" (18). But
despite Lecter's portrayal of her as a bourgeois aspirant of
sophistication, we watch her winning his respect by her treating him as
a gentleman, and when he escapes we and Clarice are assured that she
will not be one of his future victims: "I have no plans to call on you
Clarice, the world being more interesting with you in it . Be sure to
extend me the same courtesy" (351). In terms of class, Lecter sees
himself as an one of life's gentlefolk, superior to the provincialism of
much of the police force. In the movie's final scene, as he strolls down
a busy Caribbean street and towards his next meal, we see that he has
dressed for dinner and his appearance resembles that of a shabby but
elegantly attired English aristocrat. Clarice hovers between Lecter's
world of courtesy and being a distinctly (nouvelle) bourgeois heroine
who responds positively to Crawford’s middle-class concerns: "He wanted
her to do well. For Starling, that beat courtesy every time" (31). What
emerges is a partnership between Lecter’s "nobility" and Starling's
version of bourgeoisness and The Silence of the Lambs can represent a
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shift in the construction of beast and saviour in class terms from the
model Le Gaufey identifies. In Demme’s movie the partnership between
bourgeois and aristocrat (a partnership cemented by hints of a
heterosexual attraction) is defined against the "lower classes"
(represented by Buffalo's Bill's "sexual perversion", by Chiltern's
lasciviousness, by Miggs' unspeakable behavior).
Watching The Silence of the Lambs we have difficulty in conflating
the opposition courtesy/discourtesy with the opposition of self/other,
at least the opposition in which self stands (up) for the Law. There are
courteous serial killers and discourteous policemen. There are courteous
and discourteous serial killers. Joan Ullman points (beyond the movies)
to a particular representation of Dahmer which distinguishes his
courtesy from the discourtesy of his victims. Referring to the emphasis
placed by expert trial witnesses on Dahmer' s lack of sadism or hate
directed against gays, she notes "Milwaukee's mass murderer appeared to
be a squeamish, picky - and gentlemanly - homosexual: a reluctant
practitioner with refined sensibilities (as shown by his preference for
predominantly one-way, non-reciprocal, "light sex"). This made Dahmer
sound considerably superior to the brutish, mostly black bathhouse and
gay-bar pick-ups and/or victims" (Ullman 30).
The same distinction between those who are courteous and those who
are not, irrespective of their criminality, is made at The House of
Representatives Hearing. An FBI officer compares two rapists. Of the
second case, he says:
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In the twelve years that he raped, he never physically
struck or beat a victim. If he encountered resistance, he
would flee. In police parlance, he would be referred to as a
'gentleman rapist'. He was not profane or derogatory in his
verbal behavior. He relied on his presence rather than
physical force to subdue and control his victims, and
engaged in vaginal assault only. (House of Heps. 41)
The "rapist in case number one", he continues, "enjoyed hurting his
victims, while the second rapist had no motivation to physically harm
them. Investigation determined that their personalities were as opposite
as their intent and method of operation” (42). The second rapist, then,
is described as "gentlemanly" for committing "vaginal assault only", and
he is to be considered at odds with someone who enjoys "physically
harming" his victims. "Physical harm", it seems, is to be distinguished
from "vaginal assault": a distinction which presumably makes sense in a
society of gentlemen who know it is discourteous to strike or beat the
fairer sex. Discussing the stereotype of the "sex beast", Cameron and
Frazer suggest that "The sex beast is either someone outwardly
repulsive...or else he is a latter-day Jekyll and Hyde, concealing his
depravity beneath a facade of respectability and even charm" (35). At
first glance the references to gentlemanliness and chivalry in regard to
rapists and serial killers can appear to be examples of this second kind
of stereotyping. But the "gentleman rapist" of police parlance is
different in that the rapist is considered "gentlemanly" while the
assault is taking place. For the FBI Officer who describes the second
rapist as committing "vaginal assault only", what matters in his
distinction between the two rapists is the level of harm beyond or
gratuitous to the "sexual” attack. It is a distinction which can help
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to play down the abnormality of "vaginal assault", help to normalize the
idea of the female body as something which gentlemen are free to
conquer.
The link between male violence, imagery of the chivalric knight
and of the courteous gentleman is explored in Klaus Theweleit's two
volume Male Fantasies. The book's visual material frequently presents
the Nazi male in chivalric garb, and can function as an ironic
commentary on the text which is largely a psycho-analytical attempt to
understand the "Nazi mind". With Freud's notion of the ego (as a mental
projection of the surface of the body) apparently in mind, Theweleit
argues that references in Nazi literature to "body-armor" (his metaphor)
can provide a literary context to the iconographical representation of
the SS or Freikorps (private armies of former imperial soldiers, anti
communist youth, and drifters organized in the post-World War I Germany)
wearing suits of armor. The references he is mostly concerned about
describe the German soldier as a "figure of steel", in possession of a
body so hard that he is impermeable to external threats whether they be
in the form of Bolshevism, the Bourgeoisie, or Women. Anson Rabinbach
and Jessica Benjamin, in their foreword to the second volume, discuss
this chivalric imagery: "In this volume the armored organization
provides the key to understanding the emotional underpinnings of fascist
militarism. The self is mechanized through a variety of mental and
physical procedures: military drill, countenance, training, operations
which Foucault identified as 'techniques of the self" (in Theweleit
1989, xvii). And in her foreword to the first volume, Barbara Ehrenreich
245
notes the relevance of Theweleit's work to our contemporary world: "As
Theweleit says, the point of understanding fascism is not only 'because
it might 'return again'but because it is already implicit in the
daily relationships of men and women...I think here of the man who feels
a 'normal' level of violence towards women” (in Theweleit 1987, xv) .
Theweleit's work is useful, I suggest, in shedding light on our
dressing of some our monsters in chivalric attire. That which gives
meaning to contemporary versions of the warrior knight are their
opposites, and the serial killer's victims can be naturalized as such by
the warrior knight construction. In The Serial Killers Wilson and Seaman
suggest that "in spite of enormous changes in our sexual attitudes,
modern man' s reaction to a pretty girl is in most respects exactly like
that of the troubadours or the knights of the Round Table: she is an
unknown country, a sovereign state, that he would love to be allowed to
explore" (Wilson and Seaman 298). To figure the serial killer as on a
crusade is also to figure his victims as entities to be conquered. The
armored self of the serial killer can be indicative of a dream related
to the dreams of Theweleit's fascists, indicative of a culture in which
the normality of violence against women or the idea of women is
questioned infrequently. It can be an image which can stand for the
"strength" of the past against the "weakness" of modernity. Against the
chaos, impurity and monstrosity of a culture of mass communication - a
culture made up of individuals who experience what Baudrillard suggests
is the "state of terror proper to the schizophrenic: too great a
proximity of everything, the unclean promiscuity of everything which
246
touches, invests, and penetrates without resistance, with no halo of
private protection, not even his own body, to protect him
anymore...bereft of every scene, open to everything in spite of himself,
living in the greatest confusion" (Baudrillard 132-33) - the serial
killer violently asserts his individuality and physical presence in a
world gone soft.
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(iii) A Man's Man; Jeffrey Dahmer and the Dream of Masculinity
The prison society described by Jack Henry Abbot in In The Belly
of The Beast - a collection of letters to Norman Mailer about Abbot's
experiences in prison and the justice system - is a hierarchy structured
by the power to subordinate "sexually." Once power relations have been
settled, the dominated are figured as female:
In prison, if I take a punk, she is mine. He is like a
slave, a chattel slave. It is the custom that no one
addresses her directly. He cleans my cell, my clothing and
runs errands for me. Anything I tell him to do, he must do -
exactly the way a wife is perceived in some marriages even
today. But I can sell her or lend her out or give her away
at any time. Another prisoner can take her from me if he can
dominate me. (author's italics; Abbot 80)
In a society in which there are no women, the idea of "woman” is very
much alive. Abbot's mixing of pronouns displays a disregard for the sex
of the prisoner he describes. It is the role the prisoner plays which is
important, a role which stands for weakness and passivity, a role which
represents the feminine:
One of the things that takes place in a prison riot is this:
guards are sexually dominated, usually sodomized..-what is
clear is that when a man sodomizes another to express his
contempt, it demonstrates only his contempt for woman, not
man. The normal attitude among men in society is that it is
a great shame and dishonor to have experienced what it feels
like to be a woman. (78)
According to Abbot, the state's purpose in imprisoning him was to
inflict upon him such dishonor: "I was even told by the pigs who
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transported me to the prison that I was being sent there to be reduced
to a punk, to be shorn of my manhood" (79).
The assumption of male and female roles in man-to-man
relationships outside of prison is the subject of much critical debate,
debate which often focuses on the question of whether such role-playing
is subversive by de-naturalizing gender. Leo Bersani argues:
...the gay male parody of a certain femininity... is both a
way of giving vent to the hostility toward women that
probably afflicts every male (and which male heterosexuals
have of course expressed in infinitely nastier and more
effective ways) and could paradoxically be thought of as
helping to deconstruct that image for women themselves...The
gay male bitch desublimates and desexualizes a type of
femininity glamorized by movie stars, whom he thus lovingly
assassinates with his style, (quoted in Dollimore 321)
Jonathan Dollimore reads Bersani here as conceding "a potentially
subversive dimension to camp, but one inseparable from a more
problematic and ambivalent relation to both femininity and women." He
adds: "Of the subversive claims for gay machismo, Bersani is even more
sceptical, since he regards it as involving not a parodic repudiation of
straight machismo, but a profound respect for it" (321). According to
Dollymore's reading of Bersani, ideas of masculinity and femininity do
not necessarily lose much in translation from heterosexual to gay
relationships: power is represented by the masculine (and vice versa),
and weakness by the feminine (and vice versa).
For Dennis Nilsen, killer of men, Dahmer offers a brutal
demonstration of masculinity and femininity transcending the
homosexual/heterosexual divide. Speculating that Dahmer is "buzzing
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with excitement and power (his heart rate is pounding at maximum speed)
as he 'lives out' his omnipotence'", he says that:
...it is significant that a common view of the Stone Age
depicts a potent male clubbing a sexually desirable female
into unconsciousness and 'wedding' her by an act of
copulation with her passive body. Here we have the
ingredients of power/violence rendering the desired person
into a state of extreme passivity followed by sexual release
for the conqueror. It is the opposite poles of gross action
and gross passivity that attract. This is the constant in
the serial-killing conundrum whether the victim is male,
female or child, (quoted in Masters 1991, 186)
Despite the shock to the stereotype of masculinity as the preserve of
male heterosexuals, the conflation of oppositions powerful/weak and
masculine/ feminine occurs in the representation of the "homosexual"
Dahmer's relationship with his victims no differently from the
representation of "heterosexual" killers. While we, like Nilsen, can
only speculate about what drove Dahmer, we assume masculinity's presence
and femininity's absence in Dahmer's fantasy-world. In our attempt to
make sense of Dahmer, he is given the male role: he kills to prove his
manhood. One commentator speculates that Dahmer hates any male "more
homosexual" than he, a phrase we would commonly read as "more feminine"
(Masters 1991, 189). (Abbot refers to this reading thus: "The majority
of prisoners I have known - something like ninety percent - express
sexual interest in their own sex. I hesitate to call this 'homosexual'
because American society recognizes only the passive homosexual - the
one who plays the female role - as being a 'homosexual'" (Abbot 80)). It
is also noted that "It has been suggested that [Dahmer] is a homosexual
by default - that his sexual orientation was not a preference but a
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compensation for the impossibility of having a relationship with a
woman..." (Masters 1991, 189). From the perspective which sees Dahmer's
victims as women-substitutes, Dahmer's behavior can be explained by the
same paradigm that Abbot describes as relevant to all-male prison
society: whatever the sex of the player of the woman's role, masculinity
is realized by that player's subordination.
The way we make sense of Dahmer' s murders can indicate how
accustomed we are to figure murder in terms of a masculine idealism, to
ascribing the role of woman to the weak, the oppressed, the victim, to
regarding male-female politics in terms of a violent hierarchy. The
ascription of power and weakness with reference to gender is perhaps
most obvious in war. We witness, for example, the expression of the
domination of women as power with the rape and torture of women in the
occupied territories of the former Yugoslavia. With victorious forces
expressing their power by the rape and murder of women, how should we
interpret war itself except as the conflict between competing
masculinities? Identifying the connection between war and the oppression
of women, Klaus Theweleit sees fascism as "an extreme example of the
political polarization of gender" (in Theweleit 1989, xix). No doubt the
example of warfare and Abbot's description of power in prison are
extreme examples, and we can comfort ourselves by arguing that they
occur when society as we know it has broken down, or does not exist. But
power as masculinity, power as the domination of women or the idea of
women, is a meaning we carry around with us, a meaning with which we
make sense of our world, of our lives, of other people's lives. The
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silence which surrounds a male serial killer's gender might have less to
do with a conspiratorial patriarchy and more to do with the received
notion of what power is, a notion with which we are so familiar that its
construction's history can be forgotten.
While male serial killers are represented as having the aura of a
neutral, ungendered, asocial power, the acts of female serial killers
like Christina Falling (who killed the children she was meant to baby
sit) represent a more perverse, strange, and especially evil form of
power. While our ideas of masculinity and femininity may transcend the
maps we draw separating homosexuality from heterosexuality, they fail to
transcend their physical embodiments. The ascription of "male" power to
the serial killer does not proceed unproblematically when the serial
killer is female. For a society accustomed to perceiving murder as a
form of male power, the presence of female serial killers is a paradox,
is considered unnatural and threatening in a way that male serial
killers are not. And leaving questions of gender unasked when
considering the powers of male serial killers and overtly gendering the
powers of female serial killers replays our selectivity in more benign
circumstances. As I have noted previously, serial killers are often
described as "playing god", as possessing godly powers over life and
death. While we talk of His powers, of God our Father, we rarely trouble
ourselves with the gender-specificity of Him. The gender of the serial
killer is played down, unspoken in the same way that God's gender, while
assumed to be male, is unspoken, goes without saying. God’s power is
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figured as neutral and natural. And so too, it seems, is the power of
the male serial killer.
Speculating, dreaming, imagining, we, we men, make up stories
about serial killers, about what is natural about them. While somehow
the monstrosity is not always ours, we are evidently content to make the
monster one of us. Not always bothering to reinvent masculinity in a way
which unambiguously distinguishes its "power" from the "power" that we
perceive the serial killer possessing, our monster is a man's man.
Staring back at us in the picture we paint is a masculinity which
remains relatively untampered with, a masculinity whose form of power is
unquestioned. Might our automatic ascription of machismo to the serial
killer not only be the result of habit, but as symptomatic of, to use
Dollimore's words, "a profound respect for it", a profound respect, that
is, for what machismo is meant to represent? Might our figuring Dahmer's
male-male violence and murder in male-female terms be another indication
of the serial killer figure functioning as a kind of wish-fulfillment,
as a hero of male fantasy? In order to answer those questions perhaps we
should describe what it is that we see our serial killers possessing
which gives them the "right" to take the male lead in our stories.
Serial killers, we say, desire empowerment through transcendence,
through the reaching of a condition defined as ideal by it being free of
materiality. The dream of transcendence that we see is both a dream of
transcending materiality to omniscient spirituality, and a dream of
transcending society to untainted and liberated individuality. The two
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dreams merge in the figuration of society in material/ corporeal terms.
Mary Douglas says:
Any culture is a series of related structures which comprise
social forms, values, cosmology, the whole of knowledge and
through which all experience is mediated..-The rituals enact
the form of social relations and in giving these relations
visible expression they enable people to know their own
society. The rituals work upon the body politic through the
symbolic medium of the physical body. (Douglas 128)
In the dream of transcendence that physical body is female. The female
body's negation symbolizes transcendence of society, and the
transcendence of society symbolizes the transcendence of the female
body. When the social body is figured as female, criminality can be an
affirmation of one's masculinity. Transcendence is hardness,
imperviousness, strength; sociability and tolerance are associated with
softness, weakness. Former Milwaukee Police Chief Harold Breier - quoted
as saying "You can take community policing and stick it in your
ear...When I was chief, we were relating to the good people and we were
relating to the other people too: we were throwing those people in the
can" (The Washington Post. 16 Oct. 1991: A3) - is described in a Los
Angeles Times article on the police's handling of the Dahmer case as a
"tough-as-nails administrator under whose term relations with the black
community deteriorated badly" (27 Jan. 1992: A10). Why this association
of toughness with apparent intolerance, with a willingness to construct
simultaneously the idea of and condemn "the other people"?
In Capote's non-fiction novel we enter Perry's dream: "It was
after one of these beatings...that the parrot appeared, arrived while he
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slept, a bird 'taller than Jesus, yellow like a sunflower', a warrior-
angel who blinded the nuns with its beak, fed upon their eyes,
slaughtered them as they 'pleaded for mercy', then so gently lifted
[Perry], enfolded him, winged him away to 'paradise'" (93). In this
apparent re-working of Nietzsche's depiction of "we aeronauts of the
spirit" (Nietzsche 1910, 575) - or in this nightmarish vision of Sesame
Street - the warrior-angel is an avenger of the evil women who made a
hell of Perry's childhood, and can symbolize the romanticized
(masculine) world running counter to the earthly (feminine) society of
small-town America, a romanticized world to which Perry wishes to
belong. By contrast, is the dream of The Silence of the Lambs' Jame Gumb
(alias Buffalo Bill), someone who, unlike Hannibal Lecter, manages to
get the dream of transcendence confused in a way which alienates him
from the movie's viewers. Near the movie’s conclusion Buffalo Bill gazes
at Clarice through night-vision glasses and dreams of having hair like
hers, dreams that his efforts of becoming a woman could result in an
impression as beautiful. Gumb's final dreams are of becoming Clarice.
Instead of transcending female corporeality and obtaining the
omniscience of male spirituality, Gumb's dream is to transcend his male
body and become a female version of the warrior-angel.^
4 Some critics have praised Demme's movie for centering power with the
female lead. The powers that Clarice putatively possesses are those fit
for an earthly warrior-angel. After she has killed Gumb, the snow-white
poodle she carries from his house is easily mistaken for one of the
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Elizabeth Young refers to "criticism that focuses on [The Silence
of the Lambs's] formal status as the unique achievement of cult-auteur
Jonathan Demme's attempts to differentiate it from those lowbrow serial
films about serial murder known as 'slasher' movies." "But this
approach," she says, "rather than sealing off an aesthetic realm from
the 'other' of mass culture, only succeeds in registering art's unstable
affinity with that other..." (5). Tania Modleski remarks on the
"tendency of critics and theorists to make mass culture into the "other"
of whatever, at any given moment, they happen to be championing - and
moreover, to denigrate that other primarily because it allegedly
provides pleasure to the consumer" (Modleski 157). The "other" to the
serial killer construction is also "mass culture", that culture to which
the masses belong, the masses who seek merely "pleasure", the masses
who, as Andreas Huyssen has argued, are figured as female. The serial
killer represents a thrill compared to "mere" pleasure, is the wrecker
of "domesticity", is the bad to the masses' "specious good."5
Without our particular unspoken assumption of the nature of power
we would find it difficult to make sense of a large range of texts, both
"academic" and "popular." And the romanticized world of the chosen and
transcendent few includes not only those criminals whose higher goal is
lambs whose silence she has been waiting for, and for a moment she can
be our (guardian) angel too.
5 Lionel Trilling's term: "The Fate of Pleasure: Wordsworth to
Dostoevsky", Partisan Review, Summer 1963): 182.
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the defence of the "good" (those defenders of society who break
society's rules in order carry out their pledge), but also those
criminals who seek a higher goal in itself. Andre Gide describes murder
as "the culminating act gratuite that liberates man from the determinism
of the material universe. . .the point at which - irremediably - man opts
for his own freedom" (from Les Caves du Vatican, quoted in Coe 181). In
Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead there can be little to choose
between the noble warrior-seeking initiation into male adulthood through
violence and the violent criminal seeking escape from the constraints of
society. Mailer, in his preface to Jack Henry Abbot's In the Belly of
the Beast, divides the prison population into, on the one hand, those
"juvenile delinquents who are drawn to crime as a positive experience -
because it is more exciting, more meaningful, more mysterious, more
transcendental, more religious than any other experience they have
known" (pxii-xiii) and, on the other, those "those petty criminals who
are not fundamentally attached to such existential tests of courage and
violence, for whom crime is the wrong business, prison is not a problem"
(xiii). Mailer argues that "the social practice of mixing these two
kinds of criminals together is a disaster, an explosion. The timid
become punks and snitches, the brave turn cruel” (xiii). In the prison
world described by Abbot "punks and snitches" embody the idea of Woman.
But there is a divide between Mailer's preface and Abbot's letters: the
latter describe a world defined by male power, the former comes to close
to prescribing one. The divide is noted by the prisoner (figured by
Mailer as belonging to the "brave" category, those seeking religion and
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transcendence through crime) when he attempts to deflate Mailer's
romanticism: "My life is not a 'saga' and I resent your using the term
like that. I do not feel 'heroic’" (22). Our serial killer
constructions, our exciting, mysterious, transcendental monsters, our
warring, questing monsters, can resemble the hero Mailer constructs from
Abbot's letters. In such cases their heroism and power is dependant on
their transcendence of the law, society, weakness and impurity: concepts
which are implicitly and sometimes explicitly gendered.
For the male loner figure, transcendence is also silence: the
freedom and purity which comes with an existence untainted by language.
Like Dahmer, who, according to former class-mates, remained tight-lipped
about himself but was forever seeking attention, the valorized loner
figure says, "pay attention to what I do, not what I say." Figured as
extra-textual, and almost extra-terrestrial, beyond the reach of normal
man, the loner in all his forms exists in a world of unspeakableness: an
immaterial world beyond the (female) body of language and the text;
above all, an idealized masculine world. The man's man is represented
perhaps by risk-taking heroes such as Tom Cruise's character in Top Gun
: reaching for the skies in one scene, simultaneously ignoring the laws
of society and the presence of women in another by barging in to the
Ladies' Bathroom in order to speak to his prospective girlfriend. He is
the hero of road-movies which, according to Cameron and Frazer,
celebrate "the vast spaces of the continent, being on the move without
any ultimate goal" and "a masculine ethos of sexual conquest and random
violence" (Cameron and Frazer 162). And perhaps he is represented by a
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common construction of the serial killer, he who flouts "the law with
impunity", who exhibits "an antisocial trait", who needs "to seek
thrills that makes criminal risk-taking a high" (from a New York Times
article speculating about the nature of Dahmer's motivation). Like the
"Tooth Fairy" of Harris's Red Dragon, desiring social acceptance and the
company of women in one moment, violently asserting his independence
from both in another (and like the man in our modern nightmare, using
technology to shut himself off from reality and at the same time
treating his television or computer screen as a window on the world),
the celebrated outsider is also the voyeur. And perhaps we can describe
these manifestations of manhood, these states of being which value
simultaneously transcendence of women and society, in terms usually
reserved for those we perceive as not yet old enough to see beyond their
selves and their immediate environment: "Despite his cool exterior,
inside he is like a poor child on a cold night looking through a window
at the warmth of a family gathered by a fire” is William H. Reid's
analogy for that mostly male phenomenon, the psychopath (quoted in The
New York Times. 7 July 1987. C2).
To distinguish the spiritual from the material, the ideal from the
imperfect, has been described as a metaphysical gesture. Sadean critics
often describe Sade as challenging such oppositions. Jane Gallop, for
example, argues that:
...the move to contaminate philosophy, whether in Sade's
mode of scandal and sensationalism or in the current
critical mode of carefully considered questioning of
philosophy's a priori ideology, is an attack on the
hierarchical distinction, underlying Western metaphysics
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since Plato, between the ideal...and the material. Modern
continental philosophy, typified by a current running
through Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger and Jacques
Derrida, strives continually to undermine that entrenched
hierarchy, to loosen its hold. (Gallop 3)
Simone de Beauvoir, however, identifies in the writings of Sade a
hedonism which "ends in ataraxia, which confirms the paradoxical
relation between sadism and stoicism. The individual's promised
happiness is reduced to indifference...With a severity similar to
Kant's, and which has its source in the same puritan tradition, Sade
conceives the free act only as an act free of all feeling. If it were to
obey emotional motives, it would make us Nature’s slaves again and not
autonomous subjects" (Beauvoir 72). Instead of destabilizing the
distinction between ideal and material, the actions of our heirs to
Sade, our intellectual and philosophizing serial killers, are
represented as strengthening it. Their violence is against the material
not in its name, a violence which seeks to negate all that is considered
impure, a violence, in other words, involving the destruction of the
feminine. It is depicted as the fulfillment of the dream of
indifference, of the murder of a sex.
A characteristic of the serial killer which shows us they should
be given the masculine role is their putative desire for control,
"sexual" or otherwise. "These people are the most controlled people you
can imagine", says Park Dietz (Newsweek. 5 Aug. 1991: 41). That we
empower the serial killer is perhaps due to the entrenched view of what
power is, and while there are many qualities that we associate with
power, generally power is synonymous with control, control of people, of
our environment, our lives. It is central to our definition of ourselves
as sane, conscious beings. It is the central factor in the judgment of
legal sanity: Dietz, witness for the prosecution in the Dahmer trial,
pointed to "Dahmer's capacity to exert control as an indicator of his
sanity and premeditation" (Norris 1992, 9/10)^; George Palermo, also
giving expert witness at the trial, denied Dahmer was psychotic and/or
legally insane and suggested that Dahmer "is an organized, nonsocial,
lust murderer...[who] is driven by obsessive fantasies of power over
others" (quoted in Schwartz 207). The court, emphasizing the con in
control, finds Dahmer sane for "cold-blooded planning for sexual
satisfaction" as Michael McCann, prosecuting attorney, described it (on
ABC World News. 15 Feb. 1992), for proving Dahmer was "a coldly
calculating monster" (Washington Post. 31 Jan. 92: A3). This is contrary
to the reasoning of one of his victim's family members - "This is how
you act when you are out of control" (Maury Povich. 28 Sept. 1992) - and
to the opinion of Brian Masters who argues that "the very fact that Jeff
Dahmer held his murderousness in check for nine years testifies to the
intensity of his fight to control and not be controlled" (Masters 1993,
199), and that "one may make sane sequential moves towards an insane and
inconsequential purpose" (205). With regards to sanity, the law is
unconcerned with what one wants to do, unconcerned with the method of
6 with Dahmer and his Defence admitting he knew "right from wrong", the
question of premeditation was the only factor under consideration in his
insanity trial.
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control or what one seeks to control, only with whether one is
responsible for what one does. As the court finds that his acts
demonstrate a "self-control that proves he could have stopped taking
lives at any point he chose" (The New York Times. 15 Feb. 1992: 10)
there is no questioning on the part of the law of that desire to be in
control, no questioning of the sanity of that desire, and a rejection of
the idea that "hypervigilant premeditation is actually an integral part
of the insanity" (Norris 1992, 278).
From the two categories the FBI have used to divide serial
killers, "organized" and "disorganized”, it is the "positive" category
that has come to mean the "true" serial killer, the one inspiring the
most interest. What makes the construction remarkable - what separates
it from the descriptions of society's monsters offered by discourses
previously in power - is its lack of estrangement: the serial killer is
a sane, sober adult doing what he wants to do, in control of his
actions. It is the desire for control which perhaps best characterizes
the serial killer, that which propels him towards another killing. For
the serial killer, like a pre-modern caught up in a postmodern world,
murder is closure without final closure, an ending which signals the end
by directing him to new beginnings. It is a desire which can never be
fully satisfied, a desire which apparently brings only the need to kill
again in order to give another fleeting sense of control. Control is
perceived to be both a sign of normality and of monstrosity, perceived
to belong to the histories of self and of other. In the process it is
something which assumes a neutral, unquestionable, quality, assumes the
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aura of reality, something the victims of that control - those people
who are subsequently figured as without power - are denied. The sister
of one of Dahmer's victims notes that "[people] just have the impression
that all these boys were gay and they came from dysfunctional families,
[that] they were no good to society” (Maury Povich. 4 Feb. 1992). As she
suggests, when we hear about a victim we can be guilty of jumping to
conclusions about his or her identity, of readily constructing
victimhood out of those things we consider weak: homosexuality, a
"dysfunctional" family. And they are things which have a history of
being defined as weak owing to our positioning them opposite
masculinity. The victim's sister explains that her brother "wasn't
gay...he was a man and nothing but a man." The "reality" of being in
control is inscribed with the name of masculinity
We are all familiar with the ability to deny the reality of the
victims of violence. In Dahmer's trial it was demonstrated by
psychiatrists called to give expert testimony, their discourse
replicating rather than merely describing Dahmer's putative
objectification of his victims:
The killing was the unintended consequence of the drilling...
the taking-of-life issue...
Dismembering was a disposal problem...
The drugging [was done] to satisfy his sexual need for a not-fully
cooperative partner...
Death was an unintended by-product of his efforts to create a
zombie...
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The drilling enterprise.•.was not sadistic... it was a realistic
attempt to disable, but not to kill...
The disemboweling...[was] the most efficient way of handling all
the remains, which only served an administration...
(quoted in Ullman 28)
While Dahmer remains silent his legal sanity, his power of self-control,
is articulated by this sanitized language, this language of laudable
self-control. Control of the self evidently necessitates erasure of the
other.
In Dahmer's case, as I have suggested, this paradigm in clearly
represented in terms of gender. It is Dahmer's "masculine" self that he
seeks to control and it is a "female" other that he constructs and seeks
to erase. And the Dahmer we then see is someone radically selfish, lost
in his own world, in possession of a self with no other and therefore no
meaning, someone whose has destroyed his sense of difference and
consequently destroyed his own sense of self. Literature gives us
several examples of violent loners who take radical individualism to its
logical conclusion, of those who, in rejecting society and difference,
can only turn on themselves. For Truman Capote's Ferry, transcendence
and freedom is death, and being lifted by the wings of his fantasy
yellow bird will not occur until he hangs. For Bataille "the sovereignty
of Sade's character's marks them for a course leading to the 'definitive
silence' (a solitary rigor, unmediated self-destruction, an heroic
code)...'' (Gallop 13). In our books and our movies the deaths of such
characters can represent a release from a troubled and often violent
relationship with society ands its laws, a release to omnipotence.
In the stories we tell of such characters and of those framed as
their real-life counterparts, power (in terms of a freedom gained by the
erasure of the other) and meaninglessness go together. For Hegel: "The
sole and only work and deed accomplished by universal freedom is...death
- a death that achieves nothing, embraces nothing within its grasp...It
is thus the most coldblooded and meaningless death of all, with no more
significance than cleaving a head of cabbage or swallowing a draught of
water" (from Phenomenology of Mind, quoted in Gallop 38). And for Jack
Henry Abbott, the apparent freedom gained from a total escape from
difference is similarly death, but death for the other and for the
self. He notes that solitary confinement leads to pure abstraction, that
every stage in the confinement process removes the prisoner "from
experience and narrows it down to only the experience of himself" (Abbot
50): "The concept of death is simple: it is when a living thing no
longer entertains experience...So when a man is taken farther away from
experience, he is being taken to his death" (51). In the prison world
described by Abbot, a world structured by competitive masculinity, the
ultimate power - possessed by the state - is the power to enforce
another to pursue to the end the narrative of masculinity. It is an end
where the feminine has no meaning. Stephen Heath has argued that given
the cultural context of patriarchy, any act which fails to take
difference into account, which seeks the certainty of its oneness, is
implicitly gendered as masculine. Although Lacan is so often concerned
with sexual difference there is, says Heath, an assuredness, an
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indifference to whom he might be addressing and it is this indifference
which is:
...finally masculine, not because of some conception of
theory as male but because in the last resort any discourse
which fails to take account of the problem of sexual
difference in its enunciation and address will be, within a
patriarchal order, precisely indifferent, a reflection of
male domination. It might be added, moreover...that where a
discourse appeals directly to an image, to an immediacy of
seeing, as a point of its argument or demonstration, one can
be sure that all difference is being elided, that unity of
some accepted vision is being reproduced. (Heath 55)
The elision of difference would seem to have been on the mind of the
serial killer Starkweather who says, "Dead people are all on the same
level" (quoted in Leyton 295). The elision of difference is a
characteristic of the mostly male phenomenon, the "psychopath", he who
has "one of the most perplexing of emotional defects, the apparent
incapacity to feel compassion or the pangs of conscience" (The New York
Times. 7 July 1987: Cl). Jack Levin says: "we're seeing more people
spraying bullets into crowds, innocent victims being targeted, all kinds
of incredibly gross, heinous acts of homicide being committed as an end
in itself, for the pleasure of it" (on Geraldo. 4 Dec. 1991). Instead of
describing the "pleasure" of killing people with whom one has no
relation as an end "in itself", perhaps we should make a first step in
de-mystifying such a pleasure by talking of an end in his self. As Heath
suggests, in the context of patriarchy, indifference can be equated with
masculinity. And because our meanings rely on difference, indifference
assumes the mystique of meaninglessness. In the context of patriarchy,
the perpetrator of unspeakable meaninglessness is also the expresser of
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masculinity taken to its logical extreme; his "inexplicable" behavior,
masculinity's logical conclusion. He can signify the unspoken and
unspeakable essence of patriarchal discourse.
In the preceding chapters I have suggested that the serial
killer's meaninglessness can have familiar meaning, that his
insignificance can be a sign for something. It is meaning which
elsewhere - in the context of the asymmetrical relation of masculine and
feminine so naturalized and often valorized that the destruction of
women or the idea of woman is sufficient to invoke and celebrate the
full presence of the male self - we give to the term "masculinity." But
it is also meaning which elsewhere we give to the term "fascism." Or at
least that which "waged an implacable war against anything tending to
divide or differentiate, or which stood for diversity or pluralism"
(Sternhell 347). Or that which stands for inexplicable instinct over
ephemeral explication, of the transcendent few who will undertake the
"reconquest." Or that arrived at by "the total man in the total society,
with no clashes, no prostration, no anarchy" (Marcel Deat in Sternhell
347 ). (In other words that total society with no other: all
manifestations of other being destroyed). But if we are to attempt to
disrupt the procedures by which we empower, perhaps it is better not to
search for a single name, a defining origin. Perhaps we should instead
regard the meaning of the serial killer's power as dependant upon a
network of meaning, and be always alert to and suspicious of
constructions of meaninglessness. The "mindless", "meaningless" and
"motiveless" acts of the serial killer are the acts of a figure who is
also represented as achieving "ultimate" selfhood: a state without
difference, a state defined as the dead end of a continuum of behavior
with which we in the twentieth century have been familiar. For the most
part history tells us that, just as attempts to control the text end in
the figurative death of the text and of the reader, the desire to
control the world by distancing oneself from it, by fixing it in time
and place, ends in self-destruction, tells us that the erasure of
difference brings an end to a sense of self. In the spectacle of the
serial killer and of his capture and sometimes execution, in the stories
we write for him, those which reproduce the fantasies of misogynistic
male culture, it is a conclusion which can assume variously the meaning
of heroic sacrifice, of celebration, of a sacred rite of passage.
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Conclusion
Following the discovery that Dahmer, though not an Honors student,
had joined his High School Honors group for their year-book photograph,
his image was blocked out with a marker pen before publication. That
empty space among smiling, well-groomed students has been one which we
have been particularly keen to fill. Sometimes the blackness, the
darkness, the mystery unsettling the image of ordinariness is associated
with the distinctly unordinary. We can imply and sometimes explicitly
state that Dahmer did what he did because that' s what homosexuals are
supposed to do. We can suggest that he did what he did because that's
what people from dysfunctional families do. But Dahmer, we are also
told, comes from a traditional, white, middle-class family. The year
book editor, having erased the teenage Dahmer, is left with a darkness
contextualized by ordinariness, mystery surrounded by normality. Early
on in this dissertation I talked of the ways we attempt to protect that
ordinariness. Thus we read unflinchingly former FBI agent Robert
Ressler's remarking that: "Jeffrey Dahmer falls into the subcategory of
the sadistic, sexually oriented serial killer who is inevitably a white
male loner" (Newsweek. 12 Aug. 1991: 28), and instead of examining what
"maleness" or "whiteness" or "the loner" means in our culture, we turn
away, are content in our dumbfoundedness, and attempt to close the
interrogation with "but there are no real theories as to why that is
so." I later suggested, however, that we sometimes peer a little more
knowingly into that space and, off our guard, allow the unordinary to
269
trickle into the ordinary. And sometimes, we allow the blackness, the
silence, and indeed the ordinariness that it touches, to be invested
with a power, the power of the unspeakable.
The connection between unspeakableness and power is one spoken of
by Nietzsche's Zarathustra: "You would do better to say: 'Unutterable
and nameless is that which torments and delights my soul and is also the
hunger of my belly'. Let your virtue be too exalted for the familiarity
of names” (Nietzsche 1977, 63). It is a connection we make repeatedly in
our serial killer stories. In chapter 10 (iii) I suggested that the
serial killer's empowerment proceeds in part by our readiness to
construct him as a symbol of the unspeakableness lying at the heart of
masculinity, as a symbol, that is, of masculinity's mystical essence. At
the same time as reassuring ourselves that the serial killer's acts
"just happen", are bolts from the blue, he gains an authority by this
figuring of his acts as natural, as acts which simply occur, as
requiring no words to justify, or explain. He can signify the
possibility of motivelessness that lies within our writing, the mystical
and frightening possibility of the writing to which we are accustomed
(the possibility, that is, essential to narrative: the gap, the space,
the silence into which narrative propels itself, only to create more
gaps, spaces and silences). He becomes the conductor of an irreducible
force of violent nature.
The story of the serial killer can never be fully captured, the
space he represents never closed completely, his meaning never fully
expressed, unless, that is, we wish to give the history of that which
270
represents him. His figure is both that which gives ultimate meaning to
and that which can - through exposure of the means of its construction -
deconstruct the discourses which represent him. He is a construct of
discourses whose involvement in that construction is shrouded in
mystery. His crimes are associated with where valued structure - the
family, patriarchy - has reputedly broken-down, not where it is
sustained. Like all essences he can never be fully known through or as
discourse. As an essence he must be protected: he is unspeakable and
must remain so. As a result, our representation of the serial killer is
repetitive: in an age which fervently demands explanation, the denial of
explanation requires us to ask again and again. His repetitive acts echo
the repetitiveness of his representation. In the same way as the
apparent randomness and motivelessness of his crimes makes him largely
undetectable, he evades capture by familiar language. Our powers of
representation fail us. The construction of the serial killer is one
which cannot be controlled. And as a consequence it is figured as more
powerful than those powers of representation.
J. Gerald Kennedy sees Poe as anticipating the ascendency of death
as a metaphysical presence in the twentieth century, and identifies Saul
Bellow's Herzog as a witness to that ascendency. "What is the philosophy
of this generation? Not God is dead, that point was passed long ago.
Perhaps it should be stated Death is God", says Herzog. One of Herzog's
struggles, Kennedy reminds us, is to come to terms with the Holocaust's
"impact on contemporary 'metaphysics'": Herzog worries "that the sheer
volume of modern death, especially in the form of genocidal projects,
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has stripped individual existence of dignity and meaning" and that
"through this debasement of life, death has become an insatiable deity
against whose ravages religion and ethics seem impotent." For Herzog,
says Kennedy, "amid the contending beliefs and ideologies which define
the horizon of philosophical relativism - that is, the locus of
metaphysical uncertainty - death looms as an ineluctable presence, a
virtual god" (Kennedy 178). Vitalizing to Poe's Gothic form was what Poe
called this "universe of Vacancy", and the effect of the consequential
uncertain status of words on writing. But, as Bellow traces, in the
twentieth century that which potentially unsettles metaphysics has been
turned into a metaphysical presence itself, a fact indicative, perhaps,
of the culturally-perceived naturalness of that halo of certainty, of a
seemingly ineluctable desire on the part of collective culture for the
notion of metaphysical presence, whatever its identity. The serial
killer answers in the affirmative to Nietzsche's madman who, after
proclaiming the death of God, asks "Is not the greatness of [God's
murder] too great for us? Must not we ourselves become gods simply to
seem worthy of it?" (Nietzsche 1974, 125). He is Foucault's fifteenth
century lunatic, he who scornfully contemplates "that nothing which is
existence itself", who "laughs with the laugh of death" (Foucault 1988,
15), who disarms death by his production of the macabre. In a culture in
which death is taboo, he is the embodiment of that sacredness, that
unspoken power. He is the contemporary bringer of meaningless death, the
contemporary Grim Reaper, he that strips existence of dignity and
meaning. He is, as Dahmer said about himself in court, the creator of a
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holocaust. The serial killer, though potentially the great unsettler of
metaphysical truth, is turned into the embodiment of a kind of truth,
the truth of death.
Figured as extra-textual, our manifestations of evil assume the
aura of a deathly silence. The quiet ones are always the worst. Our
silences resound deafeningly with the silences of the serial killers we
find most scary. The screaming Mansons we can deal with. It's those who
seem to do their business without a word whom we invest with the most
authority. In a society which equates silences with closets, our
unspeaking, unspeakable serial killers can signify closets of mainstream
culture. Their unspeakableness, liberalizing everyday metaphors of
aggression, of domination, speaks of the violence, the misogyny
concealed within benignity. The serial killer turns those closets inside
out. As a potential destroyer of reassuring, benign meaning, his
unspeakableness is either silenced or voiced, depending on one's
relation to the safety of the middle, the "specious good."
For Wilson and Seaman, "Supreme power places one above the ' ret
race'" (226). We have a habit of defining power in terms of being
"above”, above chaos, above shapelessness, above "low life", and
sometimes above that "specious good." Invariably, we define the powerful
as such by referring to their ability to distance themselves and to
objectify. We see them in the same way we see, or used to see, the
artist: the artefacts of the powerful being the powerless. Eric Fromm's
Sane Society can exemplify normative ways of figuring power as the
ability to create and creativity as the possession of power:
273
[Man] is driven by the urge to transcend the role of the
creature, the accidentalness and passivity of his existence,
by becoming a 'creator' . . .In the act of creation man
transcends himself as a creature... into the realm of
purposefulness and freedom. In man's need for transcendence
lies one of the roots for love, as well as for art, religion
and material production...There is another answer to this
need for transcendence: if I cannot create life, I can
destroy it. To destroy life makes me also transcend it.
Indeed, that man can destroy life is just as miraculous a
fear as that he can create it. (Fromm 37)
For Sade, the suggestion that creativity and destruction can be mutually
interdependent is demonstrated by nature: "Who doubts that murder is one
of nature's most precious laws? What is her purpose in creation? Is it
not to see her work destroyed soon after? If destruction is one of
nature's laws, the person who destroys is simply obeying her!" (quoted
in Cameron and Frazer 57). That power means transcendence and
transcendence means power are notions which inform the mythology of the
serial killer, that doyen of the art of crime. For Brian Masters, "the
creative isolation of the artist" makes him the "antithetical twin of
the murderer" (Masters 1993, 41), and for Wilson and Seaman, the ability
to transcend social reality, to exist in a fantasy world, is a
characteristic of serial killers and artists alike: "It is difficult to
avoid the conclusion that what turned [Albert Fish, the "Brooklyn
Vampire"] into a dangerous pervert was precisely the the same tendency
to morbid brooding and fantasy that turned Edgar Allen Poe into a writer
of genius" (Wilson and Seaman 176). The serial killer, we hear, destroys
to create. Like Franco Moretti's description of Dracula and of
Frankenstein's monster as "dynamic, totalizing monsters...
[who]...threaten to live forever, and to conquer the world" (Moretti 84-
274
85) we represent our monsters, our serial killers, as supreme
totalizers, consuming (sometimes literally) in order to strengthen
themselves.
It may sound strange to be talking about art at such a time, but
then perhaps not according to Jeffrey Dahmer who, "reducing what was
once a vital living person to a piece of sculpture" (Norris 1992, 32-
33), paints a victim's head gold and places it atop the victim's hands,
"cupped with the palms up" (32), and then photographs the result. And as
we naturalize the idea that power and creativity can imply deathly
transcendence, Dennis Nilsen demonstrates the reversibility of that
notion, that victimization can be art: "I just sat there and watched
him. He looked really beautiful like one of those Michaelangelo
sculptures. It seemed that for the first time in his life he was really
feeling and looking the best he ever did in his whole life" he says of
his last victim, Stephen Sinclair (Masters 1991, 267). "I remember being
thrilled that I had full control and ownership of this beautiful body",
he says of another. For Nilsen the art of crime is the appreciation of
the sublime: "I think that in some cases I killed these men in order to
create the best image of them...It was not really a bad but a perfect
and peaceful state for them to be in" (267). Fromm's universal man of
creativity has, of course, a particular history, and Nilsen's comments
can make one cry out that creativity need not pre-suppose
objectification, idealization, a transcendence of the object created,
that it need not suggest a dichotomy between the creator and the
created, between the 'live' artist and the 'dead' object. We may be
275
tempted to prescribe a dose of postmodernism, at least the postmodernism
which sees creativity less as the demonstration of power and more as a
mutual exchange between artist and artefact. But then Tania Modkeski
reminds us that Lyotard "insists that postmodernism is an 'aesthetic of
the sublime’", that the sublime has often struck commentators (she gives
Kant as an example) as potentially terrifying, and that "there is
certain evidence to suggest that the converse...has some truth as well,
since a film like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. .. strikes a critic like
Robin Wood as sublime or at least as 'authentic art'" (Modleski 162).
There is always another postmodernism. As a figure representing the
powers of deconstruction, the serial killer can find himself adjacent to
particular postmodernist heroes, heroes of a postmodernism which locates
itself in opposition to what Barthes calls the "regime of meaning”,
proclaims itself in the manner of Lyotard as adversarial to the harmony
and comfort of bourgeois society. Modleski argues that many examples of
the contemporary horror film "are engaged in an unprecedented assault on
all that bourgeois culture is supposed to cherish - like the ideological
apparatuses of the family and the school" (158) and notes that "a few of
the films, like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, have actually been
celebrated for their adversarial relation to contemporary culture and
society" (158). "Just as the individual and the family are dis-membered
in the most gruesomely literal ways in many of theses films", she says,
"so the novelistic as family romance is also in the process of being
dismantled" (160). The means with which the dismantling takes place
includes open-endedness "to allow for the possibility of countless
276
sequels", a delight in "thwarting the audiences' expectations of
closure", and a tendency to "dispense with or drastically minimize the
plot and character development that is thought to be essential to the
construction of the novelistic" (160-161). The well-known "story" of the
serial killer - all repetition and no plot, endings which only signal
new beginnings, shadowy and undeveloped villains and victims, is one
which corresponds with, as well as sometimes being told by, the horror
movies Modleski describes. It is the story of a grand transgression. And
sometimes it seems to ask, along with Nietzsche, "Whither does this
mighty longing draw us, this longing that is worth more to us than any
pleasure?" (Nietzsche 1910, 575). The grandest transgression of all is
perhaps that which makes us forget what it was that was transgressed.
For Maurice Blanchot, "the disaster" is that which "seems to say to us:
there is not, to begin with, law, prohibition, and then transgression,
but rather there is transgression in the absence of any prohibition,
which eventually freezes into Law, the Principle of Meaning" (Blanchot
75). How do we write "about" something which appears not merely to
transgress, but seems to negate or make meaningless the oppositions law/
transgression, meaning/meaningless? Perhaps Capote makes an attempt, and
he writes a book whose tension might be said to arise from its constant
potential for what Blanchot calls "disaster", for that which "ruins
books and wrecks language" (Smock, in Blanchot ix). The monstrousness of
our monsters is their wrecking of familiar language. Our serial killer
is he who de-scribes, defies the logic of explanation, frustrates the
desire for narrative by just happening, by entering randomly the stories
277
of our lives, breaking their flow, bringing premature closure. While
narrative anticipates closure, our serial killer is the bringer of
random closure. Evading narrative representations, meaning of the serial
killer's acts comes from their repetition, not their place in a
narrative. Sometimes we attempt to regain control of the figure, to re
assure ourselves, by placing it as the conclusion to a story of evil, or
of child-abuse. But mostly this representation seems to disrupt itself
(or the serial killer, in the manner of Lecter, will directly ridicule
such attempts to explain him, will enjoy evading attempts at
representational capture) , and then we see him simply doing what he
wants to do with no reference to time or place, no reference to the
structures of meaning with which we are accustomed to evaluate
ourselves, no regard for the principles upon which we are used to
thinking our language and our lives are founded.
Whether the serial killer's ability to deconstruct our reassuring
certainties is curtailed by our construction of his unspeakableness, or
whether his unspeakableness, his ability to silence familiar discourse,
is celebrated, his unspeakableness represents power: the power of the
suppressed, exotic, mystical other on the one hand, the power of the
rebel, the transgressor, he who manages to express his individuality in
the face of sanitized, harmonious, mass culture on the other. And, as I
suggested in the last chapter, that power and its opposite can be
gendered: different from the pleasure-seeking ("feminine") masses are
thrill-seeking ("masculine") individuals, and according to the The
Oxford English Dictionary, as Lionel Trilling reminds us in 'THe Fate of
278
Pleasure', "pleasure in the pejorative sense is sometimes personified as
a female deity" (Trilling 168). Constructing the serial killer with
reference to various familiar genre-fictions and cultural paradigms, the
figure can be a continuation of the heroes and anti-heroes of, say, the
Western, of the road-movie, of the Gothic, of the Chivalric. A common
theme in all the various manifestations is that of the male loner. Mark
Seltzer has commented on the possible connection between ideas of
maleness and the logic of selfhood in relation to the serial killer's
motivation. Referring to the idea that there might be an "urgent
transformation of the egoistic into the erotic - the instant translation
of the uncertain difference between self and other into the 'basic'
difference between male and female" (Seltzer 96), Seltzer suggests that
the value of the idea is to "intimate the violence that proceeds from
the subject's logic of singularity" (97). He also quotes Leo Bersani
commenting on the violent sexualization of the egoistic: "The sacrosanct
value of selfhood [appears as] a value that accounts for human beings'
extraordinary willingness to kill in order to protect the seriousness of
their statements" (Bersani 222; and quoted in Seltzer 97). While Seltzer
and Bersani here might be understood as making general claims about
human identity and nature, one might make use of their comments in a
cultural criticism setting by seeking the wording of those "statements."
In America, I suggest, the wording is especially vociferous in its
sanctioning of violence to protect the self, and especially the male
self. When we construct the serial killer as the latest hero/anti-hero
(the distinction, in this case, being noticably vague) in the tradition
279
of the male loner on a quest, the quest is one whose wording 'might be
ambiguous, but whose effect is invariably violence against the "un
male . "
How to dispel the fear, the mystification, the fetishization of
the power which we ascribe to the serial killer? How best to avoid
inscribing him with the power of horror? In Part One I described
policing discourses which seek closure, which thrive on cause and
effect, on sequence, on clues, on the tying up of loose ends, those
which anticipate capture (of the criminal, and of his image, that is, a
representation which fixes the origins of the criminal and his crime).
For such a discourse closure can only be an illusion: there are always
other crimes to solve, and, as Barthes reminds us, the discourse which
purports to be wholly instrumental is a "stubbornly polysemant space"
(Barthes 1988, 147). And to such discourses the serial killer is a
powerful symbol of evasion. He represents unattainable closure, his
capture the end of untidily polysemous language. He functions as the
dream of our language of totality, of authority. Perhaps we can begin to
de-mystify him by representing him in a way which does not seek his
capture, which does not figure him as something that can be captured,
that is, as something different and distinct from his captors. Perhaps
we write too much "about" the serial killer, and not enough in a manner
which can demonstrate that the figure is inseparable from the language
with which it is constructed. Perhaps to write without implicit
reference to a world beyond, without the assumption of the opposition
within/without, without the assumption of the reality of closure, of
280
purity, is to dispense with the fetishization of all that is extra-
textual, is to dispense with the notion that language is a medium of
power, with the idea that all that cannot be controlled is intrinsically
powerful. Perhaps we should attempt to to disorient our absolutes, to
write "disastrously."
What this might mean in our everyday lives is to attempt to de
naturalize the existence of power. In his preface to Deleuze and
Guatarri's Anti-Oedipus, Foucault describes "the fascism in all of us,
in our heads and in our every behavior, the fascism that causes us to
love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us" (in
Deleuze and Guatarri 10). Even after questioning our definition of
power, after foregrounding, for example, our equation of masculinity
with power, there is still another, and more firmly fixed idea to
estrange: the assumption of the existence of power itself, of power's
eternal and natural presence, of its "truth."
Where do we look to find the origins of power, of its naturalness?
In much of our representation of Dahmer, that which sets up a binary
between him and the rest of society, that which figures the latter as
the innocent victim of the former, power is located within the
individual. It is an idea which we take, rightly or wrongly, from
Nietzsche. R.J. Hollingdale, in his explication of Thus Spoke
Zarathustra, says: "What determines the nature of 'truth'? The nature of
the I which asserts 'I am the truth'. Why truth, and not rather untruth
or indifference to truth? Because each particular life and being needs a
fortress within which to preserve and protect itself and from which to
reach out in search of aggrandizement and more power, and truth is this
fortress" (in Nietzsche 1977, 26). Hollingdale's reading of Nietzsche's
vision of identity - that is, as something whose expression is dependant
on the gaining of power which is itself dependant on the existence of
truth - corresponds with widely held notions about the need for power
being intrinsic to the idea of self. We talk of the nature of our
selves, of essence, that which is essential to personal empowerment,
that which is the truth from which the power of the individual proceed.
One way that the naturalness of power is expressed is by the binary I
have sought to question in this dissertation: the truth of the
individual distinct from society, society opposed to the individual. And
with our insistence on framing all that we see in terms of power, in
terms of hierarchy, we perceive crime in one of two ways. Generally,
society is perceived as the victim of individuals (an idea which, as I
have suggested, can have as a consequence the empowerment of those
individuals). Any questioning of this idea is translated as promoting
the contrary idea that criminals are "victims of society" (an idea which
ascribes power to society and powerlessness to the individual). To de
naturalize the idea of power is perhaps to unsettle this misleading
binary.
Foucault says "power in the substantive sense, le pouvoir, doesn't
exist. What I mean is this. The idea that there is either located at -
or emanating from - a given point something which is a 'power' seems to
me to be based on a misguided analysis...In reality power means
relations, a more-or-less organized, hierarchical, co-ordinated cluster
282
of relations" (Foucault 1980, 198). But even Foucauldians are sometimes
guilty of mythologizing power by assuming its presence to be inevitable.
The editors of Feminism and Foucault, Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby, warn
against the often indiscernible presence of power in sexual relations
and suggest that:
Perhaps the most obvious example of...feminist involvement
[in the deployment of sexuality] is the assumption that
sexuality exists outside of and untainted by power. To
claim, as [Linda] Gordon and [Allen] Hunter have, for
instance, that "we can be in principle unequivocally pro-sex
because sex itself is a human activity that has its own
worth and which can be separated from those oppressive power
relations that invade it" is to ignore both the historicity
of sexuality and the interplay between power and sexuality.
(Diamond and Quinby 198)
To say, as Gordon and Hunter do, that sex can exist without power is
not the same as saying that it does exist or has existed without it, and
is not the same as saying it can exist without reference to culture or
history. Gordon and Hunter's assumption can be counter-balanced by the
assumption of "the interplay between power and sexuality."
Of course Eve Sedgwick is correct in reminding us that figuring
nature as an illusion does not mean the power structures it engenders
will instantaneously disappear: "I remember the buoyant enthusiasm with
which feminist scholars used to greet the finding that one or another
brutal form of oppression was not biological but 'only' cultural! I have
often wondered what the basis was for our optimism about the
malleability of culture by any one group or program (Sedgwick 1990, 41).
The assumption of power's existence - expressed, perhaps, by our
obsession with conspiracy theories - is so great that power still
283
lingers, is still experienced in a substantive sense long after the sets
of hierarchical relations have theoretically fallen. But perhaps the
unmalleability of culture is related to us not going far enough, that
while we attempt to estrange forms of masculinity or patriarchy, for
instance, we fail to estrange the idea of power itself, that as power-
relations fall, we allow others to take their place. Is it not possible
to imagine sex and culture without power? Is it possible to perceive the
form power takes today as something other than the sublimated form of
primitive drives? Would not our futures be more hopeful if we dispensed
with the idea of sublimation? Some would ask: why would we want to?
Diamond and Quinby quote Pat Califia, proponent of sadomasochism, as
recalling "a private world of dominance, submission, punishment and
pain...[since]...the age of two." Califia is implying, say Diamond and
Quinby, that "people are born into sadomasochism" (Diamond and Quinby
200), that power, in other words, is natural and therefore good. To
prescribe the de-sexualizing of violence as a means of laying bare the
naturalized power-relations in our culture is to run headlong into
critical debate over issues surrounding sadomasochism. Resisting
arguments made by proponents of sadomasochism that it is a consensual
activity, Diamond and Quinby note "given the current mechanisms of
normalization in our society, sexual consent is often a function of
disciplinary power, and the highly ritualized directives for engaging in
sadomasochistic practices testify to just how prescriptive these
activities are" (200). On the other hand, Eve Sedgwick asks whether the
sexual drama of sadomasochism may actually "stand in some more oblique,
284
or even oppositional, relation to [a woman's] relation to her political
experience of oppression?" (Sedgwick 1985, 6). While Diamond and
Quinby's remarks are perhaps a denial of subjecthood to sadomasochists,
implying that they don't know what they're doing, that they are playing
some one or something else's ("power's"?) game and not their own,
Sedgwick's suggestion assumes an ability to differentiate between the
drama of sadomasochism and the reality of political oppression. The
ability to destabilize or critique that reality of patriarchal
domination is hampered when the drama and the reality fuse, when play
and non-play are blurred, when one's ability to give consent to play -
play at dominating or being subordinating, or playing at not playing -
loses meaning. In an age in which fantasies of violent domination are
seemingly realized with ever increasing frequency, the dangers of
becoming involved in someone else's masochistic "reality" increases.
Critical gestures can be subsumed in a world in which power is
fetishized, in which games of domination and submission are
indistinguishable from the reality of violent domination.
In this study I have suggested that the myth of the serial killer
is maintained with the help of the fantasies that we ascribe to the
serial killer being (to use a phrase of Foucault's) "inextricably
implicated and interpenetrated" with the dreams of "normal" society. I
have suggested that it is a myth whose attraction lies with the power
with which the figure of the serial killer is constructed, power whose
meaning corresponds with seemingly benign powers, powers which structure
that "normal” society. Helping to explain why we find the idea of female
285
serial killers strange or perverse or threatening is the presence of the
power of masculinity within both our constructions of normality and of
the contemporary monster.
Among the things which are considered normal about our society is
its attachment to violence. Richard Maxwell Brown suggests that part of
America's distinctiveness is its ingenuity in connecting violence with
achievement, with value:
By now it is evident that, historically, American life has
been characterized by continuous and often intense violence.
It is not merely that violence has accompanied such negative
aspects of our history as criminal activity, political
assassination, and racial conflict. On the contrary,
violence has formed a seamless web with some of the most
positive events of U.S. history... The patriot, the
humanitarian, the nationalist, the pioneer, the landholder,
the farmer, and the laborer (and the capitalist) have used
violence as a means to a higher end. (Brown [1], 40-41)
If we are puzzled as to why serial killing seems to be such an American
problem, perhaps we should take into account America's willingness to
believe unquestioningly that violence is a justifiable means to a
"higher" end, and especially when we live in an age in which
representations of violence as a means to a higher end fail to
rigorously define what a "higher" end might be, or in which those ends
defined by dominant culture as "higher" turn out to be forms of
empowerment at the expense of particular sections of society. Thrilled
by watching the world through the eyes of our monsters, watching and
enjoying movies like Halloween and Friday the Thirteenth which "adopt
the point of view of the slasher, placing the spectator in the position
of an unseen nameless presence" (Modleski 161), we fail invariably to
286
avoid sitting in judgment upon their victims, fail to avoid helping to
naturalize victimhood, a victimhood gendered female.
Giving policing an aura of priestly intervention, contemporary
criminal monstrosity is constructed with reference to evil instead of
insanity, and in a manner which negates notions of prevention or cure.
Just as we began to hear that imprisonment had changed Dahmer for the
better, that he was truly contrite and had become a practicing Christian
- just as we began, in other words, to think about modifying parts of
our story - he was bludgeoned to death, and the original story re
asserted itself: Goodness had finally triumphed over Evil, the only true
response to wickedness had been made. The sane but evil monster is
constructed in a manner which assumes self to be the only form of
reality, in a manner which justifies increased policing of the
individual as opposed to the questioning of social norms and values.
Helping to justify the individualization of crime (which has, as
consequences, the mystification of links between "benign" social forms
and the empowerment of the serial killer) , the myth figures the
detection of the crime as an individualized confrontation between cop
and killer. As a figure of monstrosity, the serial killer is that which
gives much of our policing discourse meaning. In this respect, it is a
figure of mystery, but at the same time signs of the serial killer are
all around us. In the moment when our surveillance locates or constructs
a serial killer, we encounter what amounts to pure spectacle, content
without form, a figure shining with the brilliancy reserved for that
which functions as an ultimate referent to the language of power.
The serial killer is a paradoxical figure: one who must not be
fully represented and one who is made in our own image. The myth of the
serial killer is one whose single meaning is unclear but which can serve
us by validating particular ways of evaluating ourselves, of policing
ourselves, serve to explain how and why our society is put together the
way it is, serve to illustrate its preoccupations and fantasies. It is a
myth which figures society as a battlefield and individuals as warriors,
either victorious or defeated, either oppressors or victims.
288
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Film/Television
To Kill and Kill Again (directed by Patrick Fleming, Ottoman Television
for Channel Four, 1992).
Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of A Serial Killer (directed by Nick
Broomfield, Lafayette Films for Channel Four, 1992).
Confessions of a Serial Killer (Twenty Twenty Television for Carlton
Television, 1993).
Murder by Number: Anatomy of the Serial Killer (Cable News Network, Inc.
Aired: 1/3/93).
Geraldo (Investigative News Group, Inc.).
The Maury Povich Show (Paramount).
The Oprah Winfrey Show (Harpo Productions, Inc.).
Donahue (Multimedia Entertainment, Inc.).
Crossfire (Cable News Network, Inc.).
Larry King Live (Cable News Network, Inc.).
Sonya Live (Cable News Network, Inc.).
Nightline (ABC News).
Day One (ABC News).

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