Blurring All Boundaries The P

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^ Blurring All Boundaries: The Postm odern Narratives^
o f Multiple M urder
by
Philip Lockwoocf'Sim pson'!
B.A.. Eastern Illinois University

M.A.. Eastern Illinois University
A Dissertation
Submitted in Partial Fulfillment o f the Requirements for
the D octor o f Philosophy D egree
Department o f English
in the Graduate School
Southern Illinois University
at Carbondale
June 1996
UMI Number: 9708778
Copyright 1996 by
Simpson, Philip Lockwood
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_________________________ PHILIP L. SIMPSON_________________________
Entitled
Beyond All Boundaries:
The Postmodern Narratives of Multiple Murder
be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the

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Copyright by Philip Lockwood Simpson 1996
.Ail Rights Reserved
AN ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION OF
PHILIP LOCKW OOD SIMPSON, for the D octor o f Philosophy degree in ENGLISH,
presented May 20, 1996, at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale.
TITLE: Blurring All Boundaries: The Postmodern Narratives o f M ultiple M urder
M AJOR PROFESSOR: Tony Williams
The most comprehensive explanation for the serial killer's current cultural notoriety has to
do with a narratological combination o f folkloric "threatening figures" and inherited
Gothic story-telling conventions as rew orked over the years into the postm odern era and
packaged for mass reconsumption in pseudo-demonic forms derivative o f popular
conceptualizations and folk legends o f werewolves and, especially, vampires. That the
serial killer inhabits the vampire's metaphorical territory so easily is no accident: the
cultural representation o f multiple murder, whether presented as fact o r fiction, changes its
guises from generation to generation but is not new to our recent history. The current
popularity o f so-called "serial killer" narratives can be explained as the latest twentieth-
century redressing o f the ongoing human fascination with tales o f sensational, multiple
murders. The "serial killer" as defined by the FBI during the American 19S0s and passed
into the mass-media instruments o f popular culture is thus a confabulation o f
Gothic,'Romantic villain, literary vampire and werewolf, detective fiction conceits, frontier
outlaw, and folkloric "threatening figure." All o f these are mvthogenic reworkings o f the
multiple murderer, whose seemingly random but idiosvncraticallv meaningful, ritualistic
invasions o f bodies serves as a m etaphor for and an invocation o f the generalized,
boundary-leveling violence o f apocalypse itself.
Given this generalized narrative trope, I wish to analyze it as it specifically
functions in several "serial killer" narratives o f the pseudo-wartime atm osphere o f the
American 1980s and 1990s. specifically Bret Easton Ellis's 1991 novel American Psycho.
Thom as Harris's 1981 novel Red Dragon and his 1988 novel The Silence o f the Lambs (as
iv
well as Jonathan Demme’s film version). John M cN aughton's 1986 film Henry: Portrait o f
a Serial Killer. Bernard Rose’s 1992 film Candvman. Dominic Sena's 1991 film Kalifomia.
and Oliver Stone’s 1994 film Natural B om Killers. I will also include another wartime
multiple-murderer text. Alfred Hitchcock's 1943 American film Shadow o f a Doubt, to
argue that this film marks a pivotal moment in the supposed transition from modernism to
postmodernism. Since these texts were not created in political isolation. I will
demonstrate that the serial killer’s recent popularity in this country satisfies not only our
human craving for the reassurance o f universal myth but also owes a great deal to an
.American version o f neo-conservatism: a social movement which, in essence, seeks to
revivify the ideology o f capitalism through its appropriation o f radical, progressive
discourse. A sense o f destability naturally accompanies times o f social upheaval, which
the near-hysterical affirmation o f capitalistic ideology in the wake o f the end o f the Cold
War certainly qualified as. The function o f the serial killer threat in such a macrocosmic
project is to paradoxically legitimate the dominant culture in a multi-tiered fashion, but the
inherent boundary-transgressing nature o f the G othic horror formula itself, upon which
these fictional treatm ents rests, also radically subverts the status quo it purports to cherish.
The end result is ontological destabilization: a key postm odern project.
Reproduced with permission o f the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
Acknowledgments
First o f all. I w ant to thank my five com mittee members, whose long hours o f reading and
critiquing have improved this study immeasurably. Dr. Richard Peterson, for whom I once
served an enjoyable semester as a research assistant, was always supportive o f my ability
as well as the topic. Dr. Brvan Crow o f the Speech-Communications department
graciously agreed to be my outside reader. Dr. Elizabeth Klaver. whom in her expertise
on postm odern theory and familiarity with the works under scrutiny was a godsend, read
several working drafts at my request and offered invaluable suggestions regarding focus
and clarity. Dr. David Blakeslev is to be commended not only for his service on this
committee but his unwavering support and encouragement during times when my
confidence during the writing process flagged. He was there with me at the beginning,
and he was kind enough not to say back in 1993 "You want to write about WHAT?"
Finally. I can never adequately thank or repay my dissertation director. Dr. Tony Williams,
for his contribution. Originally my outside reader in the cinema department. Dr. Williams
quite unexpectedly found himself to be my director when he formally came over to our
English department. His arrival was fortuitous; my first director could not continue this
project and I was at a loss until Dr. Williams graciously agreed to my plea for him to take
over. While w orking on his own book. Dr. Williams had the infinite patience and
tolerance to not only deal with an often panic-stricken graduate student's seemingly
endless series o f drafts, e-mail queries, phone calls, etc.. but also to shape that student's
mass o f undisciplined material into a coherent final draft. I am proud to say that I have
been associated with this superlative scholar. I hope to work with him again.
To my friends and colleagues at and around Southern Illinois University. I can only
say thank you for your understanding as this project evolved. It was an often chaotic
process, full o f unexpected surprises (most o f them unwelcome), and your support and
good fellowship is appreciated. I'll just name you without listing your invaluable
vi
emotional encouragement and intellectual contributions (you know what they were
anyway): Dave and Cathy Tietge; Karl and Kathy Kageff; M ike Given; Cicero Bruce;
Jennifer Beech; Dennis Ciecielski; Virginia Crank; Paul Hitchcock; Kathy Ducommen;
Joanne Detore; Ellen Tsgaris; Melody Cooper, Jackie Pietrick; Kristi Eiler, Thorunn
McCoy; Scott Furtwengler; Jeff Townsend; Lisa McClure. D onna Vance; Diann Gordon;
Garth Rubin; K.K. Collins; Leland Person; Hans Rudnick; Angie Jones; Chris Sharrett;
Bob Bell; "Rocky" Norville; Scott Vogneson; Sally Walden; Alan Brandvberrv; Jim "Ed"
White; John M cNamara; Stuart Albert; Steven and Michelle Sett; Joe and Michelle
Vargas; Jim and Patty Thiele. You guys brightened what could have been a dark joum ev.
Lastly, to my family, who provided me with the unconditional stability, security,
and love one needs in this life. My father. Les. and my mother. .-Mice, both intellectual and
professional people o f high achievement, have always supported my academic career to
the fullest extent. I can only hope to do half as well as they have in their lives. I am proud
to call them my friends as well as my parents. My wife. Candace, who had the grave
misfortune o f meeting me during my studies for preliminary exams and then the amazing
courage to stick around for the dissertation, has exhibited superhuman fortitude as well as
love during these past four years. She was also wise enough to bring into our house three
Shih Tzu puppies. George. Gracie. and Ginger, who can cheer anyone up. even someone
who has been writing for hours on an often disturbing subject. I can only say, okay,
honey, now it's w hatever you want to do.
Vli
Table o f Contents
A b stra c t.............................................................................................................................................. iv
A cknow ledgm ents............................................................................................................................ vi
Chapter One: O verview ................................................................................................................ 1
Chapter Two: The Neo-Gothic M urder Romance and Uncie C h arlie.................................40
Chapter Three: Thomas Harris’s Profiles in M u rd e r................................................................SI
Chapter Four: Portraits o f the American P sy c h o ....................................................................120
Chapter Five: Apocalypse and Myth in the 1990s Seriai-Killer N arrativ e..........................162
Chapter Six: C onclusion.............................................................................................................. 213
W orks C ite d .....................................................................................................................................222
viii
Chapter One: Overview
This dissertation studies the literary/cinematic treatment o f a social phenomenon which has
received an increasing am ount o f attention over the past several decades in the United
States. The phenomenon, recently dubbed "serial" killing by the Federal Bureau o f
Investigation, involves an episodic series o f murders, com mitted over an extended period
o f time with a "cooIing-ofF' period between each murder, by one o r more individuals.
Some o f these individuals achieve a great deal o f cultural notoriety and hence a kind o f
immortality The names o f Jeffrey Dahmer. Ted Bundy, and John Wayne Gacy have
become pan o f our national vocabulary. They influence our social dialogue as we attempt
to understand and curb violent, criminal behavior. Their infamy guarantees a virtual
industry o f true-crime books, academic studies, and governmental/law-enforcement
repons. All manner o f social crusades from a variety o f political perspectives arise as a
result o f the struggle to com prehend the damage these people have done. And in our
attempt to understand multiple murderers, we inevitably create myths about them.
In terms o f myth, the serial killer is becoming an eminently marketable form o f
what folklorist Jan Brunvald calls an "urban legend," or contem porary folk legend. Ted
Bundy. John Wayne Gacy. Ed Kemper. Jeffrey Dahmer. Ed Gein, Charles Starkweather,
Charlie Manson. Henry Lee Lucas, etc., are slowly metamorphosing into immortal (and
profitable) cultural icons, in much the same way that w hoever murdered at least five and
probably more Victorian prostitutes on the eve o f the mass-media age has become Jack
the Ripper. Concomitantly, fiction writers are creating multiple-murderer scenarios
loosely based on the media-purveyed exploits o f the actual multiple murderers. These
real-life antecedents o f Uncle Charlie. Norman Bates, Leatherface, Michael Myers. Jason
Voorhees. Francis Dolarhyde, Jame Gumb, Hannibal Lecter, etc.. are revitalized and
particularized mythic villains for an anomic world haunted by the macrocosmic specters o f
war. genocide, gynocide. terrorism , random violent crime, and the institutionalized
ideologies which make all o f these possible. The literature and legends which have
coalesced around multiple murderers answer the human need to personify free-floating
fears into a specific, slightly more containable, yet still ultimately evil, threat: for example,
the marauding serial killer o f the 1980s and ’90s, who carries much o f the weight o f our
cultural phobias in his narrative representation.
The mythic narratives take many forms and levels o f complexity. They can be as
succinct and brutally straightforward as the Jeffrey Dahmer jokes which proliferated after
Dahmer’s arrest, or they can be as artistically complex as the fictional narratives o f
L’mberto Eco and Jorge Luis Borges. But no m atter what shape these mvths are
presented in. they are hegemonic. In this country alone, especially since the early- to mid-
1960s. literally dozens o f fiction and non-fiction accounts o f serial murder (though it hasn't
always been known by that telling name) have attracted enough public and critical
attention so as to warrant serious academic study, if for no other reason than that the
social interest is so obviously widespread. What is going on here0 Why are "true crime"
books, which follow Thomas De Quincey's lead by detailing factual events with the
narrative techniques o f fiction, so numerous0 Why have respected fiction writers, such as
Joyce Carol O ates and Paul West, and filmmakers, such as Alfred Hitchcock and Jonathan
Demme, devoted their creative talents to this inherently unsavory subject0 Or. as Marilyn
Stasio writes in the New Y ork Times Book Review : "With all the serious attention being
paid, the killer must have something more important to tell us than where he gets his
knives sharpened" (29).
I maintain that the most comprehensive explanation for the serial killer’s current
cultural notoriety results from a narratological combination o f inherited Gothic story
telling conventions and earlier folkloric "threatening figures." This narratological
combination has been rew orked over the years into what I must call, for lack o f a more
meaningful term, the postmodern era and packaged for mass reconsumption in pseudo-
demonic forms derivative o f popular conceptualizations and folk legends o f vam pires and
werewolves. The "domesticated" vampire as a literary entity, for example, transmogrifies
quite easily into the contemporary serial killer beloved o f both tabloids and best-selling
novels: a neo-Gothic demon lover (like Ted Bundy, the so-called "Phantom Prince").
That the serial killer inhabits Gothic territory so easily is no accident: the cultural
representation o f multiple murder, w hether presented as fact or fiction, changes its guises
from generation to generation but is not new to our recent history, as Philip Jenkins
observes ("Perspective" 377-92). The current popularity o f so-called "serial killer"
narratives can be explained as the latest twentieth-century redressing o f the ongoing
human fascination with tales o f sensational, multiple murders.
The "serial killer" as defined by the FBI during the American I9S0s and passed
into the mass-media instruments o f popular culture is in turn a confabulation o f
Gothic/Romantic villain. literary vampire and werewolf, detective fiction conceits, frontier
outlaw, and folkloric "threatening figure." All o f these are mythogenic reworkings o f the
multiple murderer—a term preferred over the now nearly meaningless, tabloid-reeking
"serial killer" label—whose seemingly random but idiosvncraticallv meaningful, ritualistic
invasions o f bodies serves as a m etaphor for and an invocation o f the generalized,
boundary-leveling violence o f apocalypse itself. He is the grotesque literalization o f the
devoured/devouring world m otif in camivalesque folk culture, where the limits between
human flesh and the rest o f the world are blurred or erased altogether (Bakhtin 317). The
murdering bogeyman lurks in the shadows o f communal existence, prolonging his stay on
earth at the expense o f others through his own kind o f communion, and he will manifest
himself in folk narrative and literature (such as the Gothic) at times o f threatened change,
when a feeling o f dread stalks the land. The folk demonology represented in the narrative
exploits o f shape-shifters and blood-drinking monsters such as vampires, werewolves, and
now serial killers provides a metaphoric explanation o f the human tendency to murder
other humans en masse.
4
Given this generalized narrative trope, I wish to analyze it as it specifically
functions in several formative, influential "serial killer" narratives o f the pseudo-wartime
atmosphere o f the American 1980s and 1990s. specifically Bret Easton Ellis's 1991 novel
American Psycho. Thom as Harris's 1981 novel Red Dragon and his 1988 novel I h e
Silence o f the Lambs (as well as Jonathan Demme's film version), John McNaughton's
1986 film H enry Portrait o f a Serial Killer. Bernard Rose’s 1992 film Candyman. Dominic
Sena's 1991 film Kalifomia. and Oliver Stone's 1994 film Natural Bom Killers. I will also
include another wartim e multiple-murderer text o f an earlier narrative cycle, Alfred
Hitchcock's 1943 .American film Shadow o f a Doubt, to argue that this film not only marks
a pivotal moment in the commonly accepted transition from modernism to postmodernism
but also illustrates that pastiche o f earlier dramatic works and genre self-referentiality is
nothing new to "mature" postmodernism. (There are other, earlier "serial killer" narratives
I could choose from, such as Charlie Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux o r Fritz Lang's M, but I
have selected Hitchcock's film as most clearly representative o f the American recasting o f
primarily European G othic material.) Since these texts were not created in political
isolation. I will dem onstrate that the serial killer’s recent popularity in this country satisfies
not only our human craving for the supposed reassurance o f universal myth but also owes
a great deal to an American version o f what some com m entators call neoconservatism: a
social movement which, in essence, seeks to revivify the ideology o f capitalism through its
appropriation o f radical, progressive discourse. A sense o f destabilitv naturally
accompanies times o f social upheaval, which the near-hysterical affirmation o f capitalistic
ideology in the wake o f the end o f the Cold War certainly qualified as. The function o f the
serial killer in such a macrocosmic project is to paradoxically legitimate the dominant
culture in a multi-tiered fashion.
For one thing, his victim choice has definite political implications. If he targets
society's favored—children, pretty young women, the middle class—his threatening
existence proves the necessity for a strong, centralized police force. On the other hand, if
he preys on victims whose deaths, quite frankly, are implicitly condoned by the dominant
culture because o f the latter1s "deviancv," e.g., prostitutes o r homosexuals, then he serves
a cleansing function somewhat akin to divine justice. His appeal to a mass audience
hungry for sensation fuels the engines o f the entertainment industry, including those
corporate entities that call themselves "news agencies." Yet maybe, just maybe, the
inherent structural complexities o f a narrative that casts a multiple m urderer as protagonist
saves these texts from being polemical rants. The manner in which these fictional
characters are constructed ultimately subverts vested ideological interests and indeed all
such boundaries, in a manner typical to contemporary. Gothic-derived horror texts
(Modleski. "Terror" 162). and this renders them postmodern.
I am reluctant to wholeheartedly embrace the much-abused term "postmodern" in
this context, as it usually implies a somehow "new" development in human thought. Much
o f postmodernism's theorizing about self-referentialitv has been thoroughly anticipated in
the metafrctional works of. for example, Chaucer and Hawthorne. N or can the
postmodern be "used as a synonym for the contemporary," in Linda Hutcheon's cautionary
words (244) or as a justification for the critical acceptance o f kitsch, since the typical
postmodernist spends as much time lamenting just as much as any conservativ e Frankfiirt-
School critic about how far our popular culture has fallen from some past cherished
perfection (Modleski. "Terror" 156-7). I do however believe that the postmodern mindset
can be characterized, and that one o f its key foundations is an acknowledgment o f the
gradual rise o f a mass culture. One o f the inescapable effects o f a mass culture is to render
traditional grand o r master narratives increasingly unacceptable (Lyotard 15, 31-41),
simply because there are too many dissonant voices to be heard to make any one unifying
narrative wholly acceptable. Hutcheon concludes from this observation that the "familiar
humanist separation o f art and life . . . no longer holds” (248). By extension, all such
separations lose their distinctiveness because borders are increasingly fluid in the
postmodern mindset, in which such conceptual parallels as the Gothic and the
6
camivalesque can be grouped. The postmodernist aesthetic diligently effaces boundaries,
such as the modernist elitist privileging o f high art over the easily attained pleasures o f Iow
a n or a clearcut separation between inner phantasms and outer reality-.
This kind o f dissolution o f boundary typifies the mode o f postm odem itv I believe
most relevant to this study The contemporary postmodernist, while still working within
the cultural grand-narrative o f modernism, has accepted the political agenda-popularized
during the middle o f the twentieth century but panially anticipated in many earlier literary
and philosophical formulations—o f challenging all epistemological limits, including the
"sacred cow s” o f liberal humanism, without necessarily deposing them. But because this
transgression o f all boundary is inherently a "violent" act o f cognition, mature
postmodemitv as a cultural force evokes a crisis-as-spectacle atm osphere (Olsen 13) in
which literal violence as well as increasingly sensational narrative representations o f it can
easily flourish. Thus, the proliferation o f serial-murder narratives over the past decade and
a half should be perceived as one specialized branching o f a more generalized movement
toward violent spectacle in the arts. But again 1 stress this emphasis on brutalized bodies
is not a new development; Mikhail Bakhtin, for one. observes that the medieval folk-
festive image o f the rent or violated or opened body "displays not only the outw ard but
also the inner features o f the body . . . often merged into one" (318) for the purposes o f
illustrating the interrelationship between life and death, the beginning and the end. The
body and the w orld becom e one as boundaries are erased by the grotesque image. The
spectacularly m urdered body is one such image.
The m urder m etaphor in art is thoroughly entrenched, and I furthermore believe
that if we pretend this is in any way a new development in our national (even world)
literature and then refuse to condone its study on the grounds that it will all simply "go
away." we are being naive to the point o f irresponsibility. If it does seem disturbing or
even antisocial to mention murder and a n in the same discussion, it is important to
remember that the m urderous impulse has been linked to the creative urge since at least
the Romantic era. Crime itself, as the term and its connotations o f individual transgression
against the bourgeois social contract are commonly understood, is a relatively m odem
phenomenon, dating back no further than the late eighteenth century, coinciding with the
advent o f literary romanticism as a general cultural manifestation o f the metaphysical
privileging o f individual sensibility over what Joel Black calls "conventional morality as
encoded in human law" (30). Thus, the criminal and the artist share a "vision." however
crudely expressed. The uniqueness o f the individual is closer to divine, eternal truth than
anything the temporal state apparatus can codify in its legal abstractions. The artist and
the criminal both rebel against the strictures o f inherited middle-class ethics and values,
and as marginal figures share a real kinship. Black observes that
. . murder fascinated the romantic sensibility because it revealed new and totally
unexpected insights into the nature o f everyday ethical experience by offering a
premonition o f an aesthetic hyperrealitv that was altogether removed from natural
and human law. (56)
And murder has fascinated the post-Romantic sensibility as well. The proliferation o f
"texts." both factual and fictional, that center around what is currently called "serial
murder" are an inevitable consequence o f a metadiscursive. critical culture where the
modernist concept o f "high art" has ironically combined with the boundary-piercing,
rebellious agenda o f individual romanticism to create a mass-market version o f Thomas
De Quincev's "murder as fine art." One is immediately struck by the presence o f aesthetic
awareness and literary references in the literature o f serial murder, even the deliberately
clinical prose o f the social-science and law-enforcement journals. Thus, it is not surprising
that most o f our fictional serial killers are artist manques. striving to impose a private
vision upon the ebb and flow o f reality in the time-honored fashion o f unappreciated,
isolated artists everywhere w ho seek spiritually transcendent moments.
While we may have culturally moved awav from naive conceptions o f the human
relationship to divinity, we remain devoted to the hyperreality Black speaks of. In fact, it
is more obvious today than ev er in postindustrial W estern society, with computer
s
information nets encircling the globe and real-time video and audio feeds available from
counroom s, shot-up city streets and com muter trains, gunned-down or run-over student
protesters, riots, bombed buildings, burning high-rises, freeway shootings and pile-ups,
earthquake sites, tsunami-devastated villages, flooded deltas, volcanic eruptions, starving
countries, desert wars, ethnic cleansings, etc. Given such a ’-vide array o f everyday
disasters and eagerly voyeuristic media forums, the contemporary accused murderer (O J.
Simpson. Jeffrey Dahmer) is guaranteed good ratings and a corresponding electronic
apotheosis O f course, not all serial murderers in fact and/or fiction have pretensions
tow ard the kind o f mediated godhood represented by cultural immortality (to the extent o f
their conscious recognition, anyway). Some are retaliating in banal predictability against a
certain type or social class o f victim. Others are delighting in the sheer nihilistic abandon
o f destroying the human body, which has always been a site o f ambivalent emotions at best
and sheer loathing at worst. Indeed, many seem to be killing just for the thrill o f it: a
form o f criminal act that was dubbed "wilding" in the 1980s. Philosophy, religion,
intellectual ideas and rationalizations and justifications—all irrelevant, all linguistic games
and empty words. Nevertheless, silence and voids must be filled, as the cliche "nature
abhors a vacuum" tells us. so the postmodern murderer fills it with "funny little games"
(the historical Jack the Ripper’s euphemism for murder in his notorious first letter to the
press, a letter which ironically may have been written by a prankster and not the actual
murderer) played out on the bodies o f a consciously targeted Other, upon which the killer
projects the w orst o f himself and attempts to rewrite his own identity in an overall strategy
o f representational violence common to his culture.
It must not be forgotten just who the O ther is in this context. The serial murderer,
w hatever his pretensions tow ard personal fulfillment, achieves (or falls short of) his goal at
the expense o f the agony and deaths o f other people whom he has decided are subordinate
to his ow n project. Though the victims' lives are further subordinated in any discussion o f
what motivates their killer(s), it is an ethical imperative to bear in mind John Fraser's
comment in Violence in the Arts: ". . . the potential o r actual violator is defined for us
very largely in term s o f his relationship to his victims. I mean that that relationship gives
him for us m ost o f his moral and intellectual significance" (20-1). In other words, one
cannot conceive o f the murderer, actual o r fictional, without relating him to the victims, as
the murderer has chosen to redefine his boundaries and fill his hollowness in relation to
them as well. O f course, we would not be talking about the murderer had he not chosen
to kill, in which case he would be a potential murderer, a condition that applies to us all.
But the act o f talking about him does not necessarily further demean the victims or pander
to dark sensationalism, though, to be honest, that is a force often at work here. Instead, a
close reading o f the murderer's journey through his own Chapel Perilous can bring one to
his/her own personal redefinition: a movement catalyzed by murder but not partaking o f
it. P D. James, in her own seriai-killer novel Devices and Desires, movingly describes her
detective’s reaction to the discovery o f a brutally murdered woman:
Perhaps this was part o f the attraction o f his job, that the process o f detection
dignified the individual death, even the death o f the least attractive, the most
unworthy, mirroring in its excessive interest in clues and motives man's perennial
fascination with the mystery o f his mortality, providing, too. a comforting illusion
o f a moral universe in which innocence could be avenged, right vindicated, order
restored. But nothing was restored, certainly not life, and the only justice
vindicated was the uncertain justice o f men. (173)
Detective Dalgiiesh's reflection upon the nature o f his job is decidedly postmodern in tone.
Absolute ideals o f justice and order are unattainable, remote, and most likely non-existent.
To catch a m urderer does not prove God's hand guides destiny. It does not even prove
that clockwork destiny exists. It proves only that obsessive human interest in questions o f
mortality does not necessarily have to express itself in murder. It proves that there is still
a choice. It proves that a desire, analogous to murder, to exalt the trivially small and
pettily sordid details o f an individual's truncated life into a complex form o f
epistemological inquiry can be in its own paradoxical way a qualified celebration o f life’s
beleaguered importance. Or, as Thomas Harris writes in the closing paragraph o f Red
10
Dragon, as Will Graham reflects upon the now-peaceful site o f the bloody Civil W ar battle
o f Shiloh: "There is no murder. We make murder, and it matters only to us" (354).
M urder is not a hubristic usurpation o f powers reserved to God, at least not in an age
dominated by postmodemity. But, in the sense that w e negotiate small moments o f value
and idiosyncratic meaning in the framework o f com m unal co-existence, it does matter. It
is a betrayal o f a meaning painfully arrived through consensus. This is the theme o f the
most effective and socially conscientious fictional treatm ents o f serial murder, some o f
which this study will focus on.
The Serial Killer Genre Some Stipulations
I will now turn my attention to the genre conventions that shape the multiple murderer in
our contem porary American fiction. The fictional serial killer bears little relation to his
banal real-life counterparts, such as the psvchosexuallv twisted exploits o f a pathetic Ted
Bundy or Ed Gein. In fiction, he is more exotic in term s o f methodology and pathology,
since authors seldom resist the temptation to dem onize him in some way. no m atter how
restrained the treatment overall. He will typically be a debased visionary, acting as if he
occupies a higher plane than "ordinary" mortals and consequently exuding an air o f
dangerous but attractive remoteness even as he wallows in blood and filth. He is a violent
but less impassioned example what John Fraser has defined as the violator figure in
literature:
. . . he is frequently a man in the grip o f an obsession or craving, a man who is

either consciously bent on the violation or destruction o f innocents or who is so
estranged by generalized resentments that dealing with him is like trying to deal
with a time bomb. . . . the aura surrounding the literally enraged man. o r the kind
o f man liable to fearful rages, comes not only from fear or from the fact that the
great majority o f people are incapable o f losing their self-consciousness in an
intensity o f passion, but also from the ancient association o f "possession" and
"vision." (20-1)
11
Fraser's definition needs amendment with the recent addition o f the serial killer to the
American cultural scene. The fictional serial killer’s form o f visionary possession, while
destructive, does not often express itself in frothing rage, but chilling abstraction and
deliberate, almost mechanical precision well in keeping with the industrial age.
The fictional multicide’s motives are usually m ore metaphysically, psychologically,
and culturally grandiose or. inversely, completely nihilistic. He is authoriallv invested with
layers o f meaning and m etaphor which are beyond the easy comprehension o f most actual
serial killers (a truism about any fictional character rendition). His character will be an
elaborate construct designed exclusively to test philosophical maxims (free will versus
determinism), psychological systems (usually psychoanalytic), socioeconomic models
(capitalism in particular), and. o f course, the binary nature o f good and evil itself His
inscrutability will invite multiple readings from other characters within the narrative (and
from those reading it), who will invariably project their deepest fears and longings onto
the blank screen he represents. He is broadly allegorical in the sense that Frederic
Jameson defines allegory7:
On the global scale, allegory allows the most random, minute, o r isolated
landscapes to function as a figurative machinery in which questions about the
system and its control over the local ceaselessly rise and fall, with a fluidity that
has no eq u iv alen t. . . a host o f partial subjects, fragmentary or schizoid
constellations, can often now stand in allegorically for trends and forces in the
world system, in a transitional situation in which genuinely transnational classes,
such as a new international proletariat and a new density o f global management,
have not yet anywhere clearly emerged. (5)
In light o f Jameson's general definition. B. Ruby Rich’s thesis carries added weight. She
argues that serial murderers, at least in their late 1980s and early 1990s incarnations when
they gained their widest cultural appeal, represent the tensions inherent in a world that has
lost its master narrative o f the Cold W ar (6). The commodification o f the serial killer, as
Jameson might call it. reached its peak at that historical moment. Ever since, his current
status as cultural bogeyman guarantees a ready audience to any storyteller, no matter how
skilled o r unskilled (m ost o f them unskilled, but they will not trouble this study), and
ensures that the commodification will continue indefinitely.
The serial killer’s commodification possibilities are virtually limitless because as
literary figure he crosses not only gender boundaries—Norman Bates, Jame Gumb—but
genre boundaries as well. He appears in the horror, action/adventure, science fiction, and
detective genres w ith equal facility. He is also easily adaptable to print o r visual media.
To explain his utilitarian suitability to all o f these genres, however, I must first arrive at a
working definition o f genre. Genre is a complicated critical term, but Andrew Tudor's
definition, while specifically relating to film, seems capable o f including prose-fiction
genres as well; he argues that genre can only be understood as a common cultural
consensus as to what constitutes a certain type o f film (or novel. I would add) and
distinguishes it from other types. .An audience must agree on certain clearly delineated
conventions or rules o f a given genre; as Tudor says. "Genre is w hat we collectively
believe it to be” ("Genre" 122). Innovative reworking o f the genre by an individual author
(what is called auteurship in film, following .Andrew Sarris's popularization o f the concept
in the 1960s) is only recognized as such if the audience has clear expectations o f a genre
text in the first place. Tudor concludes his definition; "If we imagine a general model o f
the workings o f film language, genre directs our attention to sub-languages within it"
(123). Again, I think this definition applies to prose fiction as well. A genre author,
regardless o f his individual skill and intellectual depth, is working with an inherited model-
-a shared notion that this is the way this kind o f story will be told, which the ambitious
author typically subverts or transforms in some way to give the genre his/her identifying
signature. (From this perspective, all authors are working within the limits o f genre.) As I
hope to prove at a later point, one o f the primary sources o f fictional material is the
mythically rich folk tales generated by dramatic real-life events, and the dramatic fiction
helps to perpetuate further real-life events. (I must be careful here not to claim fiction
causes murder, but I have no doubt a good story can give a specific m urder its shape.)
This is yet another manifestation o f the cyclic bricolage Levi-Strauss speaks o f in The
Savage Vfind. defined therein as the refurbishing o f whatever inherited cultural narratives
and artifacts are at hand into novel forms by any given innovator ( 17), and again serial, or
pattern, murder provides an apt metaphor for the process o f genre rewriting.
The horror genre w ould at first seem to be the most obvious literary home o f the
serial killer, largely on the basis o f the erroneous assumption that the supernatural movie
bogeymen o f the late 1970s and '80s constitute the bulk o f the canon, with occasional
"artsy" exceptions like Lang’s M- Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux. Hitchcock's Psycho, or
Powell's Peeping Tom slightly complicating the formula for those intelligentsia with a
carefully veiled taste for "slumming." However. Michael. Jason, and Freddy are only a
few inhabitants o f a so-called "slasher" subgenre within the whole. Vera Dika's 1990
critical study o f these particular "slasher" films renames them "stalker films.” as good a
term as any: she bases this designation on the textual importance o f "the act o f looking and
especially . . the distinctive set o f point-of-view shots employed by these films" (14).
Discussing the same general grouping o f films. Robin W ood recognizes their primary
narrative project as an invitation to "an identification (either sadistic o r masochistic or
both simultaneously) with punishment" ("Beauty" 63). The threatening figure (in John
Widdowson's terminology) o f the serial killer, then, finds its fullest melodramatic parallel
in films like Halloween and Friday the Thirteenth, in which a mythic supernatural menace
stalks broadly drawn character stereotypes, usually teenagers (the Virgin, the Slut, the
Class Clown, the Jock, the Nerd) whose order o f victimization can usually be predicted
quite accurately on the basis o f their obnoxiousness. These narrowly specific narratives,
while often taken to task not only for their misogyny but also their rather depersonalized
reliance on formulaic repetition, sheer technique, and mechanical "splatter" effects, do
serve as a starting point for comprehension o f the narrative endurance o f the multiple
murderer in the horror genre. I also wish to follow Joseph Grixti's lead when he says "the
understanding o f horror fiction . . . includes all forms o f narrative, irrespective o f their
14
medium o f transmission" (Terrors xi). In this, he includes not only film and novel, but also
such diverse media as everyday conversation, television, radio, e tc .: all key players in the
process o f folklore transmission, which I will discuss at a later point. The horror story is
multi-faceted.
Martin Tropp argues that the horror story's appeal (and its ready adaptability to
film) can only be com prehended in terms o f its audience reception. The horror story is
meant to be experienced as a communal event, he insists:
As a collective experience (made immediate in our century when film enabled us

literally to be alone together in the darkness) the popularity o f the horror story
transformed private nightmares into communal events. horror stories are not
nightmares transcribed, but fears recast into safe and communicable forms—a
concrete, related, yet separate reality. H orror stories, when they work,
construct a fictional edifice o f fear and deconstruct it simultaneously, dissipating
terror in the act o f creating it. .And real horrors are filtered through the
expectations o f readers trained in responding to popular fiction, familiar with a set
o f images, a language, and pattern o f development. H orror fiction gives the reader
the tools to "read" experiences that would otherwise, like nightmares, be
incommunicable. In that way. the inexpressible and private becomes
understandable and communal, shared and safe. (4-5)
Carol Clover, while noting that folklorists usually "disown" horror movies in particular as
too profit-oriented and technological in construction, agrees: ". horror movies look like
nothing so much as folktales—a set o f fixed tale types that generate an endless stream o f
what are in effect variants" (10). James Twitchell similarly argues for an "ethnological
approach." as opposed to an auteur one. to understanding horror's appeal: "The critic's
first job in explaining the fascination o f horror is . . . to trace [horrific images'] migrations
to the audience and. only then, try to understand why they have been crucial enough to
pass along" (Pleasures 84).
These theories make more readily comprehensible the audience laughter which
often greets the on-screen death o f a character in a "slasher" film and so troubles those
critics with a limited exposure to the horror genre. Such laughter can be misconstrued as
an expression o f pure individual sadism, but it is better understood as an expression o f the
collective experience o f watching this kind o f film. A stalker film is meant to be
experienced in a group (o r "herd," if you will) and not seen in isolation, as I discovered in
viewing these films at heavily attended "Jason" o r "Michael" parties at college dorm itories
during the height o f their popularity in the 1980s. W atching the killer stalk his victims
creates a mounting level o f anxiety in the audience, and the continually deferred moment
o f murder builds the suspense to a peak which can only be alleviated by the denouement o f
the murder itself. (I am sure the structural approxim ation in these films to the rhythm o f
sexual intercourse is no accident, but I would also argue that any narrative plot seeks to
achieve precisely the same effect.) Stalker films are shamelessly tailored to create a
physical effect, the shiver o r jump o f terror, in the view er roughly analogous to what is
happening to the poor saps on the screen: superlative examples o f what Linda Williams
calls "body genre" films ("Film Bodies" 3). The shriek-followed-bv-Iaughter which can
greet cinematic murder is pseudo-orgasmic relief from tension, not delight in mayhem per
se. The audience and the film creator willingly enter into a contract in which the audience
agrees to be manipulated by the director, leading Dika to call the stalker film a "game o f
terror." Martin Tropp's commentary goes beyond the scope o f the visceral stalker film,
neatly linking the horror genre to the larger experience o f community intersubjectivitv.
from which I believe the figure o f the serial killer arises, both in reality, as it is
comprehended and mediated through language, and fiction.
A popular misconception has it that horror deals exclusively with the explicitly
supernatural. However, this is an incapacitatingly restrictive definition. Horror is better
understood as the state o f mind induced by one's confrontation with a violation o f cultural
categories, as Mary Douglas argues. According to M artin Bridgstock, she identifies at
least three different types o f violation: pollution, o r "m atter out o f place"; moral, which
"involve either the breach o f important moral laws o r outrages against people, or both";
and invasion o f chaos, o r the threat o f a "lapse into incomprehensibility" (116). Pollution
is integral to Noel Carroll's definition o f horror as an em otion composed o f equal pans
16
fear and nausea, elicited by the sight o f the monster: "Within the context o f the horror
narrative, the monsters are identified as impure and unclean" (23). The serial killer as
horrific m onster appears human, but his "hidden" m onstrosity radiates a kind o f moral
leprosy which taints all who come into contact with him. much like the vampire infects
others with his "disease.” The serial killer's pollution o f the moral environment marks him
as a genre monster. Also in accordance with another o f Douglas's ideas, Susan Stewart
identifies the chaotic, destabilizing violation o f fixed boundaries, "between the human and
the other, between nature and culture" (42), as central to horror’s effect. It could be
argued that in this effacement o f boundary, horror is decidedly postmodern in tone.
Hence, horror’s insistence on doubling "as a polysemy o f the s e lf . . since repetition in
this genre has the effect o f cumulative suspense. One repetition is sufficient to imply an
infinity o f repetitions" (43). Philip Brophv also isolates repetition as a key element in
horror: "It is a genre which mimics itself mercilessly—because its statement is coded
within its very mimicry" (3). Judging by the ubiquity o f rotelv executed and heavily hyped
sequels in all areas o f American culture, this tendency is not limited to the horror genre,
which at least often has the virtue o f metatextuailv mocking its own structure.
Within this framework o f violations, the serial killer manages to incarnate all o f
them. He is not simply another reworking o f the standard "mad scientist" figure, in spite
of obvious connections between serial murder and scientific penetration o f boundaries.
Rather, as .Andrew Tudor explains, the murdering "madman" is a relatively recent genre
development (m ost often traced back to Norman Bates as progenitor, but even one o f
Hitchcock's ow n films. Shadow o f a Doubt, predates Psycho):
. . . horror-m ovie madmen are not visionary obsessives, glorying in scientific

reason as they single-mindedly pursue their researches. They are, rather, victims o f
overpow ering impulses that well up from within; monsters brought forth by the
sleep o f reason, not by its attractions. H orror-m ovie psychotics murder, terrorize,
maim and rape because o f some inner compulsion, because the psyche harbours the
dangerous excesses o f human passion. (M ad 185)
17
This is what is so insidious and threatening about the serial killer in particular, in spite o f
cultural attempts to demonize him, he is demonstrably one o f us. in Conrad’s famous
phrase. He resists efforts to distance him. which is why the Halloween-derivative
invincible bogeyman, in spite o f its run o f immense cinematic popularity, soon exhausted
itself dramatically. (The first Halloween avoids this trap by firmly grounding Michael
Myers, juggernaut though he is. in a melodramatic but nevertheless clearly human personal
h isto ry ) Dana Polan contends that horror narratives "now suggest that the horror is not
merely among us. but rather part o f us. caused by us” (202). This tendency produces an
unresolved tension in most serial murder narratives; the killer is coded as a monster, but
his tragic personal history o f abuse and neglect is also usually foregrounded as part o f the
narrative, humanizing him to at least some extent and making him capable o f earning our
sympathy, even in the case o f clear ''monsters" like Jason and Michael. (This also clarifies
why Jonathan Demme's undoubtedly well-crafted film The Silence o f the Lambs is so
unbalanced. It pays token liberal lip service to Jame Gumb’s victimized past and then
proceeds to extravagantly mystify its two villains. Michael M ann’s underrated Manhunter.
also based on a Thomas Harris serial-killer scenario featuring tw o o f the same characters,
does a much more conscientious job o f humanizing its "monster." which might explain
why that film did not achieve the success o f Demme’s.) The overall effect o f this tension is
to draw our attention to the process o f storytelling itself when we see how genre
conventions o f "monsterdom" are played with and overlaid onto the recognizably human
killer.
Yet his actions by their very nature cannot help but propel him into the mythic
territory reserved for the m ost extreme taboo violators. His random murders pollute, in
that they often involve gross injury, mutilation, and dismemberment; they morally violate
society's laws and affront personal notions o f propriety and civilized conduct; and in their
sheer inaccessibility o f rational motive threaten chaos. It is little wonder, then, that the
real-life serial killer incurs unprecedented levels o f opprobrium, and that his fictional
18
counterpan exemplifies an aesthetic decentering o f meaning common to postmodern
narrative strategy. His serial murders imply an infinite progression and regression. His
identity is not solidly cast; he will be at least doubled in the narrative, if not tripled or
quadrupled. Even as he narcissisticallv seeks reflection on the outer screen represented by
his victims, he reflects back all attempts to read him. In another context. Jacques Derrida
explains the im portance o f doubling to postmodern perception;
For what is reflected is split in itself and not only as an addition to itself o f its
image. T he reflection, the image, the double, splits what it doubles. . . . W hat can
look at itself is not one; and the law o f the addition o f the origin to its
representation, o f the thing to its image, is that one plus one makes at least three.
(Gram m atology 36)
The tiinhouse-reflective serial murderer is the perfect postm odern metaphor for violent
penetration o f boundaries, which upsets all epistemological. ontological, and teleological
conceptions. As W .H. Rockett concludes in his study o f horrific narrative:
Thanks to [those filmmakers] who have returned to the Lovecraft notion o f the
universe turned upside down and improved upon it to turn the upside down
universe sideways through convention twisting and the abandonment o f strict
Aristotelean narrative conventions, today’s audience enters a theater knowing
anything can happen. (135)
I would reiterate my argument, then, that the serial killer narrative fashions itself from
horror-text conventions and stock horror figures such as the vampire and werewolf, but its
flirtation with postm odern metatextuality and ontological nihilism demands that it sample
from other genres as well: most obviously, the detective genre, which in itself can be
divided into classical mystery, crime thriller, psychological thriller, hard-boiled detective
fiction, police procedural, etc., depending on who is doing the classification. I will address
the detective's presence in the serial killer narrative shortly. For now, it is important to
highlight what may be the contemporary serial-killer narrative’s most distinctive feature:
its associations with the aptly named "splatterpunk" genre.
19
Paul M. Sammon has defined splatterpunk in the same terms often heard from
those performance artists who hurl blood, feces, and animal viscera upon themselves and
their audience; he claims that as a 1980s literary phenomenon, splatterpunk rebels against
"the traditional, meekly suggestive horror story" and also reacts against the "vicious
conservatism o f Ronald Reagan and M argaret Thatcher" (qtd. in Tucker 13) Ken Tucker,
reviewing the splatterpunk movement for the New York Times Book Review, writes:
Basically, splatterpunk bears the same relationship to horror fiction that punk rock
did to rock-n-roll—it is a radical gesture that shakes up the genre, that shifts the
balance slightly but significantly. Splatterpunk does not have mass appeal, but it
does inevitably influence other, more mainstream writers, who respond to its sheer
gall, its refusal to be conventionally commercial even as it inspires [sic] to great
commercial success. (13)
Splatterpunk is not as new (except for the name) as Tucker and Sammon imply. The
1960s "gore" films o f Herschell Gordon Lewis, an erstwhile English professor at the
University o f Mississippi, are early examples o f "splatter." and G eorge Romero's then-
graphic Might o f the Living Dead (19681 is often "accused" o f being the transitional film
between Lewis's low-rent films and 1970s mainstream "splatter" like The Exorcist and
Jaws John M cCarty in 1981 wTote o f "splatter movies." linking them to French Grand
Guignol theatre ( Splatter 8). David Hogan finds this com parison overly "charitable." but
does agree that H.G. Lewis "was the first filmmaker to exploit Grand Guignol sensibilities
by translating them to a believable milieu" (237), if one can call the infamously graphic
Blood Feast, centered around an Egyptian caterer sacrificing beautiful women in Miami,
believable. In many ways. Blood Feast set the tone for "slasher" movies by its graphic
victimization o f sexually alluring young women, and started in motion an across-the-board
genre trend still with us today. Hogan concludes: "Lewis' im portance as an artist is
nonexistent, but his influence on world cinema may be inestimable. He dared show the
unshowable" (242).
20
However extrem e o r depressing to humanists, however. Lewis’s splatterpunk
legacy- o f gore is merely one feature o f what Linda Williams calls "body genres." The
body genre is characterized by its depiction o f "the spectacle o f a body caught in the grip
o f intense sensation o r em otion" and also "the focus on w hat could probably best be called
a form o f ecstacy . . . a quality o f uncontrollable convulsion or spasm" (4). The very
excess o f the images seeks to replicate itself in the reactive, sympathetic body o f the
spectator, and with its grossly immediate effects tends to be associated with "low" or
"easy" cultural forms—much like the serial format. The body genre can run the gamut
from Lewis’s Blood Feast to what Williams calls "vveepie" women's melodrama. The links
between the general category o f body genre and the serial-killer subgenre are obvious.
Generally speaking, the subgenre of serial killer fiction finds itself interweaving
two general thematic movements: what I will call the psycho profile and the procedural.
.Any given narrative may be given structure by predominantly one movement o r the other,
but many will be com posed o f varying proportions o f both, as in Shane Stevens's 1979
sprawling novel By Reason o f Insanity and Oliver Stone's 1994 film Natural Bom Killers.
As with most such binary divisions, there are exceptions and mergings and fine distinctions
to the extent that the division is practically worthless (particularly in this case), but these
two themes provide a jum ping-off point for discussion. The psycho profile may adopt any
tone or stance tow ard its subject, but generally speaking, it centers around the killer as
protagonist, either placing the audience directly into the m urderous point o f view or
somewhere close by (through friends, lovers, acquaintances, and/or victims). The killer
may also exhibit supernatural abilities, at least to some extent. (John Carpenter's
Halloween is typical o f this tendency.)
Some o f the more well known, primarily psvcho-profile narratives (not all o f them
.American) include Fritz Lang's M (1931); Emest B. Schoedsack and Irving Pichel's The
Most Dangerous Game (1932): Emlyn Williams’s play Night Must Fall (1935): George
King's film The Demon B arber o f Fleet Street (1936); Frank Capra's .Arsenic and Old Lace
(1944); Edward Dmytryk's The Sniper (1952): William M arch’s novel The Bad Seed
(1954); Fritz Lang's While the City Sleeps (1956); Michael Powell's film Peeping Tom
(1960); Alfred Hitchcock's Rsycha (1960): William Castle's Strait-Jacket (1964); Emlyn
Williams's book Beyond B elief (1967); Leonard Kastle's The Honeymoon Killers (1970);
Richard Fleischer’s film Ten Rillington Place (1971); Terrence Malik's Badlands (1973):
Jeff Gillen and Alan Ormsbv's film Deranged (1974); Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw
Massacre (1975); G eorge A. Romero’s Martin (1976); Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes
(1977); John Carpenter's Halloween (19781: Sean Cunningham’s Friday the Thirteenth
(1980); Kevin O’Connor's Motel Hell (1980): Roger Spottisvvoode's T error Train (1980);
George Mihalka’s My Bloody Valentine (1981); Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street
( 1955), James Ellroy's Killer on the Road (1986), John M cNaughton's Henry: Portrait o f
a Serial Killer (1986); Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho (1991); Paul West's novel Jack
the Ripper and the W omen o f Whitechapel ( 19911: Dennis Cooper’s novel Jerk (1993). (I
am indebted to John M cCarty’s comprehensive catalogue. Psychos, for refreshing my
memory on some o f these films and books.) O f all o f these texts. Henry is probably the
most critically know n and respected. It is also one o f the most clearly postmodern,
metafictional filmic texts, in that it self-consciously plays within the genre boundaries
established by its semi-reputable predecessors. Larrv McCaffery in The Metafictional
Muse divides metafiction into two groups: fiction which examines its ow n construction or
which comments on the forms o f previous fictions, and fiction which comments on how all
fictional systems are created, operated, and dogmatized; given M cCafferv's binary schema.
Henry spans these divisions as well. (I will look at Henry in more depth at a later point.)
The second thematic movement in serial-killer fiction, the procedural, may focus
heavily on the killer but gives at least equal time to those "detectives." am ateur or
professional, who have taken it upon themselves to stop him. A partial list o f examples
includes Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow o f a Doubt (1943); James Hills's film A Study in
Terror (1965); Richard Fleischer's The Boston Strangler (1968); Don Siegel's Dirty Harry
(1971); Tom Gries's television docudrama H elter Skelter (1976); Irvin Kershner’s The
Eyes o f Laura M ars (1978); Shane Stevens’s novel By Reason o f Insanity (1979); Bob
Clark’s film M urder by D ecree (1979); Nicolas M eyer's film Time .After Time (1979);
Thomas Harris's Red D ragon (19811 and The Silence o f the Lambs (19881; Clint
Eastwood's Sudden Impact (1983); Joyce Carol O ates's Mysteries o f W interthum (1984);
Richard Tuggle's Tightrope (1984); Tim Burton’s Batman (1989); Patricia Cornwell's
Postmortem (1990). Body o f Evidence ( 1991). and .All That Remains (1992); Paul
Verhoeven's Basic Instinct (1992); Bernard Rose's Candvman (1992); Caleb Carr’s The
Alienist (1994); David Fincher's Seven (1995). All o f these narratives, while dramatically
dominated by a serial murderer, concentrate on the efforts o f other characters to stop the
murders.
In this context, the serial killer narrative is a specialized variation o f the literary
nineteenth century murder-mystery or detective genre, which in turn evolved from what
Geraldine Pederson-Krag calls the "witch-hunting" tales o f the sixteenth, seventeenth, and
eighteenth centuries, wherein "There was a need to discover witches lurking in everyday
surroundings" (16). Thus, this genre comes naturally by its sense o f a lurking menace to
be discovered behind the veil o f appearance, and has found its full flower in the United
States, whose Calvinist heritage predisposes .Americans to "read" their environment for
clues regarding their "elected" status. The mystery or detective genre is notoriously
difficult to define in the sense that almost any novelist at one time or another structures a
narrative around a crime or criminal and yet remains outside the boundaries o f genre, at
least according to academics. Even within the genre, classification is complicated by the
existence o f various narrative subsets; the police procedural, the classic "puzzle" story,
the hardboiled detective story, and so on. In spite o f the difficulties, however. David
Lehman has broadly defined the genre in this way:
The detective novel, as a condition o f its being, took murder out o f the ethical
realm and put it into that o f aesthetics. By analogy, murder in a murder mystery
becom es a kind o f poetic conceit, often quite a baroque one; the criminal is an
artist, the detective an aesthete and a critic, and the blundering policeman a
philistine, (xvii)
The detective genre, then, resembles nothing m ore than a fictional commentary on the
process o f sign-reading itself, with the detective discovering "the significance o f these
[signs] and forg[ing] them into a chain o f clues that leads to the criminal and finally binds
him" (Pederson-K rag 14). As Leham goes on to say. the detective story's "narrative line
flows backward, from effect to cause, causing the reader to become a participant or co-
conspirator” (xvii) as he she constructs hypothetical scenarios o f what may have happened
on the basis o f a few clues. Poe’s Dupin and Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes excel at this style
o f critical reading—so much so. in fact, that they become as separate from the plodding
mass o f dull professional detectives, or critics, as the criminals they ail theoretically
oppose. The intellectual mastery o f a Dupin o r a Holmes naturally compels reader
sympathy, which has the corollary (and troubling) effect o f implicating the voyeuristic
reader in the criminal mind which the equally voyeuristic fictional detective exerts so much
mental effort attem pting to enter. As we can clearly see in a novel like Thom as Harris's
Red Dragon o r the Michael Mann film M anhunter based on it. implication o f the viewer
into the criminal mindset occupies an ascendant position in the serial-killer narrative: a
trait it has inherited from the story o f detection.
The objectification which this implies has landed the detective genre, as it has
evolved from P oe and Doyle’s original contributions, squarely in the arena o f feminist
debate, as B arbara Lawrence asserts. Sherlock Holmes's emotional detachment, as she
characterizes it, has been
exaggerated by later writers until the tough American private-eye em erged, using,
abusing, scorning the women who draped themselves over him, lurked in his bed
or started undressing before he even knew their names. The writers and readers o f
these stories are, o f course, indulging in sexual fantasy. But the emphasis on maie
dominance cannot be ignored: women are objects; they are unthinking, emotional
creatures whose sole reason for existence is to serve men's needs, even when those
needs are. perhaps, abnormal, as are Philip Marlowe's or Mike Hammer's. (40)
In response to this distressing genre development. Law rence continues, women writers
created more emotionally engaged female detectives (like Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple)
who initially w ere older spinsters but gradually became m ore integrated into traditionally
masculine spheres o f activity. Today, there are fictional female private detectives (like
P.D James's Cordeiia Grey) o r law-enforcement professionals (Patricia Cornwell's Dr.
Kay Scarpetta) who directly work, or compete, with their male counterpans. During this
time, male writers have also created female detectives, w ith varying degrees o f success.
Some merely recreate hardboiled male detectives in female form, as does Peter O'Donnell
with M odesty Blaise, but others have written more plausible characters, as Thomas Harris
has done with Clarice Starling. Carolyn Heilbrun goes so far as to say that the detective
genre, in spite o f its phallocentric legacy or maybe because o f it. has been in the cultural
forefront o f revising sexist attitudes and patriarchal tradition:
[The] move tow ard andrognv and away from stereotypical sex roles—away, more
imponantly. from the ridiculing and condemning o f those who do not conform to
stereotypical sex roles—has. I am proud to say, found greater momentum in the
detective story than in any other genre, and has recently gone further in the United
States than elsewhere. (5)
Heilbrun's comment, startling as it may sound at first, is verifiable if one looks at the genre
closely The serial-killer narrative, for all its dehumanizing and gory excesses, is also
centrally facing these issues in a sometimes-progressive wav the mainstream does not. In
fact, in many ways, the gender concern I have already noted over the representation o f
serial murder has been an outgrow th o f the feminist concern with and rewriting o f the
originally masculine-dominated detective genre, and much the same process is being
replicated, at a specialized level, in the serial-killer detection subgenre. Consider, for
example, the best-selling novels o f Patricia Cornwell, w hose female protagonist, medical
examiner Kay Scarpetta. softens the narratives' obsessive, typically masculine emphasis on
catching serial killers with her empathy not for the killer (as so often happens in male
renditions o f this same story) but for the murder victims. In this, she parallels Clarice
Starling, whose concern for victims Catherine Martin and Frederica Bimmel, not her
identification with killer Jame Gumb. provides her the necessary clues to find Gumb's
house.
These kinds o f stories, regardless o f their gender shadings, reflect a distinctly
separate, and more recent, development in the detective genre: the police procedural.
The police procedural, according to Julian Symons, "concentrates upon the detailed
investigation o f a crime from the point o f view o f the police, and . . . does so with
considerable realism" (193). In contrast to the labyrinthine plotting and intellectual
complexity o f the puzzle story, the police procedural seeks to ground itself in the
mundane, often sordid, reality o f criminal behavior, which typically involves spontaneous
or "motiveless" crimes o f passion that do not involve inspired guessw ork to solve so much
as plodding adherence to the routine procedures o f policework. (Given the thematic
prominence o f the outcast vigilante in American detective fiction, this may seem a
contradiction at first, but it isn’t. The vigilante is still doggedly clinging to a code, a list o f
prescribed procedures which he must follow, alone if necessary: the institutionalized
regulations which he flouts are seen as aberrations, or deviations from the narratively
privileged "real" code o f conduct. See Slotkin's essay "Detective," page 99.)
Ratiocination is secondary to persistence. Also, rather than one crime or murder
dominating the narrative, several (usually unrelated) crimes com pete for the detective's
strained attention: again, an attempt to make the puzzle story m ore realistic. The "lone"
detective is depicted in his relationships with other police professionals, all o f whom are
suffering under their own burdensome caseloads. Multiplicity o f crime generates multiple
storylines (Binvan 109). Puzzle solving is replaced by crime solving. This twentieth-
century genre development was a prerequisite for the serial-killer narrative as we have
come to know it: the often graphic nature o f the multiple murders, and the emphasis on
investigatory detail and "realism." are legacies o f the naturalistic conventions o f the police
procedural.
Yet one last narrative requirement remains before I can truly call the serial-killer
story "postmodern." The detective story's reliance on the powers o f the mind to make
order o f complexity has to be called into question, as Michael Holquist argues. On the
basis o f precedents set by Robbe-Grillet and Borges, both o f whom have w orked
postmodern turns on the detective genre. Holquist concludes that
the metaphysical detective story does not have the narcotizing effect o f its
progenitor; instead o f familiarity', it gives strangeness, a strangeness which more
often than not is the result o f jumbling the well-known patterns o f classical
detective stories. Instead o f reassuring, they disturb. They are not an escape, but
an attack. By exploiting the conventions o f the detective story such men as
Borges and Robbe-Grillet have fought against the modernist attem pt to fill the
void o f the world with rediscovered mythical symbols. Rather, they dramatize the
void. (173)
As already argued, the serial-killer story' more than most projects its subjects (characters
and readers) into the void. This is the true narratological agenda: not puzzle solving or
crime solving, though these conventions are played with, usually to ironic effect.
Questions o f the void, called forth by the killer’s deliberate penetration into it. preoccupy
the characters within the narrative. Because o f its emphasis on ontology (and the inability
to come to definite conclusions concerning it), the revealed identity o f the murderer,
which is in flux anyway, is not as im portant to the reader, though still a concern for the
characters within the story. This kind o f narrative is not a murder mystery in the classic
sense, but rather what David Richter terms an "anti-mvstery" and Stefano Tani calls "anti
detective." The police still seek to unmask a murderer, but in many cases the killer is
revealed to the audience, by isolated point-of-view psychological portraits if not by actual
named identity, long before the police find him. And. in contrast to the traditional
mystery, the victims o f this murderer are usually chosen precisely because no traditional
investigation centering upon suspects with a hidden but ultimately clear motive will
succeed. The victims generally have little to no prior connection to their murderer. No
motive, as the classic mystery defines it. exists here for the police to uncover in plodding,
linear fashion. Richter contends that
. . serial m urder serves to break up even more successfully the narrative's diegetic
flow, the sense o f linearity, o f a movement between beginning and end. In the
process, o f course, the serial victims . . become random targets rather than
individualized persons. . . . we read the blood only as a code, an exercise in spatial
form. (108)
The modernist highbrow mystery has transmuted into this typically postmodern form o f
anti-mystery, Richter concludes. Not to completely dispute Richter's argument, I would
question his rather casual use o f the term "postmodern," which he uses to imply anything
written after World W ar II. and argue that this kind o f metafictional project, or anti-
mvstery. has always been a subsidiary o f the mystery genre. Rather than reading a plot,
the anti-mvsterv reader reads a metadiscourse on how plots are written and then
consumed by readers. Tani further identifies three distinct narrative strategies o f the anti
detective story: innovation, in which an early, unsatisfactory solution to the mystery is
complicated by a later, more puzzling one. or the solution "does not imply the punishment
o f the culprit", o r "a solution is found by chance": deconstm ction. in which "instead o f a
solution there is a suspension o f the solution"; and metafiction, in which "detection is
present in the relation between the w riter who deviously writes (’hides') his own text and
the reader who w ants to make sense out o f it" (43). To varying degrees, most o f these
elements are present in those serial-killer narratives which emphasize a pursuit o f the
killer.
Incidentally, the term "detective" as applied to the procedural movement is used
quite loosely, as the pursuing agents may not be professional law-enforcement figures at
all. In Bernard Rose's 1992 film Candyman. for example, a female graduate student seeks
to find a public-housing serial killer in Chicago. .And lest this idea o f pursuit, with its
bipolar situating o f hunter and quarry in opposition to one another, sound too morally
clearcut. the procedural theme usually works very hard to implicate the detectives, at least
to some extent, in the killer's crimes, or the cultural attitudes that make them possible.
Frequently, moral surety is completely lost o r severely undermined as both killer and
detective conceptualize their relationship in term s o f a complex, multi-role game, where
abstract, binary notions o f right and wrong becom e tenuous at best. Less overtly nihilistic
than purely psvcho-profile narratives, the procedural narrative still operates within an
ominously Gothic environment where the daily practice o f morality and justice constantly
slides away from idealistic centers, epitomizing a destabilizing strategy common to
postmodern fiction: a somewhat oxvmoronic term.
Indeed, one o f the most characteristic destabilizing operations o f postmodemitv as
a social movement is its refusal to honor the traditional demarcation between "fact" and
"fiction;" rather, all texts or linguistic constructs become "fictions" subject to reading, or
interpretation. A concept as frightening as it is liberating, the cross-fertilization (or
contamination, if you will) between genres o f representation typically divided into "fact"
or "fiction" has permeated throughout the culture o f the past century and a half. This
blurring is not the result o f a conscious rebellion against boundary on the pan o f a few
"deconstructionists." as some claim, nor is it due to some inexplicable new culture-wide
fondness for the literary conceits o f metafiction or self-referentiality. Self-referentialitv bv
itself, so often cited as a dominating feature o f literary postmodernism, is not exactly a
"new" development, as any scholar o f Chaucer. Shakespeare, Richardson, Hawthorne, et
al. can testify. The writers o f texts have always relied on authorial precedent for
inspiration and intertextual reference even as they rebelliouslv smash those old
conventions, a point well made in Andrew Britton's indispensable article "The Myth o f
Postmodernism" (16); the only truly novel development in postmodernism is the variety o f
texts that technology has provided to what is rapidly becoming a post-literate society and
the corresponding genre-crossing beloved o f all auteurs eager to strut their knowledge o f
a shared artistic past. Ours is a leisured society in which the modernist pretensions o f
"art" have successfully infiltrated the perceptions o f all consumers and creators o f textual
representation, no m atter how unsophisticated (and most are quite sophisticated, even if
inarticulately phrased) the "readings." so that equal aesthetic gravity and attention are
accorded to close readings o f Stephen King and Edgar Allen Poe, M adonna and Mozart.
In a very real sense, "postmodernism" is a complete misnomer. W e are suffering from
nothing m ore than an embarrassment o f representational riches which we gamely attempt
to read in a doggedly modernist way. and we have more "critics" who have learned the an
o f close reading not from the academy, but from television and film. All living things are
critics, Kenneth Burke tells us, and it naturally follows that the m ore a culture produces
texts which call for at least some degree o f interpretation or reading, the more "critical"
that culture will become. This does not imply that the culture will become more self-
aware o f its own hypocrisies and nationalistic delusions, o f course; it means only that it
becomes a practiced, efficient reader o f its own peculiar genres o f representation and
learns an appreciation o f their utility in constructing one's own " te x ts ." defined here not
just as a novel or poem, but as any symbolic action rooted in linguistic/narratological
principles. In fact. Roland Barthes calls the text "an anagram for o u r body" (17); in the
mass-media era o f postmodemity. our biological "texts" are murdered by "critics."
Review o f the Critical Literature and a Proposed M ethodology
The message to be received from the enormous social attention given to the serial (or
"recreational." as he is sometimes called) murderer is as varied as the ideologies o f his
concerned observers. The message, to some, is that patriarchal society, particularly that o f
the United States, promotes individual masculine terrorism against female victims, even in
its fiction, and so the serial-killer case study confirms "the links between murder,
misogyny, and masculinity," according to Suzanne M oore (71). Probably the clearest
examination o f this specific theme to date is Jane Caputi's The Age o f Sex Crime, which is
also one o f the few book-length studies o f the cultural construction o f serial murder. It
first dem onstrated to me the prevalence o f Jack-the-Ripper imagery in our "pop" culture
30
and how many m odem serial murderers have appropriated the terms o f the Ripper
discourse for their own violent agendas. (Judith W alko w itz's feminist study o f late
Victorian London. City o f Dreadful Delight, also centers around the Ripper’s crimes as
emblem o f urban misogyny.) Caputi's book, in turn, is deeply indebted not only to Colin
Wilson, who originally coined the term "age o f sex crim e” but also to Deborah Cameron
and Elizabeth Fraser's The Lust to Kill: A Feminist Investigation o f Sexual M urder, which
proceeds on the thesis that
. . although killing for sexual pleasure existed as a form o f behaviour well before
Jack the Ripper, with sporadic reports going back at least to the fifteenth century,
sexual m urder as a distinctive category with a meaning for experts and lay
members o f the culture is a product o f the mid- to late nineteenth century and was
not completely established in its present form until the early years o f this century.
( 22 )
Cameron and Fraser and Caputi argue that this form o f sexual murder, continually re
enacted in our dramatic arts, accompanied the patriarchal backlash reaction to social
advances and reforms in women’s rights.
Shifting the emphasis from gender politics to body politics. Barbara Ehrenreich
argues that the acclaim granted to films such as The Silence o f the Lambs proves "that at
this particular historical moment, we have come to hate the body. . . . Only a couple o f
decades ago. we could conceive o f better uses o f the body than as a source o f meat or
leather" (80). To B. Ruby Rich, writing about a recent spate o f random-violence films, it's
all a matter o f the body politic:
It's no coincidence that these films are appearing at the very moment in which the
Cold W ar has been decentralized, split like atom s into dozens o f hot wars around
the globe. . . . The 90s, in short, is a time o f intensely politicised violence. It
should not be surprising, then, that the film genre that has emerged is one o f
equally intense violence, but depoliticised and individualised. (6)
-Ail these explanations (and there are many more) have som e validity; the interpretations o f
the fictional or non-fictional serial killer's message, like his victims, are legion (not
31
coincidentally, th e title o f William Peter Blattv's book on the occult and serial m urder and
the basis o f the film The Exorcist IIP .
On the basis o f this widespread interest, academia is slowly awakening to the
complex issues o f narrative and representation in the serial-killer text. The study (as
opposed to the tabloid merchandising) o f serial murder has already commenced in
sociological and criminological circles. David Abrahamsen. John Douglas. Steven Egger.
Robert Hazelwood. Eric Hickey. Ronald Holmes and James De Burger. Philip Jenkins.
Jack Levin and Jam es .Alan Fox. Elliott Leyton. Donald Lunde, Joel Norris. Robert
Ressler. and Colin Wilson (to name only the most renowned) have all written prominent
contributions to the social-science literature concerning the actuality o f serial murder.
What has generally been neglected, however, is a comprehensive attempt to study multiple
murder as an im petus for myth- and narrative-making, particularly in contem porary
.America where the metaphoric legacy o f frontier violence lingers on. In addition to the
aforementioned Caputi and Cameron and Fraser, those who have attempted this kind o f
specialized study are few: Richard Blennerhassett. .Albert Drukteinis. Joseph Grixti. Joyce
Carol Oates. David Richter. Martin Rubin. Mark Seltzer. .Amv Taubin. Some genre
studies have touched upon the subject in the course o f their ow n particular tasks but left
thorough exploration to others, such as: Vera Dika's Games o f Terror, a brief but
insightful treatm ent o f the late-1970s slasher film: Carol Clover's Men. Women and Chain
Saws, an impressive w ork (despite the title) which argues convincingly that horror films,
far from being anti-feminist, are actually very much feminist in some regards: and Richard
Slotkin's Gunfighter Nation, whose findings would suggest identifying a film like The
Silence o f the Lambs as being firmly in the Indian-captivity-narrative American tradition
that presaged the W estern (635).
Nevertheless, the time has come for a realization o f the potential o f these texts as
cultural artifacts. I have heard o f a few academics who have been incorporating some o f
this "genre" w ork into more traditional coursework: for example, Glenn D 'C ruz o f the
University o f M elbourne structured a 1992 interdepartmental Performance Dramaturgy
course around a study o f serial-killer representations (see his "Representing the Serial
Killer: 'Postmodern' Pedagogy in Performance Studies" in the September 1994 Southern
ReviewV while Carl Holmberg o f Bowling Green State University tells me that he
effectively illustrates the concept o f gender horror to undergraduates by teaching Thomas
Harris’s novel The Silence o f the Lambs. A special session on serial murder in popular
literature has been proposed for the 1996 M odem Language Association meeting in
Washington. D C. These offerings accompany a general professional trend toward the
acceptance o f genre work, particularly crime fiction, and popular culture as a legitimate
area o f intellectual inquiry, as exemplified by the establishment o f such scholarly
newsletters as "M urder is Academic.” out o f Hunter College in New York.
This kind o f cultural exploration must, o f necessity, partake o f many theories and
transcend the traditionally insular boundaries o f numerous academic disciplines. Formalist
and poststructuralist readings alike are often too restricted in their selective focus on
textual structure alone, a situation surprisingly few academics choose to alter. It is
relatively infrequent that one encounters a Sumiko Higashi. who advocates a multi
disciplinary reading o f film in particular. She characterizes the limitations o f a strictly text-
based approach: "For the most part, poststructuralist critics engage in formalist or textual
analyses . . . to the exclusion o f empirical data about production, distribution, and
audience reception, and especially about the larger sociohistoric context" (175-6). F or the
purposes o f my specific study, a narrow focus on fictional texts alone (with occasional
forays into what second-hand commentators have said about them) would be reductive
and insufficiently attentive to the boundary-invading nature o f the postmodern moment,
the moment which encrypts the serial killer. Again. Caputi's book on multiple murder is
pioneering in this aspect, as she analyzes, sometimes far too superficially and randomly, a
dizzying mix o f critical theory, science, philosophy, literature, film, music, even
advertising, for indications o f misogyny. Cameron and Fraser's study, which precedes
Caputi’s. concentrates m ore rigorously (though still sampling from diverse academic
disciplines at will) on the philosophical stances which engender dehumanizing violence,
such as those formulated by the Marquis de Sade. Andre Gide. Jean-Paul Sartre, and Jean
Genet. For example, according to Cameron and Fraser, in reference to de Sade's
philosophies: "If killing is justifiable because it obeys the laws o f nature, it is pleasurable
because it does qqi obey man-made laws: it flouts the morality o f society and religion and
. . commends the act o f murder to the true libertine" ( 57). Similarly, for Sartre,
influenced by .Andre Gide. "The act o f murder is by definition an act which transgresses
life itself and thereby breaks down the conditions . which keep man's free will in chains"
(59). And in Genet's works, the murderer "has burst the bounds o f socialization, has
ceased to be the social being he was brought up to be. He has also destroyed the law o f
God and God himself, thereby becoming God" (60). On the basis o f this sampling o f
various intellectual rationalizations o f murder, one can see that the end result o f Cameron
and Fraser’s methodology is an intriguing conflation o f social science, philosophy, history,
and literary criticism: what is typically known as neo-Marxism o r sometimes New
Historicism. which in turn is an intellectual manifestation o f the more politically oriented
variations on the postm odern mindset, and not as new as these misleading terms imply.
As for me. I much prefer Michael Ryan's term "cultural" or "political criticism"
over New Historicism o r neo-Marxism. Ryan defines this kind o f criticism as cultural
because it covers not only standard works o f literature, the traditional object o f
literary study, but also such arenas o f culture as film, television, popular literature,
and the symbolic elements o f everyday life, and because increasingly it studies its
objects in terms not only o f their reference to social history or economic reality but
also o f their role in the replication o f social power through culture. (201)
This is not the old-style idealistic Marxism, which attempts to impose totality upon
variety. Ryan concludes, but a "disaggregated and reconstructed" (202) neo-Marxism
which views cultural constructs as sites o f localized tension between an array o f
competing, contradictory influences from all political directions. This view owes much to
34
the theories o f Louis Althusser, which in turn have greatly shaped the neo-Marxist
approaches o f Frederic Jameson and Terry Eagleton. Jameson and Eagleton. among
others, still hold that a totalizing project can be successful, and that the fashionable
flirtation with deconstruction and the "nihilistic'' postmodernism represented most
typically by the theories o f Jean Baudrillard will inevitably transmute into the strategies o f
negotiated reconstruction present in a New Historicist approach. For example.
Baudrillard’s definition o f simulacrum as a substitution o f "the signs o f the real for the
real" (2) initially attracted many who saw contemporary existence as based on transitory,
superficial images and not depth. Baudrillard appears to predict not a meaningfully
revelatory apocalypse, but rather a gradual dissolution into imagistic entropy: a hvperreal
holocaust. However, even Baudrillard’s rendition o f postmodernism, while superficially
nihilistic, is in itself a paradoxical move toward unification: its very act o f fragmentation
tending toward an ideological leveling o f political conflict which is more idealistic than
anything Jameson ever theorized, and much more violent in its methodology.
It is in the nexus o f the ideological tension between the Jamesonian and
Baudrillardian formulations o f postmodernism, between the political and the apolitical,
that the contemporary serial killer originates, both in fact and fiction. The serial killer
seeks transcendental meaning in the traditional manner o f all truth-seekers. but his
frustrated aesthetic eschews the arid intellectualism o f the avant garde modernists and
turns increasingly tow ard the primal and often violent immediacy o f mythic patterns,
including ritualized multiple murder. The serial killer’s murder trajectory aspires tow ard
higher meaning (becom ing Genet's version o f God) and sociological liberation (de Sade's
idealized libertine) even as it drops him to the nadir o f human behavior. It is a failed,
vertiginous project, leading its "author" into a nightmarish pattern o f compulsive killing
that nevertheless attem pts to correspond to an ideal held in the killer's tyrannically self-
dominating fantasies. It might even be said that he is an example o f Kenneth Burke's
definition o f the pious criminal: "If a man who is a criminal lets the criminal trait in him
serve as the informing aspect o f his character . . the criminal deterioration which the
moralist with another point o f view might discover in him is the very- opposite o f
deterioration as regards the test o f piety” (77). The serial killer, moreso than most,
exhibits a single-minded addiction to representations o f murder (Cameron 7) that in turn
he transcribes upon reaiitv to a radical extreme. As distressing as the notion may initially
sound, it would also be called poetic in m ost other contexts. The Romantic linkage o f art
to criminality, even murder (as Cameron and Fraser have rightly pointed out in de Sade
and Genet’s works) was a prerequisite for the cultural attraction o f contemporary' serial
murder, which substitutes—in what I wouid now call the postmodern fashion—repetition
for meaning and pattern for design.
M ark Seltzer, in his tw o-pan study o f the representation o f serial murder, sees this
kind o f compulsive act as indicative o f the machine age itself, where productivity and
counting becom e their own meanings. This complements Andrew Britton's contention
that postmodernist aesthetic in most o f its formulations amounts to nothing more than a
disingenuous philosophical retreat from, and in some cases a celebration of. capitalist
society (10). Annalee N:ewitz. expanding on Marx's definition o f "dead labor” as that
period o f time during which a worker w orks not for himself but for the corporate entity in
a capitalist state, concludes that serial m urder may be a capitalist worker's desperate
attempt to restore his own subjectivity in the machine age by destroying those who
represent certain economic classes he has targeted as enemies (42). In other words, serial
murder is a form o f capitalist recreation, i.e.. relief from work, but not a rejection o f it. .As
further evidence, she also points to the prevalence o f family relationships in serial-killer
narratives: another symptom o f a cultural commodity fetishism, which separates
productivity from leisure and family time. Under such a division, one is compelled to view
family life as a "haven" from the demands o f work, which o f course sets one up for
disillusionment and bitterness, and in the most extreme cases, murder as a way o f relief.
36
Newitz and Seltzer thus provide keys tow ard understanding the crucial role that family life
and economics plays in contemporary serial-killer narratives.
On the evidence o f arguments such as the above, it is therefore vital to place
multiple m urder in its socio-historical moment and context, another premise I accept. To
claim that there is an ahistorical, atemporal meaning o f multiple murder is to attempt a
claim at w hat Angela C arter calls "false universalization" (12)—a rhetorical project
designed to strip political implications away from actions and thus render one's own
political agenda immune from political opposition. Similarly, to attempt a purely "literary"
study o f serial m urder without examining the cultural milieu in which that particular term
originated is an evasion o f critical responsibility for one’s own temporally located
predispositions and biases and. by extension, an apology' for the specific culture in which
serial m urder flourishes. Toward this end, I will be incorporating whatever political
observations I deem helpful in explicating a given fictional text in terms o f its historical
situation. In the case o f the serial-killer genre as it now exists in the United States, one
has no choice but to look at the collusion between federal law-enforcement officials and
the media to create a social threat known as "the serial killer."
This is necessary, because as even a cursory examination o f the field reveals, no
easy distinction between the "fact" or "fiction" o f multiple m urder can be drawn. Annalee
Newitz argues that "Because fictional representations o f serial killers are often based on
biographies o f actual killers, one might say the serial killer narrative spans both fictional
and non-fictional genres" (39). Joseph Grixti. referring to the American obsession with
cannibalistic murderers such as Jeffrey Dahmer. writes o f the fictionalizing process which
accompanies public awareness o f a notorious serial killer:
Fictionalizing figures like . . . [Ted] Bundy as inhuman monsters is one way o f

coming to term s with the dislocations that they generate in order to preserve the
preferred contours o f our own identity. Popular fiction, because o f its very generic
and formulaic nature, frequently acts as a frame o f reassurance which allows us to
safely engage in this exploratory process. The process involves locating the
criminal-outsiders within a tradition, and identifying their affinities with
antecedents—which have in their turn been made part o f a mythology. What we
and our cultures are engaged in when we endeavour to contextualize serial
murderers within this broader mythology is an exercise designed to allow them to
be habitually perceived in the same unthreatening term s as is the case with
domesticated mythic monsters like the w erew olf o r the vampire. ("Consum ing’’
90)
This sounds very much a tentative start tow ard the kind o f extended mvthogenic study I
wish to engage in.
Consequently, in the next chapter, I will move back in time, to the earliest
recognizable literary antecedent o f the multiple murderer narrative: the Gothic. The
Gothic is surprisingly postmodern in its tone: rife with ambiguity, de-centeredness. self-
referentiality, and a breakdown o f boundary. It is also haunted by a menacing but
captivating “dark man” or figure, which is clear heir to the "attractive" serial killers o f the
19S0s and '90s. such as Hannibal Lecter. This dark figure stalks a usually female character
through the narrative landscape in a metaphoric seduction. As the "Satanic" Gothic genre
infiltrated its subversive way throughout other literary movements, particularly the
Romantic, the seduction theme survived and now grows especially prominent in what I
identify as the neo-Gothic. At the chronological cusp between what is commonly called
the "modern" and "postmodern” eras, I find Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow o f a Doubt to be a
representative example o f this neo-Gothic romance. The multiple m urderer Uncle Charlie
anticipates the human monsters o f the latter half o f the century, but is still clearly coded as
vampiric in the terms established by horror genre o f the first half o f the century.
Chapter Three, progressing to the later twentieth century, focuses on the genre
breakthrough Silence o f the Lambs film and the Thomas Harris serial-killer novels which
preceded it. These works encapsulate not only the Gothic formulas o f the past but an
uneasy contemporary overlay o f specifically American progressive and reactionary
tendencies inherent in a project centered around the destabilizing ontological uncertainties
o f gruesome mass murder. This mixture is central to an understanding o f the neo-
38
conserv ative revival o f the 1980s. during which the term "serial killer" was popularized by
law-enforcement representatives eager for finding and media agents eager for ratings.
The 1980s political era also coincided with an apparent upswing in rates o f random
violence and a seemingly contradictory American aggrandizement o f acts o f individual
lawlessness
C hapter Four investigates this kind o f American "wilding" (exuberant cases o f
individual predation upon others) and how it is depicted in two roughly contemporaneous
fictional texts o f the late 1980s and early '90s: Bret Easton Ellis's controversial .American
Psycho and John McNaughton's Henry Portrait o f a Serial Killer. Ellis's work, though
insightful at times in its indictment o f 1980s W all-Street wilding, remains flawed because
o f its excesses; however. McNaughton's film succeeds in its portrayal o f the desperation
and violence rampant in the disenfranchised lower classes in the glitzy 1980s. Again, these
works are characterized by a signature refusal to conventionally punish its murdering
protagonists: reactionary and progressive elements pulling at one another. But however
politically situated, these two texts still bear the stamp o f their genre predecessors in that
they consistently reference themselves to horror and southern Gothic texts, which in turn
derive from the older Gothic.
C hapter Five in conclusion will examine how. in the latest cycle o f serial-killer
texts, the multiple murderer transcends his political context and achieves his goal o f
apotheosis. Tw o 1990s films, Oliver Stone's Natural Bom Killers and Dominic Sena's
Kalifomia. are typical o f this trend. One o f the most striking aspects o f the multiple
murderer’s characterization, readily apparent in Stone and Sena’s treatments, is his mass-
media representation to his culture as a demon, capriciously murdering at will and hence
arousing the kind o f primal fears addressed in all folkloric narrative, out o f which our
modem literary formats stem. I will next refer back to the elemental consciousness o f
mythic language, as do some formulations o f postmodernism, and find a correspondingly
pre-literary narrative form, the oral folklore tale, describing these multiple murderers in
monstrous form. Bernard Rose's 1992 film. Candvm an. rather than focusing on the "end
times" like Stone and Sena’s narratives, addresses the initial process by which a myth is
created, nurtured, disseminated, and locally restructured to become, in effect, culturally
immortal. The mythic multiple murderer takes over the life-and-death roles ritually-
assigned to God and Satan in Christian culture and. in effect, supplants them.
Afterthoughts
I have left out many possible works, mostly for space limitations, the need to avoid
redundancy, and range o f focus. For example. I have not included Umberto Eco’s
excellent serial-murder mystery. The Name o f the Rose, for the simple reason that the
work cannot really be considered .American. M any such works have been excluded for
this reason. Also. I have left out the primarily 1970s works centering around murderous
seriaJ-killing families (Texas Chainsaw M assacre. The Hills Have Eyes) as being more
specifically formulaic and not as diffuse as the later postmodernist narratives centering
around solo killers. On this same basis. I have also largely excluded the intermediary
1970s and '80s series o f Halloween. Friday the Thirteenth, and Nightmare on Elm Street
films. (Refer to Vera Dika's fine study for a closer look at them.) As examples o f the kind
o f m odem myth-making that minimizes the separation between the ordinary and the
supernatural, these latter films are certainly applicable, but I have chosen the lesser-known
Candvman as more suited to my project and m ore specifically concerned with the serial
killer paradigm o f the past decade.
Chapter Two: The Neo-Gothic M urder R om ance and Uncle Charlie
Alfred Hitchcock's 1943 American film. Shadow o f a D oubt, as a quintessential neo-
Gothic murder romance, centers around the darkly symbiotic, quite possibly incestuous
relationship between the sinister Uncle Charlie, the "M erry W idow Murderer." and his
young niece, also named Charlie. She begins by hoping that the dashing Uncle Charlie will
rescue her from the dreariness o f her home life. Also implied is her sexual attraction to
her uncle, a subtext pointing to the symbolic alliance betw een the socially alienated Gothic
twins, the Shadow and the Anima. However, as the filmic text develops. Uncle Charlie
increasingly reveals his m urderous nature to an initially disbelieving Young Charlie. His
ominously suggestive w ords and actions ultimately force Y oung Charlie to recognize the
misogynistic rage festering beneath Uncle Charlie's romantically appealing surface. In self
defense, she must becom e as ruthless as Uncle Charlie; under his tutelage, she learns not
only how to survive but also how to kill. H er nightmare quest o f self discovery ends with
her surviving a struggle with Uncle Charlie that ends in his death. (Whether she intends to
kill him or not is arguable.) W hat starts o ff as a romantic comedy o f manners, to
paraphrase Robin W ood, changes into a film noir retelling o f the Gothic awakening to the
danger o f sexuality. As such, the film stands as one o f the most representative versions o f
the neo-Gothic, postm odern tale o f gender conflict and blurring.
The dynamic o f this specific cinematic "case study," when extrapolated away from
the individuals and into the larger cultural arena which H itchcock ironically comments
upon, can be read as the confrontation o f the feminine collective consciousness with the
savage terrorist campaign waged against women by the patriarchy and its attendant social
institutions and ideologies: a prominent thematic subtext o f Gothic and neo-Gothic
literature alike. For example. Young Charlie, naively trusting in the myth o f the
wandering patriarchal hero’s ability to rescue women from boredom and danger alike,
serves as a representative for her gender as she moves from unconscious complicity in her
41
own oppression to a rejection (though problematic) o f patriarchal violence. She does
what Tania M odleski urges all women to do: "to destroy 'man-centered vision' by
beginning to see with our own eyes—because for so long w e have been not only fixed in its
sights, but also forced to view the world through its lens" (W om en 9). .Another gender
representative. Uncle Charlie, embodies the w orst o f the patriarchy’s violent excesses—not
only its physical extinguishment o f individual wom en as supreme expression o f dominance,
but also its embrace o f money as tool o f social em powerm ent, its tendency to objectify
people so as to manipulate them more easily, and its technological destruction o f the
environment for profit. As a wandering agent o f the patriarchy, sent out from the urban
decay o f Philadelphia to infect the "idyllic" community o f Santa Rosa. Uncle Charlie leaves
behind him a trail o f female corpses, festooned with the bloodied dollar bills which make
his odyssey possible.
Sadly. Uncle Charlie’s journey is no isolated aberration, either in fiction or fact.
The most frightening thing about Uncle Charlie and the violence he represents is its very
ubiquitousness. In 1943. long before our contem porary obsession with mass- and serial-
murderers. a prescient .Alfred Hitchcock identified the key components o f the patriarchal
cultural forces and individual obsessions which characterize these kinds o f criminals. N or
does he present them as slavering lunatics. No. they are unremarkable in appearance—no
physical deformities, no tell-tale hockey masks or fangs. M ost disturbing o f all. they arise
from recognizably common families and strike out at their fellow human beings (usually
women or w eaker males) with little or no indication to those closest to them that they are
doing so. They also emulate, to varying degrees, their m urderous predecessors, especially
Robert Louis Stevenson's prototypical changeling Mr. Hyde, who commits one o f
literature’s first "motiveless" acts o f violence by assaulting a little girl in the street for no
apparent reason other than the sheer thrill o f savage action. Significantly, a stage
adaptation o f Stevenson's novel playing in London in 1888 was often cited, to the extent
that the play w as forced to shut down, as a possible cause o f the "Jack the Ripper"
murders then plaguing the Whitechapel District: the juxtaposition and subsequent blurring
between the stage artifice o f Jekyll and Hyde and the staged reality’ o f the Ripper murders
providing one o f the first m odem realizations o f the parallel between the symbolic
structure and conceit o f fictional creation and the structure o f social "reality." The Ripper
legend itself remains robustly healthy, largely due to its media revival every decade o r so
through sensational "new" revelations, such as the recent discovery o f a supposed Ripper
diary. The Ripper stories provide a folk-narrative pattern for new killers to follow.
Our facile explanations for these Ripper-patterned killers—that they are abused
children or mother-obsessed, sexually frustrated, impotent, patriarchal avengers, or
whatever—leave us unsatisfied. At some level, we sense the inability o f tidy case studies
or narrowly focused theories to exonerate all o f us from our societal culpability in
encouraging murder. \ ro one theory can account for it. except one that simultaneously
takes into account not only the representational appeal o f m urder but the particular
historical context o f the germination and distribution o f those representations. In light o f
this distinction, a discussion o f serial murder in artistic representation must be very careful
to clarify the cultural context o f the term "serial murder," which for all intents and
purposes, as I shall argue in Chapter Three, was invented in the United States o f .America
during the 1980s by institutionalized law-enforcement representatives with a vested
interest in promulgating the idea that serial murderers threatened the very foundation o f
.American society. The term "serial murder" had been floating around for a few decades
before the FBI popularized it during the late 1970s and early '80s. and multiple homicide
has always been with us. but it is vital to realize that serial killing as now popularly defined
refers to the sexually motivated m urder o f women by men. However, this has more to do
with media representations than actuality. The form in which multiple homicide cloaks
itself differs from country to country and year to year. In the United States' gender-
stressed society, most discussions o f serial murder naturally gravitate toward gender
differences, but the phenomenon is truly more complex, and ultimately dehumanizing for
all people, than this theoretical drift would suggest. Serial murder is not only about sexual
release, and while it is more accurate to say it is in som e measure about patriarchal
misogyny, even this tails short o f accounting for its existence in society and its popularity
in narrative representations o f all formats. Serial m urder points toward not only gender
conflict but the postm odern crisis o f representation It can also fairly be said to be the
latest manifestation o f a Gothic-fiction paradigm which immediately adhered to the Ripper
murders in England via a burgeoning mass media.
A number o f subtle textual comparisons o f Uncle Charlie to Jack the Ripper
convinces me that not only is Shadow o f a Doubt an indictment o f patriarchal savagery'
against women, as might be expected from such an invocation o f the Ripper's name in a
Gothic murder romance, but also o f the mutual parasitism that exists between media
producers and consumers in the modem technocratic state, decades before Oliver Stone's
polemical N'atural Bom Killers and a few years prior to the arbitrarily demarcated advent
o f the postm odern age. "Media" here refers not just to the newspapers that breathlessly
document Uncle Charlie's cross-country’ m urder spree, but also to the cultural
representational apparatus as manifested in the form o f romance novels, vampire stories,
murder mysteries, and so on. The film’s characters are avid consumers o f the various
narrative commodifications o f murder, and for the most p an remain unaware o f the actual
murderer sharing their room and board even while contributing to the numb complacency
which engenders predatory violence. The Gothic romance conventions that dictate
Shadow o f a D oubt's narrative structure mesh quite easily with the more postmodern
analysis o f the complex interrelationship between media representation o f reality and the
external environment called reality. Critics have often remarked upon Hitchcock's ability
to craft a complex "metalanguage" o f besieged feminism in which "the problem o f
representing the feminine is turned to a representation o f that problem" (Linderman 20);
perhaps this hypersensitivity toward gender conflict stems from Hitchcock's well-
documented interest (or obsession) with the Ripper murders. Hitchcock recognizes the
44
media-enhanced creation o f "Jack the Ripper" as instrum ental in the m odem dissemination
o f the romantic myth o f the omnipotent multiple m urderer, who slashes his masculine way
across a Gothic landscape literally seething with provocative but finally inscrutable
portents o f doom . Hitchcock’s Uncle Charlie is the G othic villain in transition, recloaked
for the m odem industrial era. but no less Gothic for all o f that.
The Gothic Shadow
At this point, a b rief historical summary o f the boundary-transgressing Gothic movement
is necessary to understand how "serial murder" texts like Hitchcock’s Shadow o f a Doubt
can appeal simultaneously to literary historians and a mass audience weaned on American
romances. Again. Cameron and Fraser's study proves instrumental in understanding the
attraction o f w hat they dub "sexual murder" in contem porary culture. The murdering "sex
beast" as hero. Cameron and Fraser argue, is a logical outgrow th o f inherited genre
conventions such as those found not only in "true-crime" broadsheet-type narratives o f
criminal case histories and their attendant moralistic tones but the more literary European
Gothic novels o f authors such as M.G. Lewis and H orace Walpole. The authors
elaborate:
A . . . m ore recent influence is the Gothic genre and indeed the Romantic
movement o f which it was a part. From this development o f the late eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries we get a characteristic ambience: a fascination with
terror, with the evil and repulsive, and a persistent conjecture o f transgression, sex
and death which is associated in particular w ith the Marquis de Sade. (36-7)
In the Gothic, the Romantic rebellion against conventional morality and vested authority
finds itself most fully embodied in Sadeian figures w ho regularly transgress the taboos
against not only sexual license but also against rape, incest, and murder. M urder is
perhaps the suprem e expressive mode o f the true libertine.
Leslie Fiedler has argued that the American novel in particular, as a dominant
mode o f popular narrative, owes much o f its structure to European Gothic prototypes
(such as M atthew G regory Lewis's 1796 novel The M onk) whose major "symbols and
meanings depend on an awareness o f the spiritual isolation o f the individual in a society
where all communal systems o f value have collapsed o r have been turned into meaningless
cliches" (117). O ne o f the primary symbols in the G othic narrative is the Maiden in Flight,
or what Fiedler calls the anima- a feminized representation o f the artist's soul dispossessed
from his/her moral complacency: another is the Shadow, "the villain who pursues the
Maiden and presides over turrets and dungeon keep alike" and who represents the animus,
"that masculine archetype in which the feminine psyche projects all it has denied. But he is
the animus regarded as forgivable victim o f passion and circumstance, an admirable
sufferer" ( 119). The Shadow is a double o f the M aiden (and vice versa) in the Gothic tale
of terror. Fiedler concludes: both are alienated from bourgeois society, and through that
distant perspective they can see how fragile and illusory bourgeois values really are. Even
as they threaten one another in the dark Gothic landscape, they exhibit an odd
understanding, perhaps even sympathy, for the other’s lonely plight, as dem onstrated quite
overtly by such pairings as the Lecter/Starling alliance in The Silence o f the Lambs.
Instead o f sharing sex. however, the Vlaiden and the Shadow share terror, with the
Shadow typically producing it and the Maiden experiencing it.
This realization leads Fiedler to make his famous pronouncement that .American
"classic literature is a literature o f horror for boys" (9). to which, in some cases. I would
also add "girls": meaning that complex issues o f rom ance and sexuality generally assume a
minor role in much o f our valued national literature, while the sadistic and melodramatic
terror-fantasies typical o f an adolescent's fear o f sex eclipse other narrative considerations.
In the general context o f American literature as Fiedler defines it, gruesome m urder (or at
least the threat o f it) stands as one o f the primary governing themes. It should surprise no
one that a series o f murders, for sheer melodramatic impact alone, serves our literature
even better. It should also not be surprising that the Shadow serial killer pursues a
feminized representative o f the anima through the bulk o f the narrative, as happens, for
46
example, in Tobe H ooper’s The Texas Chainsaw M assacre (Leatherface and Sally) or John
Carpenter’s Halloween (Michael Myers and Laurie). It is seemingly inevitable that these
two alienated gothic figures should ultimately forge a mutually respectful alliance, as
happens in Thomas H arris’s The Silence o f the Lambs between Clarice Starling and
Hannibal Lecter, o r join together in monsterdom. as in Bernard Rose's film Candvm an.
O f crucial im portance to this study is the notion that Gothicism o f this type is not
confined exclusively to the literary*: rather, the literary' conventions break free o f their
orderly boundaries (in spite o f the insistence o f academicians to the contrary') and filter out
into the wider popular discursive modes, which in turn later generations o f artists and
pundits alike draw upon for their respective reworkings o f inherited formula. For
example. Elizabeth Jane Wall Hinds has made a convincing case that contemporary heavy-
metai music as a subgenre o f rock has been heavily influenced by the Gothic mindset,
showing just how far that particular literary trope has wandered (151 -64). David Punter
traces the development o f the word "Gothic" from its literal meaning o f "to do with the
Goths" (the northern tribes o f barbarians who are said to have precipitated the collapse the
Roman empire) to its m ore generalized applications in the European eighteenth century:
specifically, its suggestiveness "of things medieval~in fact, o f all things preceding about
the middle o f the seventeenth century'" (5). The barbaric connotations o f the word
"Gothic" quickly cam e to invoke a plethora o f associations for Europeans: "Gothic was
the archaic, the pagan, that which was prior to, or was opposed to. or resisted the
establishment o f civilised values and a well-regulated society" (6). Writers, in turn, turned
to the pre-civilized. o r the "barbaric." as a metaphor for revivifying exhausted English
culture with a healthy injection o f primitivism and pre-lingual awareness. This was a risky
operation, o f course, as the cure, represented in the ambiguous figure o f the mysterious
Outsider possessed o f Dionysian appetites, could just as easily destroy civilization as save
it.
47
In this culture-wide turn to "barbarism" as a wild zone apart from the dulling
complexities o f m odem civilization lies the genesis o f the Gothic sensibility, which gives
rise not only to eponymous literary conventions and architecture but in its more optimistic
shadings a far more generalized. Romantic rejection o f all things classical. As Punter
concludes: "Where the classical was well ordered, the Gothic was chaotic: where simple
and pure. Gothic was ornate and convoluted; where the classics offered a set o f cultural
models to be followed. Gothic represented excess and exaggeration, the product o f the
wild and the uncivilised" (6). Obviously so in the popular arts, and only slightly less so in
the self-consciously styled "literary" ones, this privileging o f the pre-linguistic awareness
over the unsteady civilization constructed o f and by shifting signifiers continues. For
example, the European-created "noble savage" o f Rousseau effortlessly crossed the ocean
to become the neo-Gothic multiple murderer o f the American ISOOs and 1900s.
The trans-Atlantic flight o f the Gothic multiple murderer into the American frontier
paralleled a larger cultural movement o f Old W orld forms and ideologies into the New
World, where the European and the .American uneasily met. Not only did the Gothic
formulas cross over, but European romanticism in general, as typified by the popular
novels o f Sir W alter Scott. Many o f the romantic .American frontier authors, beginning
with James Fenimore Cooper, ow e a great debt to Scott. As Richard Slotkin says:
The historical romance was itself a European literary form, and [Cooper] adopted
the form as practiced by W alter Scott. . . . The historical romance as practiced by
Scott defined history in terms o f the conflict between individuals representing
nations and classes: and the definition o f these class and national types was a
primary interest o f the writer. Reconciliation between the opposed groups was
achieved through the revelation o r discovery o f a fundamental racial kinship
between the parties. . . . The family ties that bind the chief characters o f the
historical romance provide the metaphorical structure o f the work. The division
within the family reflects the social disorder o f the nation, and the achievement o f a
familial peace is the conclusion o f both the social problem and the family drama.
(Regeneration 472)
48
Slotkin goes on to argue that American frontier authors claim for themselves the notion o f
"family unity" while simultaneously investing it with a certain irony. The frontier hero
usually escapes from the reunited family, fleeing from its constraints out into "the
Territory." Huckleberry Finn, o f course, is the most famous literary character to do this,
but he has his antecedents, such as Leatherstocking. Thus, to a greater or less extent, the
sanctity o f the family as refuge is called into question by o u r patriarchal frontier writers,
since the male escape from family can also be read as a juvenile's escape from a
threatening, grow n-up woman.
Fiedler maintains that the "classic" American novel, while in many ways replicating
the tired formulas o f European prose fiction, is readily distinguishable by precisely this
"pre-adolescent" (4) mentality, its unerring terror o f m ature sexuality and feminine
consciousness. In fact. Fiedler continues, (male) .American writers typically shun any adult
treatment o f heterosexual relations and present their female characters as "monsters o f
virtue or bitchery. symbols o f the rejection or fear o f sexuality" (5). Hence, while the
female gender looms large (even its narrative absence) in most patriarchal .American
literature, it exists as a largely impersonal force o f nature to be dominated, or a pull
toward socialization and domestication to be fled. Nina Baym argues convincingly that
our critical definitions o f what constitutes .American literature are inherently phallocentric.
mythologizing the male individual "divorced from specific social circumstances, with the
promise offered by the idea o f .America" (131). The individual male thus exists before and
apart from socialization, and in fact seeks to escape from the "female" entrapment o f
civilization into the self-affirming, mvthic landscape. Paradoxically, the wilderness is also
coded as female in essence, but "no longer subject to the correcting influence o f real-life
experience" (136) and consequently more and more fantastic. As Baym and Fiedler both
observ e, the male alone in the wilderness becomes a celibate, infantile wanderer, freed
from familial obligation and mature sexual relationships. He may have lost his family to
hostile outside forces upon which he seeks revenge but which have also enacted in reality
49
an agenda he imagined in fantasy (as does the protagonist o f 1835’s Nick o f the Woods, a
prototypical avenger o f the sort found in popular films such as The Searchers or Death
Wish.) O r. like James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking or Mark Twains's Huck Finn,
two celibate perpetual-adolescent figures, he may avoid domesticity altogether.
In such a cultural and literary atmosphere, it is little wonder that murder, that most
melodramatic and Gothic expression o f the objectification o f the usually feminine or
feminized Other, flourishes first in American letters and. later, in cinema. Multiple
murder, o f a sort roughly comparable to what is now called serial killing, appears quite
early in American prose. In addition to the aforementioned Nick o f the Woods, the novels
Q n m n d .(I7 9 9 ). The. Partisan (1335). and The Q uaker City: or. The Monks o f Monk Hall
(1845). while mostly derivative o f the European Gothic, all present multiple body counts
and Shadow villains in which one can see the literary genesis o f the contemporary
.American serial murderer. For example. G eorge Lippard’s The Quaker Cirv features a
grotesquely deformed multiple murderer named Devil-Bug, whom according to David
Brion Davis is "interesting primarily as an early ancestor o f the countless creatures o f
horror that infest contem porary comic strips and cheap literature generally" (127).
Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland (1798) also depicts a mass murder framed by ominous
supernatural occurrences: spontaneous human combustion, disembodied voices in dark
bedrooms, and so on. Cross-fertilization between true-life murder accounts and fictional
representation is also evident: no less a luminary than Herman Melville argued in the
1850s that popular literature was overly concerned with the likes o f Kentucky's Harpe
brothers, two multiple murderers o f the 1790s (Jenkins, "Historical" 383). Some o f the
first nationally prominent cases o f "motiveless" or "lust" m urder also became known in
America during the nineteenth century, such as Thomas Piper's series o f child murders in
Boston in the 1870s: other cases o f what we would now call "mass murder" occurred at a
Kansas farm owned by the "Bloody Benders" in the 1870s. All o f these cases, in tandem
with the popular literature o f murder and thuggery, further established a cultural climate in
50
which multiple murder as thematic organizing principle played a minor but definite role
The Gothic genre's adaptability to film in the twentieth century, made possible by the
Gothic reliance on visual imagery (Bunnell 84), ensured the vitality o f the fictional
murderer to the present cinema-dominated age.
The primary narrative appeal and adaptability o f the Gothic formula resides in its
placement o f a naive but intellectually curious protagonist into a mysterious, potentially
fatal set o f circumstances which, while threatening, also educate the innocent seeker, with
the "help" o f a seducer/mentor, into the destabilizing gravness o f worldly experience: a
genre variation on what is commonly called the Erziehungsroman theme in literature.
Both competing strains o f the Gothic-derivative serial killer narrative, the psycho profile
and the procedural, share in common the Erziehungsroman structuring device. Louis
Gross identifies this kind o f quest for personal education as essentially Gothic in tone and
execution:
Gothic fiction is first and foremost, literature w here fear is the motivating and
sustaining emotion. This fear is shared by the characters within the story and the
reader. The Gothic thus examines the causes, qualities, and results o f terror on
both mind and body. It does so in a process o f epistemological inquiry, and
because it is concerned with the acquisition and internalizing o f kinds o f
knowledge, the Gothic finds an appropriate vehicle in the quest narrative or. more
specifically, the Erziehungsroman or narrative o f ed u ca tio n .. . . the Gothic joum ev
offers a darkened world where fear, oppression, and madness are the wavs to
knowledge and the uncontrolled transformation o f one’s character the quest's
epiphany. . . . the Gothic quest ends in the shattering o f the protagonists’ image o f
his/her social/sexual roles and a legacy of. at best, numbing unease or, at worst,
emotional paralysis and death. The Gothic may then be described as a demonic
quest narrative. (1-2)
As contemporary demon and shape-shifter, the American serial killer in fiction moves
through the void at the center o f what Joe David Bellamy, in his introduction to Super
Fiction, calls the neo-Gothic quest narrative. Irving Malin dem onstrates in his study New
American Gothic how many o f our contemporary writers use the Gothic images o f the
haunted castle and the forest journey to overlay a veneer o f the uncanny on the mundane.
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David Punter concurs that the neo-Gothic is a primarily .American genre, exemplified by
the works o f Southern writers Joyce Carol Oates, Flannery O’Connor, and John Hawkes:
This "New American Gothic" is said to deal in landscapes o f the mind, settings
which are distorted by the pressure o f the principal characters' psychological
obsessions. W e are given little or no access to an "objective" world; instead we
are immersed in the psyche o f the protagonist, often through sophisticated use o f
first-person narrative. It may or may not be coincidence that writers and settings
alike have connexions with the American South; in one way or another, feelings o f
degeneracy abound. The worlds portrayed are ones infested with psychic and
social decay, and coloured with the heightened hues o f putrescence. Violence,
rape and breakdow n are the key motifs; the crucial tone is one o f desensitised
acquiescence in the horror o f obsession and prevalent insanity. (3)
O 'Connor and O ates in particular have dealt with figures that we would now call
serial killers. Hal Blythe and Charlie Sweet point to O'Connor’s The Misfit as a
prototypical serial killer, murderous product o f a dysfunctional family, in "A Good Man is
Hard to Find" (3-5). Oates's debt to true-crime accounts is more verifiable: besides
writing an overview o f serial-killer "true crime" literature for the New York Review o f
Books ( M arch 24. 1994) and incorporating a serial killer into her 1984 neo-Gothic novel
The Mysteries o f W interthume. Oates was inspired by the media coverage o f Charles
Howard Schmid, the so-called "Pied Piper o f Tucson" and killer o f three teenage girls (see
Moser and Cohen), to w rite her famous 1966 story "Where .Are You Going, Where Have
You Been'1" as told from the point o f view o f one o f the fictionalized Schmid's victims.
Connie. Or. as Brenda Daley puts it. "The evolution o f Connie's consciousness—as she
faces death —is the focus o f Oates's story" (104). B oth renditions o f the story are
unmistakably New American Gothic, presenting a bleak landscape and a grotesque villain
as seen through the perceptual filter o f Connie’s questing mind. Like Young Charlie in
Shadow o f a Doubt. Becky in Henry: Portrait o f a Serial Killer. Mallory in Natural Bom
Killers, and Adele in Kalifomia. Connie finds that her romantic wish to be taken away
from her degrading circumstances has violent results. This is a common plot development
in the neo-Gothic.
The neo-Gothic as I will be using the term differs from traditional. European
Gothicism in several key ways. M ost superficially, the standard "timeless" trappings o f
Gothic melodrama—allegedly haunted ruins, womb-like caves and subterranean
passageways, exotic foreign locales, etc.—are generally carried over into recognizable,
contemporary America. The effect on the .American reader is to produce the shock o f
recognition o f familiar surroundings unexpectedly rendered threatening and alien. Deeply
rural areas, as well as inner-city "war zones." are common settings for the neo-Gothic.
although occasionally suburbia is besieged by invaders from those zones, as happens in
Red D ragon. But most significantly, while "classic" Gothic writers like .Ann Radcliffe
presented apparently supernatural phenom ena in order to reveal them, according to
Donald Ringe. "as merely delusive appearances" in a world "rationally ordered by
natural law" (27). the neo-Gothics are far less sanguine about the stability o f the base o f
natural law Certain supernatural (or m ore accurately, extra-normal) phenomena may
indeed exist for the neo-Gothics. which possibly explains the prevalence o f vampiric
imagery, apparent precognition, and psychic transference in many neo-Gothic narratives,
especially the serial killer ones. It is the rare true-crime account that can resist throwing in
a subplot or two concerning a psychic’s visions o f the killer or murders, starting with the
after-the-fact addition o f Queen's medium Robert Lees to the Jack the Ripper mythos. and
some fictional accounts also follow suit (Stephen King's The Dead Zone, for example, in
which psychic detective Johnny Smith is based on Dutch psychic Peter Hurkos. a special
"consultant" in the Boston Strangler investigation). Even in narratives that steadfastly
resist any true supernatural coding o f their murderous protagonists, the characters often
receive intuitive, perhaps even psychic flashes o f warning regarding the killer's designs
upon them, as one can see in Young Charlie’s first reaction to serial-killer Uncle Charlie in
Shadow o f a Doubt or Carrie’s immediate disliking for Eariv Gravce in Kalifomia. (The
exception is a film like Henry: Portrait o f a Serial Killer, where no one is able to read
anyone else at all.)
with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
The neo-G othic "formula," if it can be reduced to such, consists o f a controlling,
self-aware tone o f melodrama referenced to other well-known genre works and
conventions, thus relying on an audience’s ability- to make intertextual transitions. Several
areas o f focus are also present in the neo-Gothic. First o f all. seduction (overt o r implied,
vampiric in imagery) is a key theme. Second, the geography o f the fictional realm is
haunted by a dark villain and "supernatural" omens. Third, the neo-Gothic is consciously
meta-textual. draw ing attention to the process o f fiction-making and conspicuously
borrowing from oth er genres (for example, detective fiction) when appropriate. Fourth,
the neo-G othic studies gender issues in exquisitely minute detail, frequently emphasizing
sexual danger and ambivalence in violent but nevertheless feminist terms, a classic example
being Shadow o f a D oubt. This narrative may chronicle the education o f the killer (as he
perfects his chosen profession, as happens in Ellrov’s Killer on the Road or Shane
Stevens's By Reason o f Insanity) and/or o f those close to him in some wav (all o f them
potential victims o f his murderous project and hence, unwitting beneficiaries o f a crash
course in survival). The threatened maiden o f the classical Gothic formula can now take a
variety o f forms, both male and female, as gender conventions blur and reverse in the neo-
Gothic with astounding regularity. Paradoxically and destabilizingly enough, the
threatened maiden may now even be the killer himself in losing flight from his self
destructive sociopathology. A classic prototype is Hitchcock's androgynous, easily-
intimidated N orm an Bates, who literally dons women's garb as he imaginatively transforms
into his strong, domineering mother.
But in all the various permutations o f the neo-Gothic formula, o f which the serial
killer subgenre is only one narrow example, the body receives o r is threatened by
grotesque levels o f the extreme violence usually found only in nightmare, to paraphrase
Bellamy. The violence, actual or threatened, then functions as the narrative crucible in
which character is formed, deformed, o r reformed. Knowledge is dearly purchased in the
neo-Gothic, since it usually comes at the expense o f horrendous levels o f fear, pain, and
54
indiscriminate murder. I f the characters survive the ordeal, the knowledge they have
accrued better enables them to cope with the demands o f a fiercely violent and deceptive
environment in which the bland normality o f the secret serial killer masks a ravenous
monster, but a metaphoric m onster that exists only in terms o f how the killer’s actions are
received by his culture.
As one o f cinema's m ost accomplished practitioners. Hitchcock adheres to this
uniquely .American blend o f romanticism and Gothic terror. Shadow o f a Doubt in
particular may be read as the European-style restoration o f a dysfunctional .American
family, implied by young Ann's obsessive reading o f Sir W alter Scott's Ivanhoe to the
exclusion o f all interest in the family life surrounding her. through its purging
confrontation with a corrupting evil: Uncle Charlie. We can see Uncle Charlie as the
misogvnistic frontier hero "lighting out for the Territory." and then argue that his presence
in the film underscores Hitchcock's basic .American sexism. Yet Hitchcock is never this
simple. .Any familial resolution the film offers is an ironic one. Uncle Charlie may be dead
and Young Charlie may be saving her family, but the culture that produced the sexual
murderer lives on. and it has not been "fixed" in any way. The key elements for a
continuing patriarchal exodus into the woman-free West are still in place. .And so. both
the European romance and the frontier romance, which Robin W ood identify as being very
much present in Shadow o f a Doubt, are subvened, complicating the film's placement in
any one genre.
In one o f the more convincing attem pts to broadly categorize this slippery film.
Wood places the story o f the M erry W idow M urderer in the context o f .American frontier
romance:
The same basic ideological tensions operate both in It's a Wonderful Life and
Shadow o f a D oubt: they furnish further reminders that the home/wandering
antinomy is by no means the exclusive preserve o f the Western. Bedford Falls and
Santa Rosa can be seen as the frontier town seventy or so years on; they embody
the development o f the civilization whose establishment was celebrated around the
same time by Ford in My Darling Clementine. With this relationship to the
Western in the background .. . the central tension in both films can be described in
terms o f genre: the disturbing influx o f film noir into the world o f small-town
domestic comedy. (Revisited 293)
And so. Hitchcock’s blurring o f genre boundaries unmistakably identifies him as one o f the
postmodern metatextualists. His updating o f the Gothic threatening figure (Jack the
Ripper/Uncle Charlie) as a wandering exile o f the industrial twentieth century' also links
Hitchcock's contem porary sensibility to .American literary precedent. The film also neatly
straddles the dividing line between what many have called "modernism" and
"postmodernism." and as an early example o f serial-killer fiction possesses most o f the
conventions later visible in its 1980s and '90s descendants. As such, the film offers
compelling evidence that the multiple-murderer narrative is not as novel as it may seem
from its re-labeling as "serial killer" fiction and com plicates the simplistic notion that
"postmodernism" is somehow a unique development o r aberration o f post-World War II
thought.
Uncle Charlie as Jack the Ripper
The cultural progenitor o f all actual and fictional serial killers is, o f course. Jack the
Ripper, who himself is mostly a construct o f mass-media coverage o f the unknown
perpetrator's murders o f at least five prostitutes in nineteenth-centurv London. The serial
format as popularized in Victorian England also happened to coincide with the 1888 "Jack
the Ripper" murders. Periodicals thrived on serial installments, and British newspapers
(nearly 200 o f them) imposed the same narrative construct on the flux o f existence as they
engaged in fierce competition for circulation (Begg 15). The chapter-by-chapter Ripper
murders were ideal for this treatment, and Britain wasted no time framing them in the
shrill, moralistic conventions o f stage melodrama. Any pretensions the periodicals may
have held regarding neutrality were completely discarded, simply because the temptation
to editorialize and fictionalize was too great to resist. Accordingly, the print reporters let
fly their purplest prose. One is reminded o f Kenneth Burke's commentary on what he calls
the "yellow journals":
Writers for the yellow journals have a pronouncedly moral element implicit in their
efforts—for at bottom they greatly despise themselves, and such self-detestation is
basically moral. Hence they possess an altar, to which they bring offerings
appropriately unclean. Has one not noticed that a vile editorial actually rings, that
it can be read aloud, that it has rhythm and spirit, whereas the daily output o f the
merely dutiful reporter on a respectable sheet falls under the category o f a
telephone directory’7 The purely serviceable style o f the respectable paper testifies
to a basic lack o f engrossment—the writer is a mere observer. But if he works for
a paper which he profoundly despises, he is constantly handling a moral issue when
he writes, and his work shows the signs o f this moral impetus if only by an
eloquence in degradation. (83)
The press notices o f the Ripper murders employed exactly the kind o f degraded eloquence
Burke critiques. The problem is. even the "respectable sheets" were emulating the voice
o f the yellow journals when it came time to write o f the Ripper, stage villain that he was to
his Victorian audience. There is little doubt that theatrical spectacle shaped the
development o f the Ripper legend. Philip Sugden makes the point that the anonymous
writer o f the famous "Jack the Ripper" letter to the London Central News Agency.
whether he was the killer or not. probably adopted the name from the various immensely
popular stage incarnations o f Jack Sheppard, a celebrated English burgiar and jailbreaker
(259). Beth K alikoff argues that late-Victorian era melodrama, unlike the more complex
novelistic fiction, allowed audiences to vicariously and safely participate in murder
"because the criminal acts are committed by individuals who do not represent the society
in which members o f the audience must make their ways" (53). The m urderer remains
reassuringly O ther (though upon closer inspection he is anything but Other). The Ripper's
press descriptions and portraiture resembled the kind o f overblown, safely distant stage
villain (complete with waxed mustache curled up at the ends) familiar to audiences o f the
time, but with one kev difference: this villain was a real murderer.
Ironically enough, however, the Ripper as media-hvped Gothic phantom no longer
had any connection to the actual man who committed the murders: "Jack" was now a
dem on seducer o f the "fallen” women that so fascinated the Victorian "secret lite"
sensibility'. That he preyed exclusively upon sexually "transgressive" women made his
Gothic-villain status inevitable, as well as his status as ultimate patriarchal terrorist. Many
critics, feminists in particular, are justifiably troubled by his survival in popular literature,
folklore, and culture. Jane Caputi argues that film and literature, as authored by the
patriarchy, only reflects (noi critiques) the mentality o f its now-mythic Ripper progenitor.
She catalogues the following as literary' conventions in the sex-crime thriller some
reference, blatant or veiled, is made to the historic Jack the Ripper; the m other or some
other female member o f the family is blamed for creating the killer’s criminality; the victims
are blamed for their ow n death by the killer; a folk name, like "Jack the Ripper." is
bestow ed upon the killer by the police and disseminated by the media; and male pursuers
o f the killer either feel a "strong bond o f identity between themselves and their quarry’" or
reveal themselves to be less blatantly violent agents o f the same patriarchy that the killer
represents (Sex Crime 64). She also points out that the killer is made to seem, to some
degree at least, supernatural and thus immortal (34). In other words, he, or an equivalent
m urderer to take his place, will be back. Caputi's listing here is valid enough, but she
makes no allowance for the possibility that an artist may use these conventions to criticize
the brutal realities they codify.
It is true that Jack the Ripper in most o f "his" manifestations as cultural icon is
inimical to the interests o f feminism. But it is not always so. In fact, it is through the
inherited Gothic conventions o f what Jane Caputi calls "Ripper repetitions" that feminism
finds what many would consider to be the least likely o f allies: Alfred Hitchcock.
H itchcock's status as feminist com mentator is rightfully suspect, but the w ork he has
produced, for all its misanthropy (not just misogyny), presents a disquietingly clear
analysis o f the patriarchal forces that conspire to victimize women. In reference to
Hitchcock's film Vem'go. Florence Jacobowitz writes: "Far from endorsing masculine
forms o f erotic looking, the film presents a severe critique o f various forms o f patriarchal
domination and allow s for critical distance" (25). .Another o f his films, the World W ar II-
era Shadow o f a Doubt, manages to do just this.
While often accused o f being only a step or two removed from Jack the Ripper’s
own gynocidal practices, Alfred Hitchcock instead encodes a fairly sophisticated criticism
o f misogyny in his cinematic thrillers. The danger he faces in doing so is that by depicting
male violence against females in the terms the Ripper has historically established.
Hitchcock runs the not-inconsiderable risk o f being labeled a kind o f sex criminal himself.
.-And there is no doubt that Hitchcock is aware o f Jack the Ripper's history. One o f his
early silent films. The Lodger, is based on Mrs. Belloc Lowndes's novel o f the same name,
which in turn w as inspired by Victorian painter W alter Sickert's oft-repeated story about a
suspicious lodger the former suspected o f being Jack the Ripper In Hitchcock's own
words to Francois Truffaut: "The action was set in a house that took in roomers and the
landlady w ondered whether her boarder was Jack the Ripper or not" (30). Many visual
and thematic echoes o f The Lodger, and the Ripper, appear in later Hitchcock films, such
as Shadow o f a Doubt, a point made by Theodore Price: "For Alfred Hitchcock, from his
early film The L odger . . to just about his last. Frenzy nearly fifty years later, the key
recurrent them e is that o f Jack the Ripper" (xi).
Caputi. w ho has elsewhere been quite perceptive in her comments on the gynocidal
aspects o f culture, is harsh in her assessment o f Hitchcock and his Ripper intertextuality:
"[he] keeps perfect time with the traditions o f sex crime, reducing woman to pure
symbolic m atter~ his form, his production, his representation, his medium and his
message" (Sex Crim e 173). True enough, but is Hitchcock emulating Jack the Ripper, or
critiquing the R ipper mentality0 Perhaps Caputi has made the mistake o f taking Hitchcock
seriously in his series o f interviews with Francois Truffaut, wherein Hitchcock
congratulates him self on producing a "fim" picture in Psycho (a quote Caputi refers to
59
with true indignation). Tania Modleski seems closer to the mark when she argues that
Hitchcock remains ambivalent about femininity: neither misogynistic nor sympathetic to
women's "plight in p atriarch y . . . [Hitchcock's work] continually demonstrates that despite
the often considerable violence with which women are treated in [his] films, they remain
resistant to patriarchal assimilation" (Women 3 V Robin W ood, who has exerted
groundbreaking effort in his goal o f salvaging Hitchcock's artistic reputation, does not fall
into the trap o f taking Hitchcock's statements about his own work as gospel. W ood says.
"I used to find maddening Hitchcock's refusal to discuss his work with interviewers on any
really serious level; 1 have come to admire it" (Revisited 61). Instead. Wood focuses on
the filmic text itself, finding that far from endorsing sex crime. Hitchcock's work
sweepingiy indicts the cultural attitudes that produce it. To summarize, a study o fJack
the Ripper does not imply approval o f same.
Shadow o f a D oubt’s Uncle Charlie is Jack the Ripper, transplanted from New
England, an extension o f the British industrial milieu from which the Ripper came, to the
.American West, as represented by Santa Rosa. This particular homicidal manifestation o f
European literary heritage, what Leslie Fiedler calls the Shadow, easily crosses the
Atlantic to find a hom e in .America, as indeed many suspected the historical Jack the
Ripper o f doing. The .American frontier, while never quite as violent and lawless as our
Western mvthos would have it. nevertheless contained an implicit ideological violence in
which multiple m urder was never the atrocious novelty that it was to Victorian England.
It is not difficult to see the connection between American frontier violence and the sex
crime tradition. The wandering hero of the W estern easily transmutes into the fleeing
sociopath, and the hunted animals so central to our early literature into his slaughtered
female victims, as Tony Williams observes C'Chain.saw1' 13). Both character types, the
gunman and the psychopath, are essentially amoral loners, on the run from recognized
authority and yet paradoxically very much a logical outgrow th o f the ideological apparatus
60
which sanctions violence while condemning it. Billy the Kid and Jack the Ripper, boasting
o f their multiple body counts, are two variations on a central mythic theme.
Significantly, there has always been an American connection to Ripper mythology.
At the time o f the murders, handwriting experts speculated aloud that, because o f some
supposed "Americanisms" (such as the term "Boss") in the language o f the Ripper letters
to the Central N ew s Agency. Jack the Ripper may have been from America or at least had
some American background (Rumbelow 180). There has even been a literary' precedent
for Jack the Ripper fleeing to the American West, where he proceeds to slash apart dance-
hall girls (243). Thus, the mythic spread o f Rjpperism can be seen, from its historic origin
in late-nineteenth century England to tum-of-the-century America. The Ripper has
become more than a man. Now he is a symbol o f apocalyptic sexual violence and anarchy,
spreading w estw ard along with technophallic industry and the railroads and urban blight.
In keeping with the trans- Atlantic reach o f the Ripper legend, the film is. on one
level. Hitchcock's American revision o f his own earlier English film. The Lodger, except
that this time H itchcock does not have to portray the fugitive as an innocent man in order
to protect the star’s matinee-idol image. Joseph Cotten's L'ncle Charlie is no wrongfully
persecuted Ivor Novello (though Hitchcock characteristically prevents his audience from
being too com placent in unequivocal acceptance o f Uncle Charlie's g u ilt-m o re on this
later): in Shadow o f a Doubt, the Ripper is loose, and actively hunting. William Rothman
has noticed in this film many visual reprises o f scenes from The Lodger, including the
opening shot o f the rooming house where Uncle Charlie lies in uneasy wakefulness (180).
The house is num ber 13. the same as the lodger’s boarding house. There are thirteen cards
held in Hitchcock's hand in his cameo as cardplayer on Uncle Charlie's train. Rothman
also parallels the scene where, after the landlady darkens the room by pulling the blinds.
Uncle Charlie com es to vampiric life, with "the moment when the lodger is 'awakened' by
the light and then riveted by the sound o f Daisy's laugh" (182). Rothman then compares
Uncle Charlie hidden behind his train-compartment curtain to the famous shot o f "the
61
lodger, viewed through the transparent ceiling, framed with the curtain that is emblematic
o f his mystery" (187). And finally, with the fading image o f Uncle Charlie’s hat tossed
onto Young Charlie's bed to mark the end o f the film's first act, Rothman sees a similarity
to "the fade in The Lodger on the ceiling lamp, emblem o f the lodger’s mystery" (190).
Though he doesn't mention it, Rothman could also point to the repeated shot o f the
dancing couples in the "Merry Widow Waltz" as a visual parallel to the dance where the
lodger’s sister was murdered. Thus, the argument can be made that Shadow o f a Doubt is
Hitchcock's attempt to depict the sex criminal that he could not in The Lodger.
Jane Caputi contends that the literary sex-crime formula demands some kind o f
allusion to Jack the Ripper. In Shadow o f a Doubt. Hitchcock has done so. not only by
reminding his audience o f the earlier silent film based loosely on the crimes o f the Ripper,
but also by keying Uncie Charlie's nostalgic longing to the important date o f 1S88. The
Ripper's murders occurred in 1888; can it be coincidence that Uncle Charlie (and
Hitchcock) refers pointedly to that year as he produces the framed photographs o f his
mother and father0 He says. "Everybody was sweet and pretty, then. Charlie. The whole
world. Wonderful world. . N ot like the world today. N ot like the world now. It was
great to be young then." Previously, when seeing Emma for the first time in years, he has
said; "You don't look like Emma Newton. You look like Emma Spencer Oakley o f 46
Burnham Street. St. Paul. Minnesota. The prettiest girl on the block. .1 keep
remembering those things. All the old things." This resembles his later statement that he
thinks about his childhood days "all the time" and contrasts mightily with his bitter
observation that the present-day vvorld is "a hell." By nostalgically referring to the date
which Caputi has identified as the beginning o f the m odem Age o f Sex Crime. Uncle
Charlie assumes the Ripper's mantle and carries on his ancestor’s deeds.
In this scene, he also reveals his Ripper-linked fondness for second-hand
possession o f other people, especially women, through their photographic images.
Knowing how dehumanizing such appropriation is, he is highly resistant to having his own
picture taken by Detectives Graham and Saunders because this action would lead to his
identification and subsequent capture and loss o f freedom. He states this explicitly to
Graham when he forbids any further picture-taking: "Rights o f man. you know
Freedom." He has no wish to be objectified himself, though he does this to others in order
to possess them and their images as trophies ( much like the ring) o f his coast-to-coast
hunt. Uncle Charlie’s aversion to the photographic gaze (a trait also seen in Henry, title
character o f John M cNaughton's film) jars an audience into m etatextual appreciation o f the
potentially lethal nature o f the technology o f representation, embodied most immediately
in the film they are watching. Laura Mulvey's influential 1975 theory (in Screen) o f the
cinematic male gaze as a scopophilic apparatus for objectification o f women applies well
to Uncle Charlie, though it is important to remember that the presence o f the male gaze in
a fiim does not imply approval o f it as a strategy o f objectification, as later revisions (such
as Clover's) to Mulvev’s original formulation argue.
.Another strategy central to representational objectification o f human subjects is
repetition. In film grammar, this usually means the repetition o f a key image(s) which
symbolizes a primal scene o f earlier trauma for the compulsive killer. Hitchcock
continually ties in revelations regarding Uncle Charlie's killing spree to the jarring
repetition o f the M erry W idow W altz sequence, wherein elegantly dressed couples dance
and spin across a dance floor. Paul Gordon has rightly identified this repeated image as
central to Uncle Charlie's obsession. Gordon says:
[Charles's] hatred is really a repressed form o f sexual desire. . . . That the [M erry
Widow Waltz] sequence belongs to the period o f his victims is evident from the
newspaper clipping young Charlie finds which describes the woman Charles has
recently strangled as "the beautiful Thelma Schenley," who was "known to
audiences at the beginning o f the century." That the sequence belongs to the
period o f Charles's parents' early years together is evident from the fact that the
photo Charles gives to Emma dates from 1888. "The beautiful Thelma Schenley"
and Charles’s mother, then, are practically contemporaries, and so Charles's
obsession with the widows he seduces and then kills can be seen as a continued
mother-fixation stemming from his early childhood. (270)
As further evidence for Uncle Charlie's mother-fixation, G ordon refers to the bedroom
scene where Emma brings him breakfast in bed and shows him the only existing
photograph o f himself. After recounting the childhood bicycle accident in which Charlie
injured his head, Emma says, "Mama wondered if he'd ever look the same. Mama
wondered if he'd ever be the same." Gordon explains Uncle Charlie's "rigid, hypnotic
state" as he endures Emma's story: "[his reaction] .is evidence that he is still immersed
in the past, still anachronisticallv connected to the period o f the 'Merry Widow Waltz'
sequence when he was the age o f his photo and his m other was an object o f sexual desire"
(271). So. Uncle Charlie's victims-of-choice represent the linking o f sexual desire and the
mother-figure, another Ripper trademark. It could even be argued that Uncle Charlie is
targeting women from the Ripper’s own era. aged some fifty-vears plus, in a kind o f
bloody homage to the Master. Uncle Charlie also anticipates mother-obsessed Norman
Bates. Hitchcock's 1960s recasting o f the Ripper figure.
There are some superficial differences between Uncle Charlie and Jack the Ripper,
o f course, the main one is that Uncle Charlie is accused o f being a strangler, not a
mutilator. N or does he prey on street prostitutes Yet thematically, the two killers are
identical. For instance, the film imagisticallv invests Uncle Charlie’s strong hands with a
dismembering, ripping pow er in the presence o f potential female victims. While gazing at
a photograph o f Young Charlie, he plucks a flower and sticks it in his lapel button, thus
suggesting that his "designs on Charlie are sexual" (Rothm an 190). To covertly hide
front-page evidence o f his crimes, he rips apart a newspaper in a children's game for Roger
and Anne. A short time later, when Young Charlie pulls the stolen newspaper page from
Uncle Charlie's coat pocket, he violently grabs Charlie's wrist, an action emphasized by
camera close-up. William Rothman summarizes neatly the effect o f this sudden force:
". .. the locus o f Charles's frightening power, hence his mystery, is his h a n d .. . . the
capacity for violence with which Hitchcock confronts us is real" (196). Later, when Uncle
Charlie extends his hand while demanding the film roll from Detective Saunders, Young
o4
Charlie is shown in spotlighted background, gazing at Uncle Charlie's powerful strangler’s
hand in the foreground. This ominous tableau presents a paradigmatic image o f
patriarchal violence (o r its potential): the dominated victim who can only stare helplessly
at the hand which will slash/strangle/smash her.
Uncle Charlie's murderous designs on his niece become even more obvious when
he sees from his bedroom window Young Charlie meeting her suitor, Graham. In
response, his hands encircle an imaginary throat and squeeze~a visual prologue to his
literal grasping o f Charlie’s throat after possibly overhearing Graham’s confession o f love
to Young Charlie in the garage. As Uncle Charlie "pretends" to strangle her. he
announces his ow n sexual desire for her. establishing his rivalry with his law-enforcement
double Graham and his psychological juxtaposition o f sex and murder: "She's the thing I
love most in the world." Uncle Charlie's compulsion to rip women apart with his hands
even determines his choice o f words, as when he tells Young Charlie to "rip the fronts o ff
the houses" in order to see people for the "swine" they really are. (Significantly, he is also
twisting a cocktail napkin, in extreme camera close-up. ju st before this statement.)
.And. like the Ripper. Uncle Charlie associates money with sex. While the Merry
W idow M urderer's victims are not prostitutes in the strictest sense o f the word. Uncle
Charlie sees them as the metaphorical equivalents in his dinner-table speech to the
Newtons:
The cities are full o f women. Middle-aged widows, husbands dead. Husbands
who've spent their lives making fortunes, working and working, and then they die
and leave the money to their wives, their silly wives. And what do the wives do,
these useless women? You see them in the hotels, the best hotels every day, by the
thousands. Drinking the money, eating the money, losing the money at bridge,
playing all day and all night. Smelling o f money. Proud o f their jewelry but o f
nothing else. Horrible. Faded, fat. greedy women. . . . Are they human or are they
fat. wheezing animals0 .And what happens to animals when they get too fat and
too old°
Uncle Charlie perceives these widows to be usurpers o f money which belongs exclusively
to the husbands. He is angered by their "wanton" spending o f it, so angered that he might
even kill to correct this social injustice. Sex may be his repressed motive, but money
provides him a conscious mission.
In this regard, his comment about the widows eating and drinking the money is
particularly revealing. He sees the male principle, as manifested in money, being literally
devoured by the voracious appetites o f "fat. wheezing" women. Julie Tharp notices this
theme o f feminine appetite addressed by Hitchcock in many o f his films (especially
Psychol and explains it in this way: "The notion o f the devouring man-eater . . . has
historically been associated with women’s supposedly boundless sexual appetites,
boundless because o f their close connection to nature" (111-12). In Shadow o f a Doubt,
as in the historical Ripper murders, the patriarchal representative reacts savagely to female
consumption o f the money by which men so often em pow er and identify- themselves. The
reaction is doubly savage because in this instance, a threatening female sexual appetite is
not-so-subtlv implied. (Remember Paul Gordon’s argument that Uncle Charlie's primary
motivation is repressed mother-desire.) The Ripper's prostitute victims get their money by
sexual intercourse with numerous men. thereby undermining the male monopoly on both
money and promiscuity. (The fact that Whitechapel prostitutes were "promiscuous" by-
circumstance. not choice, is irrelevant to the Ripper psyche.) Uncle Charlie is also "down
on whores" because he knows the basis o f his masculine freedom o f movement originates
in the money he dishonestly professes to care nothing about.
The two Charlies’s visit to Joe’s bank distills the them es o f money and sex into one
scene. After loudly joking about embezzlement to a visibly discomfited Joe. Uncle Charlie
says, "We all know w hat banks are. Look all right to an outsider, but who knows what
goes on when the doors are locked?" Uncle Charlie equates money and banking with
secretive and deviant behavior, much like his own. He tantalizingly and consciously hints
at the nature o f his ow n sickness in this citadel o f capitalism and patriarchy. He says o f
Mr. Green, the bank president: "Forty thousand is no joke. Not to him. I’ll bet. It's a joke
to me. The whole world's a jo k e to me." Here, he foreshadow s the general tone o f his
66
later diatribes against women and society in general. Directly to Mr. Green, he says that
. . once I make the money. I'm not interested in it. . . . Y ou know as well as I do
there’s plenty o f money lying around waiting for som ebody to pick it up . . . .
Thought maybe I’d put some o f my loose cash away for safe-keeping. I got in the
habit o f carrying a lot o f cash with me when I was traveling.
Uncle Charlie does indeed not care about money as a means to purchase material goods.
Instead, it is pow er itself to him. He may leave money strewn about carelessly on
nightstands and rooming-house floors, as in the film’s opening, but he will carry it
nevertheless before it gives him mobility and the pow er o f murder. It enfranchises his
action.
If women, particularly widows who get their money from the cold bodies o f their
dead husbands, begin to exhibit any degree o f personal freedom. Uncle Charlie reacts
murderously to forestall the threat to his own autonom ous pow er. By his sociopath's
logic, he is only doing to them what they have done to their husbands. In this fashion.
Uncle Charlie becom es a patriarchal avenger. I have already noted his earlier speech
about the "fat. wheezing" women who spend their husbands' money, and it is significant
that his next potential victim. Mrs. Potter, walks into the bank president's office
immediately after Uncle Charlie says that he picked up much m oney while traveling
independently. The cam era pans left from him to VIrs. Potter w hen she walks in, a
movement Rothman designates as Hitchcock's cinematic shorthand for Uncle Charlie's
m urderous intent (200). Mrs. Potter is no grieving widow. She openly flirts with Uncle
Charlie, and she breezily remarks that "There’s one good thing in being a widow. You
don't have to ask your husband for money.” She is also on the train to San Francisco with
Uncle Charlie at the film's climax, implying that she would have been his next victim had
he not been killed himself. Uncle Charlie has a mission, one which he proclaims to the
world (Ripper-style) by his choice o f victims. Hitchcock him self said o f Uncle Charlie:
. . he’s a killer with an ideal; he's one o f those m urderers who feel that they have a
mission to destroy. It's quite possible that those widows deserved what they got,
67
but it certainly w asn’t his job to do it. There is a moral judgm ent in the film. He's
destroyed at the end. isn't he? (Truffaut 111).
Caputi would doubtless accuse Hitchcock o f sanctioning, to som e degree at least,
sexual homicide with this comment. It is possible, however, that H itchcock is perceptively
(albeit a little tongue-in-cheek, as he was wont to do with Truffaut) diagnosing the
essential psychopathology o f such killers. They do see themselves as acting out a mission,
and to do it. they need to objectify- or degrade their victims into something less than
human—to reduce them to animals o r images o f pollution. Tania M odleski identifies this
reduction as a key element in Hitchcock films, including Shadow o f a D oubt: "The
association o f women with defilement, w ith filth, is as strong in Hitchcock as it is in the
'savage mind' analyzed by Levi-Strauss" (Women 108). Again, Jack the Ripper (or the
letter-writer who claimed to be him) has set the precedent for this with his comparison of
the prostitute victims to "squealing" pigs. Uncle Charlie views his w idow s as overaged,
fat swine lined up in slaughterhouses. So. one is not really killing human beings in such a
crusade—only wheezing animals. .And. through their actions, the victims have brought it
on themselves, according to the killers. Be those victims street whores o r merry widows,
the men who kill them are self-proclaimed agents o f social justice.
Society, in turn, rewards these men with a great deal o f attention and some
semblance o f fame. This is the mythologizing process which so troubles Caputi.
Particularly through the mass media, which obligingly records the details o f every killing
for posterity. W estern society- transforms its serial killers into folk heroes, with just a
touch o f the supernatural throw n in for melodramatic chills. Caputi calls this process the
"propaganda o f sex crime/gynocide" (Sex Crime 30); she is too readily dismissive o f the
other functions o f folklore, but there is no denial that the process attem pts nothing less
than a universalization o f specifically historical, real-life individuals into ahistorical. almost
Jungian archetypes. Indeed, Richard Blennerhassett argues that the cinematic serial killer
is a manifestation o f the Jungian shadow complex (101-4). One certainly sees the Jungian
63
process in operation during the period coverage o f the Ripper murders, which Hitchcock
recreates in fictional form in The Lodger Lesley Brill describes the effect o f the
Avenger's murders on Hitchcock's London:
London’s response to the murders is to make o f them an entertainment, a source o f

titillation for the idly curious. Details both in the opening and in later sequences
indicate that the amusement the people o f London find in The Avenger’s murders is
related to the voyeuristic pleasures they take in fair-haired young women more
generally. The murders occupy an extreme place on a scale o f entertainments, but
the important point is that they are on a scale at all. (261)
A parallel phenomenon can be observed at work in Shadow o f a D oubt. The
newspaper in which Young Charlie learns the truth about her uncle screams in a 40-point
banner headline tailored for maximum audience impact. "WHERE IS THE MERRY
WIDOW .MURDERER?" (Hitchcock metatextuallv underscores the dram a o f the
revelation by adding an exegetic swelling o f music to the soundtrack.) The story goes on
to further legitimatize the killer's new-found fame by assigning him a definite modus
operandi: "The fact that all the victims were wealthy widows accounts for his being
known to the police as the 'Merry Widow Murderer."' Caputi perceptively comments that
this police/media tendency to categorize victims according to one or tw o superficial
characteristics is only slightly less extreme than what the killer does:
. . the idea that a killer is obsessed with a particular type o f w om an . . is a

recurring one . . . Although this may occasionally have some basis in reality, more
frequently such fetishes are the fabrications o f the media and/or police and . . .
further eroticize the killings.
She concludes that the killer "in actuality picks victims on the basis o f availability" (Sex
Crime 4 1). Though I think a case can be made for the idea that some serial killers do pick
certain idealized classes o f victims (we are dealing with fetishes, after all), Caputi’s remark
is worth remembering when seeing how the media instruments in Shadow o f a Doubt
crown the Merry Widow .Murderer with a colorful nickname and then voveuristically trace
69
his path cross-country. His elusiveness becomes a sign o f supernatural cunning, at least
according to the media blitz.
Some further supernatural mythologizing o f Uncle Charlie does seem coded into
the plot structure o f the film, though as always with a Hitchcock film. I cannot
conclusively say that Uncle Charlie is literally an inhuman entity o f som e kind. Rather, the
linkage o f the supernatural to Uncle Charlie is a way o f implicating the audience in the
killer's deeds through superstitious belief systems, which attempt to blame external evil at
least as much as internal choice for ill fortune or m urderous acts but do recognize, to
some extent, that the irresistible will to transgress behavorial codes "invites" that evil into
human lives. Uncle Charlie's aristocratic facade masking an inner danger serves as a fitting
symbol for the allure o f evil standard to earlier genre texts. The villain as attractive
seducer is a prominent figure in the Gothic, and the nineteenth-century literary vampire a
logical outgrow th o f the Romantic-era Fatal Man character type, as Brian Frost argues
(38). Rothman points out that the idea o f Uncle Charlie as vampire runs throughout the
film, such as the opening scene when he rises corpse-like from his sickbed, or the scene
where Graham asks Ann to tell Katherine the story o f Dracula (182). .And. in much the
same way that a vampire cannot be reflected in a mirror. Uncle Charlie seems unable to be
photographed in his adult life. He is also an identitv-changer, apparently at will. He has
three different names during the course o f the film (o r four, if you count "Merry Widow
Murderer"): Mr. Spencer. Mr. Otis, and Mr. Oakley. O f course, superstitious symbols
are linked to his sick state o f mind. The number thirteen is prominently displayed at the
two staging areas in his trip West: the number o f his rooming house and the number o f
cards held in the cardplaver’s hand on the train. Uncle Charlie him self defies Joe's
superstition about tossing the hat onto Young Charlie's bed. thus suggesting some
duplicity with the very forces Joe avoids. Ronnie Scheib has an interesting explanation for
these supernatural undertones: " . . the film is a series o f deaths. At the center o f it all is
Uncle Charlie, the walking dead, threatening to consign all others to the non-being he
70
incarnates" (62). Clive Bloom, noting the Flipper’s supernatural embroideries in popular
culture, provides the key to understanding the linkage o f U ncle Charlie/Jack to vampirism:
"Jack . . steps out o f historical circumstance and into the imagination o f the future. As
such, like King Arthur o r Robin Hood or Dracula. he is the undead" (136).
The film, with its many apocalyptic overtones, also goes to some effort to imply
that Uncle Charlie is a Gothic-style devil. The opening frames o f the film show a desolate
urban landscape-bleak, empty, basically lifeless. Patriarchal technology has destroyed the
earth. The camera slowly pans across steel bridges and junkyards as the "M erry Widow
Waltz." or "Charlie’s Theme." plays in the background. Hitchcock then cuts to an exterior
shot o f the urban boarding house in which Uncle Charlie lies waiting, vampire-like, for
darkness to fall, thus linking him to the wasteland around him. He possesses the protean
ability to shift shapes abruptly: his changing o f names, his sudden bursts o f violence, his
casting-off o f sickness and suicidal resignation when he sees Young Charlie. As Francois
Truffaut says, in reference to the scene where the train darkens an entire station with
choking smoke, it is as if "the devil was coming to tow n” (111). Uncle Charlie and the
train are one. several scenes suggest. As he gains speed to meet Young Charlie for their
first meeting on the train-station platform, the departing train matches his pace. As he
beds down for his first night at the Newton house, he blow s a smoke ring from his
omnipresent cigar just as a train whistle sounds in the distance. In much the same way the
train's smokestack choked the train station. Uncle Charlie tries to suffocate Young Charlie
with exhaust fumes. And. o f course. Uncle Charlie falls to his death in front o f a train—a
final consummation o f violence. As symbol o f man's technological expansion and
conquering o f the American frontier, the train/Uncle Charlie seemingly heralds the
potential end o f the planet by his diabolical arrival.
But most importantly to the "supernatural" theme, there seem to be tw o (and by
implication, many more) Uncle Charlies out there. Much has been written about the
telepathic twinning between Uncle Charlie and Young Charlie, but what about that other
man in the East who may also be the Merry W idow M urderer0 Graham leads Young
Charlie to believe that Uncle Charlie is the actual killer, but admits this is not confirmed:
There’s a man loose in this country. W e’re after him. We don’t know much about
him. W e don’t even know what he looks like. . . . This man we want may be your
uncle. . . . We think he is. But in the East there’s another man w ho’s being hunted
too. . . . He may be the man.
The newspaper article also relays the information that the detectives are after "2 men. one
o f whom they are certain is the actual killer." .Ambiguity’ surrounds the identity o f the
killer As Saunders says during the tightening o f the pursuit around L'ncle Charlie: ’’.After
all this, wouldn't it be tunny if he was the wrong man0 He could be."
Now. ultimately the film does make a strong circumstantial case for Uncle Charlie
being the killer. But really, what incontrovertible p ro o f is there0 A ring with initials that
match the initials o f one o f the victims: Uncle Charlie's misogynistic speeches and odd
behavior; his attem pts to murder Young Charlie. At times his behavior seems more
theatrical (such as his loud joking in the bank and his dramatic table speeches) than guilty,
as if he is enjoying the cat-and-m ouse game o f offering provocative hints o f guilt but never
outright admission. Young Charlie, as his breathless audience, doubles for the audience
also, which wants to hear him SAY IT! and. o f course, never does. The ring is the
strongest evidence against him. and Young Charlie’s claiming o f it during her erotic
descent dow n the staircase does force the presumably guilty Uncle Charlie out o f town,
but is it ever known for certain that he is what people think he is0 Could the other man
out East, the one who is chased into the propeller o f an airplane in much the same way
that Uncle Charlie is throw n (or lets himself be thrown) under the wheels o f a train, be
responsible for some o f the murders? All o f them? Hitchcock's maddening refusal to
blatantly present Uncle Charlie’s on-screen murder o f a widow frustrates the audience in
its desire for a clear resolution o f this problem. There is a "shadow o f a doubt" left as to
whether Uncle Charlie is the. only murderer, o r even a murderer at all. He has achieved a
kind o f immortality in this way. There are other men out there killing women: Uncle
Charlie’s death has not ended the carnage, just as Jack the Ripper's disappearance and
probable death fifty-some years ago did not stop it. In fact, serial murder was only
beginning. This is the disturbing message Hitchcock leaves at Uncle Charlie's funeral.
Hitchcock is not mythologizing Uncle Charlie for the purposes o f sex-crime propaganda,
as Caputi would have it; rather, he is criticizing the culture that makes a hero o f its
Rippers, but does so in an unsettling way that apportions blame to everyone: surely a
Gothic legacy o f destabilization o f boundary.
Robin W ood insists that one o f the main reasons a Hitchcock film remains worthy o f
consideration is precisely this ability to disturb the viewer through voyeuristic implication:
It is one o f the functions o f art to disturb: to penetrate and undermine our

complacencies and set notions, and bring about a consequent readjustment in our
attitude to life. Many refer to this quality in Hitchcock but few try' to account for
it: how often has one heard that a certain film is "very clever" but "leaves a nasty
taste in the mouth" . . . This "nasty taste" phenomenon has, I believe, two main
causes. One is Hitchcock’s complex and discerning moral sense, in which good
and evil are seen to be so interwoven as to be virtually inseparable, and which
insists on the existence o f evil impulses in all o f us. The other is his ability to make
us aware, perhaps not quite at the conscious level. . . . o f the impurity o f our own
desires. ( Revisited 671
Wood includes Shadow o f a Doubt as one o f these films commonly said to leave a "nasty
taste.” One o f the most disturbing things about this particular film. I think, is its steadfast
refusal to exclude anyone, male o r female, from its scathing analysis o f our modem age o f
murder. We all cooperate in it. to some extent. And Hitchcock unapologeticallv rubs our
noses in it in Shadow o f a Doubt's serial-murder case study, long before the term "serial
killer" became part o f our cultural nomenclature.
Men. o f course, are the primary agents o f oppression and violence in the
patriarchal system. The Gothic shadow-villain is a projection o f masculine antipathy
toward the feminine anima. and so in these neo-Gothic narratives, men "all. . . at one
point or another, express key com ponents o f the mind and make up o f the killer" (Caputi.
Sex Crime 85). an accurate enough observation o f the boundary-collapsing narrative
representations o f multiple murder, [n Shadow o f a D oubt, the audience sees everywhere
men who exhibit many behavioral modes o f the sexual murderer and who may even be
consciously or unconsciously encouraging it. Law officers, for example, do not com e o ff
very well in the film. Perhaps this is because, as cultural representatives o f Lacan's Law o f
the Father, they objectify people into "good guys" and "bad guys." law-abiders and law
breakers. They are also detail-obsessed, almost fetishized. in the same way as the serial
killer is; as Detective Graham says o f his colleague Saunders in response to Young
Charlie’s observation that her uncle is fussy; "Saunders is neat and fussy too ." .Another
patriarchal agent. Santa Rosa's friendly neighborhood policeman, hinders Young Charlie
twice in her efforts to find out the nature o f the sexual threat against her. The first time,
because she dares to cross the street against the light, he nearly prevents her from getting
to the library in time to find the newspaper article she needs for information. The second
time, because she is running too fast, he literally puts her back into Uncle Charlie's grasp
as she attem pts to cross the street to escape him.
Detectives Graham and Saunders know more precisely the nature o f the threat
which the Newtons face from Uncle Charlie, but they are more o f a hindrance than a help
as well. They can never find any concrete evidence against their quarry. They are reduced
to the clumsy charade o f posing as census-takers to enter the Newton house to
surreptitiously photograph Uncle Charlie. Detective Graham, in particular, is a disturbing
character (as is his 1980s fictional namesake in Thomas Harris's Red D ragon). Diane
Carson says o f him. "His aim is to contain Young Charlie and integrate her into the
traditional system" (18). the very system which often kills women like her. Though
superficially earnest and well-meaning, he manipulates Young Charlie for both romantic
and professional reasons. He orders her to obey him and, in effect, enlists her as a helpless
spy: "And you're going to keep your mouth shut. Y ou're going to keep your mouth shut
because you’re a nice girl. Because you're such a nice girl that you know you’d help me if
you knew your uncle's the man we want." .And later, the film explicitly parallels Graham's
wooing o f Young Charlie with Uncle Charlie’s murder attempts on her. Kay Sloan affirms
this: ’’the criminal w om an-destroyer (her uncle) and the representative o f both law and
romance (the detective) vie for her very selfhood” (93). Hitchcock signals the beginning
o f the male rivalry for Young Charlie with Emma's remark to her that "Your Uncle Charlie
was asking for you again. He's awfully fond o f you and that nice young man [Graham]
came twice to ask after you.” The "he" signifier in that hurried sentence could refer to
either one o f them. The garage in which Graham suggests marriage to Young Charlie is
the site o f Uncle Charlie's nearly-successftil attempt to asphyxiate her with car exhaust
fumes. And the final scene o f the film, where Graham and Young Charlie seem destined
for marriage, takes place at Uncle Charlie's funeral. Like Uncle Chariie. Graham has
something o f the reek o f death about him as well.
The two N ew ton males. Joe and Roger, also contribute to the social amalgamation
which can produce an Uncle Chariie. Joe. as head patriarch o f the Newton family,
sanctions violence in his avid speculations (along with his friend Herb) about how' to
commit the perfect murder. Emma tells an angered Young Charlie that Joe’s "murderous"
conversations with Herb are merely "your father’s way o f relaxing," but they also illustrate
the patriarchy's casual attitude toward violence. O ne is reminded o f the eager circle o f
"Ripperologists." the armchair-murderers who vicariously experience serial m urder
through study o f the Ripper’s deeds. Diane Carson declares that
Joe provides an interesting commentary on the appeal o f murder to men. Uncle

Charlie actually kills merry widows and even dear, childish Joe reads and fantasizes
about murder. . . . Uncle Charlie and Joe are, thus, curiously and somewhat
ironically linked. The first morning, talking about Uncle Charlie as a young boy,
Emma says that he was always reading; as an adult Charlie could be the title
character o f Joe’s book, the lead player, the protagonist in Joe's fantasy world.
.After his accident Charlie enters the world that vicariously engrosses Joe, the
world o f murder. (17)
And Joe's son. Roger, is even more ominous in this regard. As a pliable young boy. he is
undergoing the patriarchal socialization which sometimes turns boys into killers. As the
film unfolds, the audience witnesses the training o f a potential Jack the Ripper.
First, we see Roger’s frown o f resentment tow ard his mother as she describes
Uncle Charlie in a phone conversation: "Well, o f course [he’s] a little spoiled. You know
how families always spoil the youngest." The close-up emphasis on Roger’s reaction to
this statement links him to Uncle Charlie, a link which will continue throughout the rest o f
the film. At one point. Uncle Charlie says that he likes "all the little details" and "people
who face facts." Roger is one such person. His obsession with minutiae reveals itself time
and time again. He counts 649 steps from his house to the drugstore and then back; wants
to count every step he takes all day; asks Young Charlie how many times she woke up
during her dav-Iong sleep; catalogues the types o f rooms and berths he has seen on trains.
He is a young adept o f the scientific method, which the Victorians associated with
Ripperism. He begins to idolize Uncle Charlie, wanting to ride in a taxi with him to his
women's club speech and to stay with him on the train as it leaves Santa Rosa at film's end.
There is even a symbolic cross-transference o f phallic pow er between Uncle Charlie and
Roger: when Roger brings in the "big red bottle" o f cham pagne (blood0) to Uncle Charlie.
Hitchcock visually implies the homage paid by Roger to his mentor, much as Uncle
Charlie pays homage to the grand patriarch o f serial murder. Jack the Ripper. Roger's
presence in the film adds a disturbing validity to the minister's platitude over Uncle
Charlie's corpse as the film ends: "Santa Rosa has gained and lost a son."
The daughters o f Santa Rosa, in Hitchcock’s ironic world, are in some ways
equally culpable in the murderous goings-on. Men may be the actual killers, but women
also contribute to the social atmosphere in which sexual homicide becomes alarmingly
common. The latter quality in the film treads perilously close to the standard "blame the
victim" theme so often found in masculine discourse, but what Hitchcock has done instead
is to show just how pervasive patriarchal ideology has become, to the point o f coercing
women into sanctioning (unconsciously or even consciously) the cultural attitudes which
lead to their own destruction. Young Charlie even has to become a masculinized killer
herself (if one accepts the frankly unproveable theory that she deliberately pushes her
uncle from the train) in order to avenge not only the wrongs committed upon her but the
womankind she represents. (H ere is Carol Clover’s "Final Girl" in a film that anticipates
by decades the siasher films o f the 1970s and ’80s.) Yet both Newton females do seem to
have some special knowledge, call it intuition or a gender-specific racial memory o f a
millennia o f victimization, which can potentially save them.
For example, the two daughters in the film. Ann and Young Charlie, at first accept
unconditionally the cultural romantic myths which they have inherited. Both females are
intelligent but deluded. The film opens with a subtly disapproving comment on their
assigned positions in the Newton household. Young Charlie is first introduced in an
opening shot identical to the manner in which the patriarchal destroyer Uncle Charlie is
introduced, establishing a link between the two which the rest o f the film examines.
William Rothman maintains that the film’s double opening
serves Hitchcock's insistence that a world that knows the possibility o f fulfillment
through romantic love and a world that knows the despair o f love betrayed and
love lost are subject to the same conditions and may be encompassed within a
single frame. (180)
In other words. Young Charlie's romantic, quite possibly incestuous, faith in a heroic
male's ability to save her is cousin to the romantic despair Uncle Charlie so murderously
feels and. indeed, makes it easier for her uncle to victimize her. Her oft-repeated hopes,
that Uncle Charlie is the "miracle" she's been waiting for to save her "just-gone-to-pieces"
family and that she knows "a wonderful person who'll come and shake us all up. Just the
one to save us. .All this time there's been one right person to save us." blind her. But, as
Diane Carson notes, she will "awaken . . . to a nightmare world that makes her fantasy
untenable" (16). .And she can sense the poison within Uncle Charlie even before truly
awakening to his danger. Upon first sight o f him, she does not recognize him, and later
tells him: "At first I didn't know you. You looked sick." Contrast this with Joe's
comment that Uncle Charlie hasn't changed a bit.
Ann is another dreaming female, one who could very well be Young Charlie as a
child. (Or even Uncle Charlie as a child—he also read a great deal when young.) She
shares Young Charlie's intuitive recognition that something is wrong with Uncle Charlie:
"I remember you [Uncle Charlie] sort of. You look different." She also doesn't want to
sit by him at the dinner table anymore after Young Charlie has discovered the "Merry
W idow Murderer" article, though Ann hasn’t seen it o r heard about it. Ironically enough,
however. Ann is shown to be a voracious reader and critic, capable o f seeing other
people's critical blindspots (such as her father’s problematic love o f crime fiction.) but
unable to perceive her own at first. She singlemindedly reads Ivanhoe throughout the
opening scenes in the Newton house, refusing to put it down to take telephone messages
or talk with the people around her. visibly resenting any interruptions in her reading o f it.
Her intense devotion to Walter Scott's novel places her in thrall to patriarchallv authored
European romanticism. By placing fvanhoe in the hands o f a female child. Hitchcock is
also implicitly linking European romance to its hybrid American descendant.
As William Rothman says, "wedlock is holy in Ann's literature, in her father's it is a
condition that motivates murder" (184). The first exchange between her and her father,
Joe. is indicative:
.Ann: Isn't it the funniest thing? Here I am, practically a child, and I wouldn't read
the things you read.
Joe: Well. I guess they'd give you bad dreams.
Ann: Bad dreams0 You don’t understand. Poppa. Mystery stories have done—
Joe: Where's Roger?
Joe's interruption o f Ann is a way o f silencing her criticism o f his reading material.
Though it is not certain. Ann is probably going to tell him that mystery stories, with their
emphasis on murder and mayhem, have perpetuated the attitudes they moralisticallv
denounce. The cruel irony here is that she is unable to see that her favorite romances
78
make her m ore susceptible to the menace represented by the conventionally dashing Uncle
Charlie. H er fiction blinds her to the reality o f Uncle Charlie's savage fiction—indeed,
shapes her reality by configuring her perceptions. Thus, the daughters o f Santa Rosa,
while not actively ''inviting" their victimization in the fashion o f the heroines o f nineteenth-
century vampire literature, remain as predisposed to the problematic influence o f narrative
myth as the m ore violent males.
Conclusion: The Dissolution o f Boundary'
Concern regarding the transformative power o f fiction over its voracious consumers
dominates Hitchcock’s canon o f work, but particularly Shadow o f a D oubt. Uncle Charlie,
who seems to be both monster and victim o f a childhood head injury, is an amalgamation
o f quite familiar supernatural/superhuman prototypes in fiction such as the vampire,
werewolf, and arch-criminal (a la Professor Moriarty o f the Sherlock Holmes stories by
.Arthur Conan Doyle) in uneasy fusion with the popular-psychologv cliches o f the
twentieth-century: a trend fully developed in the FBI definition o f the serial killer. The
clear boundaries between fictional genres break down, as do the boundaries between
individuals and genders. .Androgyny, or the confusion between biological and cultural
definitions o f male and female, plays a central role in these neo-Gothic narratives,
especially so in the characters o f the female anima and the male shadow. Young Charlie,
though an attractive young woman desirous o f a sexually based relationship with a strong
male figure, exhibits the intellectual independence and strength o f resolve traditionally
granted to male protagonists. .Also like her male counterpans, she dispatches her
torm entor in climactic single combat. Similarly, Uncle Charlie, while presenting a dashing
masculine facade to women, displays a certain foppishness o r effeteness which leads at
least one com m entator to remark that "In the nattiness o f his dress, in the heavy cane he
carries, in the vintage wines he drinks, in the jewelrv he dispenses. [Uncle Charlie] is a
version o f m oderately high camp: the Gay Dandy" ( Price 62). The purpose o f this
gender confusion is not for Hitchcock to indulge in homophobia or "gay bashing," a
charge to be brought against Jonathan Demme for his remarkably similar film The Silence
o f the Iam bs decades later, but rather to illustrate the permeability o f identity boundaries
in the modem G othic narrative, where limits becom e amorphous indeed and true
knowledge a rank impossibility. Transgression becom es the only reliable ontological
strategy, the act o f violation its operative expression. In terms o f the narrative fictions out
o f which people construct their lives, the neo-G othic tale o f horror and/or terror contains
its own subversion. Its ongoing popularity and multi-generic applicability testifies to our
masochistic need for de-stability o f reassuring boundaries, including the seemingly
immutable biological reality o f the two sexes as secondarily manifested in commonly
defined gender roles.
O f course, it remained for Uncle Charlie's metatextual son. Norman Bates, to make
the murderous androgyne a pop-culture phenomenon. As envisioned first by Robert
Bloch and then Alfred Hitchcock. Norman Bates marks the commonly recognized
transitional period between the sympathetic but plainly inhuman monsters o f the first half
o f the century's popular entertainment—King Kong. Dracula, Frankenstein's monster, the
Wolffnan. the C reature from the Black Lagoon, and so on—and the human monsters o f its
latter half. (This transition also coincides with the commonly accepted boundary between
modernism and postmodernism.) Bates commits murders so savage and horrific that they
immediately distance him from humanity as thoroughly as a Dracula or Wolfman. He is
capable o f transformation into monstrous forms, e.g.. Mother: again, just like the
Wolfman. He lives in a remote, foreboding. G othic "castle" literally surrounded by
corpses. Yet B ates is also clearly a man; anything o f the supernatural o r the extraordinary
about him occurring only because o f the audience's privileged awareness o f his grotesque
actions. His "evil" is not the result o f original sin or demonic possession but unresolved
Oedipal attachm ent and improper toilet training. His transmogrification into his werewolf
form occurs internally, not physically. His facade o f "normality" remains intact for most o f
so
the film. While appropriating for himself the awesome power to murder, he is still faced
with the postm ortem , incongruously mundane chore o f mopping up blood and disposing
o f troublesome corpses.
Bates is one o f the first widely known fictional representations o f the quiet but
murderous "bov next door" character type: now a stock figure o f black hum or in our
culture but also a replication o f the Gothic villain, a necromancer w hose social alienation
leads him to explore taboo realms beyond the pale o f civilization, into our contemporary
post-industrial existences. In the next chapter. I will analyze how this centuries-old
literary villain served as a partial template for r e I analysis o f a seemingly new form o f
crime: serial murder. The FBI's "scientific" analysis in turn shaped .American genre fiction
o f the "newly" conservative 1980s and 1990s. particularly the serial-killer novels o f
Thomas Harris and the films based upon them. Harris's most memorable character. Dr.
Hannibal Lecter. is another mocking Shadow in the pedigree o f aristocratic killers, like
L'ncle Charlie, who dominate the Gothic-influenced murder romances o f the modem age.
Chapter Three: Thomas Harris's Profiles in Murder
The now-famous fictional serial killer. Hannibal "the Cannibal" Lecter. for all his
pretensions tow ard elitist, modem an . is a panicularlv savage example o f the parodic
mindset o f the true postmodernist. He exaggerates the urban-sophisticate demeanor,
ironically juxtaposed with mythic bloodlust. o f an Uncle Charlie to its nihilistic extreme.
In L ectefs film incarnations (he is played by Welsh actor Anthony Hopkins in Jonathan
Demme’s 1991 The Silence o f the Lambs and by English actor Brian Cox in Michael
Mann’s 1986 M anhunter). his British accent at once connotes high art and cultured
refinement for a Yankee audience, while his sly and mocking needling o f those who must
uncomfortably face him with full knowledge o f his previous serial murders betrays the
cruelty beneath the courtesy. Yet in spite o f all the praise heaped upon Anthony Hopkins's
admittedly superb portrayal o f the "Moriarty" o f serial killers, it is important to return to
the source o f it all. Hannibal "the Cannibal" Lecter is the inspired creation o f .American
novelist Thomas Harris, whose postmodern fictional narratives play with any number o f
genre conventions—Gothic romance, police procedural, murder mystery, hard-boiled
detective fiction, horror, etc.--even while he bases them on careful research o f the FBI's
theories and databases regarding serial murder. (For a fuller picture o f these databases,
refer to the August 1985 FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin, or Ressler, Burgess, and
Douglas's 1988 Sexual Homicide: Patterns and M otives.)
We know this because retired FBI agent and author Robert Ressler. the man most
directly responsible for popularization o f the phrase "serial killer," relays the story o f how
on two occasions in the 1980s, at the request o f the FBI public-affairs office, he showed
Harris around the offices o f the Behavioral Science Unit: gave him case profiles on such
notable serial killers as Edmund Kemper, Richard Chase, and Ed Gein; and introduced him
on his second visit to the only female agent then working at the BSU, the implication
being that Ressler provided him his worldly inspiration for Clarice Starling (M onsters 272-
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3). With Ressler's meetings with Harris, the upw ard spiral o f simulacra plays out: the FBI
profilers draw on nineteenth-century detective fiction to create a database o f "fact" which
Harris incorporates into his "reality"-based tw entieth-century detective fiction. Yet
neither are these novels celebrations o f modem law enforcement wizardry Harris's
fictionalized profilers do make use o f the FBI definitions and computers, but at the same
time they quickly realize the limitations o f academic knowledge when faced with "the real
thing." Jack Crawford. Harris's depiction o f a prominent Behavioral Science agent, is
shrewd enough to draft intelligent "outsiders" such as Will Graham and Clarice Starling
into FBI service to combat the more elusive serial murderers, particularly the Red Dragon
and Buffalo Bill. The more distant perspectives o f Graham and Starling allow them to
approach the cases "fresh." as Graham puts it: meaning that these two profilers have read
the FBI papers (Starling calls them "fundamental" in the most reductive sense o f that
word—see Lambs 17) but remain largely unconvinced by FBI orthodoxy.
At this point, a brief analysis o f the FBI profiles o f serial murder is necessary', not
only because Harris is so obviously influenced by them, but also because their debt to
genre fiction is striking. In fact, the ontology o f the entire hvperrational profiling process
lies in detective fiction, as a crucial passage in Ressler. Burgess, and Douglas's homicide
primer reads:
Although Lunde has stated that the murders o f fiction bear no resemblance to the
murders o f reality . . . a connection between fictional detective techniques and
m odern profiling methods may indeed exist. For example, it is an attention to
detail that is the hallmark o f famous fictional detectives; the smallest item at a
crime scene does not escape their notice. [This] is stated by the famous Sergeant
C uff in Wilkie Collin's 1868 novel The M oonstone, widely acknowledged as the
first full-length detective story . . . attention to detail is equally as essential to
present-day profiling. No piece o f information is too small; each detail is
scrutinized for its contribution to a profile o f the killer. (11)
The authors' veneration o f nineteenth-century detective fiction, and more significantly its
good-faith reliance on the ability o f clues to form a solid deductive chain o f logic leading
to the author o f a crime scene, is a common enough phenomenon, especially in the
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hysterically optimistic American 1980s. but what makes this passage extraordinary is its
presence in a pretentiously practical homicide investigators’ manual. The authors are
aware o f their breaking o f disciplinary barriers, as John Douglas and Alan Burgess
elsewhere write: "Criminal profiling . . . combine[s] the results o f studies in other
disciplines with m ore traditional techniques" (9). Passages like this are extraordinary not
just because they cross disciplinary boundaries, but because they also tacitly admit the
interweaving o f empiricism and representation. Jon Stratton contends that profiling as a
"new form o f detection decentres the individual and aims instead to construct a
simulacrum based on assumptions o f norm ative patterns o f behavior" (13). which are in
and o f themselves fictions masquerading as reality.
The FBI's strategy proceeds on the optimistic but dubious assumption that there is
a one-to-one. fixed correspondence between sign and signified, and that close enough
reading will strip away ambiguity and coax forth the secrets o f the signified. Ironically,
however, profiling as an act o f reading is based on a foundation o f fiction, which seems
like a fairly self-evident statement until one remembers the profilers' professed agenda is so
doggedly yoked to empirical data. It makes even more incredible the existence o f journal
articles like "The Real 'Silence o f the Lambs'", by Clinton R. Van Zandt and Stephen E.
Ether, which without a hint o f irony com pares the FBI's actual investigative strategies
against those depicted in Jonathan Demme's film and concludes, presumably optimistically,
on this basis that "Like the character o f Clarice Starling . . . the exact prediction o f human
behavior is still fictional, but the FBI's ISU [Investigative Support Unit] is rapidly closing
the gap between the art and the science" (52). The rhetorical nonchalance concerning the
merging o f reality and representation is quite revealing in this passage. The authors are
self-aware o f the artifice o f their discourse: they have accepted it and have devised a
metatextual way o f reading it. For more compelling evidence o f the cultural dominance o f
what has com e to be called postmodemity. one need look no further than the
paradoxically metadiscursive style o f those who pride themselves on their avoidance o f
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ivorv-tower intellectualism. (O f course, the profilers have been more than willing to adopt
the academic discourse o f psychoanalysis, but only because it has already informed their
conceptions about criminality.)
Seizing on this breakdow n o f formerly sacrosanct boundary as a key theme in his
fiction. Harris quickly points out the inherent contradiction in the FBI’s attempts at
scientific classification and categorization even as it embraces the ambiguity o f fiction. He
does this primarily through the creation o f serial killers who. as Ressler complains,
combine into one individual many o f the traits the FBI has assigned to various categories
o f real murderers: "personality dynamics that would be highly unlikely to coexist in one
person in the real world" (M onsters 273). Harris also directly criticizes some o f the most
accepted tenets o f the profiling manifestos. For example, the serial lust murderer as a
Freudian version o f the multiple m urderer is perhaps the one m ost studied by the FBI's
Behavorial Science Unit (BSU). which has further bifurcated the lust murderer into the
rather simplistic polar opposites o f disorganized asocial offender and organized nonsocial
offender (Hazelwood and Douglas 18). Hannibal Lecter. w hose improbable genius seems
largely created to complicate most o f the FBI's 1980s pat conclusions about serial murder,
calls this distinction "simplistic" and concludes that ”, . . most psychology is puerile,
and that practiced in Behavioral Science is on a level with phrenology" (Lambs 17).
On the basis o f the observation o f this textual freeplav between Harris and the FBI,
it should be evident that the cultural recycling o f the genre narratives o f multiple murder
cuts across the boundaries between fact and fiction. The founders o f the FBI profiling
program admit that they model their process in part after nineteenth-centurv detective
fiction, which in its turn is an outgrow th o f the Gothic formulas o f the century before that.
Harris, recognizing the artifice o f the FBI construction, uses its conclusions as raw
material for his own permutation on the Gothic genre. .And now fiction and fact are
emulating Harris, particularly in replications o f his powerful scenes involving a series o f
increasingly psychologically intimate prison-house interviews between killer and nemesis.
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Two brief examples will suffice: not long after The Silence o f the Lambs was released,
Ron H oward’s film Backdraft featured several scenes w ith an imprisoned arsonist
interviewed by a young fireman, who just happens to be w restling with the memory o f his
dead firefighter father, in an attempt to create a profile o f an arsonist still on the loose.
More recently, a non-fiction book entitled The Riverman w as published, in which
"superstar" profiler Robert Keppel details his series o f D eath-Row interviews with Ted
Bundy as both engage in a spirited give-and-take o f privileged information, ostensibly for
the purpose o f finding the still-unknown Green River Killer. Just as Ressler and the BSU
can claim some credit for inventing the media serial killer. Harris is perhaps the man most
directly responsible for the 1980s and '90s explosion o f interest in serial killers, the current
cycle o f multiple-murder narratives, and the future shape o f the myth itself. Consequently,
his influential novels merit close analysis.
Dragons and Lambs: The Serial Killer Novels o f Thomas Harris
Francis Dolarhyde. Hannibal Lecter. Jame Gumb: the featured serial killers o f Thomas
Harris's second and third novels (Red Dragon and The Silence o f the Lambs, respectively)
present an array o f violent, deviant behaviors. Lecter cannibalizes his victims to
incorporate them into his body: Dolarhyde murders entire families to possess his mutilated,
bitten female victims in front o f posed audiences consisting o f slaughtered husbands and
children: Gumb removes the skins o f his female victims and sews the remnants into a
literal body-suit that helps him enact his fantasy o f transform ation into feminine beauty. In
effect, each killer has a signature, or method o f killing (and postmortem disposal or display
o f the corpses) unique to that individual. Consequently, the plots o f Harris's novels depict
the efforts o f various FBI agents and affiliates to identify o r reveal the writer o f each
criminal signature: a murder-mystery narratological strategy Stefano Tani identifies as
specifically metafictional. Doing so, however, places the investigators at physical and
psychic risk because they must operate in the killer's territory, a pseudo-mythic domain in
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which identities are destabilized, morality suspended, and societal codes subverted in a
manner common to the entire Gothic genre to which Harris is indebted. Harris's artistic
project in composing each o f the novels is an interweaving o f dual narratives, the killer’s
and the detective's, which inevitably converge as the detective successfully identifies the
killer from his signature and then tracks him to his "lair."
Although neither o f Harris's novels is a murder mystery in the classic sense, each is
representative o f the anti-mvstery, in David Richter’s terminology While each investigator
(Will Graham o r Clarice Starling) still seeks to unmask a murderer, the killer is known far
in advance by the reader. .And in contrast to the traditional mystery-, victims are chosen
because the traditional investigation that centers on suspects with hidden but ultimately
clear motives will not succeed. The victim has little or no prior connection to the killer,
and there is no "practical" motive for the police to uncover. In Harris's novels
investigatory success depends upon intuition and empathy rather than pure logic. But the
need to enter the killer’s mindset threatens to bring the detective into conflict with society's
prohibition against manifestation o f m urderous urges.
In Red Dragon, the law-enforcement representative is Will Graham, a retired FBI
Academy forensics instructor (a civilian, not an agent) with two previous experiences in
capturing serial killers, who is beckoned from his early retirement to lead the search for
yet another such killer. In the course o f this third investigation, he loses his family and
nearly his life. The Silence o f the Lambs moves the mutilated and defeated Graham
offstage and introduces Clarice Starling, a young FBI Academy student who quietly,
almost surreptitiously, identifies and finds the serial killer "Buffalo Bill" while the
mammoth FBI pursuit, rendered ungainly by its very size and complexity, sweeps by them
until well after their confrontation is finished. She fares better than Graham does, not only
surviving her initiation into Gothic ambiguity but achieving a level o f postmodern media
renow n (the tabloids call her the "Bride o f Frankenstein") which will doubtless serve her
well in her future career.
YVhat distinguishes both o f Harris’s fictional narratives, and lends them a definite
neoconservative flavor well in keeping with the American 1980s resurrection o f frontier
mythology, is their reliance on maverick outsiders to operate beyond the FBI's
bureaucratic constraints and thus reduce the killers’ lead time. Will Graham is a temporary
Special Investigator, not an FBI agent. Clarice Starling is a student, not yet an FBI agent,
and most significantly, a woman in a traditionally hypermasculine environment. While
neither o f these tw o is a Dirty-Harrv style vigilante, both are relatively free to work at the
margins o f FBI procedure, utilizing their technological resources and social freedom o f
passage but skirting around federal regulations and paperw ork with a fair degree o f
invisibility and impunity They are also alienated in some way from the ideologies and
attitudes o f their professional co-workers: Graham is widely considered to be insane by
his colleagues (as well as by the tabloid press) because o f his empathic ability to recreate a
killer's fantasies from the evidence o f his crime scenes, and Starling is a woman whose
strength, com petence, and attractiveness make her immediately suspect to most o f her
male peers, who alternately resent her and lust for her.
Thus. Harris proposes an updated and politically correct variation on a fairly
conservative, tim e-honored American dictum: that in order for things to get done, in this
case law enforcement, competent professionals (which can now include women, if only
because neoconservatism cannot completely repudiate the progressive feminist advances
o f the past few decades) need to be unfettered by timid state legislation and interference.
Unfortunately, these mavericks will be shunned by the more traditional rank and file, either
by those who envy their achievements or misunderstand their methods. Working alone or
with a minimum o f intrusion from probably well-meaning but bungling state authority,
Graham and Starling can be trusted to accomplish what a massive bureaucracy cannot.
Circumventing established procedures and codes w ith streamlined efficiency. Harris’s
simultaneously amateur/professional detectives are, literally, out-laws, and hence are
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different from their quarrv only in degree and manner o f transgression. Joel Black
concurs:
. . . a convention o f the [detective fiction] genre [is] to portray the sleuth at odds
with the established police force. In fact, the literary figure o f the detective
typically was and continues to be an extraordinary, marginal figure who frequently
bears a closer resemblance to the criminal he pursues than to the police officers
with whom he supposedly collaborates. (43)
This is especially true for Will Graham, whose name sounds suspiciously like "Pilgrim."
the moniker Hannibal Lecter assigns to "The Tooth Fairy." as the press calls the unknown
serial killer, or. alternatively. "Red Dragon.” as Dolarhyde calls himself.
Graham’s ability to intuitively create psychiatric profiles from crime-scene evidence
is far beyond that o f his colleagues: a skill which frightens and revolts Graham as well as
many o f those who know him. His ability to "read" crime scenes borders on the
supernatural, threatening to pierce the boundary between the mundane and the fantastic.
Even his professional confidantes. Crawford and forensic psychiatrist Dr. Bloom, discuss
his ability in his absence, and Crawford has gone so far in the past as to ask Bloom to
write a study on Graham’s unique mentality. To Crawford. Bloom diagnoses Graham as
not only an eideteker. someone possessed o f a "remarkable visual memory." but an
empath: "He can assume your point o f view, or mine—and maybe some other points o f
view that scare and sicken him. It's an uncomfortable gift. Jack” (152). Graham reflects
on his "gift" as he inspects the crime scene at the Leeds house:
Graham had a lot o f trouble with taste. Often his thoughts were not tasty. There
w ere no effective partitions in his mind. What he saw and learned touched
everything else he knew. Some o f the combinations were hard to live with. But he
could not anticipate them, could not block and repress. His learned values o f
decency and propriety tagged along, shocked at his associations, appalled at his
dreams: sorry that in the bone arena o f his skull there were no forts for what he
loved. His associations came at the speed o f light. His value judgm ents were at
the pace o f a responsive reading. They could never keep up and direct his
thinking. (15)
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Passages such as this one prevent the reader from concluding that Harris is a right-wing
ideologue. In his novels, the morally ambiguous and hence Gothic landscape jarringly
destabilizes the often conservative values o f his protagonists. In this instance. Graham
longs for the stability o f family, but deliberately exiles himself from his wife and stepson
and places himself (and by extension, them) in increasingly dangerous situations until he
and they are nearly killed by his Gothic double. Dolarhyde. In effect, he spurns (how ever
reluctantly) what the desperately alone Dolarhyde covets, a more subtle variation o f the
intrafamilial horrors dramatized by Harris through the primary character o f family-slayer
Dolarhyde. When Graham attempts to return to Molly and Willy after everyone believes
Dolarhyde to have killed himself, their relationships have altered irrevocably for the w orse
under the stress o f Graham’s long investigation:
When they saw that it was not the same, the unspoken knowledge lived with them
like unwanted company in the house. The mutual assurances they tried to
exchange in the dark and in the day passed through some refraction that made
them miss the mark. (343)
Dolarhvde's psychic effect on Graham and his family is disastrous enough at this point, but
the novel is not over yet. The "unwanted company" metaphor soon literalizes itself in the
troubled Graham household. Dolarhyde. having obtained Graham's home address from
Lecter in a coded message placed in the National Tattler, stalks Graham's family with the
intent o f killing them in revenge for Graham's uncovering his identity. While Dolarhyde
does not initially succeed and is in fact killed by Molly, in the long run he has destroyed
the Grahams as surely as he has the Leedses and Jacobis. At the novel's end. Graham, his
face ripped apart by Dolarhvde's knife, lies wounded in a hospital bed as Molly prepares to
leave him to go to Oregon to her parents' house, probably never to return. (Contrast this
bleak ending with that o f Michael Mann's Manhunter. based on this novel; in Mann’s
version, the Graham family unit is optimistically restored by Graham's professional
activities, a sentiment more in keeping with neoconservative culture.) Through
Dolarhvde's psychological destruction o f the Graham family, Harris suggests that family
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life, no m atter how apparently stable o r based on love and mutual respect, is inherently
fragile and probably pathological for those concerned: a distinctly subversive idea.
Graham’s troubling sacrifice, no matter how unintentional, o f family to his w ork (a
thematic accusation usually leveled against women in 1980s and ’90s popular culture, and
another example o f Harris’s trans-gender freeplav) is not the only exam ple o f his decidedly
ambiguous status as narrative "hero." His empathic abilities, stopping just short o f the
kind o f "true" psychic insight so often a secondary' theme in actual serial-killer lore
(beginning with the supposed involvement o f the Queen’s medium. Robert Lees, in the
"Jack the Ripper" murders in 1888 London), gravitate more tow ard m urder than kindness.
Though he attem pts to forge psychic bonds with the phantoms evoked by inspection o f the
dead families’ belongings (Mrs. Leeds’s diary, for example), his true gift lies in empathizing
with the killer In a drunken state, he imagines he can see the faceless shadow o f the
Dragon sitting across from him in an empty chair and tells it comfortingly: "I know it’s
tough." Then, as he reaches out to touch the shadow, it disappears. leaving him to muse
upon his tenuous connection to the murderer:
Graham had tried hard to understand the Dragon. . . Sometimes Graham felt
close to him. A feeling he remembered from other investigations had settled over
him in recent days: the taunting sense that he and the D ragon were doing the same
things at various times o f the day, that there were parallels in the quotidian details
o f their lives. Somewhere the Dragon was eating, or showering, or sleeping at the
same time as he was. (194)
This sense o f doubling will finally reveal the Dragon's identity to Graham, but only after
Graham has compromised his safe boundary o f distance from the m urderer to a costly
degree: a disastrous twinning between equally matched super-detective and arch-criminal.
most famously anticipated by the Holmes/Moriarity conflict in A rthur Conan Doyle's
corpus o f work.
Graham can establish the empathic link to a murderer because he realizes he will
always be more hunter than prev: a dragon as opposed to a lamb. The most "intense and
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savage jov" (340) he has ever experienced comes when he realizes from watching the
Leedses and Jacobis' home movies, and cross-correlating details visible in the films to his
eideteker m emory o f evidence from the crime scenes, that the Red Dragon must have seen
these same films and that to find the murderer. Graham merely has to find out where these
two sets o f hom e movies were developed. In retrospect. Graham finds this intellectual joy
o f revelation a troubling, pseudo-murderous act: "It was unsettling to know that the
happiest moment o f his life had come then, in that stuffy jury room in the city o f Chicago.
When even before he knew he knew " (340). The point is driven home even further by the
knowledge that his insight was derived from voyeuristic absorption into the same celluloid
images Dolarhyde used in his job. film processor at Gateway Labs, as murderous imagistic
foreplay. M oreover. Graham worries that his own murderous urges may be unduly-
stimulated by his contact with killers.
The worry- is not ill-founded. Harris implies that the Tooth Fairy's murder o f
reporter Freddy Lounds is at least a sort o f wish-fulfillment for Graham, who detests
Lounds because o f the latter1s sensationalistic coverage o f Graham's previous involvement
in the Lecter case. Lounds. who has been taunting the killer in the National Tattler at
Graham's request, is gruesomely and painfully murdered when an FBI trap conceived by-
Graham leaves the reporter unprotected. Lounds dies believing that Graham set him up
for a "hit" because in an earlier posed Tattler photo Graham placed his hand on Lounds's
shoulder, as if Lounds were one o f the family pets that the Tooth Fairy ritually kills prior
to slaughtering a family. (Again. Michael Mann's film softens this crucial plot
development to the point that much o f its disturbing ambiguity is purposefully lost,
probably in the commercial interests o f making Graham a more sympathetic character for a
mainstream audience.) From his asylum cell. Lecter congratulates Graham for "the job
you did on Mr. Lounds. I admired it enormously. What a cunning boy you are!” (270)
Graham wonders about his possible complicity in Lounds's murder and comes to no firm
conclusions: "He had put his hand on Freddy's sh o u ld er. . . to establish that he really had
told Freddy those insulting things about the Dragon. O r had he wanted to put Freddy at
risk, just a little?" (271) The reader him/herself is also implicated in Lounds's murder,
simply by virtue o f the fact that Lounds, while exhibiting a certain pathetic vulnerability in
his subordinate relationship with the mothering prostitute W endy and keeping his wits
about him during his torture by Dolarhvde. is primarily an unpleasant, manipulative
character who does his best to exploit Graham’s weaknesses (as well as the police
investigation's) for personal gain within the ranks o f the tabloid press. As author o f
quickie true-crime paperbacks on L ecter and the Tooth Fairy, he is the genre predecessor
to Wayne Gale, another sleaze-joumalism schlockmeister destined to be murdered by his
story subjects, in Oliver Stone's Natural Bom Killers.
Through a sort o f sharing o f the murder act targeted against a common enemy,
Graham and Dolarhvde become thematic doubles whose separate identities become
hopelessly compromised, a convention seen in many nineteenth-century vampire and
Gothic narratives, a genre to which Harris's serial-killer novels ow e much. Francis
Dolarhvde. while undeniably human, parallels many literary vampires in his nocturnal
invasions o f houses to claim female victims who have "invited" him in through their
voluntary submission o f their photographic images to Dolarhyde's film developing
laboratory. (H e is also the Gothic seducer o f Reba McClane. who is attracted to his aloof
Outsider status among the film lab employees, though she ironically proves to be the initial
aggressor in their sexual relationship.) Graham, through close pursuit o f this "monster,"
risks contracting the infection he studies, a metaphor made clear by the novel's conclusion
when Graham meditates on the subject o f murder: "He wondered i f . . . the vicious urges
we control in ourselves function like the crippling virus the body arms against" (354). The
"vaccine" that only partially restores Graham to psychic equilibrium is the knowledge o f
his capacity for murder and the purging confrontation with his "secret sharer." the neo-
Gothic vampire Francis Dolarhvde. Graham's female successor. Starling, is a recognizably
Gothic heroine w hose moral education is obtained in the grueling and sexually dangerous
manner o f all threatened Gothic heroines.
Thus, Harris is working within a familiar genre landscape when he characterizes
Graham as an emotional chameleon whose exposure to murderers may have turned him
into one himself, and Starling as an ambitious female student whose eagerness for
professional advancement and fortuitous link to helpful male mentors (one o f them,
ironically, a serial murderer) removes her from the routine career track her fellow trainees
follow. In a real sense. Harris's individualistic detectives and the equally alienated killers
they chase are acting out. in contem porary industrialized .America, a frontier drama
analogous to the earlier genre w ar between Indians and Indian fighters which relies heavily
on a privileging o f the individual's strengths and abilities over those o f the social
institutions originally charged with protecting the traditional family unit. Not that Harris
offers panegyric conservative/neoconservative tribute to the family: ju st the opposite, as I
have already established. For Harris, the family is a site o f deep ambiguity, emotional
hazard, psychic scarring, and hair-trigger potential for physical violence. M ore often than
not. its crucial importance in his characters' lives will result in as much pain as solace, with
the extreme cases producing serial killers, such as Francis Dolarhvde. Tony Williams
examines the textual incidences o f abuse in young Dolarhvde's life (abandonment by an
uncaring and sexually promiscuous mother, threats o f literal castration by a domineering
grandmother) and concludes:
Due to years o f abuse by grandmother, he is traumatically fixated in the mirror

stage under a self-created, socially generated, monstrous super-ego named Red
Dragon. H e works out before a mirror, often concealing his face behind a mask,
unwilling to undergo separation from the maternal order no m atter how much it
has traumatized him. ("Dark Mirror" 9)
Dolarhvde's compulsive need to target substitute victims, or scapegoats, in a repetitious
strategy vainly designed to master his primal trauma o f abuse is very much in keeping with
the 1980s focus on child abuse as the chief culprit in the perpetuation o f adult violence, an
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attitude reflected in the FBI studies o f serial murder, which in turn have been absorbed
into Harris's fiction. In spite o f this ambivalence about the family on Harris's part,
however, the threat to dom estic existence posed by the vengeful return o f the repressed, in
this case the adult survivor o f child abuse, must be stopped.
Harris announces this concern with protecting the family early on in Red Dragon,
when the reader learns in the opening chapter that the offstage serial killer has slaughtered
two traditional nuclear families, the Leedses and the Jacobis, as they slept in their formerly
safe suburban homes. Both families had been affluent, respected, and dutifully blessed
w ith many children. But in the dead o f night, a lone murderer has violated this holiest o f
.American institutions, killing in one act o f mayhem per house a husband, wife, children,
and the family pet. and thus metaphorically rendered the entire country unsafe.
Recognizing at once a mortal threat to the domestic interests o f the
neoconservative state, the FBI is quick to seize control o f the investigations away from the
local police jurisdictions (a move increasingly popular for the powerfully centralized FBI
o f the 1980s) and assign them to Jack Crawford, who has successfully resolved two
previous serial murder cases. O r more accurately. Crawford has allowed Graham, an
Academy forensics instructor, to head temporarily the task forces in the field. Crawford
relies on Graham because Graham, as earlier noted, possesses an uncanny ability,
bordering on a form o f telepathy but really only a heightened sense o f intuition and keen
observational skills, to reconstruct a criminal's psyche based on the evidence left behind at
a crime scene. Reluctantly utilizing this skill, Graham has been able to stop the homicidal
careers o f Garret Jacob Hobbs, "The Minnesota Shrike," and Dr. Hannibal "the Cannibal"
Lecter. But not without a price: Graham has taken an early retirement because o f his
near-fatal confrontation with Lecter. However, when the Tooth Fairy investigation begins
to stall, Crawford exhibits ruthless managerial efficiency by pressuring an extremely
resistant Graham to return to work: as Tony Williams argues, at this point the manipulated
Graham "almost resembles a helpless child in a dysfunctional family" ("Dark Mirror" 8),
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another parallel to Dolarhvde. As alreadv noted. Graham must temporarily abandon his
wife and stepson, eventually place them in danger, and. as the novel ends, probably lose
them: a supreme irony, considering that Graham has been re-recruited in o rder to
preserve his society's traditional family values. But not his own.
The family occupies a central position in The Silence o f the Lambs as well, which
is essentially the previous novel rewritten from the point o f view o f a young female.
Clarice Starling searches for a surrogate family to replace the one she lost as a child and
finds a slew o f manipulative father-figures. Her own father, a rural marshal whom she
remembers as a policeman but who was really a night watchman, was killed during a
tumbling shootout with a couple o f thieves he surprised coming out o f a drugstore. At
that time, she was eight years old. Two years after that, her mother admitted her inability
to raise her and sent her to live with her cousin and her husband at a M ontana ranch where
her new family slaughtered horses and lambs in order to survive. .After Starling was
impelled by the ghastly screaming o f slaughtered spring lambs to run away with her
favorite horse. Hannah, she was sent away again: this time to a Lutheran orphanage.
Hannah went with her. where the heavy, near-sighted horse lived out her days peacefully
pulling children in a can around a track, but Clarice's physical connections with family
were gone. She spent her juvenile years in institutional facilities, materially well provided
for (moreso than her mother or her mother's cousin could do, it is implied) but emotionally
remote. Her only continuing family connection is an abstract knowledge o f her genealogy
(paternally reckoned, o f course):
Starling was an isolated member o f a fierce tribe with no formal genealogy but the
honors list and the penal register. Dispossessed in Scotland, starved out o f
Ireland, a lot o f them were inclined to the dangerous trades. Many generic
Starlings had been used up this way, had thumped on the bottom o f narrow holes
or slid o ff planks with a shot at their feet, or w ere commended to glory with a
cracked "Taps" in the cold when everyone wanted to go home. A few may have
been recalled tearily by the officers on regimental mess nights, the way a man in
drink remembers a good bird dog. Faded names in a Bible. (266)
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Starlings's major childhood memories are not comforting. They are ones o f loss,
abandonment, and grief: her father's hospital stay after his shooting; the death rattle in his
throat; her m other washing blood from her father’s hat and tearfully insisting that
everything will be all right; her mother in her motel maid's uniform sitting Clarice (who
must accompany her to work) down on a bed and telling her that she will be going to
M ontana, while outside an ominous crow soils the clean linens on her m other’s laundry
can; the screaming o f slaughtered lambs: the flight with Hannah; the second displacement
to the orphanage in Bozeman. The emotional privation o f her childhood parallels her to
Jame Gumb. who was bom out o f wedlock to an alcoholic failed actress and sent to a Los
Angeles County foster home at the age o f two. Starling is also a victim o f maternal
inability or unwillingness to cope with the burden o f child rearing. Additionally, Gumb's
grandparents to o k him in when he was ten, the same age as Clarice's entrance into her
mother’s cousin’s home. Here is yet another instance o f Gothic character doubling, given a
gender twist: each aspires to the traditional social sphere o f the other. B oth are single-
minded. even ruthless, in pursuit o f their goal, both defy patriarchal institutions, and both
kill. Starling and Gumb bear out Linda Williams's hypothesis that the w om an and the
monster in horror narrative, because o f their shared status as "biological freaks" in
patriarchal society, share a "surprising (and at times subversive) affinity" ("Woman" 90).
Starling, however, is not a murderer, though like Graham she com es to possess
uncomfortable insight into the "joy o f the hunt." Her quiet moment o f solitary epiphany,
when she realizes that the oddly distinctive manner in which Buffalo Bill has mutilated a
victim (Kimberly) will lead Starling directly to him. is a deliberate recreation on Harris's
part o f Graham's similar epiphanal moment in Red D ragon:
Staring into the lighted closet. Starling saw the triangles on Kimberly's shoulders
outlined in the blue dashes o f a dressmaking pattern. The idea swam away and
circled and came again, came close enough for her to grab it this time and she did
with a fierce pulse o f joy: THEY’RE D A R T S -H E TOOK TH O SE TRIANGLES
TO MAKE DARTS SO HE COULD LET OUT HER WAIST. M OTHER
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FUCKER CAN SEW. BUFFALO BILL'S TRAINED TO SERIO USLY S E W -

HE'S NOT JUST PICKIN G OUT RE AD Y-T O-W EAR Starling put her head
back, closed her eyes for one second. Problem-solving is hunting; it is savage
pleasure and we are bom to it. (294)
The intellectual will to pow er drives not only the urge to problem solve but to kill. Harris
implies here, as did Arthur Conan Doyle through his creation o f Holmes/Moriarty; our
tendency to murder one another is biologically predestined through our intellectual
hyperdevelopment. We are "bom to it." o r as Oliver Stone's mass-murderer Mickey says.
"Shit, man. I'm a natural-born killer." It is not an exclusively masculine faculty, as
Starling's possession o f it dem onstrates This drive predates modem behavioral science
dogma, or the religious dogma that preceded it. as Lecter chides Starling:
Nothing happened to me. Officer Starling. I happened. You can't reduce me to a

set o f 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’m evil0 .Am I evil. Officer
Starling0 . . Evil's just destructive0 Then storms are evil, if it's that simple. And
vve have fire, and then there's hail. Underwriters lump it all under 'Acts o f God.'
I collect church collapses, recreationallv. Did you see the recent one in Sicily0
Marvelous! The facade fell on sixty-five grandmothers at a special Mass. Was
that evil0 If so. who did it? If He's up there. He just loves it. Officer Starling.
Typhoid and swans—it all comes from the same place. (19)
Lecter here attempts to shift Starling's focus away from inherited modes o f discourse—the
psychoanalytic, the religious, even the jargon o f insurance underwriters—and onto a true
grappling with the cultural question o f evil and its resistance to definition. Lecter forces
her to metacognitivelv confront the issue o f teleology itself. Is there design, as Robert
Frost asked, or mere accident in nature0 Why does God drop church roofs on His
worshippers'0 Is Lecter evil (in the conservative sense), a freakish monster with maroon
eyes and a six-fingered hand, o r an adult victim (in the liberal sense) o f child abuse?
Lecter, and Harris, provide no pat answers, unlike the FBI. They only point out the
crumbling facades o f failing ontological systems and let the observer make o f them what
they will: a postmodern strategy, though o f course it is not called that in the novel, and
one that horror fiction in particular frequently adopts.
9S
Postmodernism is much more socially defined than the idealistic avant-garde o f
modernism: one o f the crucial differences between the tw o cultural movements. Lecter,
too, though he consciously affects the elitist guise o f a pretentiously inaccessible
modernist, relies more than he will admit on the mass reactions o f others. His
distinguishing traits are his courtesy and his artistic pretensions: usually associated with
highbrow culture. Yet his courtesy parodies the calculated game o f social maneuvering
and his art tends toward the kitschv—crucifixion watches and origami chickens. He
publishes in the professional journals he professes to despise. Lecter is the consummate
"negative" man. a living embodiment o f the shadow presence the drunk Will Graham
confronts in his hotel room—Lecter is defined only in relation to the nullifying effect he has
on the energy level o f others. Like the death’s-head moth, he lives on the salt found in the
tears o f mammals. Harris early on links any social acknowledgment o f Lecter to a sudden
collapse o f the sense-making structure o f language: "A brief silence follows the name
[Hannibal Lecter], always, in any civilized gathering" (4). L ectefs ability to withdraw
completely from others into that silent void leads Joe Sanders to conclude that Lecter is a
"reader . . . who refuses to be read" (5), but this is only partially true. He does manifest
an extreme sensitivity to attempts to quantify or de-mvstify him (as when he kills and eats
a census taker for merely asking him biographical data), but is willing to play theater for
his audience and hence is open to a reading on his ow n terms.
M ore than anything. Lecter resists reduction, and consciously plavs at self-
aggrandizement. Crawford tells Starling that Lecter's only real weakness is that he must
appear to be sm arter than everyone else (86). Paradoxically, Lecter has achieved the
ultimate in name recognition in his culture by becoming a serial killer; though this
physically removes him from society, he continues to thrive on the hyperreal effect he has
on others. Som eone will always seek him out. he smugly knows, but only if he continues
to play the game o f the Professor Moriarty o f serial killers to its furthest possible extreme.
This is why his Cain-like exile is a sham: the mere appearance o f one. Lecter would not
exist without a herd to terrorize, and he knows it. He hints at this through his admonition
to Starling to reject prefabricated discursive models, including the FBI distinction between
organized and disorganized offenders, and comprehend the primitive fears o f the massed
herd (symbolized by the worshippers who die in church collapses): being killed and eaten
one o f the strongest o f all fears. The will to power which L ecter embodies defines itself in
relation to mastery o f the herd, which also implies separation from it in order to dominate
its timid structure all the more easily.
Those who would understand him. Lecter hints, must distance themselves from
the approved codes o f civilized behavior as he has. He mocks the conventions o f courtesy
while adopting them, simply because his methodology o f existence depends on the very
cruelty that courtesy masks. His profilers must be open, as he is. to both grossly extreme
(relishing the taste o f human flesh) and finely nuanced (identifying Starling's perfume and
smelling her blood through the vents in his cell) sensory input as a way o f repudiating
civilization's verbal obsessiveness. Lecter's reactions to two o f his fellow inmates are quite
revealing o f his values. Miggs. whom Lecter verbally coerces into suicide because o f his
rude carnal remark to Starling that he could "smell your cunt" (12), enacts only the grossly
sensual aspect o f Lecter's prescription and so fatally transgresses Lecter's ideal. In
contrast. Lecter provides effective jailhouse therapy to Sammie. a religious schizophrenic
who beheaded his mother and placed the head in a collection plate at a rural Baptist
church, because Sammie's sacrifice o f the nicest person in his life was designed to please
Jesus Christ, quicken the Second Coming (134), and thus serve a loftier purpose than do
Miggs's m asturbatory fantasies. The savagery o f Sammie's symbolic gesture, however,
places him beyond the pale o f civilization, out in Lecter country.
Because o f Starling's past alienating experience with spring lambs and horses
slaughtered by representatives o f a blindly consuming society. Lecter finds Starling an
initially receptive (but ultimately resisting) student. Graham, too, reacts to Lecter's
primitivism, but Graham is in far more danger o f succumbing to it than Starling. Joe
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Sanders observes that the key difference between Starling and Graham is the depth to
which they must enter the killing mindset. Though Starling kills Jame Gumb. much like
Graham kills G arret Jacob Hobbs, "she focuses her attention on victims, trying to
determine how they became vulnerable to Buffalo Bill" (4). Starling imaginatively keeps
herself within the group, and so willingly represses herself, even as she isolates herself to
hunt Buffalo Bill. On the other hand. Graham's isolation m ore closely parallels that o f
Dolarhvde. until Graham becomes so alone in and receptive to the objectifying, tw o-
dimensional w orld o f the image that he can suddenly grasp the pathology o f the Red
Dragon during his viewing o f victims’ home movies. Graham's link to this particular
subjectivity, however, destroys him because it paradoxically leaves him incapable o f
empathizing with any other view than its solipsistic self. Gavin Smith calls Graham a
"Method cop" ("M ann” 75). a brilliant summary o f Graham's risky approach to detection,
w herein acting like a killer for a long enough period o f time becomes indistinguishable
from actually killing. The meaning is the performance, so it matters little that Graham
never actually kills anyone during the course o f the Red D ragon investigation. He has
destroyed himself: a casualty o f the hazards o f simulacratic confusion o f representation
and actuality and a testam ent to the dangers o f postmodemity.
Graham’s destruction graphically demonstrates the psychological dangers, as well
as the physical, in entering the serial killer's mindset, how ever peripherally. By contrast.
Starling’s grow th maps a way through this foreboding psychic terrain. In either case.
Graham and Starling's boundary-piercing quests parallel those o f their intended quarries,
and also provide a way o f understanding the serial-killer narrative as a whole. W hether
structured around the killer o r the detective, the narrative is typically a kind o f dark
bildungsroman. o r more accurately, a parodic echoing o f same. The killer practices and
learns his craft, while the detective masters the art o f sign-reading. In any event, the
narrative landscape both move through is distinguished by its Gothic proliferation o f signs
or clues, which in turn expresses its accessibility (or in some cases, as with the 1986 film
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Henry- Portrait o f a Serial Killer, its resistance) to reading by those who are privy to the
encryption code. Thus, in spite o f the structural ambiguities, Harris's novels about FBI
profilers affirm the possibility that given enough information and intelligence on the part o f
the profiler, signs can be read and the anonymous m urderers revealed. As Steffen Hantke
concludes o f The Silence o f the Lambs: " . . . [It] decides, despite the narrative
ambivalence o f its ending, in favor o f a moral assertion that provides the reader at least
with a powerful ideological sense o f closure" (46). .As H antke further observes, this
closure is not typical o f the more controversial entries in the serial-killer subgenre, such as
Henrv or American Psycho Harris's guardedly optimistic version o f the neo-Gothic. then,
met with a m ore receptive, largely neoconservative audience than did M cNaughton or
Ellis's work; and as I shall demonstrate shortly. Jonathan Demme's film version o f Harris's
third novel achieved a degree o f critical recognition not commonly granted to genre
narrative, though the praise was by no means universal. This critical breakthrough can be
directly ascribed to Harris's original textual insistence that some degree o f certainty is still
possible in the postmodern subversive world.
The Silence o f the Lambs as Film
Many people and critics were surprised on the night o f M arch 30. 1992. when the
Jonathan Demm e film The Silence o f the Lambs won five major Oscars, defying industry
predictions that it was impossible for a horror film to be so honored by the staid Academy.
The film won in the categories o f Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor (Anthony
Hopkins), Best Actress (Jodie Foster), and Best Screenplay Based on Material Previously
Produced o r Published (Ted Tally). Though the film had opened to generally positive
reviews, this aw ards sweep (unprecedented since 1975, when One Flew over the Cuckoo's
Nest also w on five major awards) led The Nation to grumble darkly that the recognition
granted to the horror film signified a new moral nadir for the Hollywood community:
"Perhaps that's the message Lambs bleats, that we are aswim in the undifferentiated drink
o f violence, struggle and survival, with no moral guideposts except our inner strength and
the next tracking shot" ("D ark Victory" 508). Film critics like Michael M edved were
dismayed that Hollywood no longer seemed interested in telling wholesome, familv-values
oriented stories. (See M edved’s tellingly titled Hollywood’s W ar on .America. ) Others
pursuing an entirely different political agenda were equally unhappy with the film's
success. Many gay activists picketed the Awards night ceremonies and lambasted the film
in the press, claiming that its portrayal o f serial killer Jame Gumb as a murderous
transsexual "freak" was yet another example o f Hollywood homophobia. (Oliver Stone's
JFK and Paul Verhoeven's Basic Distinct received similar criticism s.)
At the time, director Demme seemed simultaneously w ounded and puzzled by the
ire he had aroused among some vocal segments o f the populace, particularly the gay-
community. He told one interviewer:
It’s something that's occupied my thoughts so much, because I was so concerned

about the criticism, that I ought to have a really tight three lines about it—but I
don't. We knew upfront that there was a potential for misinterpretation o f this
character—that he would be erroneously perceived as a gay character—unless we
guided it away from that and made it crystal clear to the audience that this is not an
issue o f sexual preference or sexuality; it's an issue o f gender difference. This guy
doesn’t want to make love with men. he wants to he a w om an. He hates himself,
and to be a woman is the farthest thing away from the person that he loathes,
which is himself, (qtd. in Persons 110)
Obviously. Demme is am azed that Gumb’s character has been perceived as anything other
than a tortured soul who hates his own masculinity so much that he is willing to murder in
order to imaginatively transcend it. The vehicle o f his transmigration is the female body.
upon which he projects his envy’ and frustrated rage. Gumb's grotesque feminine
posturings, which have led many viewers to conclude that Gumb is a transvestite, are
nothing more than, as author Thomas Harris says in the novel on which the movie is
based, hateful parody. And Gumb's efforts to be approved for transsexual surgery meet
with rejection, since the clinics he contacts recognize that he is not a true transsexual.
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Rather, as the screen version o f Hannibal "the Cannibal" Lecter diagnoses, Gumb
hates his own identity and longs to transform into another, feminized self because o f
childhood abuse: "Billy was not bom a criminal. He was made one. through years o f
systematic abuse." Demme is fond o f telling interviewers that this is the real point o f the
film Family violence and abuse have created an individual so obsessed with self-loathing
that transmogrification into as different an identity as he can imagine is the only feasible
survival method for him. Gumb's objectification o f the female body is much more
complicated than as a function o f misogyny. He exalts the female principle as holy and
pure, something outside o f himself. He hopes to achieve this godhead by physically-
incorporating the essence o f its fleshly representatives. Gumb is a prime example o f
metaphoric imagination too literally manifesting itself through self-formulated magical
rites. Yet his egocentrism, none the less all-encompassing because o f his self-loathing, will
not allow him to destroy himself. In a complicated act o f projection. Gumb distances that
which he hates in himself by reconfiguring it into the body o f an alien Other. Then he
destroys the Other, paradoxically because he covets (and hopes to absorb) a quality that
Other possesses. Through all o f this distancing and incorporating, the identity o f the
Other means absolutely nothing to him: only her iconic status as representation o f what he
desires.
Given all these textual indicators that Gumb's concerns are far more sinister than,
and generally irrelevant to. the side-issues o f sexual preference and cross-dressing,
Demme's defense o f his film's thematic material initially seems valid enough. He obviously
sees his horror film as progressive, even feminist in its intent, and hence antithetical to
many o f the neoconservative trends o f the past decade. Many o f the critics who have
written positively about the film agree, to a greater or lesser extent. Greg Garrett
concludes that Lecter's character, through his respect for Clarice, "is capable o f showing
us . . . that gender has no bearing on competence, worth, or humanity. This is a lesson
other males in the film—and others in real life—have yet to learn" (10). One o f the lessons
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these males must learn in the film is that institutionalized force, so often identified as a
masculine principle, is not adequate to its pretensions, according to Julie Tharp: "The
male gender principle as represented by technology and the institutions o f law and order
fail here" (108). Similarly, B. Ruby Rich claims that by illustrating the dangers inherent in
a masculine environment, Demme has "purged the horror genre" o f its misogvnistic
reputation (mostly the result o f 1980s "slasher flicks") by presenting "a new kind o f female
hero, one whose vulnerability and emotions w ere seen as aid rather than impediment, one
who could avenge an entire decade’s genre sins in a single act" (9). Starling is a
particularly resourceful version o f what Carol Clover calls the Final Girl, or "the one who
did not die" and who "alone . . . finds the strength either to stay the killer long enough to
be rescued ( ending A) or to kill him herself (ending B)” (35). (Interestingly enough.
Silence portrays another Final Girl. Catherine Martin, who as a helpless prisoner o f
Buffalo Bill nevertheless holds him at bay long enough to be rescued by Starling.)
Clearly, then, the film has enjoyed critical acclaim from many who agree with
Demme that his film is feminist. It does enjoy the rare distinction o f being a horror film
that a significant number o f women enjoy. .Amy Taubin states unequivocally: "What
marks out The Silence o f the Lambs is that it is a profoundly feminist movie. For women I
know, most o f whom have seen it more than once, the film is as exhilarating as it is
harrowing" (18). Judith Halberstam believes this is so because " . . The Silence o f the
Lambs is a horror film that, for once, is not designed to scare women, it scares men
instead with the image o f a fragmented and fragile masculinity, a male body disowning the
penis" (41) One o f the more unrestrained female critics writes exuberantly:
Surely post-pubescent male cinemagoers must by now be just as bored with smirky
macho film stars as women a r e .. . . one can only applaud Starling's/Jodie Foster's
determination to gun down the serial killer who preys on women. Too many serial
film-makers nowadays are out to strip and flay them. . . . Rumour has it that Dr.
Lecter him self may be threatened in a sequel dealing with a serial killer who preys
on other serial killers. .And one w onders if Clarice Starling will come to his aid . . .
The ultim ate quid pro quo? I f so. m ore pow er to her: "Go. Starling." (Hawkins
264)
O ther critics are more hesitant to embrace the film’s politics. However, most are
not quite as put o ff by it as Ron Rosenbaum, who is morally offended by the violence level
o f the film:
. . . The Silence o f the Lambs, the upscale slasher film from director Jonathan
Demme, is not merely stupid, repulsive, sickening and hatefiil. It's worse. I think
it's evil. . . . I think [Demme's] taken an evil book and made an even m ore evil
movie. He's created for the film a kind o f sick pornography o f butchery; a camera
infatuated with decayed, mutilated flesh. . . . Actually calling Silence pornographic
is giving it too much credit, unfairly defaming pornography. It's not a pom film,
it's a snuff film—that subgenre o f pom that focuses on the simulation o f naked
women being tortured and murdered. . . . [The film's] soft-core gore-pom is even
more repugnant than the sickest slasher flick because it's done by people who
ought to know better. In fact. I think they do, but they did it anyway. Which is
what makes it not just disgusting, but evil. (73-4)
Rosenbaum's impassioned indictment o f the film’s thematic project, while simplistic and
overstated, is w orth keeping in mind when looking at the more academic negative
assessments o f Silence's impact on an audience. At heart. Rosenbaum's antagonistic
stance toward the film is political, as are the negative reactions o f more insightful critics.
Suzanne Moore, for one. is not troubled by the violence o f movies like Silence so much as
she is disturbed by their aesthetic flourish, which "gags any awkward and indeed political
questions. . . . Thus men kill, women get killed, but isn't it all wonderfully art-directed"
(71). Essentially, her concern parallels Rosenbaum's disgust toward "high-class" snuff
films. Martin Rubin, while not put off by the film, faults it for the same art-directed
pretensions that disturb Moore:
Although Lambs is conscientiously revisionist in its enlightened treatm ent o f the

heroine and its restrained presentation o f violence, it is more conventional in the
mystification and extravagance that characterize the depiction o f its two multiple
murderers. Lecter and Gumb are loaded with gimmicks, gothicisms, and colorful
psychological quirks. . . . [Lecter's] first appearance-set in a medievalized
dungeon bathed in lurid red light and resounding with ominous machine-hums—is
given a portentous build-up worthy o f the white whale in Mohv Dick- o r the
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mother-ship in Close Encounters o f the Third Kind. Like most films on the
subject. The Silence o f the Lambs cultivates the exotic orchids o f psychokillerdom
. . . (59)
Even more than the expressionistic cliches or the violence, however, what most
disturbs many o f Silence's detractors is the film's appropriation o f feminist discourse for a
covertly anti-feminist message. These critics argue that those who champion the film's
supposed feminist rendering o f sexual politics have been duped by its trendy but superficial
use o f politically correct themes (a strong female lead, blatant gender blurring, criticism o f
the patriarchy, etc.) which mask an underlying affirmation o f the traditional attitudes and
institutions being questioned and. incidentally, explain why the conservative Academy
honored a graphic horror film with five major film awards. The resulting tension between
ideological differences produces an unbalanced, problematic film, according to Elizabeth
Young, who lauds Silence for its ambitions but ultimately faults it for its "pathologizing"
o f transsexualism and homosexuality. She calls it "a film whose anxieties about
masculinity overrun its desire to rehabilitate difference, and thus a film which~in terms o f
both gender and sexuality—cannibalizes its own food for thought" (21). Certainly, scenes
like the one where Gumb camps outrageously in front o f his video cam era and tucks away
his own genitals for his grand performative finale serve little narrative purpose other than
to communicate the depth o f his "monstrosity" to an audience already predisposed to find
most oven displays o f cross-gender behavior in males contemptible, laughable, and/or
perverted. This was obviously the effect on Linda Leslie, who mistakenly writes that
Gumb. rather than tucking his genitals, has no genitals at all (49). presumably due to either
self-castration or mutation.
Young's self-consciously clever puns regarding auto-cannibalism notwithstanding,
she raises a valid concern about the movie's sexual politics. David Sundelson also finds
the film's ambivalent tone as a "response to the pressures o f feminism: a pushy, self-reliant
heroine on one hand and savage resentm ent o f women on the other" (16), a resentment he
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sees echoed on a grander scale in the national reaction to career-oriented First Lady
Hillary Rodham Clinton. As a film about transformation. Silence presents a female who
aspires to a supremely masculine profession, a male who murderously aspires to a second
hand femininity, and another murderous male who combines both extrem es into an
androgynous mix. D oes this presentation o f alternative gender constructions as freakish
or homicidal affirm our awareness that traditional gender associations are constrictive and
deforming'7 Or affirm o u r impulse to stamp out alternative sexualities as "monstrous9"
This narrative ambiguity is m ost literally embodied in the cannibalistic but civilized
Hannibal Lecter. whom Adrienne Donald calls a "gay dandy" (355). As Julie Tharp has
argued convincingly. Lecter's cultured manners and refined tastes socially code him as
effeminate and Europeanized (a true gothic hero-villain in the Jack-the-Ripper tradition),
but in a much more acceptable manner than the hypermasculine, all-American Buffalo Bill,
who paradoxically wants to remove his own genitals and has no social graces to redeem
his deviancv Lecter. as com fortable androgyne and sincere confidant to a similarly
androgynous Starling, is aw arded much more audience access and sympathy than Buffalo
Bill, who is merely disgusting and, at times, ridiculous. (Interestingly, the fact that Welsh-
born .Anthony Hopkins portrays a "European" Lecter has implications for a post-colonial
reading o f the film as well as a neo-Gothic one, particularly in light o f Lecter's climactic
flight from formerly colonized America into the "third world" o f Bimini.) But is any o f
this progressive or subversive o f dominant ideology o r gender bias, as Young calls for in
her critique9
In fact, just the opposite. Christopher Sharrett argues. For Sharrett. the film is
really a product o f what he calls neoconservative culture: a culture reformulating its
dependence upon capitalist ideology in such a way as to appropriate (and thus co-opt for
the purpose o f defusing a threat to its own existence) the radical language and thought o f
those who would oppose capital's hegemonic influence on contemporary life. Adrienne
Donald also prefers to interpret the film in economic, not gender, terms: "There are two
10S
kinds o f workers in [the film ]: w age laborers . . and professionals They don't
produce commodities—they are commodities" (348). Donald gives direct lie to Elayne
Rapping’s blanket assertion that the film "has nothing to say about political o r economic
realities" (37). Blue-collar Gumb and ruling-class Lecter turn commodification back on
itself by reducing people to things to be literally consumed. Their voracious
consumptiveness can only be offset by someone like Starling, the film implies: a Horatio-
Algerian feminist success story with a cheaply-shod foot in both economic worlds. This
aspect o f the film leads Richard Blake to make an unusual characterization o f Starling: "a
driven but essentially dull young woman eager to use her career to overcome her modest
West Virginia roots" (292). M ost reviewers who approach the film from a gender
standpoint, with its implicit duality, call Starling and Lecter in particular "brilliant."
However, neither is particularly so: a fact only the economic reading suggested by Donald
and Blake allows an audience to perceive. Lecter dispenses cheap psychoanalytic cliches
and Starling in her befuddled desperation to do something to save Catherine Martin laps
them up. Rather than geniuses. Lecter and Starling are two more consumers (Lecter o f
other people's pain. Starling o f patriarchal education) in a neoconservative landscape
populated with commodity fetishists whose only genius lies in the wavs they can best
consume things: the real genius in this regard being, o f course, Buffalo Bill.
The film is, among other things, a representative product o f 1990s neoconservative
culture, which embraces the notion o f technocratic progress to such an extent that any
internal criticism o f its unsettling byproducts—economic imbalance, environmental
degradation, nationalistic violence, ethnic intolerance, and so on—must be split o ff from
sacrosanct capitalist ideology and labeled as the output o f an alien, cultural "elite." The
notion o f the isolated nuclear family—husband, wife, and children—is central to the
neoconservative project, simply because that allegiance only to one's in-house relatives
and an idealized fealty to an impersonal concept o f country excludes sympathy for the real
plight o f others in uncertain economic times, which in turn makes it easier for the state to
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disadvantage w hatever groups it must, and cut w hatever funding it must, so that the entire
system does not collapse. Jurgen Habermas defines the neoconservatist project as
follows:
Neoconservatism shifts onto cultural modernism the uncomfortable burdens o f a

m ore o r less successful capitalist modernization o f the economy and society The
neoconservative doctrine blurs the relationship between the welcomed process o f
societal modernization on the one hand, and the lamented cultural development on
the other. The neoconservative does not uncover the economic and social causes
for the altered attitudes tow ards work, consumption, achievement, and leisure.
Consequently, he attributes all o f the following—hedonism, the lack o f social
identification, the lack o f obedience, narcissism, the withdrawal from status and
achievement competition—to the domain o f "culture." (7)
Hence, the constant neoconservative call for a "culture war"—a demonizing o f "culture" as
a separate, elitist realm from which to launch assaults on populist sentiment and modem
capitalistic progress. Ironically, however, the neoconservative does not call for a true
ieveling o f the supposed barriers between culture and society, but rather a substitution o f
one value system (the neoconservative) for another, leaving the dualistic opposition intact
but placing the form er wards o f culture in the disadvantaged slot. For this supplantation
to occur, however, the neoconservative must first gain egress to the realm, and this is
done through adopting the fashionable discourse o f the cultural "expens" so as to
"infiltrate" the ranks. The desired goal, o f course, is to bring "culture" into line with the
generalized panegyric homages to technocratic capitalism and the family institutions which
support it. Sharrett maintains that the recent spate o f high-profile horror films, o f which
The Silence o f the Lambs is typical, makes "use o f a variety o f progressive discourses
current in academ e that inevitably appear transmuted within the commercial entertainment
industry" ("Neoconservative" 102) so as to lend a veneer o f intellectual respectability to
the mass product but ultimately to sing the praises o f status-quo, capitalistic society. The
discourses being transmuted into the marketplace in this instance, according to Sharrett,
can be lumped under the fashionable academic label "postmodern."
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For Sharrett, the postm odern horror film, far from being as radical as it seems in its
graphic presentation o f violence and lawlessness and grotesquerie. invariably follows a
formula designed to legitimate the dominant culture. He outlines this formula as follows:
(1) a dominant o rder that is simultaneously discredited and affirmed. (2) an

atmosphere o f apparently unfettered sexual expression that offers status to women
insofar as they are incorporated into the dominant order. (3) a recognition o f a
camivalesque. diverse, chaotic universe that is celebrated at the same time that it is
subdued, and (4) a recognition and lionization o f the O ther only as a preface to the
total destruction o f the Other, o r incorporation into dominant ideology. (102)
The formula will also relv on proven commodities, i.e.. those the studio market analysts
know will produce profitable box-office returns. The serial killer, largely as a result o f the
19S0s collusion between law enforcement and the press to create a contem porary demon.
is one such proven commodity, and well in keeping with the conservative instincts o f the
nation. And so. Sharrett laments. Robin Wood's assertion in 1979 that the contemporary
horror film offered at least the promise o f true radical critique o f bourgeois culture was
premature and overly optimistic.
Sharrett’s thesis is pam’allv anticipated by Wood himself in the very essay Sharrett
cites. In defining the O ther (a vital concept in any discussion o f literature, but particularly
the horror genre). W ood claims it is
that which bourgeois ideology cannot recognize or accept but must deal with . . .
in one o f tw o ways: either by rejecting it and if possible annihilating it. or by
rendering it safe and assimilating it. converting it as far as possible into a replica o f
itself. ("American Horror" 9)
The Other, as W ood sees it. is inseparable from the Freudian concept o f repression. What
is repressed in bourgeois culture, or the Self, is projected upon some agreed-upon Other
so that, according to Wood, the repressed "can be discredited, disowned, and if possible,
annihilated. It is repression . . . that makes impossible the healthy alternative: the full
recognition and acceptance o f the Other's autonomy and right to exist" (9). That which
our culture most represses. W ood claims, is any manifestation o f "sexual energy itself.
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together with its possible successful sublimation into non-sexual creativity—sexuality being
the source o f creative energy- in general" (8).
It is no wonder, then, that the villains and monsters o f horror narratives, as
quintessential embodiments o f the principle o f Otherness, are invariably linked to the
forces o f sex and creativity, albeit grotesquely. (As W alter Evans first argues in a 1973
article in The. Journal o f Popular Film, the sexuality o f monsters is more in line with the
erroneous, tearful conceptions o f sex held by uncertain adolescents.) Their dynamic
energy, even woefully misdirected as it is. renders them attractive, or at least compelling,
to an audience that presumably condemns their violent actions. In many cases, depending
on the narrative cues, audience sympathy extends to some degree to the monster that is
wreaking mayhem on the textual representatives o f their own ostensible values. As
distressing as the violence might seem to unreflective humanists, it becomes, in effect, a
potential force for social change, at least during the course o f the narrative. This is why
audiences cheer for Hannibal Lecter when he promises to kill and eat Dr Chilton, the
quintessential male chauvinist who has victimized Clarice Starling out o f spite for the way
she rejected his clumsy sexual advances and who must therefore be punished for his
Neanderthal treatm ent o f women. Where generations o f advocates have failed to convince
a mass American audience o f the basic fairness o f feminist doctrine, the likes o f Dr. Lecter
succeeds.
W hen the monstrous O ther exemplifies the destructive re-emergence o f repressed
forces into dominant bourgeois culture. Wood calls this kind o f horror narrative radical
and progressive in its intent to smash or at least subvert oppressive norms o f behavior.
However, there is also what W ood labels the "reactionary wing" o f the horror genre. A
reactionary horror film, rather than undermining or disintegrating a repressive ideology,
seeks to reaffirm that ideology after putting it to the test, so to speak, in the course o f the
narrative. W ood identifies the following characteristics o f the reactionary horror film (and
by implication, other horror media): the monster is presented as purely evil, without any
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textual attem pt to explore o r at least suggest the origins o f its destructiveness; the monster
is portrayed as completely non-human, so as to lessen audience sympathy tow ard it; and
the m onster as symbol is portrayed in a way to evoke audience disgust with sexuality itself
as a source o f evil, rather than focus the audience's attentions upon the harm caused by the
ideological repression o f sexuality (23). W ood quickly cautions that most horror films will
share some mixing o f radical and reactionary- ideas, but usually one tone will predominate
over another and identify- the film’s political leanings. Upon this point. W ood and Sharrett
are in accord.
The Silence o f the Lambs on this basis can be seen as a peculiarly unbalanced
1990s reaction (given a fashionable serial-killer patina) to the mostly conservative horror
films o f the l9S0s. w hich in turn were reactions to the consciously radical horror films o f
the preceding few decades. In reference to Sharrett's assertion that The Silence o f the
Lambs is basically a neoconservative horror film. I would argue in light o f the preceding
discussion that he is correct in emphasizing the film's inarguablv conservative elements,
and also undeniably the ones that allowed it commercial success, but does not adequately
account for its subversive ones. There is no disputing that the film's surface gloss on
feminism is problematic in relation to the extreme violence with which women are treated
(even if generally offstage) in the film. Additionally. Clarice Starling's independent
investigation and alienation from her peers bears great similarity to standard vigilante
themes in masculine oriented, hyper-violent texts. On the other hand, the most graphic
violence the audience witnesses is perpetrated against tw o physically capable but fatally
complacent male police officers. Pembrv and Boyle, who in their kindly but paternalistic
attitudes tow ard trainee Starling quite obviously represent the enforcement arm o f the
patriarchy. A doctrine o f "equal pain" is in effect here, which may not be progressive in
terms o f humanistic philosophy but at least is fair. .Along the same lines, Starling's
narrative appropriation o f what appears to be typically male-gendered vigilantism. which
culminates in her extra-legal slaying o f Buffalo Bill, is no more than a desperate quest to
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save the killer’s next victim (and o f course to defend her ow n life) and not the result o f a
personal vendetta against the killer.
There are other neoconservative agendas in the film, o f course. It cannot be
denied that the FBI. as patriarchal institution o f past domestic abuses during the H oover
years, is obviously intended to be at least partially redeemed by the heroic Starling's
acceptance of. and incorporation into, its ideology. A New sw eek article, pointing out the
irony o f the FBI's avid cooperation with leftist Demme on the making o f the movie, damns
the finished product with faint praise: "Even H oover would have been happy" (Miller 24).
Jeanne Silverthome writes:
What further raises hairs on cineaste goosefiesh is the feeling that what Clarice has
so desperately trained herself to defend against (a world o f oversized dangerous
men) is exactly what she has desperately trained to join (in the guise o f the F .B .l.).
With nightmare logic, the more expert she becomes, the more vulnerable and in
danger she seem s~a paradox marked by the coincidence o f this handshake [with
Crawford] with a phone call from Lecter. promising Clarice a lifetime o f
terrorizing complicity. (18)
There is no doubt that Starling is aware o f and troubled by the FBI's history o f civil rights
violations, as evidenced by an early meeting with Crawford in which he reminds her o f a
grilling she gave him on the subject at a seminar at the University o f Virginia, but she is
obviously willing to join the organization and enforce its will anyway. Furthermore, the
film's narrative trajectory, which certainly seems at first blush to exonerate the FBI o f its
Hoover-esque stigma, does not exactly assure thoughtful viewers that similar civil rights
abuses will not occur again in the future. The film implies that only state-trained "experts"
in criminology and technology are capable o f handling the menace constituted by serial
killers: can a police state be far if enough pow er is willingly ceded to centralized authority
because o f the largely illusory fear o f ubiquitous crime?
But the film's FBI hierarchy, as symbolized in Jack Crawford's remote but
unmistakably fatherly figure and the bulky trainees who tow er over Starling in hallways
and elevators, is also portrayed as sexist, cumbersome, overly reliant on its own gee-whiz
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technology, and thus implicated in the same hvpermasculine mindset that produced its
quarry, Buffalo Bill. In the narrative world o f the film, the local cops at the West Virginia
funeral home are caricatures o f inept rustics who all but drool over Starling, and the fed s
are impressively busy but nevertheless inefficient automatons. The only "savior" in this
film is Starling: there is some fairly heavy-handed, androgynized Christ imagery attached
to her. as in the sketch Lecter draws o f her holding a lamb to her semi-bared breast in
front o f Golgotha, and even she is more mocked by the forced association than
spiritualized. Cherished (neo)conservative ideals, such as sanctity o f the family,
patriarchy, clearly defined gender roles, and strong law enforcement, do not come o ff very
well. (O ne traditional value that does seem marginally affirmed is Emersonian
individuality as opposed to modem bureaucratic allegiance: Starling's self-reliant
investigation. Lecter's solo escape, even Gumb's briefly successful defiance o f the state,
are privileged moments in the narrative.) The systematic abuse endemic to the family unit
has created Buffalo Bill and threatened Starling with incest at the sheep and horse ranch—
she denies this, but its presence is felt anyway. As Buffalo Bill rejects sexuality in general.
Starling may have renounced heterosexuality, Stuart Klawans suggests ("Silence" 246),
though this reading seems to me overly dependent on extra-textual knowledge o f Jodie
Foster's alleged lesbianism, details o f which can be found in Janet Staiger's essay "Taboos
and Totem."
O n the evidence o f these details, I can conclude that patriarchy's inherent
pathologies have generated a savage war against women and even driven its true believers
(like Jam e Gumb) to grotesque levels o f self-loathing and rejection o f its tenets even while
embracing its murderous strategies. Gender boundaries shift as macho Vietnam-veteran
Gumb tries to change into a woman, feminine Starling tries to join a notoriously
patriarchal institution, and a brutally effete L ecter hisses out the patriarchal wisdom o f the
ages accompanied by "gay dandy" mannerisms. The technocratic pow er o f the
domineering male gaze is similarly defused, appropriated, or otherwise evaded by female
Starling, who faces dow n the covetous stares o f physically imposing and semi-lustful cops,
a lecherous doctor, a frighteningly insightful serial killer, and another serial killer who
tracks her through a dark cellar with the aid o f his night-vision Army goggles. And local,
state and federal police agencies do a good job o f bustling around officiously and spending
a lot o f money on com puters, faxes, and airplane rides, but a not-so-good job o f catching
the object o f all this activity.
For all o f these reasons, the film defies easy categorization as a "liberal" or
"conservative" film. For all o f its unpleasant subject matter, there is a little ideological
something for everyone, particularly feminists who applaud Starling's resistance to the
invasive male gaze, even Lecter's. Sharrett. no advocate o f the film, admits that portions
o f it complicate easy dismissal:
To be sure, the "postmodern legitimation" that the film undertakes allows the
bum t-out. illegitimate nature o f genre art. something that gives the film its
progressive moment and credibility. Crawford is manipulative, the medical
profession vicious, small-town hicks narrow-minded, family life stifling, and the
media intrusive and demeaning. That Clarice wends her way through this culture
is supposed to suggest an enlightened potentiality. The gray, melancholy light o f
the middle-American landscape, the resonances o f the tales o f the dead gunfighter
(the father), and the Plains Indians wars (Buffalo Bill) reflect the film's sense o f the
desiccation o f popular art and the cultural assumptions supporting it. Such
resonances cannot, however, separate the film from the cynical culture that
generates it . . . ("Neoconservative" 104)
Sharrett's analysis o f the culture is accurate enough, but the film it has produced here
should not be discounted out o f hand. Certainly, it renders into fiction many o f the
countersubversive themes and concerns that helped create the serial killer media blitz o f
the 1980s in the first place, and as such should be viewed with healthy skepticism. See,
for example. Henry Lawton's discussion o f the film, where he maintains that strong, cause-
oriented women "soldiers" like Starling, Ripley from Aliens and Sarah Connor from the
Terminator series are designed, in a cruel misappropriation o f feminist agenda, to lure
women into the same state-controlled, ideological mindset which has historically
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compelled men to sacrifice their lives for the state whenever called upon (41). But the
film also cannot shed itself entirely o f its "illegitimate'' genre origins, and any
neoconservative agenda it may be following is partially subverted by its ow n narrative
project and cinematic Gothicism, particularly in its murky lighting, which strains our
vision, darkens all colors, and blurs sharp edges in a visual parallel to the thematic
ambiguity central to the neo-Gothic. The film is too ambiguous in its political statements
to be com fortable to the countersubversive. Is Clarice Starling a loyal advocate o f the
status quo. o r is she a radical feminist intent on reforming the FBI to hec agenda0 The
answer, o f course, is neither o f those two extremes. Her politics defy simple exegesis, as
does. I think, the film.
The serial killer subgenre, o f which Silence is the respectable critical darling and
certainly one o f the best-looking examples in terms o f its atmospheric moodiness, is
distinctive precisely because o f the indeterminate tenor o f its narrativ es. As a villain, the
fictional serial killer is polymorphous, and supports a wide range o f interpretations--
subversive and countersubversive alike. Because o f the serial killer's core emptiness and
shiny veneer, he reflects back all attempts to read him. He can be many things, depending
on who sees him. which makes him an apt metaphor for postmodemity. He can be the
tragic result o f child abuse, or the ultimate manifestation o f evil, and usually both at the
same time. (This contradictory emotion is expressed probably as well as it ever will be by
the character o f Will Graham in Michael Mann’s film Manhunter. who says o f its serial
killer: "My heart bleeds for him as a child. Somebody took a kid and manufactured a
monster. At the same time, as an adult, he's irredeemable. He butchers entire families to
pursue trivial fantasies. As an adult, someone should blow the sick fuck out o f his
so ck s") He is a voracious consumer o f other people’s energy—note Lecter's needling o f
the distraught Senator M artin at the Memphis airport—but gives none back. He is an
ontological black hole from which no meaning can escape. Yet he has undeniable effects
on the real world that must be dealt with, so he cannot be safely ignored. Consequently.
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his pursuers and interrogators try to force him into self-revelation so they can protect
themselves from him and his kind, and they find only themselves. The serial killer as
fictional construct is almost Lovecraftian: he is an idiot god. mechanistically following
predestined destructive paths (a "natural bom killer") and brutally shunting aside or
swallowing the other human personalities he meets along the way. Buffalo Bill cares
nothing for the suffering o f the women he imprisons, starves, and flays to make skin suits.
This is why Letter's acknowledgment o f Starling's needs in their final meeting at
the Tennessee courthouse is so remarkable. L etter deviates from his escape plot, and his
customary invasive sucking o f Starling's mind, to return to her a snippet o f information she
requires to find Buffalo Bill, save Catherine Martin, and briefly exorcise some o f her
(Starling's) private pain. He does expect something in return for providing her the final
clue—he wants to know when "the Iambs stop screaming”—but in terms o f the social
contract the tw o have established (quid pro quo). Lecter honors the contract when he
does not have to. He does so because he w^ants to. Human life and abstract notions o f
social and legal contracts do not matter to him. but adherence to the rules o f an agreed-
upon game between him and Starling does. He may push the boundaries o f the rules, but
he doesn't break them. He still sadistically allows Starling to think she is going to be
unceremoniously removed from the counhouse by Dr. Chilton before she can obtain the
clue, but calls her back at the last second to pass her the case file in which Buffalo Bill’s
identity waits to be deciphered. At this crucial moment, they touch finger to finger for the
first and only time: a moment o f textual orgasm after which L etter’s subsequent escape is
anti-climactic. At this moment, the viewer knows that Lecter has finally fulfilled his
teasing promise to Starling—to give her Buffalo Bill in return for personal information
about her past—and the narrative quickly winds down to Catherine xMartin’s thrilling but
standard rescue from the m onster’s dungeon.
L etter’s farewell gift to Starling is not altruistic, but it is a form o f reciprocity, a
concept Lecter seems to value, if for no other reason than he can obtain advantages from
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the exchange. By giving Buffalo Bill to Starling, Lecter must wait for her return gift o f
information, but the fact he is willing to wait at all gives him a depth o f humanity notably
absent from Jame Gumb. This is why Gumb’s monstrous characterization seems to me a
real narrative misstep; its ciiched superficiality, designed purely to give the film its villain,
damages the final product far m ore than any suggestions o f homophobia. It is true that
Lecter’s intellectual faculties at times seem almost preternatural, which initially tem pts one
to classify the film as reactionary based on W ood's criterion that the portrayal o f pure,
inexplicable evil is a warning sign o f this, but all Lecter is is a consummate gamesman: not
a monster, as Chilton calls him early on. Lecter’s knowledge o f Buffalo Bill is not derived
from long-distance sleuthing, as Lecter first implies to Starling: Lecter knew Jame Gumb
(a coincidence best not examined too closely for narrative plausibility) from his now-
defunct psychiatric practice. It is true that Lecter looms monstrously large in the
narrative, as horror convention demands, but he is humanized as well, especially in his
(sexual0 fatherly'7 both'7) interest in Starling, to the extent that theater audiences cheer for
an imminent act o f murder and cannibalism when he delivers his infamous closing line to
Starling: "I do wish we could chat longer, but I’m having an old friend [Dr. Chilton] for
dinner." The audience has been completely taken in by actor Anthony Hopkins's decision
to play Lecter "as a nice guy" (qtd. in Gire 108). The text implicates an audience into its
voyeuristic journey through the realm o f serial murder: an audience led to fear real serial
killers is rooting for a fictional one to kill a representative o f the authoritarian mainstream
culture dedicated to the elimination o f such criminals. This spectator attraction tow ard the
barbaric, the chaotic, the dangerous wild zone o f the non-civilized identifies the
Gothic/Romantic subversions at w ork underneath the patina o f neoconservatism.
Conclusion
Is a chorus o f cheers for Dr. Lecter a radical, progressive development, completely flying
in the face o f the countersubversive climate which has made the serial killer as cultural
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icon so prominent in the first place'7 Or is it a neoconservative one completely in keeping
with the national mood o f lethal vengeance tow ard those who offend'7 Are some serial
killers more sympathetic than others'7 Why is Hannibal Lecter cheered and Jame Gumb
booed0 Has Lecter been mythologized into a Neitszchean super-villain, or has. as Robert
Conlon claims, "his ow n mythological power" (12) been defused through his bonding with
Clarice Starling'7 Is serial murder an absolute evil, as public discourse commonly has it. or
does its degree o f vilification depend on the context in which it occurs'7
The most comprehensive answer to these provocative questions lies. I have
argued, in the recognition that our cultural construction o f the serial killer depends upon
the Gothic literary genre, from which arises the .American renditions o f the Western, the
detective story, and the horror tale, among others. All o f these formulas provide in
varying measure the most immediate predecessors to the narrative o f serial murder. In the
ambiguous genre terms that Thomas Harris establishes, politics loses its Manichean
simplicity and we are invited to see the formidable Gothic villains as human beneath the
masks. Yet these tales are still traditional enough to allow some narrative closure: the
m onsters are unmasked by the agents o f the social norm and robbed o f their potency in the
process. In the next grouping o f texts I shall examine in the serial-killer cycle, no such
closure occurs. A film by John McN'aughton and a novel by Bret Easton Ellis stirred up
critical controversy and public animosity (especially in Ellis's case) largely because these
blatantly political texts resist affirmation o f neoconservative values to a greater degree
than does Harris's work.
Chapter Four: Portraits o f the American Psycho
It is generally true that the fictional multiple murderer partakes o f Gothic or neo-Gothic
conventions. His capricious murder o f strangers and his oft-cited ability to seduce his
victims into their own deaths while simultaneously avoiding police detection render him
compellinglv supernatural, mythic, almost God-like in effect. But it is also true that any
given depiction o f this Gothic anti-hero will be inextricably linked to the political context
in which the author composes his/her work. The serial killer o f the 1980s and '90s texts
herein under scrutiny is no exception. In his individual assertion o f violent control, this
character type remains recognizably .American in ideology and thus, however
uncomfortably, one o f us. He rewrites his identity through what came to be known in the
I9S0s as "wilding": brutal, apparently motiveless attacks committed by presumably bored
malefactors upon luckless strangers.
Initially considered to be an urban crime with racial overtones, wilding is now
identified as a much more generalized and politicized expression o f American
individualism run rampant and thus culturally sanctioned to some degree. Because he
conceives o f and carries out his actions in a manner not dissimilar to the violent
methodology o f the larger social structure, the serial murderer o f strangers stands a good
chance o f remaining unremarkable, largely undetectable, and hence nearly unstoppable
amid the generalized tapestry o f violence. Two fictional serial-killer narratives o f the
period make exactly that point by depicting two murderers in full wilding m ode and
conspicuously omitting any significant presentation o f law-enforcement efforts to impede
their invisible killing spree. Neither o f these remorseless killers is captured o r even truly
noticed by the culture they victimize. Hence, the killers escape personal accountability: a
plot development which probably contributed to the high degree o f public and critical
anger directed at the two respective narratives and their authors. One is the 1986 film
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Henry Portrait o f a Serial Killer, directed by John M cNaughton. which I will leave aside
for now; the other is the infamous 1991 novel American Psycho, by Bret Easton Ellis.
In the traditional sense. American Psycho contains no plot or characters o f any
substance and instead presents one epic catalogue o f designer brand-names and products
after another, a textual strategy which alienated most reviewers o f the novel long before
the violence begins approximately a third o f the way into the seemingly endless narrative.
What the novel instead offers is a startlingly "liberal" reaction to the ideological excesses
o f the triumph o f capitalism in the 1980s. M ost o f these excesses are given corporeal
form in the narrative's serial-killing protagonist (Patrick Bateman), as Ellis explains.
I already had the idea to write about a serial killer before I moved to New York in
1987 . . . That summer, before the Crash. I was hanging out with a lot o f Wall
Street guys. What fascinated me was that they didn't talk about their jobs at a ll-
only about how much money they made, the clubs and restaurants they went to.
how beautiful their girlfriends were. It was all about status, about surface. So 1
thought about juxtaposing this absurd triviality with extreme violence. .If
people are disgusted or bored, then they’re finding out something about their own
limits as readers. I want to challenge their complacency, to provoke them. . . .
American Psycho is partly about excess—ju st when readers think they can't take
any m ore violence, or another description o f superficial behavior, more is
presented—and their response tow ard this is what intrigues me. (qtd. in Hoban 36)
While it is generally a critical fallacy to take an author’s statements about his own narrative
agenda at face value. I believe that Ellis has summed up as well as anyone can the
overriding them e o f .American Psycho: the excess o f 1980s capitalism. His novel is only a
more extreme example o f similarly themed polemical works o f the same time period, such
as Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire o f the Vanities and Oliver Stone's Wall Street. These
narratives contend that a society based largely on the manipulation o f stocks and credit is
abandoning its last pre-modem connections to tangible economic foundations and thus, by
implication, its sense o f shared community. Money, in and o f itself always more o f a
concept than a solid medium o f barter, becom es even more ephemeral in a world financed
by stock manipulation and purchased by individuals with Platinum American Express
cards. One is left only with G ordon Gekko's assertion o f capitalist human values in the
film Wall .Street: "Greed is g o o d .” In an environment where ruthless hoarding at the
expense o f others' literal survival is not only tolerated but rewarded, it is axiomatic that
violence will accom pany avarice.
As these authors insist by their choice o f setting, the American 1980s provided no
dearth o f respectability to villains and rogues o f all stripes as long as they complemented
the newly refurbished definition o f national purpose. In some regards, the decade was a
sociopath's dream. .Amoral and irresponsible public behavior was tolerated, excused,
justified, condoned, and even encouraged, all in the name o f reviving at least the
appearance o f p re-I9 6 0 s faith in the American mission both domestically and abroad.
Visible manifestations o f the nation's economic gulf between classes, such as a sizeable
homeless population, were represented to the culture as individual failures o f will,
enterprise, or morality and not as inevitable byproducts o f .American ideology In fact, the
homeless in particular were portrayed as lazy ancFor insane subhuman pandhandlers in a
fashion well in keeping with historical persecution and media demonization o f .America's
"tramp" classes. (For example, see Simmon, pages 58-9. for a discussion o f the cinematic
portrayal o f the victims o f urban poverty.) Charles Derber. expounding on Christopher
Lasch’s identification o f narcissism as "the most widespread personality disorder in late
tw entieth-century America." writes that "In the Reagan-Bush era. narcissism became
mixed with a deadly brew o f sociopathic indifference, cloaked as a virtue in the official
rhetoric o f entrepreneurship, individual initiative, and self-reliance" (13) For Derber. this
brew creates a society plagued by what he calls "wilding" tendencies.
"Wilding" is the term first used by the bored black teenagers to describe their
actions (in a much-publicized case) in beating and raping a white, female Central Park
jogger in New Y ork City on April 19, 1989. The jogger eventually recovered from a
weeks-long com a with severely disabling brain damage, but her attackers dem onstrated no
remorse and. in fact, treated the incident as something o f a lark, at least in their public
pronouncements. Derber summarizes the incident's effect on contemporary- America:
To white middle-class Americans, wilding symbolized something real and terrifying

about life in the United States at the turn o f the decade. Things were falling apart,
at least in the heart o f America's major cities. . . . The fear o f wilding became fear
o f the Other: those locked outside o f the .American Dream. They had not yet
invaded the world most Americans felt p an of. but they menaced it. The Central
Park attack made the threat real—and it unleashed fear among the general
population and a backlash o f rage among politicians and other public figures. (4-5)
However, w hat these threatened individuals did not fully realize or admit was that this
kind o f "wilding" was endemic to the entire 1980s culture and had its antecedents in other
notorious, so-called "thrill killings" such as the one com m itted by Leopold and Loeb in the
1920s.
The 1980s specter o f black urban wilding was. if disproportionately feared, a
ghetto-ized and marginalized threat which, for most white Americans, could be kept at a
distance with enough guns and police. But at more privileged points on the socio
economic continuum, white middle- and upper-class .Americans were engaged in far m ore
generally destructive acts o f wilding. As Derber notes. "M ost .Americans do not become
killers to make it up the ladder or hold on to what they have, but the traditional restraints
on naked self-aggrandizement seem weaker—and the insatiability greater" (11). In
narcissistic ruthlessness, the so-called "yuppies" o f the 19S0s. with their greed-driven
acquisitiveness and willingness to transgress the law for personal gain, were not that
different from the urban youths who attacked passers-by for no reason at all other than the
sheer sport o f it. Both groups were essentially sociopathic in their actions.
Wilding is not limited to yuppies and gang members, however; Derber identifies it
at all levels o f society. Wilding can also be perfectly legal, "like the frantic and single-
minded pursuit o f wealth. . . . cultivated by some o f the country's leading corporations and
financial institutions” (16). According to Derber. there are three kinds o f wilding in
American culture: economic, "the morally uninhibited pursuit o f money by individuals o r
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businesses at the expense o f others": political, "the abuse o f political office to benefit
oneself o r one's ow n social class, or the wielding o f political authority to inflict morally
unacceptable suffering on citizens at home or abroad"; and social, "personal or family acts
o f violence. . . . [or] collective forms o f selfishness that w eaken society." Whatever their
kind, they are "all manifestations o f degraded American individualism" ( 17). As such,
while some forms o f wilding were condemned (the Central Park assault), others (such as
Oliver North's illegal diversion o f arms shipments to Iran and subsequent defiance o f a
Congressional investigative committee) were praised as expressions o f .American courage
and individual enterprise, a "proud” legacy o f our frontier heritage.
Wilding at all social levels is nothing less than the deliberate manifestation o f brute
force, violence for violence's sake. Yet it still fulfills some basic psychic need for the
individual who enacts it. As such, the expression o f the wilding act will differ from
individual to individual. Each act will temporarily satiate a different emotional demand,
based on the specific sociopathy at its foundation. The precise form and symbolic value o f
the violence depends on its author, but one factor remains com m on to all. The wilder will
avail himself o f the symbolic modes o f expression o f his society, so he is dependent on the
signifier structure o f the very culture he wishes to attack. The modes o f his expression lie
all around him, waiting to be picked up; Levi-Strauss calls this operative strategy
bricolage. In one sense, wilding is contagious, but only to those who want to "catch" it.
The intent arises from within, but the expression depends on the culture. Invariably, the
more brutal the environment, the easier it is for those disposed to brutality to find a
personally rewarding form o f violent statement.
For, as distressing as it may seem, human violence is not analogous to the
predations o f animals. It signifies something, however dimly realized, to its perpetrators.
.And it is meant to signify something, no matter how inarticulately "phrased." to the
victim(s) and the society in which both victim and victimizer live. It may mean nothing
more than nihilistic defiance or a compulsion to break w hatever society (or a particular
subset o f it) values, but that is still a symbolic action, o r reaction. And the cumulative
effect o f ail this individual assertion o f violence is nothing less than the gradual dissolution
o f civilized behavior: a long-term social apocalypse. Nowhere is this theme more
explicitly, if turgidly, spelled out than in Ellis's American Psycho
.American Psycho- Literary Wilding0
The admission m ust be made up front that everything reported about the graphically
violent content o f American Psycho is true. It features several torture'm urder scenes
which compare, to my knowledge, with the most violent and repellent o f any in English
literature. If one reads these scenes out o f context or without warning, the subsequent
impulse to hurl the novel into the nearest dum pster will be nigh near irresistible. The
atrocities o f Patrick Bateman upon his primarily (although not exclusively) female victims
practically defy sane imagination: they are literally unbearable to read except in the most
cursory sense, o r at least they were for this reader. They are representations o f "wilding"
(defined, it will be remembered, as the savage assault o f strangers for the sheer thrill o f
violent, extralegal action) in its rawest, ugliest sense.
A brief and by no means comprehensive catalogue o f these actions begins with the
affluent W all-Street commodities broker Bateman's relatively mundane but politically
charged blinding o f a homeless man and the stomping o f his flea-bitten dog. Gizmo (131-
2). From this point on. the episodic violence (m ade more jarring by its flat tone and
juxtaposition w ith long descriptions o f Bateman's banal consumer lifestyle) escalates to the
point o f apocalyptic absurdity. He guts a sharpei in front o f its horrified owner, then
calmly stabs and shoots the owner to death (165-6). He slashes the throat o f an
apparently Japanese delivery boy in graphic realization o f his Wall Street colleagues'
fashionable Japan-bashing (180-1). (Ironically, Batem an discovers the Japanese youth is
really Chinese, so the murder was even more pointless.) He smashes an axe into his friend
Paul Owen's face and then dissolves the body in a tub o f lime located in a vacant Hell's
Kitchen apartment far removed from his own fashionable Iuxurv-apartment digs (217-9):
another richly symbolic narrative movement for wealthy Bateman.
All o f this is extreme but no worse than any contem porary action thriller. Where
Bateman (and his creator Ellis) dem onstrates his true "virtuosity" is when he vents his
misogynistic rage on. variously, female acquaintances, an old lover who jilted him.
strangers, and prostitutes. He dispatches them individually, over the course o f several
hours, with an assortment o f nailguns. chainsaws, scissors, and pow er drills. These are the
scenes which simultaneously horrified and angered prepublication reviewers and ultimately
led to publishing company Simon & Schuster's decision to cancel the book's publication.
This after already having accepted the manuscript and paid enfant terrible Ellis, author o f
the 1985 sensation Less Than Zero and member o f a less-than-elite crew o f 1980s
"yuppie" writers that includes Jay M clnemey. a hefty S300.000 advance. (Paradoxically.
Simon & Schuster is owned by Paramount, which is responsible for such graphic films as
Friday the 13th). Ellis himself was accused o f a form o f wilding: penning irresponsible
incitements to violence for financial gain.
But the book was not yet dead. Perhaps recognizing the financial value o f
controversy. Vintage Books editor Sonny Mehta quickly picked up the novel and provided
Ellis with another payday. As the backstage wrangling betw een the publishing companies
and Ellis’s agent continued, literary' pundits were quick to either praise Simon & Schuster's
good taste and social responsibility or condemn the company's corporate cowardice.
Battle lines formed immediately around the First .Amendment, as the admittedly scarce
Ellis advocates claimed "censorship" and more numerous opponents cried "pornography"
and as yet another work o f questionable moral influence ran afoul o f public decency
(w hoever defines that). On the sidelines, understandably nervous booksellers were given a
question-and-answer checklist by Publishers Weekly informing them how to handle
custom er challenges, protests, and picketing if they decided to stock the book ("For
Booksellers" 9). O f course, most o f the arguing parties had no idea exactly what the novel
described, apart from their fevered perusal o f two graphic excerpts in Time and Spy
magazines.
Most o f those who actually bothered to read the Simon & Schuster manuscript or
the Vintage edition some months later soon confirmed in their various printed forums that,
indeed. American Psycho was not only pomographically violent but badly written at that.
According to most. Ellis managed to be irredeemably offensive and boring at the same
time. But mere dismissal on technical and stylistic grounds was not enough. In
retrospect, one gets the sense that these aesthetically offended critics do not want Ellis’s
treatment at Simon & Schuster to make him another First .Amendment martyr and thus in
some way rescue the book from oblivion. So. the sagacity o f Simon & Schuster's actions
had to be defended by proving that the novel in question was worthy only o f disposal.
The critical savaging o f the novel quickly escalated, most o f it personally directed
at the author, as if he had literally committed the horrors detailed within the novei. For
example. Roger Rosenblatt, in The New York Times Book Review, headlined his scathing
review: "Snuff This B ook!” (3) Time magazine, in one o f the articles that eventually
compelled Simon & Schuster CEO Dick Snyder to drop American Psycho, called its
forthcoming publication "A Revolting Development" (Sheppard 100). In the National
Review. Terry Teachout chose a more dignified but nevertheless pompously self-righteous
approach when he speculated that
. . Ellis spent his undergraduate years steeped in the modish brand o f academic
nihilism that goes by the name o f ’deconstruction,' a school o f criticism in which
works o f art are verbally hacked to pieces in order to prove that nothing means
anything. He seems to have learned his lessons well, if a bit too literally. (46)
Even Norman Mailer, who has not been above using graphic violence in his own work and
admits some admiration for Ellis's talent in the March 1991 Vanity Fair, nevertheless
concludes sadly in the same piece that he could not "forgive" Ellis for botching a
potentially Dostovevskian theme (221).
If Mailer, often considered to be no friend o f feminism, could not forgive Ellis, one
can imagine the feminist reaction to scenes in the novel such as the one where Bateman
introduces a live, starving rat into a dying woman's vagina; o r the one where he explodes a
woman's breasts by clamping jum per cables to her nipples; o r the one where he orally
rapes a severed female head, or the one where he cannibalizes a female corpse, first by
ripping raw flesh from the bone and later by cooking what's left. And there's much, much
more, all equally graphic. As potential victims o f the brand o f extreme violence detailed in
Ellis's narrative, many female commentators obviously felt personally threatened (or in
some cases attacked) by what they perceived as Ellis's incitement o f real-life, misogvnistic
psychopaths, many o f whom would doubtless use his book as a "how-to novel on the
torture and dismemberment o f women." Those were the w ords o f Tammy Bruce,
president o f the Los .Angeles NOW chapter, as recorded on a telephone hotline message
established for those concerned about American Psycho's detrimental effects. (A boycott
o f Random House. Vintage's parent company, was also organized by the Los Angeles
NOW ) Barbara Grizzuti Harrison called the book "barf’ ( 14S). Naomi W olf decided on
inspired analogy in her dismissal o f the novel: . . overall, reading American Psycho
holds the same fascination as watching a maladjusted 11-year-old draw on his desk, until
he covers it with the same B -l bomber or pair o f tits" (34). Gail Collins lamented that in
spite o f the furor over the novel, Ellis suffered "no notable dam age to an already toad-like
professional image" (134).
Clearly, then. Ellis had gained no new artistic allies as a result o f his foray into
revolting subject matter. He was accused o f working out his ow n latent psychoses in print
and/or cynically compensating for the failure o f his second novel, The Rules o f Attraction,
by writing a new book so repugnant that it could not help but generate lucrative
controversy. (Interestingly, Patrick Bateman is the older brother o f the protagonist o f The
Rules o f Attraction.) While there may be some truth to both o f these assessments, a few
minority reports made the audacious claim that regardless o f his motives in writing the
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novel, maybe Ellis had a right to expect that a book that had already been accepted and
paid for and edited and typeset should not be canceled without warning, that he should at
least be able to shop his book around to a potential publisher, and that he might even have
a valid w ork o f literature here, or at least a flawed but intriguing indictment o f 1980s
values.
C hristopher Hitchens, for one. finds it incomprehensible that President Ronald
Reagan is accorded public clemency for a trip to Germany's Bitburg cemetery after
claiming the genocidal Waffen SS weren’t all bad. and yet Bret Ellis is taken to task for
writing a novel about a yuppie serial killer (7). Robert Zaller asks why widespread media
coverage o f the real-life Jeffrey Dahmer case, which roughly coincided with the furor over
Ellis's book, and victims’ families attempts to cash in on the lucrative Dahmer cottage
industry' w ere never subjected to the same kind o f excoriation in public com mentary (323).
Zaller concludes that Ellis had to be ceremonially drummed out o f the ranks o f serious
authors because his w ork possessed too much merit to be dismissed as mere trash. In the
context o f publishing industry ethics. The Nation's editorial staff wonders why "Corporate
P.R. and fear o f controversy, rather than editorial judgm ent, were the determining factors"
("Backdoor" 720) in Simon & Schuster's decision. A favorable review in Film Comment
argues that "the book's savagers have condemned Ellis as a sleaze merchant just because
he is faithful to Patrick's point o f view" ("American Psycho" 56).
But perhaps most puzzling o f all. the trashing o f American Psycho occurred at a
point in .American cultural history when popular fascination with the serial killer had
reached unprecedented heights. Necrophilia, torture, mutilation, dismemberment, and
cannibalism—all were widely discussed, stock concepts in the mass-media treatm ent o f
serial murder. These subjects were deemed suitable for primetime television treatment.
Tabloid new spapers for years had enticed grocerv-store patrons with gruesom e headlines
and photographs o f the serial-killer-of-the-hour. including a widely published 1989 front
page photo o f the charred head o f executed murderer Ted Bundy. Fiction and non-fiction
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books alike explored the grisly practicalities o f serial homicide in unflinching detail. Why,
then, was Ellis's book the subject o f so much vituperation? Perhaps it was because it had
shown its shocked readers all too clearly, in unsparing and merciless detail, what the
savage mutilation and murder o f human beings is all about. The novel is the logical
culmination o f a trend initiated by groundbreaking 1950s horror/crim e narratives like
Psycho and Homicidal wherein supernatural veils were dropped in favor o f "realistic"
psychoanalytical explanations o f human "evil." American Psycho may even have been the
strongest statem ent yet in American culture against misogynistic violence, since it
demonstrated so unequivocally the previously unspoken agenda o f the sexual sadist and
dispensed with the custom ary trappings o f Gothic romance so often found in works o f this
kind. Thus, as strange as it may seem, the book may be a feminist deconstruction o f male
violence, a possibility Jane Caputi. an eloquent critic o f patriarchal savagery in Western
civilization, at least entertains in her article ".American Psychos" before dismissing such a
heretical notion (103).
Ellis's critical denunciation is also clearly rooted in the critical ambivalence
surrounding most genre authors, and perhaps m ore indicative o f revulsion toward the
shamelessly capitalistic social mores o f the American 19S0s than any true analysis o f Ellis's
black comedy o f "yuppie" manners. (One o f the epigraphs o f the book is a quote from
Judith Martin, o r "Miss Manners." in which she defines "manners" as the social
prescriptive code that prevents us all from killing each other.) It also didn't help that Ellis
seized the voyeuristic readers o f polite literary society, many o f whom had embraced the
gory but more restrained novels o f Thomas Harris, and rubbed their collective noses in the
viscera and spurting blood they did not w ant to see: a stark unveiling strategy often
adopted in overtly subversive narratives, such as Wes Craven’s controversial early film
Last House on the Left. There is no doubt that many did feel assaulted or threatened,
given the tone o f their written responses to Ellis's book. Barbara Grizzuti Harrison’s is
typical: "For days after I read American Psycho. I watched men on the s tre e t. . . and I
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wondered: D oes that one harbor fantasies o f killing me? Mr. Ellis poisoned my days:
don't let him poison yours" (149). Such an affront could not be tolerated, and Ellis
became a literary villain unparalleled in recent American publishing history. Indeed, as
Pagan Kennedy notes, he became the temporary American equivalent o f the hiding Salman
Rushdie, who had been condemned to death by Islamic extremists.
Yet. less than a year after the American Psycho controversy, Jonathan Demme's
film The Silence o f the Lambs opened to general critical acclaim and public approval. In
the previous chapter. I have argued that while Thomas Harris's ambiguous storylines
ultimately resist easy categorization, they do offer just enough narrative closure to appeal
to a largely neoconservative audience still interested in seeing evildoers punished for living
out the vicarious destructive fantasies o f their middle-class audiences. In stark contrast.
Ellis's work too clearly subverts bourgeois values without giving at least the appearance o f
ideological restoration by the time his novel winds down to an entropic conclusion. Law
enforcement as an authoritative presence is largely absent from American Psycho, and
Bateman is an uncomfortably recognizable embodiment o f the violence inherent in
American capitalist philosophy and materialism. Ellis's brand o f unremitting nihilism
revolted many o f the same bourgeois intellectuals who lauded Harris’s similarly themed
material. Yet. for all the controversy, the Ellis novel is not some unprecedented artifact o f
the supposedly debased, sensation-driven, pornographic culture o f the twenty-something
generation, but rather another in the long pedigree o f neo-Gothic tales centered around
murdering protagonists whose actions pow er the narrative engines o f the texts.
Ellis's .American Psycho, like the other narratives I am analyzing, is heavily
influenced by, and pays obvious textual homage to, the popular horror/Gothic narratives
o f genres past, if one can overlook the exhaustive lists o f clothing labels. Patrick Bateman
is obviously named after Norman Bates and less obviously Batman, two genre shape-
shifters whose murky narratological positioning between the poles o f "hero" and "villain,"
in a destabilizing tactic I identify as Gothic, makes them ideal referents for protagonist
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Bateman. Bateman, whose identity is constructed solely from whatever pieces o f 1980s
consumer society he can integrate into his public persona, naturally gravitates tow ard
horror narratives, fact and fictional, with which his audience and potential victims should
be familiar. As he tells an acquaintance in a sushi restaurant: "I'm into, oh, murders and
executions mostly" (206). He is an example o f w hat Ellis has passingly called in
interviews serial killer chic, which can be further defined as a sensibility that depends on a
culture-wide voyeuristic interest in notorious murderers to simultaneously dwell upon (in
deceptively casual conversation) and mask its ow n obsession with the subject. Bateman
talks about notorious real-life serial killers and fictional ones with no apparent discernment
between them, and becomes quite agitated when his listeners express disinterest or
confuse the names, as evidenced in the following exchange between Bateman and his
Wall-Street "friend" M cDermott on the subject o f Leatherface. the chainsaw killer from
Tobe Hooper's film The Texas Chainsaw M assacre:
"Don’t tell me he was another serial killer. Bateman. Not another serial killer. . . .
you always bring them up. . . . .And always in this casual, educational sort o f way.
I mean, I don't want to know anything about Son o f Sam or the fucking Hillside
Strangler o r Ted Bundy or Featherhead. for god sake." . . . I say . . . "Featherhead?
How in the hell did you get Featherhead from Leatherface9" (153, 155)
Bateman's annoyance with M cDermott's contem ptuous dismissal o f serial-killer popular
lore reveals the former's deep investment in such narratives as structuring frameworks for
his own identity. But it is an identity paradoxically insular, visible to no one except
Bateman's victims in spite o f his public flaunting o f and explicit confessions to outrageous
acts o f murder.
For instance, Bateman attends an office Halloween party wearing a suit covered
with real human blood, a sign on his back that reads "MASS MURDERER." and a
fingerbone from one o f his victims attached to his lapel. O f course, everyone treats this as
just one more harmless manifestation o f Bateman's quirky obsession with serial murderers
(330). Bateman becomes increasingly agitated that no one seems to remark upon his
behavior as anything to be alarmed about, so much so that he feels compelled to confess
his crimes to people who still do not listen to o r believe him. At a dinner with his former
lover Evelyn, in response to her com ment that he's "being a lunatic." he angrily insists.
"Goddamnit. Evelyn. What do you mean, being? . . . I fucking am one" (333). He then
agonizingly admits his “need to engage in . . . homicidal behavior on a massive scale
cannot be. um. corrected. . . but I . . . have no other way to express my blocked . . .
needs” (338), but for some reason Evelyn thinks he is nagging her again to have breast
implants. He confesses two murders to Harold Carnes's answering machine only to find
later, during a personal barroom confrontation in which Carnes drunkenly mistakes
Bateman for somebody else, that Cam es considered the message a joke (387). Bateman is
so frustrated by this that he shouts. "You don't seem to understand. You're not really
comprehending any o f this. I killed him. I did it. Cames. I chopped Owen's tucking head
off. I tortured dozens o f girls. That w hole message I left on your machine was true"
(3S8).
In the world o f American Psycho, the superficially slick but hollow characters are
too self-absorbed to listen to another’s w ords and too vapid to realize their content. Their
narcissism, expressed in their fitness quests for "hardbodies," provides the climate o f social
indifference in which the homeless and the helpless can be victimized (or "wilded") with
impunity by a Patrick Bateman. Bateman and his peers are also "hardbodies" in the sense
that they seem literally hollow, mechanical, inorganic: clockwork yuppies. Their inability
to empathize is perfectly summarized by Bateman, the spokesman for the commodities
brokers, the corporate raiders, the account executives, the stock traders, the financial
manipulators, and all the other upper-class wilders who try to touch meaning through
sensation:
There wasn't a clear, identifiable em otion within me, except for greed and,
possibly, total disgust. I had all the characteristics o f a human being—flesh, blood,
skin, hair—but my depersonalization was so intense, had gone so deep, that the
normal ability to feel compassion had been eradicated, the victim o f a slow.
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purposeful erasure. I was simply imitating reality, a rough resemblance o f a human

being, w ith only a dim com er o f my mind functioning. Something horrible was
happening and yet I couldn't figure out why—I couldn't put my finger on it. (282)
H ere is a clear evocation o f Baudrillard's theory o f simulacra as it applies to an individual's
construction o f his/her social identity. Batem an cannot feel; hence, he can only w atch his
increasing alienation from humanity. B ut in spite o f his emptiness and the ferocity o f his
murders, Bateman's insistence on immediately graspable truths renders him the m ost
intellectually compelling character in the narrative.
Which isn't saying much. Intellectualism is only a distant memory in this novel’s
indictment o f Donald Trump’s New York. There are no truths to be grasped in B atem an’s
world; only material goods to be consumed and discarded for the next shiny bauble o r
new line o f designer clothing. Bateman and his peers have artistic pretensions, o f course,
in the self-flattering sense that "an" som ehow stands at a critical distance from com mon
culture and thus can only be appreciated by those such as one's self, possessed o f
sensitivity and refined intellect. However. the traditional modernist distinction between
high and low a n (with high an occupying the privileged position once held by religion) has
been effaced in the signature fashion o f the postmodern m urder narratives; the songs o f
Huey Lewis and the News and Phil Collins equate to high culture for Bateman, who
spends many pages laboriously critiquing these 1980s musical icons in a parody o f
academic textual analysis while simultaneously welcoming their ease o f accessibility. One
such passage begins:
I've been a big Genesis fan ever since the release o f their 1980 album. D uke.
Before that I didn't really understand any o f their w ork . . . It was Duke (Atlantic.
1980), w here Phil Collins' presence became more apparent, and the music got
more m odem , the drum machine became more prevalent and the lyrics started
getting less mystical and more specific (maybe because o f Peter Gabriel's
departure), and complex, ambiguous studies o f loss became, instead, smashing
first-rate pop songs that I gratefully embraced. (133).
Bateman then proceeds to explicate the meaning o f each song on the album in a confused
ramble that extends for four pages in excruciatingly minute detail. Sadly, he is the only
character in the novel to attempt an intellectual process, even as ludicrous as his analysis
o f Genesis becomes. This is a world bereft o f meaning o r beauty, so analysis o f its
contents produces only mockery.
Not even Bateman's attempts to end the cultural absurdity through enacting a local
apocalypse count for much, since no one realizes a yuppie serial murderer is at work, and
any Armageddons are merely the imagination reflecting back upon itself its own
pathologies. Bateman sees portents o f cosmic disaster everywhere, but they exist only
within his head: "When we look up at the clouds . . . I see . . . a Gucci money clip, an a \.
a woman cut in two. a large puffy white puddle o f blood that spreads across the sky.
dripping over the city, onto Manhattan" (371). In a longer passage. Bateman conceives o f
absolute, unmediated reality as a "desen landscape" denuded o f "life and water" and
resembling some sort o f crater, so devoid o f reason and light and spirit that the
mind could not grasp it on any sort o f conscious level and if you came close the
mind would reel backward, unable to take it in. . . . This was the geography around
which my reality revolved: it did not occur to me. ever, that people were good or
that a man was capable o f change o r that the world could be a better place through
one’s taking pleasure in a feeling o r a look or a gesture . . . Fear, recrimination,
innocence, sympathy, guilt, waste, failure, grief, w ere things, emotions, that no one
really felt anymore. Reflection is useless, the w orld is senseless. Evil is its only
permanence. God is not alive. Love cannot be trusted. Surface, surface, surface
was all that anyone found meaning in . . . this w as civilization as I saw it. colossal
and jagged . . . (374-5)
Indeed, this is a bleak landscape o f apocalypse, but it is an abstract, purely personal
concept o f Bateman's, and as such, it has no warrant in reality. There is no one-to-one
correspondence between sign and signed (another G othic resonance), which is why
Bateman is always seeing people that look like so-and-so and why his conversations
always involve people who are never talking about the same thing, except for random
fragments o f linguistic connection that break apart as quickly as they form.
In such a dissociated world, nothing is verifiable. Even Bateman's murders may
not have occurred in actuality; he may be lying about them, o r hallucinating them, or
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remembering them incorrectly. There is some textual evidence to indicate that none o f
these murders are happening; the aforementioned Carnes tells Bateman that he couldn't
have killed Paul Owen, as Cames claims to have had lunch with Owen in London well
after Bateman’s confession to the answering machine (388). (On the other hand, since
characters in the novel are always mistaking each other for someone else. Cames could
have had lunch w ith someone other than Owen. Nothing is certain in this novel.) At a
moment when he feels tempted to abrogate his coldness and form a connection with a
woman named Jean, he hints that all o f his murders may have been fantasies: "Sometimes.
Jean. . . the lines separating appearance—what you see—and reality—what you don't—
become, well, blurred. . . . I think it’s . . . time for me to . . take a good look at the
w orld I've created" (378-9) At the very end o f the novel. Bateman responds to an
isolated word "Why'1" that he hears in a bar and directs a pointed, contem ptuous aside at
his audience (presumably, us) that hints this entire chronicle o f waste and murder may
have been a deranged joke on a voyeuristic readership:
just opening my mouth, w ords coming out. summarizing for the idiots: "Well,
though I know 1 should have done that instead o f not doing it. I'm twenty-seven
for Christ sakes and this is, uh. how life presents itself in a bar or in a club in New
York, maybe anywhere, at the end o f the century and how' people, you know, me,
behave, and this is what being Patrick means to me, I guess, so. well, vup, uh . . ."
and this is followed by a sig h ,. . . and above one o f the doors covered by red
velvet drapes in Harry’s is a sign and on the sign in letters that match the drapes'
color are the words THIS IS NOT .AN EXIT. (399)
Bateman's (Ellis's) last joke on the reader, then, is to plant the suggestion that this
rambling confession may be an admission to crimes that did not even happen in verifiable
reality. Instead. B atem an’s/Ellis's story may simply be a metaphoric indictment o f the
masturbatory narcissism o f the New Y ork upper-middle-class nightclub circuit from which
there is no exit. W hether Bateman actually committed these murders, then, remains
ambiguous. The reader who attempts to find textual confirmation one way o r the other
will suddenly be halted by the realization that the novel, as fictional construct, can finally
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provide no reliable key to deciphering its contents and to have ever thought that it or any
other novel could is to become disturbingly aw are o f one's own susceptibility to
imaginative absorption by narrative. To search for clues as to whether Bateman's story as
written by Ellis is "true" is a patent absurdity, yet this is exactly what fiction readers, or at
least the more reflective ones, attempt to do w ith and to their second-hand narratives.
Fiction is read as reality, particularly if a strong emotional engagement is created by the
spectator toward an identifiable character, event, or theme within the text, and reality
constructed in terms o f fiction.
This is what the serial-killer narrative does best: destabilize assumptions about not
only the nature o f good and evil, but the distinction between reality and appearance and
fact and fiction. One would be hard pressed to find a clearer example o f a boundary-
undermining novel than American Psycho Yet. for all its laudable ambitions. I must fault
it not for its gore but its unrestrained, unreflective use o f the techniques o f metafiction.
The end result is a nihilistic implosion o f meaning that, while instructive and at times
interesting to watch, tells me that the more exuberantly nihilistic versions o f
postmodernism, such as Baudrillard's increasingly suspect emphasis on an absolutely
ephemeral notion o f hyperreality, are indeed spiraling themselves into gleeful oblivion.
Finally, what troubles one the most about Ellis's novel is not the violence, which is so.
extreme and sq improbable as to be ludicrous and not nearly as disturbingly "attractive" as
that in The Silence o f the Lambs. (It is exceedingly difficult for me to imagine anyone
other than a clinical sadist and/or sexual psychopath o f many years' standing, which are
not nearly as common as the more paranoid am ong us would have it, being titillated in the
slightest by this material, let alone incited to violent action.) Rather, it is the banality o f
nihilism. Bateman's attempts to murder not only people but imagination itself proves itself
an ontological dead end (THIS IS NOT AN EX IT), a valuable enough insight, but by the
time one forces a reading o f (Ellis's) turgid, detail-obsessed prose interspersed with
unflinching but relatively infrequent accounts o f grisly excess, one begins to appreciate the
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wisdom o f avoidance o f the imitative fallacy in fiction. Then again, that may be the point.
We are so weary and disgusted o f Bateman, Ellis, and ourselves by novel's end that it will
be a long time before w e want to read another serial killer novel or see a film on the
subject, and so Ellis has perhaps unwittingly rendered a public service to those who worry
about fiction glamorizing criminals. I cannot decide if Ellis has written the most
conscientious, demystifying, demythologizing novel about serial murder possible, and thus
one o f the best, or the most pretentious, boring, nauseating, and generally despicable one
yet. Ellis possesses undeniable stylistic skill, but to see it used on such a frustrating
project as American Psycho troubles me greatly. Which, again, may be the point. Seidom
has individual violence been presented in as de-glamorizing a light as in this novel.
Here Be Monsters: 1980s Demonology
O f course, romanticized individual violence o f the kind .American Psycho makes so
unattractive has always been central to the fiercely isolationist American character, as its
embrace (and continual narrative recycling) o f a bloody frontier mvthos demonstrates.
Indeed. Derber argues that "American history can be read as a succession o f wilding
periods, alternating with eras o f civility" (20). According to Derber's pendulum theory,
the 1980s wilding period, which has extended into the 1990s in slightly altered form, owes
its vigor to a widespread reaction against the "moral idealism o f a new generation o f youth
in the 1960s" (21). Derber's reference to the so-called idyllic 1960s is astonishingly
simplistic; nevertheless, a common perception does currently exist that somehow 1960s
"radicalism," quaint and naive as it is, needs to be firmly repudiated. The cult o f .American
individualism has reasserted itself, if indeed it had ever really weakened, by recapitulating
the nostalgia-filtered mood, if not the reality, o f supposedly less turbulent historical
periods, like the 1950s.
O f course, for any culture to suppress internal criticism, a suitable enemy, or
Other, must be created so that solidarity in the face o f hostile action can be maintained.
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Needless to say. the more novel o r dramatic that threat, the more new sworthy it is.
Especially in an age o f instantaneous global communications, it only takes a few
noteworthy occurrences to elevate any "threat" to the level o f public awareness and
correspondingly create a sense that the menace is more immediate and geographically
closer than it in fact really is. In the 1980s. several "new" dangers reconfigured American
perceptions o f reality. The threat o f AIDS scared millions into monogamy. .As the latest
o f a long line o f demonized drugs, "crack” and its racist connotations o f urban decay and
sleaze disgusted middle-class .Americans into approving newly invigorated drug-
interdiction programs. Increasing credulity toward repons o f Satanic ritual sacrifice o f
infants and abuse o f children became apparent in .American spiritual life, leading to a
nation-wide spate o f hastily convened counter-Satanist conferences, at which concerned
parents. Satanic-abuse "survivors." and supposedly objective law-enforcement
professionals would meet and accuse various people and groups o f devil worship and
ritual abuse (V ictor 67-8). There is nothing new about this tendency in American society,
o f course; periodic "witch-hunts" target certain groups (usually those posing a threat to
the patriarchal, capitalistic status quo) by symbolically demonizing them, most notoriously
in the Salem "witch trials" o f 1692 and the M cCarthy campaign against "high-ranking
Communist infiltrators" in American society during the 1950s. However, there are lesser
known episodes o f historical witch-hunting, such as the 1876 maligning o f unionists and
feminists which Richard Slotkin documents in The Fatal Environment, leading one to
conclude that the American fear o f the demonic O ther is deeply engrained.
I have already com m ented upon the neoconservative climate o f the 19S0s; one o f
its strongest themes in America was a revival o f religious fundamentalism in which threats
to the prevailing ideology w ere typically portrayed as evil, or "Satanic." Serial killers and
mass murderers were quickly linked to Satanism, an association encouraged by the
massive publicity given to Richard Ramirez, the "Nightstalker" o f Los Angeles, who was
fond o f flashing Satanic symbols to court watchers and TV cameras. In 1987. Maury
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Terry- published a sensational book called The Ultimate Evil, wherein he claims that New
York serial-killer David Berkovvitz (the "Son o f Sam") and Charles Manson committed
murder at the behest o f the Process, a Satanic cult based in San Francisco but exerting
nefarious influence across the country (according to Terry-). The subversive agenda o f
these sensational criminals, especially when supposedly bolstered by alliances with Satanic
societies, constitutes nothing less than a direct assault on mainstream .American values,
and so dire and restrictive measures are often advocated to combat these threats and the
"permissive" liberal society in which they flourish. The people and organizations who fear
serial killers and other overblown, media-created threats like Satanism are
"countersubversives" who utilize the serial killer menace (among others) to promulgate
their ideological agenda o f imposing ever-greater measures o f social control upon the
moral lives o f the citizenry (Bromley 56). What distinguished the 1980s was the degree to
which the countersubversive mindset to o k hold across many levels o f a mainstream
.American society that had previously rejected leftist conspiracy theories o f the 1960s as
too radical or extreme. .And in this paranoid, vaguely occult-tinged melange, a "new" kind
o f criminal received an inordinate am ount o f publicity.
Robert Lindsey, in a January 22. 1984. New York Times article, quoted Justice
Department official Robert Heck that 4000 Americans a year, half under IS years o f age,
were being murdered by "serial killers." Heck based this claim on an examination o f the
approximately 5000 unsolved homicides each year in this country. He also claimed that
this murderous phenomenon had increased dramatically since the beginning o f the 1970s:
"Something's going on out there. . . . It's an epidemic. Yet, if you look at these people,
they look normal, you couldn't pick them out o f a crowd" (7). And worst o f all. at least
35 o f these "normal-looking" serial killers were even then on the loose, supposedly killing
scores o f strangers as they drifted across the countryside.
Philip Jenkins comments on this influential newspaper article: "The essentials o f
Lindsey's story were repeated extensively during 1984 and 1985, especially the estimate o f
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four thousand serial victims each year" ("Panic" 2). An April 30, 1984. article in U.S.
News & World Report implies that more than 4000 cases a year are serial homicides,
"twice the 1970 total” (Gest 53). The August. 1984 issue o f Omni is more specific: "By
1982 the annual number o f reported murders rose to 23.000, and o f these. 4.1 IS were
motiveless, unsolved cases" (Kagan 20). A November 26, 1984, Newsweek article refers
to ".An epidemic o f serial murder" and quotes the FBI’s Roger Depue. “It isn’t just a matter
o f being m ore aw are o f [serial murderers]. The actual number seems to be increasing"
(Starr 100). This same article claims that by conservative estimates 30 unapprehended
serial killers were then active.
These articles are typical o f the 1980s mass-media print coverage o f the serial-
murder phenomenon. Jenkins also notes that the electronic media contributed to the
reporting, with an HBO America I 'ndercover episode receiving much attention through its
presentation o f notorious serial murderers Ted Bundy, Ed Kemper, and Henry Lee Lucas
("Panic" 2). The episode also featured actor re-creations o f the crimes, as did a 1984
documentary entitled Murder: No Apparent M otive. Recreations o f sensational crimes
was soon to become a television-tabloid staple (America’s M ost W anted, for example) and
a reliable ratings booster: irrefutable evidence that a society which claimed to fear and
despise crime couldn't watch enough o f it.
Ted Bundy and Ed Kemper gripped the public imagination for many reasons, not
the least o f which was that they preyed on pretty young women in beast-like fashion but
came across as articulate, reasonably intelligent, and polite: archetypal Gothic seducers.
But most o f the early 1980s "serial-killer panic," as Jenkins calls it, can be traced to the
sinister figure o f Henry Lee Lucas, a one-eyed drifter who confessed to literally hundreds
o f murders (600, at one point) in 1983. M ost o f the mass-media stories about the
"epidemic" o f serial murder led o ff by mentioning Lucas and his staggering confessions.
Much o f Lucas's autobiography is suspect, on the basis that he may very well have
been telling his interrogators what he believed they wanted to hear, but certain facts can be
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stated with relative certainty. So far as is known. Lucas began his murderous career in his
twenties, killing his ow n mother in I960. He claimed in his defense that his prostitute
mother had abused him for years, dressed him up as a girl for his first day o f school, and
forced him to watch her have sex with customers. Lucas was convicted o f second-degree
murder and then paroled in 1970 after serving ten years o f a forty-year sentence. He said
that upon his release, he murdered a woman only a few miles away from the penitentiary'.
He then drove from state to state, allegedly killing as he went, supposedly at times for a
Satanic cult named the Hand o f Death, and picking up w hatever odd jobs he could.
Following his arrest, he also implicated a traveling companion. Ottis Toole, in many o f the
confessed murders. (Lucas w as consistently rough on his few friends. One o f his last acts
before imprisonment was to kill another traveling companion, his common-law teenage
wife. Frieda.) Lucas kept confessing and confessing, perhaps in a campaign to claim his
Warholian "fifteen minutes o f fame." Toole achieved notoriety in his own right when he
confessed to the abduction and murder o f Adam Walsh, whose father John later became a
prominent victims' rights advocate and the host o f one o f "reality" television's most
histrionic programs, America's Most Wanted
No one is really certain how many murders Lucas has committed. There is little
doubt he is a multiple murderer, but no one really believes anymore he killed 600 people.
Lucas himself now says he just doesn't remember how many people he killed, but it was
less than ten. In Bill Ellis's words: ", . . if we take a middle ground and assume that he
did kill more than one and fewer than 600 people, then Lucas may well have patterned
some random m urders after legendary accounts o f ritual murder" ("Ostension" 217), thus
placing Lucas in a social dialogue dependent upon the communal fears and prejudices o f
1980s America.
If one did. accept Lucas's story. Lucas was much m ore than a serial killer. He also
murdered at the command o f a Satanic organization which numbered in the hundreds,
reached into the highest levels o f "respectable" society, and abducted a majority o f the
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thousands o f American children reported missing each year. The conspiratorial nature o f
this explanation com plem ented the strong paranoid streak in contemporary .America.
Furthermore, a multitude o f social evils had been given a tangible face and an identity, and
an identified enemy w as far less frightening, and far m ore manageable, than an unknow n
one. The need for vigilance had not eased—after all. these people were everywhere, even
in middle-class suburbia—but the fight could now be waged on something approaching
equal terms, as long as public support and funding continued to be pumped into law
enforcement.
Lucas served many valuable functions for law enforcem ent agencies The
existence o f people like him justified the existence (indeed, expansion) o f those agencies
chartered to stop him. His confessions to hundreds o f murders also allowed some multi-
jurisdictional housecleaning. Accommodated by police investigators eager to close the
books on unsolved homicides in their jurisdictions. Lucas traveled the country again, this
time on taxpayer dollars. He visited myriad crime scenes and confessed to his appreciative
law-enforcement audience any and all murder cases they placed before him. According to
Bill Ellis, "investigators from 26 states used his confessions to close their books on m ore
than 200 murders" ("Ostension" 217). M ost o f these confessions eventually proved
bogus, but Lucas had already managed to manipulate the police, press, and public into the
belief that this lower-class, one-eyed drifter was a new kind o f monster in .American folk
demonoiogy, capable o f killing not only strangers but his own wife and mother, and w hose
killing ground included all o f North .America. As part o f the mvthification process so
central to sensational criminal cases, Lucas inspired several true-crime books and at least
one critically lauded film. Only Wisconsin serial-killer Ed Gein has been so honored in
fictional homage.
Lucas, with his lower-class origins and seedy appearance, exemplifies a subtext o f
what can be called the serial-killer master narrative: the middle- and upper-class fear and
subsequent demonizing o f the repressed lower classes. M onsters who are fictional o r in
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the process o f being fictionalized (such as Lucas and his ilk) are often portrayed in terms
which emphasize their socially downtrodden status. The monsters represent, at least to
some degree, fearsome caricatures o f the poor, the uneducated, the unemployed, the
unsophisticated, the inbred, the mentally ill o r insane, and/or the backwoods rural as
perceived by the bourgeois suburbanite, many o f whom otherwise consider themselves
good liberals. Lucas, in the term s established by the media’s melodramatic reportage o f his
case, was all o f these. Carol Clover summarizes this attitude nicely: "People from the city
are people like us. People from the country . . . are people not like us" (124)
Arising as he did from the midst o f the "wild" 1980s. Lucas provided the perfect
bogeyman for a decade which saw the governmental privileging o f the moneyed classes
(through deregulation and the explosion o f investment banking) to the virtual exclusion o f
those classes lower in the financial hierarchy. As American society retooled itself to a
"trickle-down" operating mode, the hopelessly excluded Lucas exploded upward in the
public perception. His was the return o f the financially repressed and socially scorned, at
once affirming the bourgeois's worst suspicions about the subhuman proletariat masses
and stirring liberal guilt about the consequences o f poor living conditions and economic
disempowerment: all o f which contributes to a class-based fear o f the Other that Carol
Clover calls "urbanoia." (Perhaps no better fictional depiction o f this class warfare exists
than in H.G. Wells's The Time Machine, wherein the subterranean and bestially degraded
Moorlocks emerge aboveground to cannibalize the gentle and refined Eloi. The link
between Wells' novel and the economic subtext o f many horror narratives was first
established by Tony Williams in his analysis o f The Texas Chainsaw Vlassacre in the
winter 1977-78 issue o f M ovie.) The existence o f Lucas served many bourgeois purposes,
but one o f the primary was to confirm to an alarmed public that impoverished drifters
really were murderous beasts, to be run to earth by any law-enforcement measures
necessary. Serial killers, much like drug dealers and Satanists, lent themselves all to o well
to media sensationalism, which in turn fanned public fears o f crime victimization and
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created a climate in which the state could implement ever-m ore repressive police measures
to curtail a perceived threat, o r "epidemic.” which was never all that widespread to begin
with.
M ost o f these cultural cross-currents find their expression in John McNaughton's
skillful pastiche o f 1980s serial-killer lore, Henry: Portrait o f a Serial Killer. Henry is
specifically based on M cNaughton's study o f Henry Lee Lucas, who in turn unsuccessfully
sued M cN aughton for defaming his character. (Something similar happened during the
production o f Richard Fleischer’s film The Boston Strangler, when legal representatives o f
Albert DeSalvo. the real-life Strangler, successfully fought to have DeSalvo's
characterization drawn as sympathetically as possible. Indeed, one is struck by the
narrative sympathy accorded to a befuddled, agonized DeSalvo as portrayed by Tony
Curtis. ) Some o f Lucas's biography does appear in slightly fictionalized form in
M cNaughton’s film. As previously mentioned. Lucas's Oedipal hatred o f his "prostitute"
mother, and the specific story o f her dressing him up as a little girl the first day o f school,
finds its way into Henry's explanation to Becky as to why he killed his mother. The
character o f Otis, an implied homosexual child molester, and his murderous alliance with
Henry is loosely based on Ottis Toole's teaming up with Lucas on a cross-country m urder
spree that may o r may not have happened, depending on whether one believes their
numerous confessions. (Otis's interest in young boys, and the brutal murder by Henry o f
an adolescent boy. also evoke audience's fears o f the 1980s criminal "war on children.")
The ill-fated Becky is the fictional analogue o f Freida, Lucas's teenage wife, whom he later
killed.
However, more important to McNaughton’s project is not slavish recreation o f the
sordid details o f the actual Lucas's life, but rather the psychological study o f a man who
can repeatedly kill strangers and intimates alike without remorse and an examination o f a
culture in which that can so easily happen. McNaughton chose to shift his focus away
from the kind o f police procedural story such as written by Thomas Harris and onto a
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cross-genre mix o f true-crim e case study, film noir, and horror film. One o f his most
important decisions in the film is to specifically respond to the mid-1980s taw enforcement
definition o f the serial killer, and the resultant media deluge o f serial killer stories about
men like Lucas. One o f the most prominent features o f this coverage was an implied need
for stronger, more centralized law enforcement capabilities to combat the lower-class
drifters preying upon decent society; McNaughton both echoes and subverts this concern
by acknowledging the existence o f a Henry Lee Lucas but also admitting the impossibility
o f ever stopping those rare few like him. no m atter w hat kinds o f law-enforcement
procedures are implemented. Whereas the most skillful o f Thomas Harris's FBI profilers
achieve success. M cN aughton questions the basic enterprise o f profiling itself, what with
its optimistic insistence that the intuitive, artistic reading o f signs, or "clues," can
scientifically point to the malefactor.
For example, one o f the most important scenes in the film involves Henry's
tutelage o f Otis on the finer points o f evading police detection. As Otis (concealed behind
bushes) videotapes the beating o f a homeless man by tw o others (a prime example o f
wilding behavior), Henry tells him:
If you shoot somebody in the head with a .45 every time you kill somebody, it
becomes like your fingerprint, see0 But if you strangle one. stab another, one you
cut up and one you don't, then the police don’t know what to do. They think
you’re four different people. What they really like, what makes their job so much
easier, is a pattern. What they call a modus operandi. . . . It’s like a trail o f shit,
Otis. It’s like the blood droppings from a deer you’ve shot. All they gotta do is
follow those droppings and pretty soon they're gonna find their deer. . . . You can
use a gun. I'm not savin' you can't use a gun. Just don't use the same gun twice.
Henry's insistence on avoiding pattern, on studied random ness and unpredictability o f
murder, indicates a degree o f am ateur insight into w hat criminologist Steven Egger has
called the "linkage blindness" (164-5) o f police when confronted with a series o f what may
or may not be unconnected homicides. Henry's ability to vary his modus operandi to
evade outside reading identifies him as not so much a criminal genius, but rather an
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"evervman" serial killer in direct contrast to the manipulative Hannibal Lecter: a killer not
interested in outw itting the authorities in a highly public, teasing gam e o f "catch me if you
can," but rather one who wishes to remain undetected and hence invisible. FBI profiling,
if indeed it could ever discern the shadowy existence o f Henry, would be helpless to
identify him. In fact, law enforcement is conspicuously absent in M cNaughton's film. The
audience never sees any police reaction to. or even recognition of. Henry’s murders.
He is aided in this invisibility by a casually brutal and itinerant society o f wilders
and potential wilders. as implied by the pointless beating o f the homeless man that goes
unnoticed by all except Henry and Otis, where scores o f homicides do not arouse much if
any official reaction and go relatively unnoticed by the media-reliant public. The serial
killer who wishes to "go public" with his murders must be unusually inventive in his
(paradoxically) easily identifiable pattern (a la the serial killers o f Thomas Harris or the
Biblically influenced killer o f David Fincher's Seven ) o r compile an enormous victim toll,
so as to attract the simultaneous attention o f the police and media. Henry, on the other
hand, disguises him self behind the enormous violence level and corresponding
desensitization inherent in American society. The means o f violence are also readily
available, Henry knows. As he tells Otis, it is easy to obtain different guns for different
murders: "Anyone can get a gun. A phone call can get you a gun." The last cultural
component crucial to Henry's success is .American pride in its own mobility. Henry's
vagabond lifestyle o f the road mirrors the larger nomadic wanderings o f the average
American, and dimly echoes not only the specific fictional genre o f the road movie but the
larger issue o f American pride in its very rootlessness. Mobility has always meant freedom
to escape one's past and the consequences o f that past; for Henry, it allows him to escape
punishment for murder. Again, in his extended tutorial with Otis. Henry knows that "The
most important thing is to keep movin'. That way they might never catch up to ya."
But none o f this interaction with Henry and Otis is ever enlarged upon, or given
any real direction. O ne o f the key metaphors in the serial-killer narrative is aimless circling
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toward specific moments o f murderous clarity, then more circling; Henry as narrative
never really gets anywhere either, which some may see as an artistic flaw, but in my
opinion constitutes the aesthetic significance (or art. if you will) o f stories like it. In no
other texts that I can think o f do the paradoxes, contradictions, and outright cruelties o f
the narratives by which we consciously structure our imaginative lives receive such
deliberate, metafictional analysis in such deceptively formulaic, straightforward storylines.
Undeniably. Henry's portrait as sketched by M cNaughton remains vaguely outlined,
approaching simplicity in the most negative sense at times. W e never do get a true sense
o f the how or why o f a Henry Lucas, as promised by M cN aughton’s deliberately
misleading title. We are expecting not only a description, as the FBI attem pts to do in its
1980s serial-killer pronouncements, but an explanation and a meaning, as we often
optimistically expect our fiction to do. Instead. M cNaughton presents a narrative that
does indeed prevent closure, to such an alarming extent that the M PAA decided to
effectively prevent most .Americans from seeing this film o r even knowing about it.
Henry: Creation o f a Serial Killer
In 1985. a then-obscure John McNaughton watched a news segm ent about Henry' Lee
Lucas on the program 20/20. The images o f Lucas stayed with M cNaughton, and when a
Chicago video distributor asked McNaughton if he had any ideas suitable for a low-budget
shocker. Lucas was set on his way to becoming a cultural icon ("Henry") only slightly less
recognizable and infinitely more critically respectable than "slasher" star Freddy Krueger, a
point elaborated upon in Jeffrey Sconce's essay "Spectacles o f Death" (103-7).
M cNaughton was not interested in the gorier aspects o f Lucas's deeds, but rather in the
sort o f mind that could conceive o f and carry them out so casually and frequently. Or, as
Waleed Ali. M cNaughton's video-distributor associate, said, "He didn't want to shoot the
usual blood-and-gore film . . . He wanted to take the audience inside the mind o f a man
who had absolutely no conscience or empathy and could kill as easily as most people go
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out to buy a pair o f shoes" (qtd. in McDonough 44). M cN aughton. true to his intentions,
created a script and film that, while violent, remains less graphic than any one o f the
Friday the Thirteenth films and immeasurably more com plex and disturbing.
The film, m ade for S I00.000. shot in four weeks, and starring then-unknowns,
debuted at the Chicago Film Festival in 1986, where it caused a local stir but not much
else. The film’s obscurity was further ensured when the M otion Picture Association o f
.America gave it an "X" rating on the basis o f its "disturbing moral tone,” as opposed to
specific objectionable scenes that could be cut. and thus guaranteed that theater and video
chains would not m arket it. Henry marginally survived on the midnight-movie circuit,
simultaneously mired in legal wranglings over its "X" rating, until 1989, when The Thin
Blue Line director Errol M orris recommended that the film be shown at the Telluride Film
Festival. Surprisingly. Time then picked it as one o f the year's Ten Best, and favorable
notices appeared in national publications such as Rolling Stone. Soon, the 1986 film
became a 1990 mini-hit and critical discovery, achieving nation-wide video release and
even reaching late night cable television. Most people involved in the production o f Henry
admit they had long ago given up hope on it reaching a w ide audience, but McNaughton
apparently never had. He says, "Henry taught me a great lesson . . . If a film has power,
it’ll walk on its ow n legs eventually" (qtd. in Wilkinson 75).
Henry undeniably possesses great power as cinema, in spite o f and maybe because
o f its obvious low budget and use o f unknowm actors, although the effectively menacing
Michael Rooker in the title role has deservedly gone on to relatively high-profile,
mainstream Hollywood supporting appearances in Mississippi Burning. JFK. Cliffhanger.
and The Dark H a lf and Tom Towles (Otis) featured as the cowardly Harry Cooper in
Tom Savini's 1991 remake o f G eorge Romero’s Night o f the Living Dead. The tone o f the
film is uniformly unsettling throughout, not simply because o f the escalating numbers o f
victims (most o f w hom die offscreen) but because o f the mundane dreariness o f the
protagonists’ lives juxtaposed with the casual violence endemic to their socioeconomic
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positioning. Henry, Otis, and Becky are utterly w ithout education, job skills, o r hope o f
economic advancement. Becky is suited only to sham pooing the hair o f the w ell-off
patrons o f a dow ntow n Chicago beauty salon; Otis is a parolee who can only find
employment pumping gas at one o f the few remaining full-service gas stations; H enry is an
illiterate ex-con (he cannot read the "I Love Chicago" slogan on Becky's new T-shirt) who
drifts from part-tim e job to job with about as much frequency as he murders.
That most o f Henry’s murders are based on a non- or pre-literate rage against class
distinctions is undeniable. In fact, one o f Henry’s m ost horrifying and protracted
murderous episodes takes place in an upper middle class suburban home, directed against
a hapless nuclear-familv husband, wife, and teenage son reminiscent o f the families
murdered by Francis Dolarhyde in Harris's Red Dragon. Henry's savagery7is aiso
infectious among those who have as little to lose as H enry does, the film warns: Otis
quickly overcom es his initial resistance to killing and surpasses his mentor Henry in sheer
lustmord- and even the sweetly vulnerable Becky becom es complicit in Henry's m urder
and disposal o f Otis and thus joins Henry in outlaw status. Whether the film is in essence
an indictment o f social disparity, or a neoconservative polemic against the animalistic
lower classes, remains ambiguous. This open-endedness liberates the film from any easy
conclusions about its political agenda, and as already noted in the case o f The Silence o f
the Lambs, forces the audience to render a judgment based on a balanced overview o f the
cultural context in which the narrative exists and the internal aesthetic being postulated.
Just as Silence found itself criticized (though to a far lesser degree than most high-
profile works o f the same nature) for certain supposed political agendas, Henry found
itself castigated for its "disturbing moral tone" by the M PA A and was given one o f the few
"X" ratings assigned on the basis o f content other than sexually explicit material. The
ratings controversy over Henry's tone predated the much more intense flap over American
Psycho, but shared many o f the latter's central assumptions: the work was misogynistic.
gratuitously violent, morally objectionable, etc. John M cDonough summarizes what
seems to be the main objection the M PAA had toward Henry:
.in movies, bad seeds must still suffer, at least through a final reckoning with
their conscience. Because Henry the killer cannot feel com passion, he cannot
suffer. He is beyond the reach o f moral self-awareness. W hen he kills his
girlfriend at the end as coolly as he's dispatched a slew o f strangers, the audience is
denied its catharsis. The issue, in the eyes o f the rating board, wasn't breasts,
genitals or even violence. M ost o f Henry's killings are offscreen anyway. The
issue was the film's attitude o f neutrality toward Henry. (44)
While the film does not entirely resist the temptation to pass didactic judgm ent on H en ry -
after ail. his dissociation from his fellows is obviously coded as the most extrem e kind o f
dehumanizing alienation and thus something to be avoided—M cD onough's point is. for the
most part, valid. The film disturbs because Henry never comes to an ethical reckoning
with his own savagery. Not even the fact that Henry escapes justice at the end o f the film
is that troubling. Any number o f cinematic killers, from Michael M yers to Hannibal
Lecter. have managed to do so. generally with the audience's hearty approval. Henry does
what he does, like any predator would, and doesn’t fritter away his time wringing his hands
in ersatz remorse and regretting the waste o f his own life, let alone the lives o f others. In
short, he never visibly repents, even for a moment.
His climactic murder o f the sympathetic character Becky finishes any lingering
expectations the audience may harbor about Henry's spiritual redem ption or damnation.
While exhibiting a surprisingly old-fashioned, even prudish gallantry tow ard Becky
throughout the film, he does not hesitate to kill her when she threatens to becom e a
personal hindrance and completes the insult to audience expectation as he expressionlessly
disposes o f her dismembered corpse in a bloody suitcase by the side o f the road. This may
well be. as Peter Bates claims, "one o f the bleakest endings in film history, more downbeat
than Detour. Edgar tim e r's classic film noir" (57). (Though the com parably bleak ending
o f 1995’s Seven, which presents an audience with yet another dismembered woman in a
container and the corresponding personal and professional ruination o f her detective
husband, obviously owes a cinematic debt o f inspiration to Henry.) Unlike the audience
reaction to Chilton's imminent death at the hands o f Hannibal Lecter. no viewer is primed
to cheer for th e pathetic Becky's murder by Henry. But neither is it much o f a surprise. It
simply happens.
Given that Henry doesn’t "learn" anything about his condition other than that he
must keep moving, what is the value o f watching his fictional non-progress? Since we are
not given the in-depth psychological study impishly promised by M cNaughton's title, we
must look tow ard an examination o f the genres from which the film draws its inspirations.
We must assum e we are dealing with a less gaudy Quentin Tarantino, and proceed on that
basis. And on that basis. Henry suddenly becomes much more accessible, and its
psychological case study overtones largely irrelevant. Henry is representative o f the
nihilistic O utsider found in the genre psycho profile as I defined it in Chapter One. Unlike
his mad-scientist genre forebears, as Andrew Tudor has identified them. Henry claims no
mission, no obvious vendetta, no search for Godhood or sacrament. From a metatextual
vantage point. H enry’s audience is purposefully not given the customary "signature"
murders, which according to Jeffrey Pence "function . . . as internal allegories,
supplemental texts o f commentary to the primary text o f the serial killer’s actions" (5 3 1)
and also optimistically imply a pattern killer can be caught if a skillful enough reader, or
detective, is available. The film's decaying landscape is unbearably bleak and violent,
offering little hope and no redemption for its characters, who are not as psychologically
analyzed as the film's title might suggest. Rather, as Dave Kehr notes, Henry and his two
doomed com panions, Becky and Otis, are better understood as proletariat failures whose
lack o f intelligence, job skills, o r money consign them to marginal, squalid existences that
terminate as gracelessly as they do quickly:
Henry . . . carries little psychological resonance; his coding is more cultural or

social, marking him as a product o f a dying rural underclass, uneducated,
desperately poor, precivilized. Henry, Otis, and Becky seem the last survivors o f a
condem ned tribe, whose final migration has led them into a hostile urban
landscape. . . . It's as if M cN aughton had discovered a new kind o f m onster in
H enry no longer supernatural, no longer psychotic, but somehow sociological—
the specter o f an extinguished class. As such, there is no resisting him. no
talismans to wave o r Freudian phrases to invoke. Henry is as inevitable as history,
and indeed the film does aw ay with any notion o f suspense. (62)
And. just as history is susceptible to a multiplicity o f interpretations, so is Henry's
personal history. .As viewers, we are granted little insight into the personal history which
contributes to Henry’s present-day savagery, although we do learn from Otis that Henry
spent time in prison for killing his mother. Thus, we are primed by genre knowledge
(based primarily on Hitchcock's Psycho-) to expect a traditional blame-the-mother tirade
from Henry, and he doesn't disappoint us. In a filmic moment lifted directly from the real
Henry Lee Lucas's confessions to police, fictional Henry tells Otis's sister Becky that his
mother was a whore, and while this in and o f itself w asn't so bad. he says, she did make
him and his father watch her liaisons and made Henry wear dresses: his stated reasons for
killing her. Immediately, the film coerces the gullible viewer into seeing Henry as yet
another patriarchal avenger, out to re-em power himself in opposition to a castrating bitch-
mother-goddess (such as the one w hose desiccated, preserved corpse presides over the
cannibalistic family in Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2). But Henry himself complicates this
simple reading o f his own pathology. O ver time, he gives tw o o r three different
explanations o f how he killed his mother: with a basebali bat. a knife, a gun. Becky calls
one o f these discrepancies to Henry's attention, and Henry shrugs it off and changes his
story about the instrumentality he used to kill his mother. Why0 Is he lying about killing
her at all0 Is he lying about the manner in which he killed her? The efficacy o f the "my
momma was a whore" reason for Henry's behavior is ruined by Henry's own narrative
inconsistencies, and those in the audience influenced by genre convention to expect a
standard psychoanalytic explication o f Henry's motives are deliberately left puzzled and
floundering, such as the indignant reviewer who claims Henry is a failed dark comedy
because it does not provide "a clear commentary on the character’s actions" (Grant 367).
He does seem to have a lethal aversion to sexual contact, as his ultimately
murderous discom fort with Becky’s romantic interest in him. makes clear, but the
spectator is unable to fathom why this sexual prudery on Henry's part exists. Henry also
disapproves o f Otis's uncontrolled sexual desires, particularly his incestuous designs on his
sister Becky. O ne is tempted to trace Henry’s sexual conservatism back to the prostitute-
mother explanation again, since at least three o f Henry’s murders involve prostitutes, but a
closer reading o f the film reveals a more free-floating emotional aaxietv only tangentially
related to sexual intercourse. Henry's emotional withdrawal from Becky's sexual
advances, to the point he is able to kill her and then cut apart her body to hide it in a
suitcase, betokens an inability to connect (to say the very least) in any empathetic way to
the needs o f another.
This is not to say Henry routinely treats Becky badly, as does Otis: he even saves
her from Otis's rape by killing him. a murder she has a hand in when she stabs a comb into
her brother’s eye. She also voluntarily accedes to Henry's grisly plan to cut up Otis's body
and dump the remains in the river, rendering her even m ore complicit in Henry's crimes.
O f course, she does not know that Henry is a serial killer: to her, he has saved her from
Otis and now will rescue her from the despair o f her life. Peter Travers summarizes
Becky's feelings for Henry: "Sensing nothing o f [his] current m urderous proclivities, she
sees him as a lifeline" (69). The supreme irony in all this, o f course, is that Henry is a
perfect gentleman, whom Kim Newman calls "the most normal, well-balanced person in
the film" ("H enry" 44), right up until the point he kills Becky, thus illustrating the dangers
inherent in romantic notions that a man can save a w om an from the grimness o f daily
existence. (Oddly, this very attitude is neatly summed up by Michelle Pfeiffer's character
Catwoman in the otherw ise unremarkable Batman Returns when she scolds a woman she
has just saved from a would-be rapist: "You make it so easy for them, don't you? Always
waiting for some Batman to save you." This is the same film in which Michael Keaton as
Bruce Wayne com pares himself, intriguingly, to Ted Bundy. It will be remembered that
Patrick Bateman, the .American Psycho, is imagisticailv linked by Ellis to Batman.) The
deconstruction o f gender myth is central to the kind o f American neo-Gothicism
exemplified by writers such as Tennessee Williams, whom McNaughton cites as a key
influence (M cDonough 45).
A nother irony is that Henry as neo-Gothic seducer is dangerously attractive in the
traditional mode but sexless. He resists Becky's physical overtures and seems more
relieved than embarrassed when Otis drunkenly catches them and thus concludes the
threatening encounter. During none o f this does Henry express any hostility toward
Beckv. (This has the effect o f skewing audience sympathy toward Henry and away from
the loutish, incestuous Otis, whose death the audience is invited to cheer but
simultaneously kept from doing so by its painfully graphic nature~a master stroke on
M cNaughton's part.) He seems to genuinely appreciate Becky's gentleness and love for
him. even mouths the ambiguous words "I guess 1 love you too" to her. but when the
potential bond to her threatens to arrest his downward spiraling momentum, he kills her
and moves on without betraying any reaction to this m ost personal o f his murders.
Henry is indeed inscrutable, as Peter Bates notes: "Henry . . . appears to take no
pleasure in killing. There are no shots o f his face after any o f the murders, thus no clues to
what he feels afterwards" (57). If any meaning or pattern can be assigned to his murder
series, the audience cannot rely on Henry, or even the creators o f the film, for that matter.
This is why Henry does not structure its subject m atter in terms o f detective or police
procedural conventions. The detective o r police officer’s basically optimistic insistence on
sign-reading in order to infer pattern simply will not w ork with Henry. As he proudly
advises his protege Otis to emulate (even showing o ff his knowledge o f the Latin phrase
modus operandi and taking offense at Otis's "big fuckin' deal" response), he consciously
varies his weapons, victim selection, and MO from m urder to murder so that police sign-
reading will not be able to track him. Only bad luck or self-destruction can stop him. No
outside moral agency is capable o f saving his victims; in fact, society doesn’t even seem
aw are o f Henry’s predations. The only representative o f the criminal justice system in the
film, Otis's probation officer, is a disinterested bureaucrat w hose heavy caseload and
general indifference to his clients allow Otis, and by extension his friend Henry, to
circumvent supervision at will. Henry moves in silent anonymity and with impunity The
film appears (superficially, anyway, though the ominous, music paired with Henry on the
prowl reeks o f standard horror-film narrative coaching) to impose no judgm ent o r sanction
upon him. a quality which led to its "X" rating. Henry simply is, going now here and
everywhere at once. In this quality, Henry may be more honest to its subject, or at least
more intellectually compelling, than its big-budget. glossy Hollywood counterparts like
The Silence o f the Lambs, as Martin Rubin argues in his analysis o f five psycho-profile
films (The Honeymoon Killers. Badlands. The Boys Next D oor. M urder O ne, and Henry).
Rather than provide cathartic resolution, as Silence does, and at least some qualified
restoration o f a reassuring status quo, Henry simply departs from its still-free subject at
the film's conclusion, and the serial continues offscreen. Rubin elaborates on the uniquely-
disturbing qualities o f films like Henry:
The characters just seem to wind down, overcome by exhaustion and inertia . .
The films end with the main characters left in a limbo o f disconnection and
suspension . . . these films are [also] centered on a position with w'hich it is difficult
to sympathize but which we cannot get outside. Their inaccessible protagonists
stand in contrast to the ambivalently sympathetic outlaws and psychopaths o f Gun
Crazy. Peeping Tom. Psycho. Bonnie and Clyde, etc. On the other hand, the films
are not centered on the side o f normality, with the inscrutable killer positioned as
an external threat, as in Cape Fear. Experiment in T error. Sleeping with the
Enemy, and the most characteristic stalker/slasher movies. We remain at nearly all
times on the killers’ side o f the narrative. The realm o f "normal values” is not only
distant but is often regarded by the criminal protagonists with a kind o f sneering
disdain which the films make it difficult to discredit entirely. (56)
A film like Henry stands at an ironic distance from not only mainstream values but the
conventions o f genre itself while never truly departing from any o f them. Contem pt for
traditional systems is present, but neither is the killer's agenda validated. Devin
McKinney, though finally critical o f the film, lauds its overall tone: "It stands at just the
right distance from its subject, never enforcing a sociologically judgm ental thesis" (19).
Terrence Rafferty, clearly frustrated by this same ambiguity, petulantly concludes that the
film, "both hip and deeply conservative, is consistent only its bad faith" (91). As the latter
comment illustrates, the film is deliberately hard to read, though its landscape remains
enigmatically cluttered w ith portents suggestive o f disaster (again, however, not clearly
so).
For example, early on in Henry, the camera pulls back from a close-up shot o f
Becky gutting a fish in the kitchen sink and discussing the absent Henry with Otis. It is an
uncomfortable scene to w atch, not only because o f its narrative foreshadowing o f Becky's
fate but simply because the sight o f the knife slicing through the obviously real fish’s
entrails is deeply unpleasant. Why should this be so0 Cleaning a fish is a relatively
ordinary task. But in the doggedly realistic landscape o f Henry, a look enhanced by the
film’s painfully obvious low budget and use o f unknown actors, the casual levels o f
violence associated even w ith the actions o f doomed Becky, a natural-born victim if ever
there was one. suggest the omnipresence o f brutality rumbling underneath even the most
prosaic o f encounters. O tis leers at Becky, taunts her about her husband Leroy when she
asks him not to, orders her to wait on him. and eventually rapes her. Becky herself guts a
fish as competently as Henry dismembers his dead friend Otis or would-be lover Becky
later in the film. Henry and Otis calmly discuss the do's and dont's o f serial killing while
videotaping a mugging o f one homeless man by two others that no one interferes with.
No one notices that Henry and Otis are killing a string o f people: two prostitutes, an
obnoxious fencer o f stolen goods, a good-Samaritan motorist, a suburban nuclear family
(probably the scene that threatened to give Henry its X-rating). The fact that violence is
so pervasive and unquestioned, just part o f the scenery, lends Henry an oddly muted tone
in spite o f its gorier moments, a tone which Pete Boss distinguishes as pivotal to
contemporary horror:
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The bodily destruction o f the modem horror film is . . . often casual to the point o f
randomness; devoid o f metaphysical import, it is frequently squalid, incidental to
the main action, mechanically routine in its execution and lonely but for the
unwavering scrutiny o f the lens as it seeks out details o f broken bodies. (16)
Though speaking o f 1970s "splatter" like Catch-22 and Jaws. Boss could also be referring
to McNaughton's dispassionate inspection o f Henry's murder victims, who have been
variously shot, stabbed, strangled, clubbed, o r punctured with broken bottles and then left
in seedy hotel rooms, ditches, and rivers. Their savaged bodies seem intrinsic to the
generally deteriorated lower-middle class suburbs o f Chicago, an effect M cNaughton
achieves by keeping the victims’ deaths offstage and then casually panning over what's left.
His camera does not flinch from the brutalized flesh, but he does not titillate as many
directors o f iesser ability might decide to do. Even the surrealist touches—distant
background screams and Henry's echo-chamber "killing" voice yelling things like "Die.
bitch!"--aurally superimposed over these unflinching views o f m urder victims do not lead
the audience in the same heavy-handed way they have come to expect from the "slasher"
genre. There are also no heroic FBI profilers chasing through the Gothic landscape to
save the endangered American family in Henry Instead. Henry and Otis make their own
snuff-movie o f the proceedings wherein they murder an entire family, and it is this second
hand, grainy, in-and-out-of-focus representation o f the murder scene that the audience
actually sees.
As another key postmodern concern, the technology o f representation com es in for
a subtly devastating critique in Henry; even Henry himself isn't comfortable being in front
o f the video camera, which they have stolen from the dead stolen-goods dealer. Otis,
whose limited mentality cannot fill up his leisure time without a television set anyway
("Shit. I's gots to have a TV"), takes an immediate liking to the camera, and tapes his
sister and Henry dancing, much to Henry’s discomfort: obvious even filtered through the
unsteady video image and grainy film stock o f Henry itself. Otis's art direction to his
actors consists entirely o f shouts o f "More!": he insists they keep dancing even when both
sit down on the couch to escape his Mulvevan camera gaze, which metaphorically violates
his sister long before he does so in actuality. Otis as an auteur leaves much to be desired,
and this dance set piece is deliberately paralleled to the tape that Henry makes o f his and
Otis's invasion o f the suburban house. (This is yet another evocation o f Harris's
Dolarhyde. who films the murders o f the Leedses and Jacobis.) The "home movie" that
Otis and Henry compose, in spite o f its undisputed status as "probably the scariest home-
movie footage ever to make it to the big screen" (Wilkinson 75), is another moronicallv
directed piece o f w ork that continually and. even worse, unintentionally violates its own
boundaries, with Henry shouting another set o f off-stage directions to his eager but
hammishly amateurish "star" Otis and having to drop the camera in mid-scene and enter
the picture frame to chase down the murdered couple's teenage son and break his neck.
(Oddly, it is at this shocking point that Henry paradoxically elicits audience sympathy by
preventing Otis from sexually molesting the dead woman's body: a classic example o f
what Kenneth Burke calls "perspective by incongruity ") But Henry and Otis’s film's
subject matter is so inherently sensational that one is forced to pay attention to it.
One supposes this snuff movie within a movie to be John McNaughton's self
reflexive commentary on the lurid nature o f his own movie, which may at times resemble
the unintentional monochrom e drabness o f Henry's movie but never partakes o f its
dehumanizing, misogynistic, egocentric point o f view, in spite o f Amy Taubin’s assertion
that the film becomes all o f these things at precisely this point (17). (Taubin must not
have watched M cNaughton's film too closely, as she makes a point o f lamenting Becky’s
narrative reduction to object but herself does not get Becky's name right. She calls her
"Luanne.") Henry as a film may disturb because it refuses to narratively "punish" Henry
according to genre convention (though one could argue his emotional dissociation, never
more evident than in his callous destruction o f Becky, is an ongoing punishment o f a sort
probably too psychologically subtle to be appreciated by many in the audience), but it does
not exploit.
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Rather, it critiques audience expectations o f genre and finds them nearly as
disturbing as H enry’s acts o f wilding against his fellow humans. M ost o f the standard
touchstones o f genre narrative are present in this film: the foreboding horror-film music,
the doomed girlfriend, the drifter on the road, the male-bonding subplot, and so on. We as
knowledgable viewers recognize these moments and anticipate certain plot developments
as a result. W hen normally that plot develops according to our expectations, we are
content with its rote familiarity: but Henry continually disappoints in this regard. The
horror-film music builds to a crescendo where nothing happens (note, for example, the
disjunctively long scene where a prowling Henry drives a car dow'n a highway off-ramp to
ominous soundtrack accompaniment); Becky's off-screen death is frustratinglv neutral in
tone; Henry's road joum ev is not a flight to or from anything; Otis and Henry's alliance is
brief and undeveloped. W atching this film presents the genre-conscious viewer (and who
isn’t0) with a number o f false starts and red herrings, creating an uncertainty that is crucial
to M cNaughton's insistence that signs cannot be reliably read. Just as Henry evades
detection, the film eludes analysis or categorization. And it does so in a carefully crafted,
aesthetically consistent fashion that American Psycho does not. The film painstakingly,
even conscientiously, presents to its audience a postmodern American murderer in full
wilding mode.
Conclusion
The American 1980s revived a careworn ideological apparatus o f frontier self-reliance and
nationalism which only the decade before many people had assumed to be hopelessly
irrelevant to m odem existence in a global marketplace. Certain perceived threats, e.g.,
communism, Satanism, drugs, serial murder, etc., were correspondingly demonized in
order to establish cultural bogeymen against which the state could unite and thus restore
traditional .American ideological boundaries. Through this unfication. the state could
further entrench its political and economic agendas in the collective mind o f its compliant
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subjects. Bret Easton Ellis and John M cNaughton. observing the current fascination with
and fear o f serial murderers as one o f those societal threats, decided to portray the
bogeymen in term s decidedly subversive o f mainstream values. Instead o f society's
inexplicably evil outcasts. Patrick Bateman and Henry are instead its most logical products
and indeed rely on American ideology and technology for their murderous success.
Through a common link to conservative ideology, the distance between murderer and
voyeuristic spectator is erased. Though at opposite ends o f the economic hierarchy,
Bateman and Henry share the .American embrace o f violence, or wilding, as an appropriate
response to alienation and disempowerment. Bateman suffers from a crisis o f not only
identity but epistemology itself and so literally strikes out in mechanical frustration against
those disenfranchised people his peers victimize financially or sexually. Henry, on the
other hand, is not so "intellectual" or privileged; rather, he kills anyone who impedes his
aimless drifting through the rurai underbelly o f rustbeit .America. In either case, these two
murderers illustrate more clearly than any in Harris’s contem poraneous work the political
milieu in which the "serial killer" was defined. Thus, while Gothic elements remain in
Ellis's book and M cNaughton's film, particularly the cam ivalesque erasure o f boundary,
the primary emphasis falls on just what constitutes an .American psycho. The "political"
serial killer, however, proved too controversial for mainstream audience acceptability, so
in the final chapter o f this study. I will examine how more mythic, and hence apolitical,
interpretations o f multiple murder dominated the next w ave o f serial-killer spectaculars in
the early- to mid-1990s.
C hapter Five: Apocalypse and Myth in the 1990s Serial-Killer Narrative
A fitting way to end this study is to look at three complementary, hugely ambitious, and
quintessentiallv postmodern films o f murder, apocalypse, and myth—Oliver Stone's 1994
Natural B om Killers. Dominic Sena's 1993 film Kalifomia- and Bernard Rose's 1992 film
Candyman. I have previously noted that the Gothic tale o f murder transmogrified into the
1980s serial-killer "penny dreadfuls" o f the past decade, and with the release o f these
1990s films the implied social apocalypse o f earlier serial-murder treatments is now an
overtly aesthetic one as well. Perhaps the primary' concern the three films share is the neo-
Gothic effacement o f boundary, wherein representation becomes reality and vice versa and
lovers becom e gender terrorists. As I will argue, this diffusion constitutes a "virtual"
apocalypse o f imagistic chaos: an amorphous flux which the postmodern murderers have
no choice but to embrace, but also against which they struggle to pierce with actions o f
extreme physicalitv. including murder. The goal is to establish a stable identity, which
tragically can only be reached through a mythic existence that transcends the destabilizing
change inherent in the temporal. Ritual, repeat murder is the strategy these primitive
postmodems choose in order to grasp eternity. Disturbingly, in the case o f Natural Bom
Killers. Kalifomia. and Candyman, the strategy' seems to eventually work for the multiple
murderers, which compels other searchers for identity in the narrative to follow their leads
to an alarming degree.
It appears that in these narratives, there is no such thing as a distant o r "safe"
spectator to murder, particularly if that spectator is male. The separation between murder
and non-murderer narrows to a very nearly indistinguishable point, in an inchoate narrative
movement inaugurated by Gothic convention and given fullest manifestation in the
postmodern breakdown o f the traditional distance between the producer o f a text, or
author, and its consumer, or reader. In the latest multiple-murderer narrative cycle, o f
which these three films are representative, everybody "kinda becomes bad" because there
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are no privileged zones o f saving illusion: zones where nobility, altruism, and love exist.
O r if they do exist, they can only be reached by extreme physical violence, whose
inescapable immediacy erases all intermediary thought, modes o f interpretation, conflicting
ideologies, and so on. Narrative strategies are specifically tailored to implicate the
reader/consum er into the writer/producer’s violent project o f smashing through barriers in
a paradoxical attem pt to achieve moments o f pure insight.
Thus, the political overtones that shape Harris's work. M cNaughton’s film, and
Ellis's novel are subordinate to the aesthetics o f apocalypse characteristic o f the latest
w ave o f 1990s serial-killer films. Distressingly, characters like Mickey Knox. Early
Grayce. and the Candyman are apt spokesmen for the violent postmodernist, precisely
because they murder again and again in an idiosyncratic attempt to bring down a wider
cultural apocalypse in which all historical and political complexities are burnt away in an
eternal moment o f personal revelation. The narratives these multiple murderers populate
likewise enact a kind o f literary apocalypse wherein aesthetics and genre melt down and
re-coalesce into intriguing, if extreme, new forms. Politics does play a part in the
structuring o f these texts, but only insofar that the characters within attempt to divorce
themselves from context and live in the eternal present o f myth.
It is thus not a contradiction to call these kinds o f texts "levelers o f boundary" and
in the same breath "political.” After all. "apocalypse" is an imaginative attempt to
transcend the localized, time-bound complexities o f sociopolitical history. Yet. since the
conception o f one cannot exist without the existence o f the other, it follows that even in
the most apocalyptically and mythically minded texts, at least some sense o f the history
they are reacting against will be found "betw een the lines." In self-reflexive genre films
like Natural B om Killers. Kalifomia. o r Candyman- one does not have to look too far.
The Candymaris monstrous existence stems from the American history o f white-on-black
violence and the contemporary ghettoization o f urban black America. (I will return to
Candyman later in this chapter, as it presents us with a special case.) Stone's and Sena's
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films are "white-trash" epics centered around the m urderous cross-country exploits o f tw o
unrepentantly mass-murdering, lower-class male protagonists and their more ambivalently
characterized param ours (both superbly played by the sam e actress, Juliette Lewis, who
can project adolescent vulnerability and petulant rage at will). Kalifomia's serial killer.
Early Gravce, is a snorting, leering, uneducated, beer-swilling, "killbilly hick from hell"
(Darke 46) who nevertheless achieves moments o f transcendental awareness, which in his
unlettered Jim Morrison-inspired vocabulary he can only call entering the "doors o f
perception." via the ultimately transgressive act o f murder. Similarly, "killbilly" M ickey
Knox, the demon lover o f Natural Bom Killers, kills dozens o f people because o f his
"Nietzschean" belief that murder is the purest expression o f an undeniable human will to
aggression (according to Oliver Stone in an interview with Gavin Smith, page 12). Within
the fractured narratives they inhabit, both m urderers rise from the lower end o f the
socioeconomic spectrum and embody the standard wisdom that mass murderers are
typically white males whose egomaniacal pride often exceeds their educational level and
general employability. Mickey Knox is a superm arket delivery boy (in Stone's surreal
visual register, a blood-drenched Meatman hauling sacks o f butchered flesh); Early G ravce
is a recent parolee who cannot hold a job in a m irror factory and whose only real
employment prospect is janitorial work at the local college. There is implied here at least
a marginal connection between disempowerment and murder, but the tw o narratives are
clearly not concerned with complex sociology so much as they are expressionistic
demonization o f the disenfranchised, characteristic o f the neoconservative mindset I
xamined earlier.
Unlike Henry, which paid token lip service to the plight o f the uneducated and
unskilled w orking class, Kalifomia and Natural B om Killers exaggerate the already
overblown audience stereotypes o f the poor, rural, and white laboring classes for the
purpose not only o f political satire but o f Gothic melodrama, which I have already
identified as a key component o f this kind o f narrative. One is immediately struck by
Mickey and Early's exaggerated Southern accents, their to m T-shirts, their wild and/or
greasy long hair and sometimes-ponv tails, their folksy colloquialisms ("does that meet to
your satisfication*7" Early drawls to Brian), their hawking and spitting and armpit
scratching, their unlettered right-wing philosophies o f force, their rustic paranoia o f cities
and authority. Early, in particular, possesses a suspicious distrust o f the government and
corporate sectors, believing that covert missions to the m oon are happening "all the time"
and that the standard nutritional advice to "eat a good breakfast" is propaganda put forth
by "the cereal people:" certainly a terrible pun in the context o f a serial-killer film. (Early
and Mickey's laughable ignorance does not mitigate against their lethality, however: in
some ways, their unsophistication lends a primal force to their argument-bv-action.) By
such lampooning, these films reassure at least some members o f a middle-class audience,
i.e.. the consumer cereal people, that their discom fort with visible representatives o f the
"white trash" culture is not borne out o f irrational prejudice but judicious discretion.
On a more literary level, one is also reminded o f Richard Slotkin’s assertion that
the .American frontiersman, once heroic in his uncivilized status, has been reformulated by
the modem horror genres into a threatening, anarchic character representing the
primordial impulses that must be repressed by civilization; "Early Gravce" and Mickey
Knox are pre-civilized in dress and manner in such a way as to be reminiscent o f American
heroes o f past eras, fiercely individualistic, physically exceptional, and utterly out o f place
in modem urban society. They are the genre descendants o f such horror-film characters as
the degraded, cannibalistic family o f The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, o f which Tony
Williams writes:
Like most contemporary horror films. [TCM ] confirms the worst fears o f the
Puritans. The slaughterhouse family represent the ultimate degeneration o f the
pioneers, who w ere believed to be in danger o f succumbing to the dark forces o f
the wilderness. They are also the spiritual descendants o f those debased
communities noted by Crevecoeur. As the Puritans saw in the Indians a dark
mirror image o f themselves, so the family is a macabre parallel to the affluent
youths in the film. (Chainsaw 121
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W hether this "killer hick" characterization common to the horror genre (including such
mainstream breakthroughs as Deliverance! is ultimately self-ironic and hence helpful in
undermining (not exploiting) established stereotypes o f the rural poor is an open question.
The possibility remains, however, that Early and Mickey, as extreme examples o f
the return o f the repressed, usefully serve to unsettle com fortable bourgeois assumptions,
liberal and conservative, about the proper treatment o f .America's disadvantaged. I have
already focused on this debate as a discordant note in the 1980s celebration o f capitalism,
and it could well be that in the 1990s we are seeing m ore and more violent
representations, fictional and otherwise, o f the socioeconomic frustration that dares not
speak its name in the still prevailing mood o f unwillingness to criticize one’s own ideology
even while suffering under its structural inequities. (Is there any other way to account for
presidential candidate Pat Buchanan's recent spasm o f popularity among elements o f the
Republican party'1) But these polemical texts lack any coherent political agenda. Rather,
they partake o f a representational strategy that levels all political disputes into one howling
cry o f paranoid, frustrated rage. Natural Bom Killers, and Kalifomia to a lesser extent,
are tw o such apolitical political films: a pardoxical brew o f dialectical slipperiness which
can be called postmodern. Its signature mood is one o f frustration.
This frustration is only exacerbated by the overwhelming mass o f conflicting
viewpoints, contradictory narratives, and colliding images available in contemporary
modes o f information transmission, which in the aggregate w e call "the media." For some,
there seems very little point anymore in entering into political dialogue, as there is simply
too much complex information and irreconcilable perspectives to be accounted for given
the demands on one's time. According to those such as Baudrillard, we are lost in a
funhouse w orld o f inflationary images that have no real connection to or warrant in reality:
no "gold standard" or "-backing," as it were. For some, the only alternative to
representational inflation is destruction: to blow' things up and revel in the sheer spectacle
and immediate sensory awareness o f the undisciplined release o f energy. Image
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proliferation may de-center one's interpretive reality, but violence re-centers it by
obliterating, how ever briefly, the linguistic constructs by which we define reality.
Violence or any other extrem e physical activity is a last-ditch survival strategy on the part
o f the human mind to save itself from becoming hopelessly mired in its own imaging
project and thus irrevocably divorced from a saving certainty. As Larry Gross concludes:
"Violence is a secondary symptom o f a primary disease, the sheer pollution o f
representational imagery" (12). This simulacratic pollution is the tw entieth century's
apocalypse, at least according to Stone and Sena.
Aesthetic Armageddon: Natural Bom Killers (1994)
Oliver Stone addresses head-on the issue o f postmodern image pollution in Natural Bom
Killers His film is now notorious not so much for its violence (which was largely trimmed
from the final release anyway) but its assault on representational overload. Dispensing
almost entirely with traditional Hollywood reliance on an emotionally gripping linear plot
and engaging characters. Stone instead concentrates on giving his audience an aesthetic
experience (as opposed to an emotional one) whose only tangential emotional affect is
comprised o f disorientation and weariness. He compresses multiple genre films and media
formats into the film's tw o-hour running time: the cross-country road movie, the
superhero cartoon, the m onster movie, the prison-riot movie, the outlaw couple movie,
the police procedural, the "reality TV" re-enactments, the tabloid prison interview, even
the half-hour family sitcom complete with laughtrack, applause on cue, commercials, and
credits (the I Love Mallory sequence). The audience seeks in vain for the reassurance o f a
steady camera movement, a consistent film stock from scene to scene o r even within the
same scene, a stable cam era angle, a scene with only a few cuts o r no distracting clutter o f
background and foreground special effects. Self parodic references to other genre films
(including Scarface and Midnight Express, both o f which Stone scripted) fly by so fast that
one is only aw are that he/she has just missed something. No one is certain what is reality
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and what is hallucination for the on-screen characters, especially during a mystical desert
interlude when M ickey consum es hallucinogenic mushrooms and embarks on a vision-
quest into his own troubled past, a sequence which m ore properly belongs in Stone's
previous The Doors than this film. Stephen Schiff says o f all this visual disjunctiveness:
". . . you feel as though you w ere seeing [Mickey and Mallory’s] conscious and their
unconscious lives and the forces that formed them, all at once" (46).
The result is an uneven film at best, though one can hardly fault it for its ambition.
It strives to achieve the ironic distance so dear to modernist aesthetics through its visually
hyperkinetic bludgeoning o f the frustrated viewer into, finally, numbness. That in the
technoculture age o f plentiful visual spectacle Stone is able to achieve a mass-audience
effect typically reserved for aficionados o f modernist a n is no small accomplishment, but
one almost wonders if it w as worth it and if the means justify the end. For one thing.
Stone's signature moralizing is more pronounced here than usual, perhaps because he
justly feared that conservative critics would take him to task for the film's sensationalism,
and this tends to offset any ironic effect he achieves. For example, the Native .American
visionary whom Mickey and Mallory inexplicably encounter in the wasteland occupies a
privileged moral position in the narrative; he clearly "sees.” without a hint o f irony on
Stone's part, that Mickey is an actual demon while Mallory, suffering from "sad sickness"
and "lost in a world o f ghosts." has just watched too much damn TV. The Native
American is also a true prophet. While dying, he tells Mickey: "Twenty years ago I saw
the demon in my dreams. I was waiting for you." The audience is obviously meant to
accept his reading as authentic, especially since Mickey's unintentional murder o f the seer
in a hallucinogenic panic leads not only to the killer couple's renunciation o f meaningless
murder but their immediate capture.
Just as the romanticized, "primitive" Native American is outside the scope o f
Stone's indictment o f popular media, so too, it is implied, is the brutish Mickey. These are
sublime characters, one light and one dark, and their sentimentalized portraiture does not
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sit well in the midst o f Stone's accusatory tract. The Native American is absolved o f all
blame in the hyperreal proceedings, and oddly, M ickey is too, a point Stuart Klawans
makes: " . . . M ickey's evil isn't just a shadow o f the media after all. His evil must be
something absolute, something that escapes the media" ("Killers" 285). So, in spite o f his
cribbing o f tough-guy lines from pop-culture texts ("Let's make some music, Colorado,"
he says just before blasting Wayne Gale), which misleads us into thinking he is as media-
brainwashed as sitcom-viewer Mallory, Mickey can be read as a demon o f apocalypse:
not necessarily Christian (though Christian images o f the Beast, the number 666, the
horned devil, and so on are obviously present as a p an o f the continuum o f the
iconography o f evil) so much as pre-civilization. Because he is outside human agency, he
also manages to relieve us o f culpability, and thus the need for self-correction, in some o f
the narrative goings-on. Significantly, Mallory is also excluded from Mickey's homosocial
mystical interlude, capable only o f standing outside the sacred hoop and berating M ickey
in stereotypical nagging-wife style ("Bad!" "Bad!" "Bad!") when he fails his vision-quest.
In terms o f the Robin W ood formula earlier cited, the presence o f these two extra-human
and hvper-masculine characters renders Natural Bom Killers at times into a reactionary,
misogynistic tale at odds with its own reform-minded agenda.
Yet this is not the most damaging criticism o f the film. After all. as I have argued,
the reactionary and progressive elements in any complex w ork are constantly shifting,
trading off. intermixing. Mallory's character, for example, offers a sympathetic and
surprisingly feminist critique o f masculine pathology, according to Fuchs (65). No, what
hurts Natural B om Killers the most is its over-reliance on its technocratic gimmickry,
which makes it "the most sensationalistic attack ever made on sensationalism" (Powers
296). Just as Bret Easton Ellis's .American Psycho manages to be a boring, splat-toonish
work in the end because o f its slavish recreation o f Bateman's boring, splat-toonish
mentality, so too does Stone's film exemplify the narrative danger o f the imitative fallacy.
Its studied simulation o f channel-surfing becomes just another exercise in channel surfing,
to paraphrase Nick James. James elaborates:
For all the hallucinogenic frenzy with which this film shuffles the full range o f
image-gathering options, it is a curiously second-hand experience. Its pictorial
exuberance feels forced, a slap-dash imitation o f music video and infotainment
style. . . . Stone is clearly so afraid that his audience won't get the fact that he's
engaged in parody, that he restates everything over and over, repeatedly cutting
from wielded gun. to reacting victim, to entry wound, to gun again. (45)
Again, the net effect is to render the audience weary o f the film's subject, simply because
Stone's imagistic complexities are clearly impossible to keep pace with and the viewer
consequently gives up all the decoding or character-identification strategies so often a p an
o f the viewing experience. Paradoxically, it is exactly this kind o f narrative dehumanizing
process that Stone attacks. Added to this is a lack o f thematic unity, which Christopher
Sharrett notes: "The movie's confusion makes it enervating and passionless, surprising for
an Oliver Stone project, but this flows naturally from the director's failure to find a single.
focused concept and a style to carry it" (Killers 84). The collage o f images becomes the
story, rather than a support for the story. On the basis o f this fetishization o f technique.
John Simon concludes: "[the film] is manifestly far too enamored o f what it pretends to
satirize, even if it knew how to do it" (72). As is evident from these negative critical
assessments. Stone is injured here by his embarrassment o f images, which are so
vertiginous as to be nearly ineffectual. There is clearly a guiding talent at sporadic w ork
here, but tow ard what end0
One end, perhaps, is to produce the ultimate neo-Gothic thriller. Mickey and
Mallory's demonic courtship and marriage, com plete with a blasphemous exchange o f
blood vows over a global vista which M ickey calls "my world," is the literal culmination o f
a metaphoric trend already noted in the Gothic romance: the mating o f the Shadow and
the Maiden into one murderous hybrid. M allory does not begin this narrative as a killer;
rather, it is her seduction by Mickey that transforms her into first a patricide and then a
spree killer. During the "[ Love Mallory” flashback. M allory is presented as a waif-like
innocent whose skimpy attire nevertheless hints at her sexual desire for a male who can
rescue her from the domestic prison established by her sexually abusive father. Just like
Young Charlie's, her desires are soon fulfilled by the appearance o f her "dream" man—in
this case. M ickey the "meatman." who significantly asks Mallory if she is a "big meat
eater." Mallory indicates her willingness to assum e Mickey's predatory nature through her
replv: "I could be." Their spontaneous romance sets into motion what plot there is in the
film: the stealing o f the family car which lands M ickey in prison, his subsequent jailbreak
through divine intervention in the dual forms o f a concealing whirlwind and rattlesnakes
that attack the pursuing guards, his Charles Starkw eather-like liberation o f Mallory
through the killing o f her parents, and the fifty-plus-victim killing rampage that follows.
Their union thus unleashes a personal apocalypse upon the land, as Mallory envisions in
response to M ickey’s assertion that the end o f the world is nigh: "I see angels, Mickey.
They're cornin' dow n to us from heaven. And I see you ridin' a big red horse. . . And I
see the future. There’s no death, because you and I are angels." As Wayne Gale
summarizes, they tear "up the countryside with a vengeance right out o f the bible."
Through Mickey and Mallory’s multi-state m urder spree, the linkage o f sexuality and death
inherent in the neo-Gothic is given particularly lurid form here.
.Another neo-Gothic element present in th e film is the doubling between villain and
observer. O f course, Mallory is the female m irror to Mickey, but others in the narrative
also embrace his methods. Jack Scagnetti, homicide detective, allows his spectator's
hatred for killers (originating in his childhood witnessing o f the shooting o f his m other by
tower-sniper Charles Whitman) to transform him into a psychopathic obsessive who sees
no contradiction between his loathing o f criminality and the pleasure he takes not only in
his vigilante style o f manhunting but in the near-strangling o f prostitutes. When asked by
Warden McClusky how he became an "expert" on psychopaths. Scagnetti elaborates:
I'd recom mend having your mother killed by one. After that happened, I
developed a rather keen interest in the subject. I was bom and spent the first part
o f my life in Texas. . . . one day, I was with my m other and we went to play in the
park. Just so happened to be the same day Charles Whitman climbed to the top o f
the University o f Texas tower and started shootin' strangers. . . . The thing is,
Dwight. I didn't hear any o f the shots. I didn't hear any of'em . One minute I'm
walking with my mother and all o f a sudden her chest explodes. She hits the
ground. I'm just lookin' at her and her forearm flies off. her hip explodes, and I'm
not hearin' any o f the shots, right? . . And ever since then I've had a strong
opinion about the psychopathic fringe that thrives today in America's fast food
culture. I tend not to exhibit the self discipline, v’know, becoming o f a peace
officer.
This, o f course, is a gross understatement o f Scagnetti's willingness to transgress the law
he is sworn to enforce. He is a willing conspirator in McClusky’s equally extra-legal plot
to transfer M ickey and Mallory from the prison to a psychiatric hospital for evaluation, at
which time Scagnetti will manufacture an excuse to shoot them. Scagnetti’s childhood
trauma o f witnessing the puzzling, soundless dismemberment o f his mother has given him
a reservoir o f helpless rage, which like Mickey’s agonizing memories o f childhood
disempowerment. expresses itself in adult over-compensation. As in most o f the
procedural narratives I have examined, Scagnetti's character is a double for the killer he
pursues: three o f the most obvious examples include the title o f his shamelessly self-
promotional book ("Scagnetti on Scagnetti"). which initiates the doppelganger theme for
the viewer, his abuse o f the prostitute in a hotel room visually similar to the hotel room in
which Mickey rapes and kills a female hostage; and his barely concealed sexual desire for
Mallory, which ultimately leads him to place himself in a fatally vulnerable position quickly
exploited by M allory's lethal hands. The message conveyed by Scagnetti is that we are all
latent psychopaths (especially males, but as the character o f Mallory Knox demonstrates,
women are only slightly less susceptible), and it takes only an inspired mentor to bring that
latency roaring to life. Mickey Knox, in an interview with tabloid reporter Wayne Gale
that sparks a riot in the incendiary atmosphere o f the tyrant McClusky’s prison,
summarizes this attitude:
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Everybody's got the demon in here, okay [pointing to his breast]. The demon lives
in here. It feeds on your hate. It cuts, kills, rapes. It gives you your weakness,
vour fear. Only the vicious survive. W e're all told we're no good pieces o f shit
from the time we can breathe. After awhile, you kinda becom e bad.
The demon is M ickey's metaphor for the inborn human desire to kill, but he also posits it
to be an essentially innocent instrument o f survival: it is the culture represented by Wayne
Gale that twists it into an image o f something evil and perverse, to be vicariously
experienced by an audience that has repressed its m urderous impulses but nevertheless
retains the collective memory o f the hunt.
This study o f negotiated voyeurism is what salvages Stone's film, according to
Cynthia Fuchs: its "fairly sophisticated analysis o f the relationship between media
producers and consumers" (64). That is. rather than merely a simplistic diatribe against
the corrupting evils o f the panoptic mass media, the film is m oreso an examination o f the
multiple contem poraneous realities negotiated at the ever-shifting moment o f intersection
betw een the producer o f the image and the consum er o f it. This not only applies to the
American M aniacs "zombie" viewers (Wayne Gale's contem ptuous term for those he
panders to) who voyeuristically populate the film's fictional landscape, but to the actual
audiences watching a film by Oliver Stone called Natural Bom Killers who are expected to
possess the necessary pop-cultural knowledge to decode its array o f loaded but
nevertheless enigmatic images. One must know film and television genres to understand
what Stone is up to. One must know who Tonya Harding, David Korresh. Lorena
Bobbitt, and O.J. Simpson are to watch this film. There is even a replication o f the
infamous Rodney-King-beating videotape during the scene outside the Drug Zone store
where Mickey is subdued by a relentless police barrage o f fists, clubs, and Taser blasts.
One is reminded o f Eliot's "The Wasteland" in terms o f the extra-textual knowledge the
consumer is expected to bring to the narrative in order to make any sense o f its
lamentations. T he only real difference (and it is a major one. o f course) between the two
representational wastelands is that Stone’s has to deal with the intellectual devastation and
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reality transformation wrought by decades o f television programming. This is such an
obvious target, yet an unavoidable one, that even though a sleaze-TV monger like Wayne
Gale is a narrative prerequisite for Stone's analysis, the .American Maniacs sequences are
the film’s weakest. It is humorous but not exactly a revelation when Gale tells his editor
that "Repetition works. Do you think those nitwits out there in zombieland remember
anything'7 It's junk food for the brains. It's filler. Fodder. Whatever."
One o f the film's stronger points is not its trashing o f trash TV. but rather its study
o f the true social power a multiple m urderer achieves in the mass-media age. It is too easy
to say that his glamorization promotes "copycat" violent actions, as all too many
superficial critics o f the media insist. The superstar criminal's potency is more subtle than
that. It is the power to influence the evolution o f the aesthetics o f a culture. As he is a
modernist, the murderer will consistently fail because he attem pts to enact what amounts
to an avant-garde aesthetic in a culture that doesn’t have the time, attention span, historical
knowledge, and memory to devote to a comprehensive assessment o f the project. But as
he is a postmodernist, he will achieve a mediated social success because he has lowered his
sights, so to speak. The fact that he will be ostensibly hated is a small price to pay. since
he is more concerned with the visible manifestations o f power, and people with the power
to control are often hated. As technological revisions o f modes o f communication have
reduced the time lag between deed and cultural transmission throughout the last two
centuries, the murderer may be assured o f controlling through fear and dread more people
than has been possible in previous historical eras. (One reason for Jack the Ripper’s
relative immortality, for example, was the extensive initial coverage granted his crimes by
a newly flourishing mass press.) It may be hard to offend G od anymore, what with
lightning bolts and miracles being in short supply, but it is trivially easy to offend the
audience o f a talk show, as Charles M anson has delighted in periodically doing with
Geraldo Rivera’s studio audience. In fact. Stone makes a point o f paralleling Wayne
Gale's sanctimonious hypocrisy with Rivera's, right down to the ludicrous self-conceit that
Gale/Rivera is a serious, "ballsy" journalist. Manson and his kind have been assured an
electronic, hvperreal immortality as their images bounce from satellites. Their words and
actions linger on in print and video. A collaborative act o f creation, reliant on a
paradoxically supportive society hungry for more sensation, has occurred concomitantly
with the destructive act o f multiple murder.
The dizzying multiplicity o f perspectives and images in the culture, all competing
for viewer attention, demands a novel aesthetic, which in terms o f multiple murder means
either more victims o r more grotesquely staged or mutilated victims. M urder is more o f a
performance a n in the latter half o f this century than it has ever been: a fact Mickey Knox
understands quite well. He knows the terminology unique to his craft, correcting Wayne
Gale when the latter calls him a serial killer: "Technically, mass murderer." Mickey also
makes a point o f leaving a living witness at each crime scene (whenever circumstance
allows, that is) so that reponers are sure to obtain sensational survivors' accounts suitable
for wide press play. He kills as many people as he can. and in as many dramatic ways as
he can. to ensure his notoriety above and beyond other competitors. In prison, he asks
Wayne Gale who had higher ratings on American Maniacs: John Gacv. Ted Bundy.
Charles Manson. or himself. Mickey beats all o f them except Manson. to which Mickey
good-naturedly sighs. "It's pretty hard to beat the king." He acquiesces to Gale’s interview
request because its tim ing-follow ing the national aggression spectacle known as the
Super Bowl—ensures the biggest international audience possible. He prepares for his live
prison interview by shaving his head bald: a convention o f villainy popularized by "King"
Manson during his media-hvped trial and also Stone's homage to mass-murderer Colonel
Kurtz as played by Marlon Brando in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (Fuchs
67).
In spite o f his contempt for Gale. Mickey as performer knows that he needs Gale
in order for Mickey's self-empowering justifications to be relayed to a voyeuristic audience
o f millions who have been disappointed by yet another super-hyped Super Bowl game.
and furthermore knows that Gale’s self-righteous condemnations are merely a theatrical
convention designed to assuage an audience's guilt pangs over its enjoyment o f the
spectacle. Gale him self is the biggest hypocrite o f all: pretending to a moral outrage and
a concern for audience he does not feel because the ratings demand it. After Gale
"angrily" demands a reason for the Knoxes’ killing spree, simply because this posture is
expected o f him, Mickey points out the contradictions in Gale’s position:
Y'mean was an instant o f my purity w orth a lifetime o f your lies? . . . you and me.
we’re not even the same species. I used to be you. then I evolved. From where
you’re standing, you're a man. From where I'm standing, you’re an ape. Y ou’re
not even an ape. You're a media person. The media's like the weather, only it’s
man-made weather. M urder is pure. You're the one who made it impure. Y ou’re
buying and selling fear. You say whv° I say. why bother0
Gale him self gives lie to his stance o f moral superiority during the ensuing prison riot.
which he initially covers as a ratings bonanza but quickly embraces as a liberation from his
old life and becomes an active part o f the story, as opposed to a reporter o f it. He is so
exhilarated by this anarchic release o f primitive energy that he begins to ally himself with
Mickey and Mallory's escape bid. taking up arms against the law-enforcement
representatives o f the very society whose middle-class morality he has pandered to for so
long and leaving his wife via cellular phone, a particularly delightful technocratic moment
in the film for media-ape Gale. (Incidentally, only moments later, his mistress Ming rejects
him. again over the cellular phone.) He believes he is championing Mickey and Mallory's
cause, and furthermore believes that they are grateful to him for helping them escape. He
seems genuinely surprised as well as panicked when Mickey and Mallory inform him that
they are going to kill him, rather than take him with them to the fugitive underground
network. As with most o f Mickey's murders, this last on-screen killing is not motivated by
anger o r hatred, but a desire to make a statement, as he tells Gale: "I'm not one hundred
percent exactly sure what it's saying, but it's a statement.” That Mickey does not know
what his own statement is should not be a surprising admission by this point in the film: in
spite o f his rough-edged articulateness during the interview, he is at his core a non-verbal
primitive who communicates primarily through his actions, as any other form o f
authenticity is virtually impossible in the image-polluted society he reluctantly inhabits and
symbolically destroys by shooting Gale.
In this media-conscious context, the film's title reeks o f irony. The phrase "natural
bom killers" suggests determinism, that Mickey (and M allory) was elected by G od or
destiny to be what he is. a human embodiment o f the "natural" killing instinct symbolized
by the rattlesnakes that litter the film's landscape, and that he was in fact helpless o r unable
to choose otherwise. There is some textual evidence for precisely this view, as I have
already noted in Mickey's relationship with the mystic Native .American. Mickey himself
puts a lot o f stock in the concept o f fate, ascribing to it his meeting o f Mallory on his meat
delivery. He also tells interviewer Gale that he was a killer, or bad seed, from birth: "I
was thrown into a flamin' pit o f scum forgotten by God. . . . I came from violence. It was
in my blood. My dad had it. His dad had it. It was all ju st my fate. My fate." In
response to Gale's confident assertion that one must learn evil and is not bom to it,
Mickey questions the premise that murder is evil: "It's just murder, man. .All God's
creatures do it. . . . the w o lf don't know why he's a wolf. The deer don't know why he's a
deer. God just made it that way." He also questions Gale's use o f the phrase "innocent
victims" by implying that these people have been preordained to die. specifically at Mickey
Knox's consecrated hands: "But I know a lot o f people w ho deserve to die. . . . everybody
got somethin’ in their past. Some sin. Some awful, secret thing. A lot o f people walkin'
around out there already dead, just need to be put out o f their misery. That's w here I
come in. Fate's m essenger.” He finally concludes his interview with a tag line that drives
ratings-conscious Gale into ecstasy: "Shit, man. I'm a natural bom killer.” The riot that
follows hard on the heels o f this pronouncement, a riot that allows Mickey and M allory to
not only re-unite but escape prison in the confusion, vindicates for them the belief that fate
has meant them to be together and free.
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At first glance this talk o f fate would seem to contradict Stone's narrative
insistence that representational pollution is at least partially to blame for our American
culture o f violence. Christopher Sharrett concludes that the film's title is thus heavy-
handed irony, really "suggesting there is nothing 'natural' about our current world, both in
the sense that it is perverse and that the people in it are made, not bom" (Killers 84).
However. Cynthia Fuchs sees m ore depth to Stone's cinematic theme as encoded in its
title: "Mickey and Mallory as killers . . . are 'natural bom .' in that they’re delivered into a
rampantly chaotic technocuiture predicated on violence as entertainment, education, and
ethic" (65 ). It is their fate to exist in a simulacratic world o f image devoid o f any warrant
in reality, and this imagistic pollution is so pervasive as to affect them from birth. Mickey
may be a demon to the narratively privileged Native .American, then, but only by virtue o f
the demonic culture he was bom into and not as a result o f divine exile. Fuchs also
observes that the m ost popular current explanation for serial killers and other violent
adults, the so-called "abuse excuse." is for Stone just one more cultural construct lacking
in any mythogenic foundation o r applicability. Again, this seems something o f a
contradiction, given the textual prominence o f parental sexual abuse in Mallory's past and
alcoholic neglect in Mickey's, but Stephen Wright's cameo as a psychiatrist who refuses to
endorse the "abuse excuse" for Mickey and Mallory insinuates that "it can’t w ork here,
where the entire population seems to be at risk and at fault; Mickey and Mallory's excess
isn’t a transgression, but an evolving norm" (65-6). Stanley Kauffmann expands on this
theme: " . . . no clinical attempt is made to justify their homicides. They live in a time
piled higher with temptations to mindlessness than any age in history. These two people
are simply unable to bear the beguilings o f quick animalistic gratifications that most o f us
are still able to resist" (27). In other words, all o f the proffered explanations for the
Knoxes' behavior, including but not limited to fate, child abuse, and the media, are cultural
constructs. At times, one explanation may seem more applicable than others, but the flux
o f Mickey and Mallory's hvperreal existence continually defers analysis or rigid
codification, as the unfortunate D rug Zone clerk, who mistakenly believes on the basis o f
American Maniacs re-enactments that Mickey will spare him because he is the only clerk
in the store, finds out.
In the end. one is left w ith a film about mass/spree/serial murder that has attempted
to incorporate most if not all o f the current sociological perspectives on and genre
treatments o f the subject and pays a price in terms o f narrative and thematic unity'. Stone
has dem onstrated a willingness as filmmaker to take on politically charged and ambitious
themes before, which alone makes him a worthwhile Hollywood talent for some. John
Powers, for one. writes: "Say w hat you will against Oliver Stone—and lately it's become
almost obligatory to give him a caning—he remains the only Hollywood filmmaker who
doesn't think America is too big to put up on the screen" (293). As this is written, the
release o f his film Nixon has Stone once again running afoul o f those revisionist historians
(a misleading term if carelessly used, since it can imply there is at least one "true" text o f
history somewhere) who resent Stone's revisionist American histories, which include JFK.
The Doors. Bom on the Fourth o f July. Wall Street. Platoon. Talk Radio, and Sal vador
In Natural Bom Killers, he addresses nothing less than the end o f American civilization,
which makes it a fitting answer to the contemporaneously released Forrest Gump, a truly
hypocritical film which sees no contradiction between its rewriting o f .American history' for
nationalistic purposes and its creators' public pronouncements that it has no political
agenda. Stone's apocalyptic film, as controversial as it may be to those Gump-ites who
decry its nastiness and question its intentions, fits right into that peculiar strain o f
American literary millenialism which simultaneously laments and masochistically welcomes
whatever social ills the author chooses to blame for the downfall o f the United States. As
Mickey proclaims the "Whole world's cornin' to an end" and Mallory fantasizes her and
Mickey's transm utation into angels in a future without death, they confirm Stone's thesis,
however fractured or obscured by intruding thematic tangents, that image pollution is the
real demon o f the apocalypse.
ISO
Multiple Murder and Postmodern Apocalypse: {California
Similarly, Dominic Sena's ^California, while on a much m ore modest and personal scale o f
apocalypse than Stone's film, staggers under the representational overload it so gamely but
perhaps hubristicallv shoulders. Like Natural B om Killers, Kalifomia proclaims its
sweeping diagnosis o f America’s infatuation with m urder in promisingly well-crafted early
scenes and then ill advisedly proceeds to superimpose what reviewer Chris Darke calls "an
Olympian moral perspective on matters o f Good and Evil” (46). this time in the form o f a
cliche-ridden voice-over provided at irritatingly frequent intervals by its writer protagonist.
Brian Kessler (played by David Duchovny. now o f X-Files television fame). The first o f
Brian's voice-overs occurs in the opening credits o f the film, after Early Grayce has
dropped a huge rock from a highway overpass onto the windshield o f a passing car and
thus caused a fatal wreck:
I remember once going on a school trip to the top o f the Empire State Building.
When I looked dow n at the crowds o f people on the street they looked like ants. I
pulled out a penny and some o f us started talking about what would happen if I
dropped it from up there and it landed on somebody's head. O f course, I never
crossed that line and actually dropped the penny. I don't think Early Grayce knew
there was a line to cross.
The not-so-subtle implication being here, o f course, that Brian’s childhood fantasy o f
randomly dispensing death-from-above has found literal expression in the actions o f the
child-man Grayce, establishing the first o f many thematic parallels between Brian’s passive
voyeurism and Gravce's active reality. Brian also emphasizes his retrospective opinion
that random killers like Grayce suffer not so much from evil intent as moral imbecility: not
knowing "there was a line to cross." In Brian's initial apportionment o f blame. Grayce's
actions remain relatively pure, if not commendable; it is society's abusive treatment o f him
that receives the lion's share o f blame.
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It is this fashionable "liberal" opinion that is put to the test in the course o f
Kalifomia’s narrative, exactly as in Natural Bom Killers, and in the morally ambiguous
manner so central to o u r multiple-murder narratives, all ideologies are found culpable. It
is this ambiguity that m akes narratives like Natural Bom Killers and Kalifomia worthy o f
our attention and respect, in spite o f the flaws. N o r are these texts utterly nihilistic, as
detractors charge. In fact, what comes through most clearly is a strident and surprisingly
conservative insistence that our postmodern cultural dialogue and relative freedom o f
expression, by making it so easy to dehumanize and thus to murder, is nothing short o f a
representational Armageddon, and ail (men and women) are guilty to some degree.
Kalifomia in particular appears to be what Christopher Sharrett would call a neo-
conservative film and Robin W ood a reactionary one. largely because its narrative arc
clearly validates the early observation o f one o f Brian Kessler’s friends that multiple
murderers are simply "bom evil." Yet as with The Silence o f the Lambs, the inherent
ambiguity provided by the neo-Gothic and horror genres from which the serial-killer
narrative originates saves Kalifomia from its reactionary excesses.
In Kalifomia. for example. Brian Kessler kills serial-murderer Early Grayce.
ostensibly in self-defense, but nevertheless renounces killing. Brian’s initial writer’s
empathy and pity for serial killers is the very engine that powers his flirtation with murder
(represented by his homosocial attraction to Early Grayce) and corresponding near
downfall. His know ledge o f murder, which he feels he needs to increase for fulfillment o f
a contract on a proposed book about serial killers, is frustratinglv academic; he complains
that "What little I knew about serial killers I’d learned in the university library, and the only
thing I knew for certain w as that people didn't kill each other in libraries." Inspiration
strikes him after a drunken, stoned party one night; he takes his lover Carrie to a local
abandoned warehouse w here a woman who had been abused there some years ago by her
father committed a series o f murders in her adulthood. Standing in the dark building.
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imaginatively reconstructing the crimes while Carrie takes photographs. Brian begins to
formulate a plan for finishing his book, which he expresses to Carrie the next morning:
. . . for the first time I understood that woman as a human being. I was walking
where she walked, where she killed. I was in her skin. I w as looking through her
eyes. I think we’ve got a book here. With your pictures and my writing it's a
book. . . . A book on some o f the most infamous murders in American history I
w ant to go w here they lived and w here they killed. .And I w ant you to take the
pictures and I'm going to write the text.
Under this pretense o f honoring a book contract and simultaneously granting his lover
Carrie's wish to travel to California for new career opportunities, he solicits for fellow
riders on the ride-board at his college to share expenses on this unusual cross-country
roadtrip. Serendipitouslv. Early Grayce. looking for the personnel office upon the
direction o f his parole officer, arrives as Brian is posting the notice. The stage is thus set
for Brian's education in the fine an o f murder.
Early will test the limits o f Brian's liberal views regarding criminality and banish his
naive fascination with murder. The film immediately establishes Brian's well meaning but
woefully inadequate experience with his pet subject. Discussing serial killers for what
must be the nth time with some obviously long-suffering college friends at a panv, Brian
lectures:
I'm talking about the mind o f a serial killer as it relates to culpability. Someone
who has no ability to distinguish between right and wrong is like a child. In the
eyes o f the law. he should be treated like a child. He should not be imprisoned. let
alone executed. . . Most o f these poor people suffer from severe chemical brain
imbalances. . . . The answer is research and treatment under hospital-supervised
conditions. Not the electric chair.
One o f Brian's friends quips. "Yeah, that's great, Brian. Unless it's your mother's head
they find in the refrigerator." Brian responds: "True. But executing the killer would not
bring my m other back, would it0 . . . Actually, it wouldn't make me feel any better."
.Another o f Brian's friends is having none o f this "liberal" sentimentality: "Brian. The
bottom line is, these people are evil, plain and simple."
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It is only much later that Brian, after experiencing victimization at the hands o f an
actual serial killer and in return killing the killer, comes to realize that his earlier
sympathetic stance w as based largely on a self-rationalization o f his own voyeuristic
attraction to the subject. Having never faced the situation, it was easy to be attracted to it.
Early points out Brian’s ignorance: "You ain't never killed no one, have you, Bri"1 . . .
Nope. .Ain't seen nobody killed either, have you? . . . Nope. Tell me somethin’, big time.
How the hell you gonna write a book about somethin' you don't know nothin’ about'1"
However, when finally confronted with the option o f actually shooting a wounded
policeman shot in the groin by Early. Brian discovers even upon threat o f his ow n death
that he cannot m urder in this fashion. At this crucial narrative moment, Brian breaks the
sympathetic link he had been forging with Early. He is not so much like his "buddy" as he
had thought. The cost o f discovering this self-knowledge is the loss o f his book about
understanding murder, as he admits to Early: "You’re right. Early. I don’t know shit
about killing. Y ou go tta tell me. Does it make you feel good1 Powerful'1 Superior'1
Who are you angry- with'1 Y our mother'1 Y our father'1” Brian runs through the standard
sociological litany o f rationalizations for murder, but Early refuses to endorse any one
explanation. He teases Brian by hinting that all this may stem from his father's abuse,
leading Brian to assum e that Early symbolically murders his father when he kills. But
Early refutes this pat theory when he tells Brian, over the writhing policeman that Early
has shot, that "I know that's not my father, you idjit. That there's a policeman in a world a'
hurt." Early provides only a partial explanation during his climactic battle with Brian:
"Hey. Bri'. You wanna ask me some questions'1 . . . Do I feel powerful? Do I feel
superior'1 No, I feel good." Finally, Brian confesses his inability to make sense o f Early
Grayce: ”1'II never know why Early Grayce became a killer. I’ll never know why any o f
them do. When I looked into his eyes I felt nothing. Nothing."
Early Grayce, as his rather heavy-handed name implies, stands mostly apart from
the complex linguistic structures encoded into law, sociology, politics, formal education.
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and good home training. To the extent that it is possible for a human being to eschew
language and still function in the society o f others, he does so. reiving on non-verbal
snorts and. when he has to, rural colloquialisms to convey his messages. Though he
shares the m urderous agenda o f a similar "negative man.” Hannibal Lecter. he stands in
elemental opposition to Letter's sophisticated mockery. Grayce does exhibit some
rudimentary knowledge o f a popular culture and mythology shared with others: for
example, he quotes from a Lvnrd Skynrd song while beating Brian senseless at the film’s
conclusion and subscribes to the half-joking American stereotype that California is
populated by "cuckooheads." But. generally speaking, he lives a pre-verbal existence
based largely on immediate appetite: eating, beer-drinking, screwing, and impulsive
killing. Brian says o f him: "Early lived in the moment. He did whatever he wanted
whenever he wanted. It was that simple. I didn't know if I was fascinated or frightened by
him. Probably both.” Brian aiso initially pities Early for his lack o f social graces, saying,
"He can't help the way he was raised. I kinda feel sorry for him." In one o f his
retrospective voice-overs. Brian remembers how he also thought Early was "harmless.
Primitive but harmless. O f course, the fact o f the m atter was that he’d killed his landlord
less than an hour before we'd met him." Early completely overturns Brian's pat
assumptions about the roles child abuse and chemical brain imbalances may play in the
creation o f a serial killer. He is an inscrutable and lethal enigma who cannot be read: a
well-worn literary convention in America, from Puritan religious treatises through
Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter and Melville's White Whale to the present. Crudely put. Early
is a caveman, or at least a marginally more socialized version o f Leatherface. in the post
industrial tw entieth century. He is doomed to extinction but also deadly in his fall.
To call Early a "postmodern murderer" for this primitive quality is not the
contradiction it initially appears to be. If multiple murder indeed derives its undeniable
impact from its postmodern character, as I believe it does, it is first o f all necessary to
comment on one o f the most paradoxical aspects o f postmodernism: its relation to
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primitivism, o r neo-primitivism. Postmodernism, in at least some o f its theoretical
formulations, meshes quite well with the kind o f 1980s neoconservativism I have focused
on. and it is interesting to note that Elliott Leyton has characterized mass murderers o f all
kinds as some o f the m ost conservative figures in contemporary' society (10). Michael
Amzen remarks that "most postmodern texts are rife w ith allusions to primitivism" (184).
Jurgen Habermas agrees, calling Bataille, Foucalt. and Derrida "young conservatives" who
eschew "aesthetic modernity" and "instrumental reason" and embrace "a principle only
accessible through evocation, be it the will to power o r sovereignty. Being or the
Dionvsiac force o f the poetical" (14). If postmodernism is defined in terms o f its reaction
against and mockery- o f the high aesthetic principles o f modernism, even if ironically-
sharing them, it is only natural that this reactionary movement will increasingly embrace
the irrational, the anti-aesthetic, the magical (in much the same way as the Gothic), and
what Derrida calls the "incantatorv" rhythms o f primitivist language ("Spectres" 38) as
methods o f reincarnation o f the icons o f the traditional past into a troubled present as a
prophylactic measure against a feared future. Modernism, according to David Spurr.
rationally acknowledges the "impossibility o f its own [recovery] project" (267). u'hereas
postmodernism irrationally succeeds in its recovery by de-valuing strict adherence to
deductive reasoning, rigorous proofs, logical connections, and epistemoiogical coherence.
The serial killer, as one o f the most extreme examples o f magical thinking we can
find in our contemporary existence, is also a manifestation o f postmodernism's paradoxical
turn to primitivism. N ot romanticism, with its implications o f idealized individual
insularity as negotiated between the poles o f innocence and experience, but primitivism,
with its implications o f anti-discursive, eternalized individual communion: an absorption
o f the ego into a larger entity for the paradoxical purpose o f self-aggrandizement (an
essentially fascistic project). This brand o f neo-primitivism is the egocentric's natural
response to a complex m odem existence that, by compartmentalizing knowledge into
specialized and exclusive branches o f expertise (Habermas 9) threatens to overwhelm the
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ego. Drastic, dramatic measures are required to preserve the ego in the postm odern
environment: in ours, serial killing serves such a purpose for a (thankfully) limited
minority whose mindset differs in no significant fashion from the neoconservative, latently
fascistic majority. Early Grayce. for one. fits right into the culture o f the redneck bar
where it is safe to assum e that Brian’s liberalism and yuppie appearance would not find a
receptive audience. In fact, on the basis o f his brush-cut hair, fine features, and chic black
garb. Brian is called a "cum-swizzling faggot” by a pathologically masculine drunk. Only
Early's violent intercession (smashing a beer bottle into the drunk's face without warning)
saves Brian from a beating.
For the purposes o f this argument, it is also important to remember that
postmodernism as a m ode o f thought is not limited to the latter twentieth century (see
Eco. "Postmodernism"), though that is when this way o f thinking earned its fashionable
sobriquet. Brenda Marshall insists that "The postmodern moment is not something that is
to be defined chronologically; rather, it is a rupture in our consciousness" (5). A
chronologically defined understanding o f postmodernism privileges our own timeframe
too much, as Elizabeth Jane Wall Hinds points out. and does not allow for the obvious
"postmodern" touches in previous historical genres such as the Gothic (161). Rather, the
postmodern mindset can be found in any age where the exigencies o f social living create
an awareness o f the stale unviabilitv o f traditional linguistic, i.e.. fiction-making, systems
for negotiating symbolic continuity between the past and the present moment. This sense
o f disjunctiveness often shows up in what Hinds calls the "Satanic" literary' subgenres—
Gothic, neo-Gothic, heavy metal, serial killer, and so on—because what they "have in
common, historically speaking, is their appearance during respective ages o f cultural shift,
at times o f deep change which bring about a dual sense o f belatedness and dread, an
understanding that an ’age’ has passed and the new one is none other than chaos itse lf’
(161). This fear o f change accounts for the seeming paradox that the postmodern
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hyperawareness o f intertextuality and contextualitv betrays a doomed M anichean longing
for the simple assurances o f eternal truths, as Habermas contends.
To retrieve some saving sense o f what Mircea Eliade calls the axis mundi o f
permanence, postmodernism not only endorses, either implicitly or explicitly, but derives
from an eschatological philosophy that transcends easy categorizations such as
romanticism, naturalism, realism, modernism, expressionism, surrealism, existentialism,
postmodernism, etc. The serial killer, moreso than most. longs for the destruction o f
apocalypse, and attem pts to will it into being through constructing a gramm ar o f murder.
His apocalyptic performance attem pts to reforge, through rote performance o f a
murderous ritual whose origins lie in antiquity, a lost link between language and
underlying warrant o f meaning. The repetitive performance becomes a method o f creating
being and meaning, not just a substitution for it. as in modernism. Ideally, the artificiality
o f the performance could be lost and its eternal veracity invoked through the mimesis o f
the ritual.
This urge to escape temporality underlies the apocalyptic mode, which certainly
informs the serial-killer subgenre and gives an unattractive character like Early Grayce his
transcendental resonance. Early Grayce. already given to a magical-thinking mindset as
illustrated by his paranoid conspiracy theories, finds it quite easy to embrace a mystical
philosophy which aims for a transcendent "rapture" up through a "door”: his m etaphor for
the circuit or link between humanity and divinity. His impulsive behavior, including
murder, is a self-medicating route tow ard the selflessness o f eternity: designed to free him
o f the troubling intermediating force represented by rational thought.
As Early begins to form a bond o f friendship with Brian during the long roadtrip to
the Nirvana represented by California, the mystically inclined killer shares his philosophies
with the interested (read here, voyeuristic) writer. During their male-bonding sidetrip to a
rural pooihall and bar. Early confides to Brian: "I'm bettin' we're going to find us some
doors around here. . . . openings to other dimensions. See, I read. I'm tellin' you if a man
ISS
knows what he's doin', he can transport himself anywhere in this goddam n universe."
Then, as the two men become even closer following their shared danger in the barfight
with the belligerent redneck. Early continues:
You remember them doors, them doors I was talkin' about. Bri'? . . . I found me a
couple o f'em in Kentucky. Hell. I wasn't even lookin' for the first one. I was on
the side o f the road swingin' my sickle. I turned around and there's this door, this
big ol' door. And light's cornin' out. blindin’ me real good. And I'm thinkin' this
can't be. this can't be. So I closed my eyes and I count one, I count two. I count
three, four, five, and I open my eyes. It wasn’t there.
In standard psychiatric terms. Early would be classified as a "visionary" serial killer on the
basis o f statements like this. He sees a "higher calling" to his murderous quest: in his
case, to find another door and this time to successfully enter it. As Early's secret sharer.
Brian understands something o f Early’s perceptions: "When you dream, there are no rules
Sometimes, there's a moment as you're waking when you become aware o f the real
world around you, but you're still dreaming. You may think you can fly. but you better
not try. Serial killers live their whole lives in that place, somewhere between dreams and
reality." .And just as Brian envisions California as "a place o f hopes and dreams, a place to
stan over," Early hopes that his shared trip to California will show him a door. All the
panicipants in this road quest have unfulfilled desires which they optimistically (and
perhaps deludedly) expect California to magically satisfy. Brian wants to find the
knowledge he needs to finish his book. His lover Carrie wants to find a gallery which will
show her "extreme" photographs. Adele, Early's girlfriend, wants to escape poverty and
settle down with Early in idyllic surroundings. And Early wants to go through that door.
Unfortunately, the traditional American westward journey to renewal and
opportunity works about as well for these four inspired adventurers as it did for the Joads
in Steinbeck's The Grapes o f W rath. Adele is murdered by her lover; Carrie is raped and
brutalized by Early; Brian is not only savaged by Early but unable to find the knowledge
(even accompanied as he is by a killer) that will allow him to finish the book satisfactorily.
189
Brian and Carrie do make it a California beachhouse, but it is a house haunted by the
memory o f what happened to them on the road as well as by the remnants o f Brian's
unfinished book. As fictional characters, they bear out M ichael Atkinson's thesis that the
nomadic heroes o f the road movie (one o f the genres to which Kalifomia definitely
belongs) will not find w hatever they envision as the American Dream: "Whatever might
be found on the road, it won't resemble any universal truth, it will elude those explicitly
searching for it, and it won't be easy to tie to the hood and bring hom e” (17).
That Caiifomia-as-Heaven is a piece o f philosophical hokum and self-delusion is
suggested by the film's misspelling o f the name (Kalifomia) in the title, so it is no real
surprise that the protagonists fall short o f their goal. Ironically, the only one who may
have gotten what he wanted out o f the doomed roadtrip is Early. Even though he is shot
to death by Brian and never reaches California, the manner in which he dies suggests that
at the moment o f death he reached his longed-for door. At the remote desert locale where
he takes Carrie to rape her. an old nuclear test site appropriately named Dreamland. Early
degenerates into the most bestial form the audience sees him in. He becomes completely-
undone. nearly losing the pow er o f speech beneath his thickening accent, resorting instead
to snarling and slobbering. His swinging long hair hides his human features. In the course
o f this segment, he consumm ates the sexual desire he has felt for Carrie the entire trip (to
the extent that he cut Adele's hair against her will into a fashion similar to Carrie's) by
handcuffing her to a ratty bed in the abandoned target house and raping her. It is at this
narrative moment, the low ebb o f Early's socialized humanity, that Carrie stabs him with a
broken shard o f glass just prior to her sexual assault by Early. Though he does not die
right away, the loss o f blood in combination with his attack on Carrie weakens and
disorients him to the point w here his rationality is completely dispelled. He thinks he sees
a "door" open up just outside the house, spilling intense white light over him. Gratefully,
he walks toward the light, saying, "Door. Where ya been0" Just as he gets close enough
for us as audience to see that the light is merely the reflection o f sunlight from broken
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glass in an broken doorfram e lying in the yard (though w hether Early knows this is
uncertain). Brian appears from the halo o f blinding light to bash Early in the face with a
shovel. During the ensuing fight. Brian kills Early, but this death may have been a
welcome one for the sufferer, as the visual equation o f Brian as avenging killer with the
light o f divinity as it appeared to Early implies. Though the audience knows that the do o r
and the light were a chimera. Early may have achieved his goal through dying.
Therefore. Early's murders may have been primitive attem pts to prepare him for his
own mystic transport. He would not be alone in his private appropriation o f the
methodology o f ritual sacrifice for essentially religious reasons. Carl Jung has explained
the longing for eternity in this way:
. . We . . believe in the welfare state, in universal peace, in the equality o f man.

in his eternal human rights, injustice, truth, and (do not say it too loudly) in the
Kingdom o f God on Earth. . . . The sad truth is that man's real life consists o f a
complex o f inexorable opposites--day and night, birth and death, happiness and
misery, good and evil. We are not even sure that one will prevail against the other,
that good will overcom e evil, or joy defeat pain. Life is a battleground. It always
has been, and always will be; and if it were not so. existence would come to an
end. . . . It was precisely this conflict within man that led the early Christians to
expect and hope for an early end to this world, o r the Buddhists to reject all earthly
desires and aspirations. These basic answers would be frankly suicidal if they were
not linked up with peculiar mental and moral ideas and practices that constitute the
bulk o f both religions and that, to a certain extent, modify their radical denial o f
the world. (74-5)
Basically. Jung argues that Christianity (as well as Buddhism) is founded on a desire to
escape the painful struggles intrinsic to life constrained by temporality. In the Christian
mvthos. the "end" is exactly that: the cessation o f the turbulent life-cvcles or -processes
which are biological hedges to insure survival o f the species (if not the individual) against
the finality o f death. The afterlife, then, is an abstracted, final state o f divorce between the
tyrannical dictates o f mortal flesh and the sense-less spirit (for Christians and Buddhists
both. Jung maintains). It is quite literally the end o f personal, as well as social, history.
What happens in a culture based at least in part on such a mythos is a desire for that
191
society's own end. as that would be the culmination, and the fulfillment, o f all spiritual
impulse. It is not really a wish for cultural suicide, though that is certainly one result, so
much as a longing for meaningful (and extra-human) resolution o f w hat seem to be
presently insurmountable problems inextricably woven into the corrupt social fabric. This
apocalyptic desire permeates all cultural modes o f expression, including diverse literary'
genres.
It is no accident that in the horror genre in particular (which can certainly
encompass a "road" movie like Kalifomia) we frequently find a m otif which John May has
labeled the "secular apocalypse" (33). The secular apocalypse borrow s the Christian
Doomsday pattern for works o f a non-religious nature. The symbolic language o f the
secular apocalypse often borrows the trappings o f its religious forebear, including
secularized images o f Satan as wandering instigator o f deceit and destruction, essentially
"Protean" (May 34) in nature. Additionally, indications o f general moral decline are
present. Despair, not religious faith in renewal and salvation, characterizes the secular
apocalypse. Destruction is the primary result, not rebirth in any redemptive sense. The
threat o f widespread, nihilistic devastation looms in the near-distance. From the opening
o f Kalifomia. Sena provides constant reminders that this is a debased world winding down
into entropy The camera begins tracking through a rainswept, uninhabited expanse o f
featureless concrete roadways and shadowy overpasses reminiscent o f the desolate
Philadelphia o f Shadow o f a D oubt: the world as urban artifact. Ballard's C oncrete Island.
The only two people visible, a female hitchhiker and the married man who hopefully picks
her up, are quickly killed by a hunk o f crumbling concrete deliberately throw n onto the
man's windshield. This is also the urban world o f Brian and Carrie, tw o young
sophisticates at a city college who will venture forth into another kind o f wasteland: the
rural wilderness that gives birth to mass murderers like Early Grayce. Gravce is an
emissary from that American Third World, where farmhouses and trailer parks and
abandoned mines in Tennessee and Texas and Nevada (all famous m urder sites that Brian
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visits on his roadtrip) conceal the unquiet memories o f terrible deeds. The memories
themselves have the pow er to pollute o r contaminate those who come after, as Brian notes
o f a slaughterhouse where a female survivor o f child abuse killed a number o f victims:
"The victim returns to the scene o f the crime and becom es the criminal." The moral decay
is contagious, like vampirism.
Early Gravce may be a vampire-man who seduces Brian into murder, but Grayce is
also a secularized Satan figure who brings down the apocalypse upon the heads o f sinners,
much like M ickey Knox does in Stone's film. This them e is initiated when Early walks
into a chili parlor in search o f Adele and encounters an old man mumbling to himself at the
lunch counter The man says over and over. "The Antichrist would be a woman in a man's
body, with seven heads and seven tails." Early leans in to hear him better, listens, and then
affirms simply. "Yeah.” The old man's ramblings are evocative o f similar oracular
pronouncem ents in other genre narratives (the Omen series, for example) where the "end"
is foretold by apparently insane prophets, the difference here being that the existence o f
the supernatural in Kalifomia is in doubt. Early may believe in the occult, as implied by his
enthusiastic endorsement o f the old man's mantra, but the narrative's ambiguous
positioning on this issue gives no one else such assurance. The old man's words provide
no foundation for belief even if taken at face value; he does not say that the Antichrist is a
woman in a man’s body, but would be (if he/she existed). Also, if we as audience accept
that Early is the .Antichrist spoken o f by the old man, we must somehow reconcile the
androgynous nature o f the old man's .Antichrist with the hypermasculine Early. Such
encounters, then, may be supernatural only in image: given bogus veracity by the
trappings o f the empty iconography o f religion. Adele jokes that Early is fated to
supernatural reincarnation because o f all the bad luck coming to him from the numerous
mirrors he broke at his factory job: "We came to 449 years it would take for him to work
it all off. and after he’d died he’s gonna have to keep cornin’ back to earth over and over
and over again." But again in its narrative context this "prediction" lacks any warrant.
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Likewise. Early's repeated association with images o f nuclear apocalvpse—his climactic
murder o f a retired nuclear scientist living in the Nevada desen. his strapping o f a nuclear-
bomb casing to the hood o f the convertible, his abduction o f Carrie to an old nuclear test
site to "find us a door"--is not so much an indication that he is the Antichrist but rather an
antichrist-like figure and hence only an image o f him: a significant difference.
Given that Early Grayce is not the .Antichrist. I can still safely say that Kalifomia
and other texts like it nevertheless depict a localized pseudo-apocalypse coalescing around
the strange-attractor actions o f its killer protagonist. M ultiple murders in particular are
fitting m etaphors for the particular industrial and post-industrial manifestation o f the
general human desire to end history'. Machine-like repetition o f any action, including
murder, is the key to obliterating temporal/political awareness because the action is
predicated upon a belief that a Platonic-stvle ideal exists to be revealed on the individual
time-bound level. The postmodern primitive, like Early Grayce. wants to come home to
this lost belief just as his modernist predecessors did. but whereas for the modernist the
belief is only lost, however irretrievably, for the postm odernist it is non-existent. Early
Grayce doesn't really see a heavenly door releasing a flood o f brilliant light, at least from
our rational perspective: he only thinks he does. F or the postmodernist, only a true
miracle, utterly divorced from human comprehension and hence residing in the timeless
land o f myth, can succeed. (It is Grayce's nearness to death, and corresponding final
release from rationality, that alone allows him to see that final d oor.) Hence, the desolate,
ftiriously energetic turn to pre-modem magic.
M ircea Eliade formulates the first principle o f "archaic" or primitive thinking: "an
object o r an act becomes real only insofar as it imitates o r repeats an archetype" (34). The
second principle is this:
.All sacrifices are performed at the same mythical instant o f the beginning; through
the paradox o f rite, profane time and duration are suspended. And the same holds
true for all repetitions, i.e., all imitations o f archetypes; through such imitation,
man is projected into the mythical epoch in which the archetypes were first
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revealed. . . . insofar as an act (or an object) acquires a certain reality through the
repetition o f certain paradigmatic gestures, and acquires it through that alone,
there is an implicit abolition o f profane time, o f duration, o f "history": and he who
reproduces the exemplary gesture thus finds him self transported into the mythical
epoch in which its revelation took place. (35)
Early Grayce. then, is attempting to erase the distance betw een himself and eternity-
through his unzipping o f formerly seamless bodies, and in this, he is no different than
millions o f truth-seekers before him. Where he pans com pany from them and becomes an
enemy o f society is his willingness to sacrifice victims o f his ow n choosing, as opposed to
panicipating in a collective ritual o f institutionalized m urder designed for the express
purpose o f preventing individual murders: an insight originally offered by Rene Girard
( 102).
Early Grayce kills to be nearer his precious door. But the moment o f
transcendence ends quickly, if indeed it is ever achieved, leaving the seeker frustrated and
eager to repeat the experience in the hopes that next time it will be better, longer lasting,
and finally definitive. For the postmodernist, however, this is impossible. Repetition is the
only strategy left, since its action at least fulfills the human need to avoid stagnation. In
terms o f ritual murder, the murderer seeks not further violence, but a progression toward
an end to violence, as real-life serial killer Dennis Nilsen realizes about his own murders:
"Each one seemed to be its own last time" (qtd. in M asters 265). In theory, the repetition
strategy transcends temporal circumstance and touches eternal origins. In practice, it
tends to only hint at the desired suspension o f time. Repetition is the medium whereby a
link is forged, in tandem with sacrifice, with eternity.
Repeated sacrifice is required for communion because, as our modem conceptions
o f entropic exhaustion dimly echo, the energy o f the G odhead requires regeneration
through mediated exchange. According to Mircea Eliade, for example, the archaically
common practice o f the sacrifice o f the firstborn served to restore a child o f god, as the
firstborn were considered to be. to the depleted energy stock o f the divinity (109). In this
manner, a recycling o f energy was assured, and thus by extension, eternity. As Bakhtin
theorizes, this is the grotesque body in action: a central notion in the cultural construction
o f the serial killer. W hether based on faith or logic, the sacrifice, as medium o f
communion, remains a constant. It appears in myths and legends worldwide, such as the
Egyptian myth detailing the dispersal o f Osiris's fragmented corpse across the countryside.
Tannahiil suggests that this myth o f dismemberment "is a literary sublimation o f the
a n cien t. . practice o f burying the dissected pans o f a human sacrifice in the fields to give
flesh, blood and pow er to the resurrection god” (21). Repeated ritual murder is essential
to Western religion, as well as a standard m otif in religion's m ore secularly structured
cousins, folklore and the dram atic narrative arts. Is it any w onder that a mystically
inclined but too-literal minded sensibility will, on occasion, turn to a private campaign o f
repeat murder as sacrament'7
Now I am reaching the final paradox o f the slippery' serial-murder narrative cycle.
Because these killers are generally depicted as flawed visionaries, they invoke—even while
mocking—the tired language o f myth and through their terrible actions revivify the
exhausted linguistic systems, e.g.. law. faith, spirituality, social contracts, and so forth,
necessary to counteract the threat. Though the serial-killer m ethod is nihilistic in practice,
it ironically parallels the apocalyptic thinking o f the wider culture and consequently prods
the survivors into consideration o f historical and metaphysical issues long since relegated
to the toothless realm o f fairy tale. Though no final answers o r "happy" endings are
possible, the process o f confrontation itself, as the Bildungsroman learning experience o f
Gothic tradition, illuminates perhaps the darkest crannies o f human existence. This
knowledge is usually the only compensation offered to the survivors o f the serial-murder
campaign, but it does provide valuable insight into the nature o f murder. The knowledge
will be needed again, because like any "good" monster, the serial killer as a type never
really dies in the narratives o f multiple murder, especially the 1992 Bernard Rose film
Candyman. where the audience is relatively certain that the killer, unlike most o f the other
multicides under discussion, is a supernatural entity. Certainly, an individual murderer in
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the typical serial-killer narrative may die. but another will invariably rise from the Gothic
setting to take his place.
Jane Caputi finds this a necessary prerequisite o f w hat she sees as this particular
subgenre's misogynist agenda, so that the terrorist threat to women continues from
generation to generation: certainly one valid reading o f the genre, but an unnecessarily
narrow one. Generally, any one killer’s "immortality" is not a physical defiance o f death so
much as a cultural one: the memory o f his deeds haunts the community through a folktale
cycle centering around what John Widdowson calls threatening figures, o f which
vampires, werewolves, and now serial killers are specific subcategories. O f course, in
some plots, o f which John Carpenter's Halloween and Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm
Street are the most typical, the killer is at least implicitly coded as, if not specifically
acknowledged to be. supernatural and correspondingly immortal. As .Amy Taubin
observes. “It is the killer’s ability to rise from the dead in film after film—rather than his
appearance, his physical strength o r even the extrem e sadism o f his actions—that
demonises him" (16). On the basis o f this observation, it is not inappropriate to call the
fictional serial killer a vampire figure, but the wealth o f supernatural associations he
usually carries expands that classification: a point made over and over in Candvman.
whose title character exhibits some recognizably vampiric qualities but also inverts them
for the purpose o f unseating the audience's genre-w eaned expectations. It is more
accurate to say that Candvman is the clearest exploration yet o f the mythic subtext only
hinted at in Natural Bom Killers and Kalifomia. and a far more ambitious and subversive
narrative. While the latter two films concentrate on the more or less traditional Gothic
image o f the masculine destroyer o f white middle-class society, Candvman centers on the
murderous return o f a sacrificed black man and white female and through this widening o f
focus suggests that all o f our imaginative attempts to touch eternity, whether through
religious ceremony o r folk tale or human sacrifice or social apocalypse, are by nature
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dehumanizing and monstrous. This is a far more transgressive theme than Stone's naive
romanticization o f Native American ritual.
The Power o f Folklore: Candyman U 992)
A mythic-folklore dynamic is clearly at work in Candvman- as a brief synopsis o f this
lesser known but intriguing film reveals. A series o f gruesome, motiveless murders in
Cabrini Green (the castration o f a retarded boy negligently left alone by his mother in a
public restroom, the brutal m urder o f a woman whose repeated calls to 9 11 were ignored,
and numerous others) has frightened the residents and led them to whisper rumors about
the Candyman: an all-purpose, hook-handed bogeyman who has been given a distinctly
African-American cast by the housing-project inhabitants. Helen Lyle, a graduate student
at the Chicago campus o f the University o f Illinois, and her graduate school partner
Bernadette Walsh (played by Kasi Lemmons, who portrayed a remarkably similar
character. Clarice Starling's room m ate and ally Ardelia Mapp. in The Silence o f the
Lambs) see a connection between the Cabrini Green rum ors and the urban legends they
are dutifully collecting as part o f their thesis research from the privileged, mostly white
college freshmen, who are economic worlds removed from the Cabrini Green residents.
Significantly, it is a black cleaning woman at the college who provides Helen with her first
knowledge that the black community has adopted its ow n version o f the Hookman story.
Helen and Bernadette intrepidly drive to the housing projects to conduct primary research,
and in a gutted apartment Helen discovers a large mural by some anonymous ghetto artist
depicting the black killer's head and gaping mouth: a representation o f Hellmouth. Helen
also meets a young black mother, Ann Marie, and her infant son Anthony, both o f whom
will later be targeted by the Candyman as part o f his project to exile Helen from society.
On a subsequent return trip, this time by herself, Helen meets a helpful boy, Jake,
who directs her to the public restroom where the retarded boy was killed. She enters the
filthy restroom and encounters a black man who knocks her unconscious with a hook he is
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holding. Upon her recovery, however, she discovers that a gang leader pretending to be
the Candyman has been arrested for the crime, leading her and the black community to
conclude that an all-too-human killer has been emulating the Candyman legend for his own
ends. It is at this significant moment the "real" Candyman, a deep-voiced, hook-handed
specter in a "pimp" fur coat, begins appearing to Helen. He entreats her to become his
victim and achieve immortality: an offer she initially rejects. To force her into a reluctant
alliance, the Candyman abducts Anthony and later kills Helen's partner Bernadette in such
a way as to implicate Helen for the crimes, then rescues her from her captors. Her escape
from a mental ward (during which a psychiatrist is killed) makes her look even guiltier.
She flees home to discover that a female student o f her husband Trevor has moved in with
him: Helen is now truly alone, ready to surrender to the Candvman’s seduction. The
monstrous courtship ritual ends when Helen saves the infant Anthony from his
imprisonment within a huge pile o f burning wood, previously set aside for a bonfire
planned by the residents o f Cabrini Green, and traps the Candyman inside. She is burned
to death in the rescue, but her legend will be carried on by the Cabrini Green residents,
who attend her funeral en masse (led by Ann Marie and the boy Jake, carrying a large
hook before him) and paint a new mural, this one o f her flaming head, on a crumbling
apartment wall. The criminal violence and grisly murders o f the recent past have found a
legendary new life in the folklore o f Cabrini Green.
On the basis o f Rose's obvious concern with politics, race, gender, and urban
mythology as they relate to the desire for apocalypse, and his refusal to present any o f his
themes in simplistic or partisan terms a la Stone or Sena, I would have to champion his
film as an artistic success and an apt w ork with which to conclude this study. He gives us
an example o f just how well the serial-killer narrative can offer radical social critique when
all o f its elements are in balance and place. The character study o f Helen Lyle is also
ambiguously complex, refusing to pass judgm ent on her evolution to monsterdom but
never caving in to the nihilism always lurking at the margins o f narratives such as this. In
R eprod u ced with permission o f the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
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comparison to the high critical profile o f a Silence o f the Lambs o r a Natural Bom Killers.
Rose's quiet, somber, and darkly beautiful film came and went with relatively little fanfare.
It deserves better, and it is one o f the joys o f writing this study that I can lavish upon
Candyman a little o f th e academic scrutiny it deserves. One o f its greatest strengths is that
Candyman makes explicit the folkloric aspects o f the current American fascination with
the serial killer in a w ay that no other narrative o f this kind has done, and it does so by
illustrating to an uncom fortable degree the need we as a collective have for this kind o f
"monster."
Rose's Candyman w orks so weil because it "addresses the process o f mvthification
itself rather than simply using a nursery rhyme to explain a m onster’s origins." according to
Kim Newman ("Candyman" 39). The plot reworks the "Hook" bogeyman into the
avenging, vampire-like revenant o f a black artist (yet another serial-killer artist) who was
lynched, according to a pompous folklorist named Purcell in the film, for sexually
"knowing" a white w om an during .America’s historical period o f slavery. The conservative
white elements o f the black man's society mete out to him the extreme sanction reserved
for transgressors, attem pting to expunge him and his crime literally from history by tying
him down at the site o f what will one day be Cabrini Green, sawing o ff his hand with a
rusty saw-blade (an obvious m etaphor for the emasculation often performed upon the
black victims o f white lvnchings, since the Candyman's hook/hand first rips into his
victims’ genitals), and allowing a swarm o f bees from a nearby apiary to sting him to death.
The murder attempt ultimately fails, however, because the black artist is somehow
resurrected in the form o f an undead avenging spirit, accompanied by swarms o f bees that
burst forth from his chest cavity and emerge from his mouth during his climactic kiss w ith
Helen. The mortal black v ictim still exhibiting the signature wounds o f his lynching, is
thus atemporalized as the Candyman. His murder, symbolic o f white-European genocidal
practices, remains the primal national trauma o f the film's narrative and presages the
ghettoization o f the black community into government "reservations" like Cabrini Green,
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but Rose's film has revised the mythic realm to allow for the return o f the repressed. A
murder victim is the ultimate repressed; th e Candyman's folkloric survival, which seems
dependent on the belief o f the African-American urban masses and graduate student Helen
Lyle rather than any transcendent effort o f will on his part (leading ineluctably to the
question o f whether he even exists), is a restoration o f a formerly buried part o f American
history and a provocative reinsertion o f politics into the supposed eternal domain o f myth.
N ot that Rose intends this as a positive restoration, since the Candyman primarily
victimizes his own people: rather, it is an inevitable one that poisons as it resurrects. In
this, he is a black vampire: one o f the first serious renditions o f the genre figure into an
African-American milieu, as opposed to "blaxploitation" films such as Blacula.
The Candyman is much like the familiar cinematic vampire, as certain scenes
consciously echo. Helen's first sight o f him in his Cabrini lair reveals him laid out on an
elevated slab, arms folded over his chest in a tableaux o f vampiric iconography instantly
recognizable to a genre-conscious audience. Her driving o f a wooden stake into his chest
also helps to dispatch him: another archetypal moment in the vampire narrative.
Candyman is clearly intended to be a supernatural being who stalks the urban decay o f
Cabrini Green and creates a contemporary mythology for inner-city African .Americans,
much as the folk legend vampires o f an earlier age and different culture did for European
peasants. Just like the European vampire, the Candyman is a threatening figure in the
folkloric sense because he punishes, as indeed he was punished by status-quo society,
those who violate the norms o f the community which he haunts. He harms those who
wander into forbidden places, like the black boy who enters the dangerously unattended
public bathroom in Cabrini Green, or Helen Lyle, who as a white woman dares to seek
egress into the black housing projects o f Chicago. Yet, like the vampire, he faces curious
restrictions upon his range. He cannot venture too far from the community that spawned
him. and he must be invited by his victims.
He is also obviously based on the famous "Hookman" who supposedly preys upon
parking couples on whatever "lover’s lanes" happen to be in any one given area and hence
conveys the m essage that teenagers should not engage in premarital sex (see Bill Ellis.
"Hook"). Significantly, the film opens with a co-ed's retelling o f the Candyman’s slaughter
o f yet another doomed, amorous babysitter and the child she is supposed to be guarding,
an obvious acknowledgment not only o f the original Hookman tale but also a genre nod to
the 1980s Halloween-styie horror films wherein similarly neglectful babysitters meet with
violent ends. Paradoxically, the Candvman's infliction o f the most extreme sanction
(death) against transgressors puts him solidly on the neoconservative side o f law and
order. His castration o f the retarded boy in the public bathroom confirms the dire
warnings o f those who caution children not to wander away from their parents; his fatal
seduction o f Helen Lyle tells white women to avoid the sexual temptation offered by black
men; his m urder o f the babysitter serves as admonishment to those teenage girls who
would neglect their apprenticeship to motherhood in favor o f sexual pleasure.
But in other ways, he is not so much an oppressive agent for social control as a
uniquely personal form o f invited self-punishment for those who deliberately invoke his
wrath upon themselves. The Candyman. like a sensual, Romantic-era vampire, has to be
invited; the method by which to invite him is to look in a mirror and say the word
"Candyman" five times. (Here again is the repetition intrinsic to ritual.) The mirror
metaphor, a central one in vampire literature, again appears here, in slightly altered form;
unlike the vampire, the Candyman can certainly be reflected in a mirror, but he may only
be an imaginative projection o r double placed and confined there by the gaze o f the
spectator, doom ed by his/her own will to believe in the Candyman.
This ritualistic summoning is suicidal in practice for most people, as the Candyman
invariably slits open "from groin to gullet" (in his ominous words) those to whom he
appears. But in certain exceptional cases, the Candyman, again like the lonely Romantic
vampire, decides to impart his immortal "gift" to a victim who has taken his fancy and
whom he thinks would make a good immortal. Bernard R ose elaborates on this theme:
I think there’s always been a kind o f love/hate, almost sexual relationship between
these kinds o f horror figures and their prey. W here in a sense both parties need
each other to exist. It's obviously very apparent in Dracula. In Phantom o f the
Opera too. In a sense, all these figures are essentially undead. And the reason
they’re undead is always through some tragic mishap or unhappiness. There is
something very melancholy and lonely about them. I think that they're always
searching for their ultimate mate and everything. And that, in a sense, is pan o f
the whole gothic nature o f the film and the idea o f trying to do something that was
modem gothic. Which is kind o f a nineteenth century idea that comes from the
writers o f that era. The idea that the consummation o f love is ultimately death.
.And I think those ideas are very woven into horror pictures. . . . And it is
something that's very' important in that it stops them from just being insane
murderers, which is always a little boring, (qtd. in Cunningham, 13)
The manner in which the m onster consummates the relationship with his prey is done in a
parody o f courtship and sexual intercourse. The Candyman engages in a protracted
seduction o f Helen Lyle for the sole purpose o f "corrupting" her into monstrous
immortality through his kiss. She is predisposed to accept his offer because she may be
the reincarnation o f the lover whom the black artist was lynched for. as her discovery o f
another mural depicting a woman with her face witnessing this long-ago atrocity suggests.
("It was always you. Helen." the Candyman tells her.) His method is to exacerbate her
pre-existing alienation. She is working in a patriarchal setting (a university) where her
initiative is frowned upon and her research ideas pre-em pted by her own husband, a
professor at the school. Finally, she literally becomes a supernatural entity as a result o f
her symbiotic relationship with the Candyman. and kills her unfaithful husband after he
unwittingly calls her back from the grave by repeating her name five times into his
bathroom mirror. By finally succumbing to the Candyman's repeated supplications to "be
my victim and live forever." she has removed herself from her own culture forever and
joined him in his culture as a new matriarchal bogevwoman. She is the Final Girl, whose
monstrous potential and affinity with the Gothic predator has always been implicit, turned
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full-fledged monster. Her transformation from passive victim to active monster also
dramatizes an important concept in folklore study, advanced by Vladimir Propp, that any
one audience m em ber hearing a folktale, as a potential future perform er o f the narrative,
can w ork individual changes on the master plot, preserving its central points but also
producing a new variant o f it in the retelling (8). Helen as m onster is a "retelling'' o f the
Candyman masterplot.
Rose's complex study o f monsters and folklore announces its thematic intentions
early on. As already noted, the film begins with a female undergraduate relaxing the story
o f the babysitter and her "bad-boy" boyfriend Billy (who escapes the Candvman's wrath
only to have his hair turn white and lose his sanity, a common folkloric touch which the
boy Jake incorporates into his retelling o f what happened to the first man to find the
castrated boy in the public restroom) to interviewer Helen Lyle as the "most frightening"
story the younger student has ever heard. (Ironically, the babysitter character o f this
opening narrative is using the Candyman myth as a way o f titillating Billy, which implies
that these frightening stories may have an aphrodisiacal function as well: the Candyman
recognizes this dual function when he tells Helen. "Your death will be a tale to frighten
children, to make lovers cling closer in their rapture.") The young babysitter in the story
makes the mistake o f repeating the Candvman’s name for the fatal fifth time into the
bathroom mirror; he materializes behind her and promptly dispatches her, and the baby she
is caring for, with his hook. Naturally, the story is more frightening because it supposedly
happened to som eone not known personally to the present narrator but to an acquaintance
o f the narrator’s: "My roommate's boyfriend knows him,” the undergraduate breathlessly
tells Helen. This rhetorically lends the narrative some degree o f credibility, based as it is
on an actual source who could be tracked down if someone went to the trouble, but since
no one will take this kind o f trouble or is expected to do so, the narrative remains safely
uninvestigated and "true." in spite o f its obvious fictional structure. With this opening
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narrative-within-a-narrative, Candyman immediately announces that it will dramatize the
methods o f folklore transmission, and by so doing metadiscursivelv com ment upon them.
In an interview with Carl Cunningham. Bernard Rose confirms that his film
specifically addresses the persistence o f what have becom e popularly know n as urban
legends or myths. He says:
I think it's very hard to frighten people with things that are just completely
nonsense. The thing about urban myths is that w e all know them. They’re very
much m odem folklore. They are some kind o f collective unconsciousness that
seems to exist in everybody. In a mechanized world full o f com puters and this
communications network and that communication network, they're a wonderful
testam ent to the absolute strength o f the most ancient tradition o f all. o f people
telling stories around a campfire. The irony is that in a world full o f technology,
these stories still exist and the oral folkloric tradition is still there and it manifests
itself as urban legend. (14)
Without disputing Rose’s claims about his own film, it is important to take a moment to
clarify the term inology one uses to discuss matters o f folklore. The academic study o f
folklore makes clear (and often conflicting) distinctions between myths and legends.
rumors and reports; for our purposes here, Bill Ellis's use o f the term contem porary
mythologies "to refer to global scenarios accepted on faith by subcultures who use them to
link and give ultimate meaning to puzzling events" ("Mutilation" 44) is best fitting. The
contem porary mythologies arise from "clusters o f legends, rumors, and beliefs [that]
collaborate with other kinds o f stories or bits o f information to form global bodies o f lore"
(43). W hat Jan Harold Brunvand calls an "urban legend" would be a particular legend or
rum or that contributes to the global body o f lore. In Brunvand's words:
Urban legends belong to the subclass o f folk narratives, legends, that—unlike fairy
tales—are believed, or at least believable, and that—unlike myths—are set in the
recent past and involve normal human beings rather than ancient gods or
demigods. Legends are folk history, or rather quasi-history. As with any folk
legends, urban legends gain credibility from specific details o f time and place or
from references to source authorities. (3)
The totalizing narrative provided by the Candyman brings together all o f the
separate bits o f m odem paranoia encapsulated in the urban legends sprinkled throughout
the text o f Rose's film. In fact. Rose begins the film by specifically referring to many o f
the urban legends catalogued by Brunvand in his first well-known popular w ork. The
Vanishing Hitchhiker. Helen Lyle's preliminary investigations (along with her husband
Trevor's) o f urban legends known to the University o f Illinois at Chicago's undergraduates
turns up the usual old chestnuts given regional redressing: the Hookman. the doomed
couple, the stoned babysitter who mistakes her charge for a turkey and roasts it for the
parents as a surprise upon their return home, the alligators that supposedly infest New
York sewers. (The castrated-boy-in-the-public-restroom is another urban legend, one
often associated with white racist fears o f the black Other, so its prominence in the Cabrini
segments o f the film signal Rose's shift o f focus from the privileged white community to
the impoverished black community.) Trevor echoes Brunvand in his pendantic lecture to
his students, who have been sharing their versions o f the "alligators in the sewer" urban
legend as Helen enters the lecture hall:
Why would Annie and Dianne both be suffering from the same delusion in two
cities over a thousand miles apart? Let's face it. folks. There are no alligators in
the sewers. It's "round the fire." It's bed-time stories. These stories are modem
oral folklore. They are the unself-conscious reflection o f the fears o f urban
society.
It appears as if Trevor has just explicitly stated the theme o f the film, in almost the same
words Rose uses in his interview with Cunningham, but Trevor's academic pettiness (for
instance, his willful contamination o f his own wife's research protocol by lecturing about
urban legends to the students that constitute her pool o f respondents) and personal
hypocrisy (his denial o f the obvious affair between himself and one o f his students) clearly
compromise his standing as a credible textual reference point. Furthermore, his too-neat
definition o f modem oral folklore, while valid enough as a starting point for the film's
thematic trajectory, quickly reveals itself to be woefully inadequate to explain the
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transpiring events. O f the film's academic setting, Colin M acCabe concludes: "[it]
provides the film's fundamental argument: that all attem pts at interpretation are simply
evasions o f realities too powerful to articulate" (24). His smug and condescending
dismissal o f the possible reality behind the narrative fiction o f the urban legend renders him
an unreliable com m entator. The Candyman's manifestations to Helen Lyle do not exactly
contradict Trevor's theory, but they do demonstrate it to be a bloodless, academic
abstraction.
None o f this is to say that the Candvman exists in any literal sense; he may or may
not. The Candyman himself, during his first appearance to Helen, tells her that he cannot
exist without community belief (similar to Freddy Krueger's dependence on teenagers'
dreams to survive after death in the Nightmare on Elm Street film series) and that the
degree to which he manifests himself to a chosen audience depends on that individual's
level o f belief in him. "You were not content with the stories, so I was obliged to come.
Be my victim. 1 am the writing on the wall, the whisper in the classroom. W ithout these
things I am nothing." In a subsequent appearance to Helen, after she has supposedly
debunked the Candyman myth through her exposure o f the gang member who had
emulated the Candyman myth by attacking people with a large meathook. the "real"
Candyman states that he exists only because he has a congregation that wills him into
being: "Your disbelief destroyed the faith o f my congregation. Without them 1 am
nothing." He also reassures Helen that her exile from humanity and subsequent death has
its compensations, mainly immortality: "As for our deaths, there will be nothing to fear.
Our names will be w ritten on a thousand walls. Our crimes told and retold by our faithful
believers. We shall die together in front o f their very eyes and give them something to be
haunted by." Thus, the community's will to believe may have conjured up a literal
Candyman. or it may simply have provided a metaphor o f evil, a folk schema for
interpreting events, w'hich makes comprehensible the dangers and misfortunes afflicting
the residents o f Cabrini Green.
Similarly, Helen’s aggressive desire to produce an original and hence publishable
thesis through her study o f the Candyman urban legend, in combination with her
resentment o f Trevor’s dalliances and the other tensions (such as childlessness,
underscored by her concern for the infant Anthony) inherent in their shaky marriage, may
have called forth a monster or, alternatively, driven her to insanity and delusion. The
kidnapping o f Anthony and the murders that begin to spread outw ard from Helen may
have been com mitted by her and not the Candyman. though she does not remember them
if she has and w e as viewers do not see her abduct the infant or kill anyone until the end o f
the film, when her literal transformation into "monster" is complete. Certainly, the police
and her husband believe her to be a kidnapper and killer. There are two possible
conclusions. Either the Candyman exists on some m ore o r less corporeal level, perhaps
invoked by Helen's subconscious desires, and has framed Helen for these crimes in an
attempt to remove her from mainstream acceptability into the Gothic realm o f the Outsider
he occupies, as he whispers to a miserable Helen contemplating suicide on a bridge over
the Chicago river: "They will all abandon you. All you have left is my desire for you."
(The one bit o f strong evidence to suggest Candyman's physical existence is the survival o f
the infant .Anthony in the vacant Cabrini apartment that doubles as Candyman's lair as
Helen languishes in the psychiatric hospital for a month. Who takes care o f the baby if she
doesn't0) Or. Helen's gradually escalating belief in him has compelled her to murder those
close to her, just as the Candyman victimizes those o f his own community. The film
steadfastly refuses to grant its viewers unambiguous know ledge on this point; though we
see the Candyman as he continually exhorts her to "believe in me and be my victim,'' it is
only through Helen's eyes, or the eyes o f other true believers. W hen the camera moves
away from these credulous perspectives, we see little to nothing o f the Candyman.
For example, in a scene where the Candyman appears to be floating above Helen,
who is strapped to a gumev in a psychiatric ward as a direct result o f police suspicion o f
her involvement in a series o f murders, an outside surveillance cam era sees only Helen
striving to escape her bonds. When shown this film by Dr. Burke, a psychiatrist engaged
by the authorities for her insanity defense, she is shaken by the possibility she may indeed
be delusional, and quickly attem pts to call the Candyman into being for the doctor: ''I'm
not capable o f that. . . . no part o f me. no m atter how hidden, is capable o f that. I can
prove it. I can call him." Which, from her unreliable point o f view, she proceeds to do.
with predictably fatal results for the good doctor. One could argue. I suppose, that as a
supernatural entity, the Candyman cannot or will not appear on film or videotape, just as a
vampire cannot be reflected in a mirror; however, the possibility remains that the
Candyman has no external life separate from the imaginations o f those who believe in him.
Colin M acCabe makes the very good point that there are moments o f visual nothingness
periodically interrupting the film: they begin as white flashes nullifying the image frame as
Helen takes flash photos o f the Candyman mural in the abandoned apartment, and
gradually escalate in frequency as Helen begins to question her own sanity (24). These
visual null-zones also just happen to coincide with the Candyman's appearances and
disappearances to Helen. On the evidence o f the w hiteouts, one may very well infer that
Helen Lvle is a murderer all along, structuring her killings in terms o f the Candyman
legend just as the gang member who attacks her does or, more likely, psychically
projecting a Candyman into being through m urderous wish-fulfillment.
N or should it be too glibly assumed that Helen literally becomes the "Candyman,”
as her killing o f Trevor and the closing shot o f the mural o f her flame-wreathed head
suggest. Her bevond-the-grave murder o f Trevor, which initially seems meant to be taken
at face value by the viewer, may simply be a figment o f Trevor’s guilt-wracked
imagination, as there are those enigmatic white flashes washing out the image field again;
there is also some suggestion that the whole scene is a narrative cheat on Rose's part and
Trevor may have been murdered by Stacey, his obviously disenchanted lover, who will
almost certainly be suspected o f the crime by the police if it did happen. And o f course,
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there is always the possibility that the Candyman and the Candywoman d a exist in the
margins o f the white flickers between the film frames.
The m onstrous Candyman is clearly an integral part o f the imaginative life o f the
community he threatens. He shares their race, their marginalized existence, their norms,
their most conservative values; through his presence he validates the sanctity o f those
concepts most dear to urban African-Americans. Ann Marie, the dutiful and drug-free
young mother who expresses to Helen her disapproval o f the hoodlums downstairs, is safe
from Candyman's hook, if not Helen's knife. By killing only those o f his own whom stray
into forbidden territory', he demonstrates his allegiance, however brutally exhibited, to his
ethnic heritage. His existence also explains, if not justifies, the prevalence o f violent and
premature death in the urban black community and thus provides it with a totalizing
narrative that is paradoxically much more reassuring and manageable (through ritual) than
the disparate, largely uncontrollable specters o f poverty, drug use. gang violence, and so
on. This is why the Candyman does not often choose to victimize the wider white
community outside o f the confines o f what is now Cabrini Green, though that would seem
to be his most logical choice in terms o f a standard revenge motif; he is a product o f the
black .American experience, and as such, he is ghettoized even in his supernatural
incarnation. He loses much o f his power outside o f the sustaining belief system o f the
inhabitants o f Cabrini Green. He can only appear as an actual entity to ethnographer
Helen Lyle after she enters the black community and "goes native." as it were. H er earlier
invocation o f his name in front o f her apartm ent mirror is fruitless. He is inextricably
bound to Cabrini.
There is little doubt that in the film, the urban black community at some level
needs the Candyman as a form o f black-nationalistic totalizing narrative. His victimizing is
much more palatable to those affected than is. say, the institutional racism pandemic in
.American society. As a metaphoric, perhaps actual, method o f social control, he grow s
organically and spontaneously from the immediate concerns o f Cabrini Green and thus
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functions as a means o f self-policing n o i imposed from without by the resented white
community. As a natural outgrow th o f the local community, he can also be banished
(though not slain, at least not permanently) by strict adherence to locally defined ritual.
For example, the Candyman is dispatched only after Helen Lyle, as the one closest to him.
traps him within a mountainous pile o f burning wood and trash. The trashpile has been
erected by the residents o f Cabrini Green in preparation for a massive bonfire, the specific
original purpose o f which remains unclear: Jake mentions to Helen only that it is for a
"party." But when Jake hears and sees Helen entering the trashpile where Anthony has
been hidden and mistakes her for the Candyman, the Cabrini residents torch it in an
attempt to kill the monster who has been terrorizing them. (This is another classic genre
moment: how many m onster movies have depicted the enraged "villagers" marching upon
the monster's lair with torches'1) The burning refuse first confines and then incinerates the
Candyman. as well as kills Helen along with him. but not before she delivers .Anthony from
the holocaust and places him in the grateful hands o f his mother. H ere is a camivalesque
uprising o f the common folk, which seems to be the only way to banish a m onster that
they have collectively created in the first place.
But. as their witnessing o f Helen's death adds a new chapter to the Candyman
legend, just as the Candyman promised. Helen is given a new form o f existence,
dependent on the community's continuing belief system, that bridges the g u lf between the
temporal and the eternal. Similarly. Trevor's guilt over his abandonment o f Helen while
she was alive now sustains her in this new form. Like the Candyman. her immortal form
bears the scars o f her mortal ordeal: her hair burnt down to a white powder. But unlike
the Candyman, and in a m ethodology paralleling the actions o f the protagonists o f female
"rape-revenge" genre scenarios, she manifests herself to take a grisly personal vengeance
only upon the person whom she feels most victimized by: in this case, Trevor. She
castrates and then eviscerates him with the hook left at her gravesite by the Cabrini
processional. For Cabrini residents, it appears that Helen will be a different and frankly
more sympathetic kind o f monster: a flame-enshrouded, maternal protector o f the weak
and innocent, e.g., .Anthony, who will exact a terrible revenge upon their patriarchal
victimizers. Thus, the women and children o f Cabrini will have little to fear from Helen,
but the gangbangers. the rapists, the adulterers, the deadbeat dads, etc., have now been
put upon their guard. Rather than a male folkloric threatening figure who prevs upon the
weak and/or sexually adventurous. Helen transmutates into a female threatening figure
who preys upon those who prey upon others and serves as a form o f community policing
for the multicultural 1990s. Thus, through her eternal presence, she forcefully addresses
some o f the specifically contextual problems facing the African-American community, and
we as an audience witness the yoking o f folk myth to history. Stone and Sena gave us
only the end; Rose com pletes the cycle and initiates a post-apocalyptic beginning.
Conclusion
The folkloric threatening figure, male o r female, who can rise from the dead either literally
or metaphorically is endlessly self-replicating in the Gothic formula. Because o f this
vampiric capability, he serves very well the purposes o f the postm odern mindset, which
seeks to comment upon the structure o f comment itself. But self-referentiality poses some
enormous representational risks—mainly, becoming lost in the simulacratic fimhouse.
Whenever this happens, it seems as if the only saving response is some form o f primal
violence, a shattering o f all constructed boundaries in an effort to find one impermeable
boundary. In folklore o r literature, the attempt to overcome self-referentiality even while
obsessed by it leads to an effacing o f boundary resembling nothing so much as the ultimate
energy diffusion o f death, either o f one's self or others. On a culture-wide level, the desire
to transcend insubstantialitv in combination with the dominance o f the false image, if
carried far enough, leads to a wish, in popular 1980s argot, to "end history" and lose one's
self in the reassuring eternal present o f myth. Thus, the serial killer is not a romantic rebel
or a political terrorist but a debased transcendentalist concerned only with his egocentric
immediate situation. Mickey Knox and Early Grayce seek violent satiation o f their
overriding carnal desires, and even the Candyman. a victim o f racism, returns from the
grave not so much for vengeance as for immortal union with his ideal woman. These
characters’ m urderous acts are performed not as coherent political manifestoes but as
idiosyncratic expressions o f individualism paradoxically reliant on scraps o f inherited,
easily graspable narratives o f primal simplicity and violence. I began this study by citing
B. Ruby Rich's claim that the violent, nihilistic cinema o f the 1990s is a frustrated reaction
to the ever-fragmenting politics o f post-Cold W ar W estern civilization; I find this
argument to be borne out by close examination o f the most recent wave o f cinematic
serial-killer texts. I would add, however, that this frustration betrays a fundamental
longing for the ultimate boundary blurring o f apocalypse.
Chapter Six: Conclusion
I have argued in this study that the 1980s and ’90s serial-killer narrative is indebted to the
sensational genre literature o f previous decades, especially the Gothic conventions and
symbols that w ere established during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in dark
reaction to the optimistic egocentrism o f mainstream Romanticism. The imaginative
projection o f the psyche onto the outer worid becomes a waking nightmare in the Gothic.
Sexuality transform s into a force for destruction, not renewal. Identities, gender, even
bodies themselves lose their distinctiveness and becom e fluid. The Gothic villain, the
vampire, the serial killer—these in turn are literary recloakings o f the folkloric threatening
figure, whose O utsider status and malevolent actions against transgressors o f the social
norm render him an effective means o f social control and hence an agent o f the status quo
This folkloric heritage explains why the villains and m onsters beloved o f our sensational
genres simultaneously traffic in individual rebellion and social conservatism. Though these
figures are forever alienated, they engage on lonely quests for transcendental meaning
through violent piercing o f boundaries and. more poignantly if mundanely, acceptance
from a society that dreads them. The tension between these two irreconcilable impulses—
transgression and assimilation-characterizes the O utsider psyche and clarifies for us the
centuries-old affinity between the artist and the murderer. While both may be inimical to
middle-class values, both also typically aspire to an acceptance or recognition by it more
than they will admit, even to themselves. Thus, it is vital to understand the political
context in which any given murder has been committed o r any murder-centered text has
been com posed, since that context is generally comprised o f the rhetorical
pronouncements o f the ruling middle-class against which the killer/artist is defining
himself. The "text" left behind as artifact illustrates th e individual will as embroiled in
violent negotiation with bourgeois values for social p o w er as well as identity.
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In the American 1980s, the "serial killer" threat as defined by federal law
enforcement agencies and disseminated culture-w ide by a sensationalistic media served as
the creative inspiration and research pool for a num ber o f writers and filmmakers, just as
the newspaper reports o f the Wisconsin murders o f Ed Gein had influenced Robert Bloch
to write Psycho twenty years before. Simultaneously, journalistic accounts appropriated
the conventions o f melodramatic fiction to present actual serial murderers to a voyeuristic
public. The result was an imagistic stew o f serial-killer iconography in which, for
example. Jeffrey Dahmer’s 19 9 1 arrest for multiple murders could be called a "real Silence
o f the I.amhs" event and instantly com prehended in the full horror o f its cannibalistic
aspects. The boundaries o f fact and fiction have thus been neatly eliminated, contributing
to a social atm osphere in which horror-film cliches dictate a reactionary public policy
designed to counter a hvper-inflated menace.
The menace is necessary as justification for the neoconservative restoration o f
outdated, crumbling institutions and dogma, w hose previous unsuitability to modem
conditions is forgotten in the scramble to characterize progressive reforms as contributing
factors in the breakdow n o f family values and the corresponding rise in random violence,
drug abuse. Satanic ritual murder, and so on. Strangely missing from the neoconservative
debate over the country's undeniable social ills, however, is any acknowledgment that the
system itself may be flawed in fundamental ways. Instead, blame is assigned to various
subfactions or, in many cases, specific "mad" individuals within the society: a political
strategy that allows public ire a focus while sheltering the overall socioeconomic structure
from meaningful criticism. Serial killers in particular direct attention away from the social
milieu in which they flourish and onto intriguing but ultimately fruitless psychoanalytic
explications o f their supposed lunacy. This is w here the best o f the serial-killer fiction I
have examined can function as a corrective in a way that the lurid media coverage o f
actual murderers usually does not: a method o f refocusing on the context and not the
isolated singularity. John iMcNaughton and Bernard Rose perform this aesthetic duty well.
and even the w eakest entrants into the seriai-killer narrative cycle—Oliver Stone and
Dominic Sena—offer up marginally subversive and potentially progressive indictments o f
the American w ay o f violence built so solidly into its political infrastructure.
In addition to the political violence o f American life, these troubling narratives also
underscore th e more abstract parallel between m urder and art, specifically story-telling.
Narrative craft can serve as a m etaphor for any willful human activity, including murder,
according to Kenneth Burke: " . . all life has been likened to the writing o f a poem,
though some people write their poems on paper, and others carve theirs out o f jugular
veins" (76). Then the multiple murderer’s repetitious slaughter, in fact and in the fiction it
inspires, becomes a method for violently structuring what is m ost likely a hopelessly
unstructured and brutalized/brutalizing life. Especially for the fictional neo-Gothic
murderer, such as Francis Dolarhyde or Early Gravce. the act o f structuring through
pattern m urder is an act o f faith, to some extent. It implies that structure is possible, that a
pseudo-Platonic order can be momentarily imposed on disorder. That imposition is also
an act o f hubristic control in a simulacratic. self-referential age where hubris as classically
defined is no longer possible. Given this, what could be a m ore desperate assertion o f
egotistic control than a series o f "motiveless" murders0 For an individual to take others'
lives for arbitrary and unfathomable reasons, a solemn pow er traditionally granted only to
God and His duly ordained institutional representatives on earth, is a savage declaration o f
independence from, as well as an usurpation of. socially accepted designations o f
centralized and secondary concentrations o f power. It is a blatant and extra-legal
incorporation o f the modus operandi o f extrinsic pow er structures for intrinsic gain.
Structure (o r staging) dispenses power and control, even if that control is illusory
or self-deluded. M urder outside o f the bounds o f institutionalized ritual is an
appropriation o f the traditional God's power over humanity, though acting on the same
logic which equates blood sacrifice with worship o f the godhead. Repeated murder, in
mythopoetic symbolism, exponentially increases that individualized pow er and surplus o f
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appropriated energy The serial murder spree is thus a privately ritualized but nevertheless
publicly theatrical performance in which the object is to transform the body o f another into
a momentary sacrament with . . . well, something. What that something may be depends
very much on the idiosyncrasies o f the performer/murderer.
Some actual serial m urderers (Richard Chase, Jeffrey Dahmer) seem to attem pt a
ritual incorporation into their ow n bodies the powers o f life and love (and thus G od) by a
violent form o f personal transubstantiation—the life forces o f the victims transferred to the
life energy o f the killer in a form o f metaphoric vampirism. Psychiatrist James Brow n
states flatly. "Vampirism, in its fully mythological significance, exists today and is known
as sexual homicide” (16). The symbolic energy transfer integral to vampirism and
communion alike seems designed to augment the individual’s depleting energy reserves
(through the medium o f blood exchange) to the point where immortality or even divinity
can be reached, so long as enough energy has been tunneled into one's own essence. Such
is the nature o f biology's attem pt to transcend the apparently unalterable mechanics o f its
own dissipation. If only enough energy can be taken in to replace that which is inevitably
lost through the course o f daily existence, then eternal life is theoretically possible—at least
in magical thinking, which deals more with the mythopoetic images o f energy transfer than
the mundane reality o f consuming spurting blood from severed arteries.
Brown’s theory that the vampirism o f the past is the serial m urder o f today is based
on his observations that serial killers often exhibit primitivist behaviors linked to magical
notions o f energy transference: cannibalism, totemistic trophy-taking o f body parts, return
visits to crime scenes, and the frightening escalation o f violence levels as the "serial"
progresses. The m urderer often cuts deeper and deeper into the body, dissecting it as if to
reach a hypothetical core but hacking it apart in frustration when the discovery o f a center
eludes him. N ot unsurprisingly, it is the mutilators (Jack the Ripper, Ed Gein. Ted Bundy,
Jeffrey Dahmer) who resonate most clearly in the public folk memory that provides source
material for the Gothic-influenced novelists and filmmakers o f our historical moment.
The multiple murderer's real-life serial parallels the public presentation and
dissemination o f an artist's private vision, which is why the contem porary serial killer and
the novelist/filmmaker ineluctably gravitate tow ard one another’s spheres. Enacting an
idiosyncratic m urder campaign, writing this kind o f "text," is perhaps the supreme
expression o f the need for control that seems to drive most multiple killers. Authorship is
control. One can be the God o f his/her imaginative creation: a w orld where a social non
entity can suddenly attract the immediate attention o f millions: in this case, through the
act o f murder. Thus, the compulsive need for more than one murder, the urge to endless
repetition o f methodology but a paradoxically progressive body count sequence, the desire
to reinvigorate numbed aesthetics with escalating sensation.
In an era desensitized to incredibly high levels o f violence, the horrific deeds and
sheer numbers o f the average serial killer still retain the pow er to disturb (in a wav the
similarly related but vaster, more remote magnitude o f political genocides like the
Holocaust cannot) as they titillate. When the body itself becomes an explosion, an
unmistakably fragmented or violated body instead o f a "real." holistically tunctioning body
composed o f wetlv vibrant flesh and hair and blood and mucous and organs, and when we
know another human being has performed this callous dissection for essentially
unknowable reasons, we experience yet another dislocating loss o f center and further
erosion o f reassuring safety zones in a century notorious for its destabilizing uncertainties.
We become uncomfortably aw are o f our latent voyeurism. We turn away from the serial
killer’s atrocities, even as we surreptitiously peek behind us to see them. Though we can
still muster a degree o f old-fashioned outrage when confronted by such crimes, we eagerly
consume their every detail. The killer usually knows we will react in this ambivalent way.
He knows we may condemn him, but we wall not ignore him. W e hate ourselves for our
interest, but it exists. The testimony o f many known multiple murderers confirms their
hvperawareness o f audience reception. The killers want to dominate not only the victim
but the culture as well. In this, they are usually successful. Their fortunately rare
:is
imposition o f private fantasy upon the public sphere seeks to efface the boundary between
the private self and the negotiated public self in a dramatic performative ethos not
dissimilar to the idealistic agenda o f art.
Brian M eehan concurs, seeing serial m urder as a perverse expression o f m etaphor
usually reserved for poetry:
. . it is precisely in the area o f symbol and metaphor that we see an affinity

between the mind o f a serial murderer and the mind o f a poet. Each is unusually
sensitive to the m etaphors that convey unspeakable violence, and each believes
passionately that literal truth must lie at the heart o f figures o f speech. In terms o f
imagination, m urderer and poet may be more closely allied than is the poet with his
merely ordinary audience. And nowhere is this strange alliance more important
than on the level o f myth. For serial murderers crave a mythic significance at least
as much as poets wish to give it to them. For this reason, before the invention o f
clinical terms o f psychiatry, the language o f myth was the only language adequate
to convey the nature and imagination o f such a bizarre criminal mind. (4)
Meehan's mvthogenic argum ent allows us to move away from the "who's responsible"
literary- game o f blaming specific authors or genres as promoters o f violence in W estern
culture. Postmodernism has no com er on violence, so it is not Baudrillard’s or Derrida's
fault. The existentialists did not invent murder as literary metaphor; we cannot blame
Sartre o r Camus. The Gothic and Romantic movements are ultimately not indictable. Nor
can we point accusatory fingers (as do Caputi. Cameron and Fraser. Colin Wilson) tow ard
Genet or De Quincey or Richardson or even that superlative villain-of-letters. the Marquis
de Sade. .Any one author can certainly be blamed for perpetuating violence or giving it
his/her own historical flavoring o r idiosyncratic nuances, but the impulse to narrative
depictions o f violence is as old as our linguistic structures. We will never be rid o f these
kinds o f representations as long as humans m urder other humans for reasons that have
very little to do with what book they were reading or the movie they saw the night before.
O f course, one’s ow n historical moment will usually appear to be the worst yet in
terms o f its general moral breakdown, institutional decay, and so on. but this ethnocentric
attitude becomes more curious when even the briefest acquaintance with the vast history
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o f W estern literature dem onstrates the prominence o f murder (the gorier, the better) as
thematic material. M urder, often multiple m urder at that, is no uninvited newcomer to our
ow n American literature, as this study has shown. We may find the frequent presence o f
m urder in our accepted classics disturbing. It calls into question our most cherished
beliefs about literary representations o f love, tenderness, empathy, and faith. We may
suddenly find that Shakespeare is different from de Sade only in degree.
The sadism which bears the M arquis's name is alarmingly present to some extent in
most literature. But if sadism and violence seem especially prominent in recent literature,
say. works o f the twentieth century, it may simply be that our increasingly swifter access
to an overwhelming barrage o f media images o f our violent world—the primary
distinguishing characteristic o f the postm odern mindset—has had the same horrific impact
on our artists as on the rest o f us. O ur a n may be decadent and in decline, as the literary
millenialists fondly claim, or it could instead be benefiting from its cross-fenilization with
other kinds o f popular media. If freer subject m atter--a problematic notion when we
remember that graphic murder, suicide, mutilation, cannibalism, incest, rape, and other
sundry brutalities manifest themselves all throughout previous periods o f literature—does
lead to a civilization's moral decline and eventual collapse, then indeed we feel ourselves
to be in deep trouble. If our continued exposure to fictional and non-fictional images o f
violence from around the globe jades o u r sensibilities to the point that we demand more
and more sensational input to satiate our numbed imaginations, we are the latter-day
Romans demanding our own virtual-reality bread and circuses. If we subscribe to a
Yeatsian view o f history, we can very well believe that we are close to the end o f a cycle.
It does often seem as if barbarians w ander the land and infest the cities, killing and
brutalizing as they go. and we cannot help but w onder whether representations o f violence
and pornography in our culture helped drive them to it, as Ted Bundy claimed to a
surprisingly uncritical national audience on the eve o f his execution. We suspect we may
be unindicted co-conspirators in a long chain o f events which has led to violent anarchy
and chaos.
Because o f this very real fear o f complicity, it is difficult to know what constitutes
a proper moral stance tow ard the study o f violence, w hether in its real-life or fictional
manifestations. Violent crime, especially sensational crime like serial murder, obviously
arouses primal, unthinking hatred as well as a generally unadmitted but unmistakably
existent voyeuristic interest. The fear o f violent crim e is often cited as Americans' first
concern, despite evidence from law-enforcement studies and the FBI Uniform Crime
Reports which suggests that most violent-crime rates have declined over the past decade,
though not to the lower levels o f previous decades. This fear stems in no small pan from
media emphasis o f sensational crime cases (serial killers are perfect in this capacity),
which gives the impression that violent crime is far m ore prevalent than it really is. I do
not deny that there are too many victims o f violent crime. N or do I deny that these
victims are ow ed certain rights. But I also think it is an intellectual mistake not to analyze,
study, and discuss the cultural factors, including literature, which may or may not have
contributed to the environment in which that victim w as victimized. Such study may lead
us to some areas o f human behavior where we do not wish to go. even at the distance
afforded by time and space from certain disturbing events. But because we are
uncomfortable or upset does not relieve us o f our obligation to continue pertinent
investigations.
Contrary to popular belief, the study or fictionalization o f multiple murder does
not necessarily demean the victims o f it. It is also not necessary to over-sentimentalize the
victims o f multiple homicide, which is merely another way o f objectifying into symbol the
once-living in a manner not dissimilar to that o f the murderer. It is a sad fact that to study
the complex moral issues raised by murder, we must study the murderer. It is
unavoidable. To equally focus on the victim is helpful in reminding us that a human life
has been willfully ended by the agency o f another. To remember the victim is to provide a
needed balance in order to retain our humanity. But we cannot ignore or uselessly
demonize the victimizer either. No m atter what our opinion o f that person, he o r she had
motives and reasons, however delusional or grossly opportunistic, for murder. To attem pt
an explanation o f those factors will not stop murder as a social ill. but it may enlighten us
as to our individual and cultural potentials for destruction.
And isn’t this ultimately w hat artists can do for us0 It is little wonder that artists
often gravitate tow ard the theme o f murder. The taking o f human life is always abstractly
symbolic as well as immediately physical. The reasons for taking it can illuminate much o f
the often-unacknowledged darkness and self-contradictions in our culture, a revelatory
process which artists thrive on. The risk here, o f course, is that the bearer o f bad news is
seldom welcomed. He or she who writes o f murder is often equated with the actual
murderers around us. o r at least accused o f providing the requisite imaginative schemas
for them to structure their murderous rampages. The treatm ent afforded to Bret Easton
Ellis and. to a lesser extent. John M cNaughton. is typical o f such reactionary views.
While there is no easy refutation o f these charges, the alternatives are worse. To
turn awav from the unsavory, to pretend it isn’t there, to dismiss it as beneath serious
notice, to declare it an unfit subject for fictional representation—such avoidance has too
long characterized a public reluctant to admit its own ideologies may contribute the most
to a level o f violence it abhors. Otherwise. I fear that one o f the lines in Leonard Cohen's
framing song ("Future") to Natural B om Killers will become ever more applicable: "I
have seen the future, brother. It is murder."
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VITA
Graduate School
Southern Illinois University
Philip Lockw ood Simpson Date o f Birth: October 5. 1964
R.R. #4, Tanglewood Apartments #1, Carbondale. Illinois 62901
Eastern Illinois University

Bachelor o f .Arts English
Eastern Illinois University

M aster o f Arts English
Dissertation Title:
Blurring All Boundaries: The Postmodern Narratives o f Multiple M urder
M ajor Professor: Tony Williams
Publications:
"Jack the Ripper and the M erry Widow Murderer: Blood Brothers in Hitchcock's
Shadow o f a D oubt." Clues 18.1 (Spring/Summ er 1997)
"Mystery Rider: The Cultural Construction o f a Serial Killer." CineAction 3S
(Fall 1995)
"The Contagion o f M urder: Thomas Harris's Red D ragon." N otes on
Contemporary Literature 25.1 (January 1995)

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I hereby recommend that the dissertation prepared under my supervision by

Beyond All Boundaries:

The Postmodern Narratives of Multiple Murder

be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the

TITLE: Blurring All Boundaries: The Postmodern Narratives o f M ultiple M urder

M AJOR PROFESSOR: Tony Williams

do with a narratological combination o f folkloric "threatening figures" and inherited

packaged for mass reconsumption in pseudo-demonic forms derivative o f popular

into the mass-media instruments o f popular culture is thus a confabulation o f

multiple murderer, whose seemingly random but idiosvncraticallv meaningful, ritualistic

invasions o f bodies serves as a m etaphor for and an invocation o f the generalized,

boundary-leveling violence o f apocalypse itself.

Given this generalized narrative trope, I wish to analyze it as it specifically

multiple-murderer text. Alfred Hitchcock's 1943 American film Shadow o f a Doubt, to

.American version o f neo-conservatism: a social movement which, in essence, seeks to

revivify the ideology o f capitalism through its appropriation o f radical, progressive

discourse. A sense o f destability naturally accompanies times o f social upheaval, which

The end result is ontological destabilization: a key postm odern project.

served an enjoyable semester as a research assistant, was always supportive o f my ability

as well as the topic. Dr. Brvan Crow o f the Speech-Communications department

Lastly, to my family, who provided me with the unconditional stability, security,

professional people o f high achievement, have always supported my academic career to

honey, now it's w hatever you want to do.

A cknow ledgm ents............................................................................................................................ vi

Chapter One: O verview ................................................................................................................ 1

Chapter Two: The Neo-Gothic M urder Romance and Uncie C h arlie.................................40

Chapter Three: Thomas Harris’s Profiles in M u rd e r................................................................SI

Chapter Four: Portraits o f the American P sy c h o ....................................................................120

Chapter Six: C onclusion.............................................................................................................. 213

W orks C ite d .....................................................................................................................................222

industry o f true-crime books, academic studies, and governmental/law-enforcement

attempt to understand multiple murderers, we inevitably create myths about them.

In terms o f myth, the serial killer is becoming an eminently marketable form o f

the Ripper. Concomitantly, fiction writers are creating multiple-murderer scenarios

cultural phobias in his narrative representation.

Dahmer’s arrest, or they can be as artistically complex as the fictional narratives o f

knives sharpened" (29).

cultural notoriety results from a narratological combination o f inherited Gothic story­

telling conventions and earlier folkloric "threatening figures." This narratological

observes ("Perspective" 377-92). The current popularity o f so-called "serial killer"

narratives can be explained as the latest twentieth-century redressing o f the ongoing

human fascination with tales o f sensational, multiple murders.

into the mass-media instruments o f popular culture is in turn a confabulation o f

"serial killer" label—whose seemingly random but idiosvncraticallv meaningful, ritualistic

invasions o f bodies serves as a m etaphor for and an invocation o f the generalized,

boundary-leveling violence o f apocalypse itself. He is the grotesque literalization o f the

exploits o f shape-shifters and blood-drinking monsters such as vampires, werewolves, and

other humans en masse.

Given this generalized narrative trope, I wish to analyze it as it specifically

functions in several formative, influential "serial killer" narratives o f the pseudo-wartime

include another wartim e multiple-murderer text o f an earlier narrative cycle, Alfred

a pivotal moment in the commonly accepted transition from modernism to postmodernism

appropriation o f radical, progressive discourse. A sense o f destabilitv naturally

accompanies times o f social upheaval, which the near-hysterical affirmation o f capitalistic

cultural notoriety results from a narratological combination o f inherited Gothic story