Serial Killers

[poliphilo]

Silence of the Lambs was OK. Se7en was passable. But since then the weirdo serial killer has been done to death.

As a genre, the serial killer murder mystery is as artificial as Agatha Christie. Real life serial killers don't take their inspiration from the Book of Leviticus (or whatever.) They don't pit their enormous intellects against the police.

Real life serial killers are demented low-lifes. Psychopaths as brilliant as Hannibal Lecter is supposed to be don't go on killing sprees; they set up their own businesses or go into politics.

Comments

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

Have you seen Summer of Sam? It's an interesting take on the genre. For one thing, the killer is very much a background character. It concentrates instead on the lives of a group of young people (disco dollies and punks, since it's set in the late '70s), exploring their interactions with one another as any youth culture film would do, but setting them against the backdrop of the killings (which don't affect any of them directly). And the killer in question isn't some intellectually-driven, but socially dysfunctional, genius. He's just a guy with a mental disorder, who thinks the devil is telling him to kill people. Perhaps in that respect it helps that he is based on a real serial killer.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen it, but I think I'd like to.

I recently watched Nick Broomfield's two movies about Aileen Wuornos- a mixed up, crazy woman, pathetic and scary- and as much a victim as anyone she killed.

[zephyrcrow.livejournal.com]

I understand why movies like Monster get made, and I'm not one for doggin' on artistic expression, but I think that sucks a lot. I can't see any life experiences that justify killing. I mean... poor woman, but as soon as she started killing people, I stopped feeling sorry.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I hated Monster.

The Broomfield documentaries are rather different.

Actually I don't think Wuornos was a serial killer in the classic sense. She wasn't driven by horrid atavistic urges; she was a prostitute who killed a John in self defence and then, since she got away with it, went on to kill a few more.

[idahoswede.livejournal.com]

Most serial killers aren't very bright, because if they were very bright, they'd be getting away with it. Of course that leads to the question of how many Hannibal Lecters are out there that haven't been caught and we don't know about.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I just don't believe in Hannibal Lecter.

I just read the Wilkipedia entry on Denis Nilsen- a British serial killer who has the reputation for being intelligent. It turns out the only reason he kept killing for so long was that the police were even stupider than he was and kept missing the clues. On one occasion they assumed the incident they'd been called out to was a gay lover's tiff and handed the victim (half-butchered) back to Nilson, who proceeded to finish the job.

[mokie]

Same thing happened with Dahmer, as I recall--even though the victim the cops handed back was clearly drugged, injured and underage.

Silence and Se7en worked so well because they brought the audience something they'd not seen before--a killer that was smarter than they were. We were bored to death with sinful hicks stalking righteous suburbanites in the '70s and teaching us all that Suburbia is the place to be; the unstoppable and inhuman killing machines of the '80s who taught teens that sin could kill you had long since stopped being scary and started spouting one-liners. But now the killers were smarter than we were, were two steps ahead of us and taking things very seriously. It was a nice change of pace.

But then they did it to death and dumbed it down, villains became protagonists, and the directors and audience both forgot which side they were supposed to be on. The killer only becomes the hero when the audience stops fearing him, and when that happens it's time to go back to the genre's drawing board and figure out which cycle is coming around again...

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

There seem to be a lot of parallels between Nilsen and Dahmer.

Yeah, the serial killer thing has run out of steam. The latest sub-genre seems to be the one where you imprison a group of people in some confined space-
in the style of reality TV- and put 'em through hell while Big Brother watches and smirks. I've seen three or four of those recently. The best of them was the Canadian indie, Cube.

[idahoswede.livejournal.com]

Sounds rather like the Jeffrey Dahmer case, where the cops also handed back a bloody victim to him because it was a "gay thing".

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Serial killers don't get away with it because they'e smart, but because the cops are so dim.

[cataptromancer.livejournal.com]

Brings to mind what the Sandman tells the convention of serial killers in my favourite issue:

“And you, you that call yourself collectors. Until now you have all sustained fantasies in which you are the maltreated heroes of your own stories. Comforting daydreams in which, ultimately, you are shown to be in the right. No more. For all of you, the dream is over. I have taken it away. For this is my judgment on you: that you shall know, at all times, and forever, exactly what you are. And you shall know just how little that means.”

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I like that.

We mythologise serial killers- and they don't deserve it; They are all of them poor, ragged, stupid, fatuous specimens of humanity.

[cataptromancer.livejournal.com]

I agree. Calling someone a 'monster' not only obfuscates the human motivations that explain behavior, but gives a power to the 'monster' that he or she otherwise wouldn't have. We shouldn't mythologise genocidal dictators either.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

No more monsters means no more heroes either- but I can live with that.

[happydog.livejournal.com]

Psychopaths as brilliant as Hannibal Lecter is supposed to be don't go on killing sprees; they set up their own businesses or go into politics.

Truly. What serial killer can match Don Rumsfeld or Henry Kissinger?

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Exactly.

[methodius.livejournal.com]

I think there is a distinction between a serial killer and a mass murderer.

Perhaps it would be clearer if we called the latter "parallel killers", by analogy with the cable.

The social function of serial killers

[methodius.livejournal.com]

I think you miss the point of serial killers.

Serial killers perform the smae function in the early postmodern West as witches did in early modern Europe (and in Africa now, where modern and premodern worldviews exist side-by-side, as they did in Europe in the 16th century.

The serial killer is the symbol of societal fears, and the figure of evil people just love to hate.

Re: The social function of serial killers

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Good point.

And in both cases the reality is very far removed from the myth.

Re: The social function of serial killers

[methodius.livejournal.com]

I don't think we've had any serial killer hunts yet, but perhaps the serial killer is late 20th century, and the 21st century image of evil is "terrorist", in the West, of course. Elsewhere, it is "American".

Re: The social function of serial killers

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

And the average "terrorist" like the average "witch" or "serial killer" is a dim, screwed up social misfit.

I give you Richard Reid- the shoe bomber.