Yahia Lababidi's first book, Signposts to Elsewhere, is out next month and may be pre -ordered on Amazon.His essays and poems have appeared in journals world-wide. In 2007, he is to be included in the Encyclopedia of World Aphorists, by James Geary.
Murder is not inconceivable. People conceive of it all the time: in the ungovernable world of dreams, in the flush of passion or fits of negative emotion (rage, jealousy, fear, hate, etc…). Children, before they are socialized regarding right or wrong, casually conceive and enact it, in play. Adults, too, may nonchalantly wish death upon others in careless figures of speech, such as: drop dead or I could kill you. In fact, not only do people conceive death, they relish other’s conceptions of it as well. The world’s longest running play, seen by over 10 million people and performed in 44 different countries over 50 years, is Agatha Christie’s murder mystery: The Mousetrap. The play is still considered one of Britain’s must-see tourist attractions, along with a tour of an actual murder mystery: the crime scenes of London’s legendary Jack the Ripper. There are several tours of the Ripper’s hunting grounds, but the ‘leading’ one boasts: “This is the only Jack the Ripper Walk to show you Victorian Photographs of the streets and murder sites as they were in 1888 and of the poor unfortunate victims and to give you a free summary fact sheet to help you remember each aspect of the murder mystery.”
In the U.S, where slasher films are a popular and lucrative genre, murder is an industry. Seduced by the romance of crime, no amount of (celluloid) blood seems to slake the thirst of the viewing audience. Only a decade ago, the nation was transfixed by the celebrity murder trial of OJ Simpson. Since then, court room television enthralled people with real cases in real time of those who transgress. Director Oliver Stone examined in macabre detail the media’s indiscriminant celebration of murderers in his cult classic: Natural Born Killers. The critical and popular success of film portraits of serial killers (fictional and nonfictional) such as Psycho, Silence of the Lambs and more recently Monster attests to this same fascination. Less artful cinematic depictions like Nightmare on Elm Street, Seven, Kalifornia, Scream, The Chainsaw Massacre and an endless, yearly stream of bloody entertainment indicate a kind of psychological roller coaster that the audience rides with bodily dread, screaming their heads off only to get on again for another gory ride. But this is entertainment, sublimated if not sublime. Do the real thing, take a life, and you still might get the ultimate punishment, the death penalty, alive and well in 38 states of the U.S.A.
The perennial fascination with the perfect crime is perhaps that of getting away with it, unpunished. This question of punishment is one that deeply occupied Dostoevsky in his psychological thriller: Crime and Punishment. As the protagonist, Raskolnikov posits:
“… an 'extraordinary' man has the right... that is not an official right, but an inner right to decide in his own conscience to overstep... certain obstacles … [if] it is essential for the practical fulfillment of his idea…”
His ‘extraordinary’ man, not unlike Nietzsche’s Ubermensch (or Overman), perceiving himself Beyond Good and Evil, is thus permitted everything. In this case, the ultimate transgression he decides upon is murder. Yet, such individualistic morality does not withstand testing. Theory applied, Raskolnikov (the extraordinary man) discovers he cannot afford the crime spiritually, and feverish guilt and self-torment prove to him that he is not above the Law (inner or outer). Or as the anti-hero of Crime and Punishment confesses to a prostitute in the novel, ‘I murdered myself.’ This is merely articulate fiction. But something of these questions must be wrestled with by the actual murderer (and more so the serial killer) in deciding to ‘overstep’, even if they are not thus expressed.
It is difficult to determine the profile of a murderer. Namely, anyone can and does commit murder. En masse, people do it in the name of state (‘war is licensed murder’ quipped pacifist philosopher Bertrand Russell), or in the name of God (without the least sense of irony or blasphemy). Jealous or spurned lovers do it, desperate parents or offspring, disgruntled employees, and even angry teens, as in the infamous Columbine massacre ( April 20, 1999 ) where two armed high school seniors went on a rampage, killing 12 students and a teacher before turning the weapons on themselves.
There is an Egyptian saying that partially accounts for the democracy of murder. “El sillah yittwall” literally means the weapon lengthens, or has a life of its own. It is an injunction not to have weapons lying around, lest one use them. It is also ashrewd acknowledgement of the power of temptation, an all-too-human elaboration of the Christian prayer “Lead us not into temptation.” Just as temptation makes a thief, so it makes a murderer, according to this wisdom. By the same token, common sense dictates that where there is less access to weapons there is less likelihood of crime, witness the US versus Canada, for example.
Civilization is a fragile thing, carefully stitched together, yet easily undone. Humans, too. In one sense, we are a form of organized chaos, capable of unraveling for an instant or a lifetime. In a very real sense, we are easily punctured water balloons, or vulnerable bags of blood and bones. Walking down the street, we entrust our frailties to complete strangers everyday. In his Surrealist Manifesto, Andre Breton states: “The simplest act of surrealism is to walk out into the street, gun in hand, and shoot at random.” America is surreal that way, with drive-by shootings being their peculiar variation on this theme. Moreover, according to an FBI statistic, with five percent of the world’s population, the US produces 75% of the world’s serial killers (a term that gained currency in the mid 1970’s, following the emergence of Ted Bundy and Charles Manson). If there is anything more engrossing to the masses than murderers, it is serial murderers. Murder may be committed in the heat of the moment, drunk on passion, any amateur can do it. But the serial killer is perceived as a professional, an evil mastermind, and a career in murder the product of an unhinged individual with uncanny presence of mind. In short, a successful Raskolnikov, or crime without self-punishment.
To contemplate a serial killer is to be assaulted by the absurd, an existence as irrational as a natural disaster or illogical as dreams. Orson Welles said of Iago (from Shakespeare’s Othello) “Oh, he has no reason, there are those who do evil without any motive other than the exercise of mischief and the enjoyment of the power to destroy.” The power serial killers exert then, on the public imagination, may stem from their power over another’s life or life itself. They come to represent the power of Death over Life, personified, seemingly omnipotent, pitiless human gods of destruction or angels of death. There is a certain grandeur to death (as one of life’s inevitable and privileged moments) and therefore, awe-through-association for those figures who dare administer it.
What must it be like to inhabit such an amoral universe, to persist past the first crime, past remorse, contemptuous of the laws of man and God; how does one become addicted to murder? These are questions that fuel the doomed glamour surrounding serial killers. Very little is actually known about what makes a serial killer. Mechanistic theories - reducing murderers to biology, heredity, or environment – fail. Not all are abused as children, or pathologically troubled young adults. More disconcertingly, some are described as gentle, mild-mannered, or even good neighbors. Two of the most infamous serial killers, Bundy and Manson, are almost a study in contrasts. Although both were possessed of personal magnetism, it appears to be of a very different kind. Bundy, noted for his easy charm, disarmingly represented himself in court and managed to acquire many stays of execution, based on his seeming ‘ordinariness’. Manson may have been charming to his “family” or “harem”, but to the public he looked the caricature of a crazed creature, wild-eyed and demented. Moreover, the pieces of the puzzle left behind rarely fit, and murderers’ account of matters or motivations (when they are found legally sane) do not add up. Which comes as no surprise, really, given that they are unaccountable for themselves.
All that can be said with certainty of these professional murderers is that the overwhelming majority are Caucasian males, between 20-40 years of age, and that they appear to be low on empathy, or fellow feeling. The rest is mystery. The more gruesome strain (those who cut up, sew, and/or eat flesh) must, of necessity, be inhumanly detached. Like the sinister inverse of surgeons, deadly rather than healing, they too cannot afford to feel for the skin and bones that they ‘work’ with. The devil is in the details. With horror and morbid curiosity we read the catalogue of their atrocities; Ed Gein (found insane in 1957): human-skin leggings and lampshades, skinned-out vest of breasts and strap-on female genitalia, a belt of female nipples, a shoebox containing nine salted vulvas, with his mother’s painted silver; Edmund Kempler (active in the Seventies): his mother’s decapitated head kept as masturbatory object and dartboard; Jeffrey Dahmer (arrested in 1991): admissions of necrophilia, staged pictures of corpses in various poses and stages of surgical dissection, painted skulls and preserved sex organs. Recoiling and considering how they pulled it off, we cannot help but marvel at their fiendish ingenuity, or malevolent intelligence.