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Psycho Paths

SOUTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Preface........................................................................ixIntroduction: The Serial Killer in Fiction.....................................11. The Gothic Legacy and Serial Murder.........................................262. The Psycho Profilers and the Influence of Thomas Harris.....................703. Detectives Versus Serial Killers............................................1134. Serial Killers and Deviant American Individualism...........................1355. The Serial Killer, Myth, and Apocalypse in 1990s Cinema.....................172Notes..........................................................................209Works Cited....................................................................225Index..........................................................................235

Chapter One

The earliest recognizable literary breeding ground for what would become the serial killer fictional narrative is the Gothic tradition. Though the term "Gothic" is overused by critics, nevertheless it remains the most appropriate starting point for this examination of serial killer fiction. Of crucial importance to understanding the destabilizing-of-meaning strategy common to the serial killer subgenre is acknowledgement that its Gothic literary progenitor is devoted to transgression of boundary and breaking of taboo as a textual agenda. Two representative Gothic (or neo-Gothic) texts featuring serial murder will serve as extended illustrations. One is the 1991 Paul West novel The Women of Whitechapel and Jack the Ripper. The other is the 1997 Gary Fleder film Kiss the Girls.

West's novel is based on an elaborate but largely discredited theory, popularized by the late Stephen Knight in his 1976 book Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution, regarding the identity of the Victorian serial murderer nicknamed "Jack the Ripper." According to Knight, the Ripper was not a lone killer but a trio of men who killed five prostitutes who had been blackmailing the British government with their knowledge of Prince Edward's sexual indiscretions and illegitimate daughter. Taking this basic plot outline from Knight's theory, West also portrays three Rippers, each participant representing a different masculine face. The royal physician Sir William Gull is the primary killer-a misogynistic slasher and mutilator who gives the crimes their unmistakable signature. Coachman John Netley and the famous impressionist painter Walter Sickert cooperate, the former gleefully and the latter reluctantly, as corporeal extensions of Gull's formidable but physically incapacitated will. But in and of themselves, none of the three men is "Jack the Ripper." Singular responsibility for the murders is diffused among many contributors and precipitating factors that have joined together at a particular nexus in time, space, and English history.

Gary Fleder's 1997 film Kiss the Girls, based on the 1995 novel of the same name by James Patterson, places its two sympathetic protagonists, forensic psychiatrist Alex Cross and medical intern Kate McTiernan, into a deadly confrontation with two serial murderers, "The Gentleman Caller" and "Casanova." In the film, the monomythic Jack the Ripper has split into two neatly compartmentalized, yet complementary, separate killers-one a self-styled "lover" of independent women and the other a vicious mutilator. Both are quite similar, however, in the way they objectify, torture, and murder women. Casanova, for example, who claims to loathe the Gentleman Caller's sexual "sloppiness" as evidenced by his desire to dismember, nevertheless rapes women savagely enough to tear apart their vaginas and leaves them, hair shorn away and limbs bound, to die alone in the forest. When Alex's niece Naomi is kidnapped by Casanova and faces a similar fate, Alex tries to find her in time to save her life. He is aided in his search by Kate, who was also kidnapped by Casanova but escaped from the underground dungeon in which he keeps his female captives. As the investigation continues, Alex discovers that Casanova and the Gentleman Caller actually know each other and are locked in a gruesome rivalry to claim as many victims as possible. The film concludes with both serial killers dead, Naomi rescued, and Alex and Kate victorious.

Serial Murder and the Gothic

A brief historical summary of the boundary-transgressing Gothic genre is necessary to understand how texts such as West's novel and Fleder's film are most accurately labeled as "Gothic." The Gothic mode is not confined exclusively to any one genre or artistic medium. Rather, the conventions break free of their orderly boundaries and filter out into other popular discursive or artistic modes, which in turn later generations of artists and critics alike draw upon for their respective reworkings of inherited formula. David Punter traces the development of the word "Gothic" from its literal meaning of "to do with the Goths" (the Germanic tribes who are said to have precipitated the collapse of the Roman empire) to its more generalized applications in the European eighteenth century, specifically its suggestiveness "of things medieval-in fact, of all things preceding about the middle of the seventeenth century" (5). The barbaric connotations of the word "Gothic" quickly came to invoke a plethora of associations for Europeans: "Gothic was the archaic, the pagan, that which was prior to, or was opposed to, or resisted the establishment of civilised values and a well-regulated society" (6). Writers of fiction, in turn, turned to the precivilized or the "barbaric" as a metaphor for revivifying the supposedly exhausted English culture with a "healthy" injection of primitivism and prelingual awareness. This was a risky operation, of course, as the cure, represented in the ambiguous figure of the mysterious outsider possessed of Dionysian appetites, could just as easily destroy civilization as save it.

In this culturewide turn to "barbarism" as a wild zone apart from the dulling complexities of modern civilization lies the genesis of the Gothic sensibility, which gives rise not only to eponymous literary conventions and architecture but a far more generalized rejection of 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 of cultural models to be followed, Gothic represented excess and exaggeration, the product of the wild and the uncivilised" (6). The Gothic is rife with ambiguity, sexual perversion, decenteredness, self-referentiality, repetition, and breakdown of boundary. According to G. R. Thompson, Gothic literature dramatizes the philosophical tension between modern, progressive, and secular notions of man's innate goodness (the romantic influence) and medieval conceptions of man's spiritual corruption. The narrative tantalizes but finally refuses to provide metaphysical illumination or revelation. For Thompson, the purpose of the Gothic narrative ambiguity and occult overtones is to force readers to ask questions about human existence,...