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Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture

2006; Wiley; Volume: 39; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/j.1540-5931.2006.00320.x

1540-5931

Jean Murley,

Sexuality, Behavior, and Technology

David Schmid. Chicago : University of Chicago Press , 2005 . That American popular culture is obsessed with both celebrities and serial killers is not a particularly new observation. Since the 1970s and the advent of the true-crime juggernaut in the trade publishing industry, "famous" serial killers have occupied a unique position in the public consciousness—widely reviled and rightfully hated. Certain kinds of murderers have also been endlessly written about, researched, interviewed, filmed, and obsessively covered in American media outlets. Indeed, in the heady and sordid atmosphere of true-crime celebrity, infamous criminals—Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer—take on dimensions of celebrity which mirror those of the biggest stars within the worlds of entertainment. The construction of such figures is so axiomatically one sided and widespread that the structures and strategies of representation which create public fascination in their deeds are nearly invisible. In Natural Born Celebrities, David Schmid, professor of English at the State University of New York at Buffalo, identifies and interrogates those structures, showing how and why they work, and what it means that American popular culture has such a complex relationship of fascination and repulsion with serial killers. The book opens with an overview of the existing scholarly literature on murder and serial killing in America, and Schmid raises the issue of the nexus of celebrity and violent murder by examining the phenomenon of "murderabilia," the sale of artifacts of murders and murderers. He finds that the famous serial killer "effectively and economically satisfies a double need, both halves of which have grown over the course of the twentieth century: the need for representations of death, and the need for celebrities" (17). In the following six chapters, Schmid combines his encyclopedic knowledge of true-crime pop culture artifacts with a wonderfully easy understanding of postmodern theories of media and the construction of knowledge to thoroughly illuminate American fascination with serial killers. The resulting chapters range from comprehensive histories of Jack the Ripper, H. H. Holmes, and the FBI, to original and bright readings of films like The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Kalifornia (1993), Natural Born Killers (1994), and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986), or television programs (Twin Peaks, The X-Files, Profiler, and Millennium), and true-crime texts such as Ann Rule's The Stranger Beside Me (1980). Some of the best material is found in the chapter on the FBI, as Schmid shows how during the 1980s, that organization posited a grave internal threat—the multistate, multivictim serial killer—which in turn secured power, public respect, and large amounts of federal funding for the agency. Chapters on the questionable heteronormativity of serial killers in true-crime and the post-9/11 conflation of terrorists and serial killers are particularly interesting. One aspect of the serial killer phenomenon that Schmid leaves unexamined is the curious emphasis, present in all discourses on serial killers, on their utter lack of conscience. This emphasis reveals a preoccupation with the function of conscience within human communities, both defining proper humanity and describing a seemingly dangerous moral condition which appeared to threaten civil society. America has not yet been overrun by conscienceless predatory serial killers, as predicted by the 1980s FBI and darkly foretold by true-crime writers, but the figure of the psychopath/sociopath still casts a long shadow over most representations of murder and continues to help locate serial killers in an alien moral territory. Although a somewhat cumbersome over-reliance on secondary sources slows down and often interrupts Schmid's prose, Natural Born Celebrities is an important contribution to studies about how crime is processed, understood, and consumed in American culture.