14 DAY TRIAL // "The online auctioning of Ted Kaczynski's personal effects is a typical example of the so- called 'murderabilia' industry and that industry, in turn, is a prime example of how the serial killer has become an iconic celebrity figure in American culture over the past 20-30 years," says David Schmid, Ph.D., associate professor of English at the University at Buffalo. This preoccupation and its place in American culture is the subject of his new book, "Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture".
"Although the Kaczynski sale is being undertaken for the unimpeachably moral reason of providing restitution to the families of his victims, this sale will unavoidably participate in and profit from the celebrity culture that has surrounded serial killers for some time," he said.
Why do we make serial killers into celebrities?
"The answers to those questions are deeply colored by the psychosocial needs of both author and audience," Schmid says, "and often tell us more about those needs than about the subject in question."
Schmid points out that despite the fact that USA produces 85 percent of the world's serial killers, Americans consistently represent them as "other" than themselves -- as loathsome, monstrous, utterly alien creatures. Nonetheless, at the same time they are treated as icons, celebrity performers and fetish figures.
"We can hardly deny it," Schmid says. "We collect their nail clippings, photos and dirty clothes. We watch their trials and listen to their victims on the morning news. We compete online for serial-killer board games and action figures; gobble up endless hours of cable programming and films featuring their lives and deeds, and read hundreds of best-selling books about one serial killer after another, even though we know the outcome before we open them. We do it all because we are compelled to resist the idea that these characters, so familiar, so endemic to America, are at all like the rest of us."
By emphasizing their "creepiness," he adds, we can deny that they share many of our values and obsessions and, except for the fact that they act out the worst of them, frequently live unremarkable lives among us. "Even when our serial killers appear remarkably ordinary, the 'serial killer industry' reassures us that they are not."
"In part because the old dividing line between fame and notoriety has become increasingly blurred, so that celebrity is defined more than ever by whatever it takes to grab a jaded public's attention, no matter how appalling the attention-grabbing actions are," Schmid says. "There's also a natural human tendency to be perversely fascinated by extreme deviant and criminal behavior, precisely because it's so different from our humdrum everyday lives. Moreover, with serial killers, that fascination is intensified by the fact that serial killers appear to be so ordinary when they are arrested--think of how bland, even boring, killers such as Jeffrey Dahmer and David Berkowitz turned out to be. It's this combination of normal appearance and extreme actions that drives the public fascination with serial killers, turning them into household names."
Despite American's denial that serial killers are often quite ordinary, Schmid says their fantasies and compulsions represent values embedded in American culture, values that permeate institutions and entertainments: the utter and often brutal supremacy of the white patriarchal system; misogyny; deep ambiguity and anxiety about the body, sex and sexual orientation; a relish for violence; fear of powerlessness and loss of control, and obsession with celebrity.
"One way that true-crime narratives deny the similarities between them and us," says Schmid, "is through the popular image of the so-called 'mask of sanity.' It is a device that turns the killer's apparent ordinariness into the most compelling sign of evil by depicting it as a fa?ade hiding the 'truth' of the serial killer's identity.
"This is not enough to undermine and demonize their apparent normality, however. One of the more recent innovations in true crime narratives is the search for, and presentation of signs of deviance in the killer's childhood, however spurious".
"The consumer of true crime takes great comfort in the deterministic logic that binds these children to their evil fate from their very earliest days," Schmid says. "It distances our 'good families' from these products of 'bad families,' again allowing us to deny that we or society at large is implicated in their behavior."
To describe the manner and means to which Americans have used serial killers over the past century, Schmid extricates the interrelated strands of a complex cultural tapestry and examines each individually and in relation to one another. Among the topics he covers are:
* The Victorian origins of the American serial killer as a cultural icon
* The FBI's historical and disturbing use of serial killers as a promotional tool
* The enmeshment of serial killers in the Hollywood star system
* How and why we perpetuate myths about these killers
* The purpose of conflating aliens, devils and serial killers in television crime dramas
* Where you can pick up Ted Bundy's autopsy and burn photographs for a song
* The historical relationship between media technologies, fame and violence
* The dialectic between normality and monstrosity in true crime narratives (demon spawn vs. an especially roguish example of the ladies' man)
* The queering of serial murder in true crime -- Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy, Aileen Wournos
* Serial killing and terrorism inside the U.S. before and after 9/11
Schmid notes that since 9/11, Americans have developed a new obsession with actual and fictional terrorists of many stripes. He argues, however, that despite the fresh flow of popular culture dedicated to terrorism, "the celebrity serial killer will continue to be durable and highly visible in American popular culture. This is because, paradoxically, and thanks to the figure's long-standing presence on the American scene, the serial killer has a familiar and even comforting quality compared with the radical "otherness" of the terrorist," Schmid says.
"Above all, serial killer celebrity is motivated by our recognition that serial killers are somehow as quintessentially American as apple pie," Schmid wrote. "Although we are appalled by our fascination with the serial killer, what could be more American than a complex and ambivalent reaction to a criminal figure? Just like cowboys and gangsters before them, serial killers such as Ted Kaczynski have become celebrities because we know, on an intuitive level, that they are more like us than not."
