CARGAS ESTATICAS

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Helen Hudson, under siege from a serial killer who invades her home in a num-ber of ways, at first through a computer virus. The techno-virus that violates the sanctity of Hudson’s apartment serves as apt metaphor for the contagion of se-rial murder, at least as it has proliferated in American media instruments, includ-ing genre cinema. Like a replicatinclud-ing virus, the serial killer film, a small but fi-nancially lucrative subgenre of thriller and horror cinema, is endlessly derivative of its predecessors. Also, the subgenre tends to depict its serial killers as suffer-ing from an infection or disease of the soul, sometimes caused by the “viruses”

of demonic influence, bad parenting,¹ and/or violent media. While the virus metaphor is not completely inappropriate in this context, the subgenre falters when it eschews complex sociopolitical criticism and instead blames one or per-haps two “viral” agents for the perpetuation of violence. Copycat, with its titular serial killer depicted as the victim of media corruption and bad parenting, is a prime example of one of these overly simplified narratives of serial murder. For a film such as this to venture further into the complex intellectual territory of causation and motive would distract from the narrative’s primary purpose, which is to thrill (or titillate) an audience at once desensitized and hyperconscious of the fictional and factual images of spectacular criminal violence transmitted daily through other media venues. This cultural obsession with real and imagined murder infiltrates the individual psyche like a particularly hardy strain of virus—

the very point that Copycat argues from a particularly reactionary position.

Regardless of its intellectual shortcomings, Copycat, by presenting a fictional serial killer who imitates real-life serial killers, is nevertheless a valuable text for illustrating that serial murder as a narrative subject consistently blurs the catego-ries of fact and fiction and elides the differences between historic serial killers

and fictional ones. The news reports of serial murder frequently adopt the con-ventions of horror fiction,² while television and theatrical films on the subject routinely employ the conventions of documentary reporting. Most fictional se-rial killers are blatantly or subtly based on real-life precedents: Jack the Ripper, Ed Gein, Ted Bundy, Henry Lee Lucas. These killers initiate their murderous agendas within the context of a virtually real culture that, with its excesses of

“reality TV” and public discourse that labels the Jeffrey Dahmer case a “real-life Silence of the Lambs,” collapses together, as Robert Conrath suggests, “traditional epistemological categories of fact and fiction, veracity, and verisimilitude” ().

Annalee Newitz likewise argues that “Because fictional representations of serial killers are often based on biographies of actual killers, one might say the serial killer narrative spans both fictional and non-fictional genres” (). These critics suggest that there is no easy distinction to be drawn between the fact and the fiction of serial murder as it is culturally defined. The serial killer has become a media obsession precisely because a series of murders translates so well into the representational sine waves of mimetic fictional narrative. Note, for example, how the Wisconsin murders of Ed Gein during the s found fictional expression during the s (Alfred Hitchcock’s film Psycho, based on Robert Bloch’s novel Psycho), s (Tobe Hooper’s film The Texas Chainsaw Massacre), and s (Tho-mas Harris’s novel The Silence of the Lambs).³ Once a series of murders (like Gein’s) has been “written” about and disseminated into cultural consciousness, another serial killer will provide source material for the next generation of fiction. In other words, a “rhetoric” of serial killing, wherein real killers and their inevitable chroni-clers communicate with a voyeuristic audience, has been developed.

As symbol makers, human beings (including serial killers) reconstruct reality into the narratives through which they make sense of the world. But how does a given storyteller decide what is important to tell? According to Kenneth Burke, a narrative’s final form depends on the storyteller’s terministic screen—Burke’s term for the perceptual filter through which an individual receives and interprets external events.

As symbol makers dependent on idiosyncratic terministic screens, we as hu-man beings necessarily interpret the flux of events as fictions that include some possibilities of meaning and action and exclude others. Burke argues it this way:

“Even if any given terminology is a reflection of reality, by its very nature as a terminology it must be a selection of reality; and to this extent it must function also as a deflection of reality” (). We also tend to conceive of our individual biological trajectories through existence as “stories.” We divide our lives into distinct stages and thus create more or less orderly but highly selective and ideo-logically colored “autobiographies” out of the chaos of countless possibilities. We self-dramatize our miseries and triumphs, endlessly cast ourselves as the protago-nists in important events that may or may not have much to do with us, and do our best to sanctify our own versions of events as the Truth. Occasionally, given an undefinable mix of chance, zeitgeist, self-promotion, and proper publicity, our

private actions, or “stories,” will appeal to the larger society’s vested interest in producing commercially appealing stories for mass consumption. Out of such raw stuff, factually based human drama can be created in many different narra-tive structures and genres. These diverse stories can encode any number of ideo-logical messages that, as Burke would say, deflect attention from other possible selections of reality. In particular, private events that involve sensational murders, such as the random serial killings of strangers, provide endless grist for the pub-lic storytelling mills of mass culture, much to the consternation of critics who lament our increasingly desensitized culture of spectacle. But again, in a culture driven by capitalistic market forces, how does the storyteller decide what is im-portant or profitable to tell?

In the case of the serial murder film, the storyteller is inevitably drawn again and again to the symbolic connection between narrative craft and violence. The connection is made explicit in the term “serial murder” itself. Mark Seltzer, no-ticing the conceptual link between serial murder and literary craft, claims that most of the sociological definitions of the phenomenon equate murder-as-ad-venture serial killing with “an addiction to representations” and hence “a patho-logical addiction to representation as the cause of violence” (). Perhaps, then, the cinematic creator of a serial murder narrative recognizes something of his/

her own addiction to aesthetics in the real-life criminal phenomenon and re-cre-ates that obsession in the fictional protagonist’s baroque crimes. Given the com-plex but gripping identification strategies by which narrative-based cinema thrives, it is not surprising that, reciprocally, some members of the film-consum-ing audience may forge an at-least subconsciously sympathetic link with the artist-murderer’s aesthetic practices. It stands to reason, then, that an actual serial mur-derer, existing within a culture that consumes and thus to some extent implicitly condones sensational murders as acceptable subjects for narrative treatments, may pose as a particularly dark form of the socially shunned “starving artist.”⁴ All of these diverse terministic screens find convergence, satisfaction, and pleasure in the spectacular narratives of serial murder.

It is tempting, at this point, to follow the lead of cultural critics who accuse the popular media of creating an imagistic environment in which media con-sumers inclined toward violence can find precedent, however fictional, for their worst imaginings, and thus some tacit justification or even acceptance for their deeds. Additionally, some cultural critics fear that these narratives are how-to primers for creative murder techniques and avoidance of capture. For example, in a  documentary entitled Murder: No Apparent Motive, convicted killer Edmund Kemper claims to have learned most of his evasive techniques from watching television “cop shows” during the s and s. Another infamous serial murderer, Ted Bundy, told a number of interviewers, most famously the politically conservative family-advocate James Dobson, of his early obsessions with lurid detective magazines and bloody pornography. Such “confessions” give ammunition to those who fear that the media plays a significant role both in

inciting potential criminals to act and in training them. Typical is a comment by New York City police detective Ray Pierce: “Every other day, when you turn on the television, there’s a story on it about serial murder. . . . You can be sure the killers are watching, too, and that they’re adjusting their behavior accordingly”

(qtd. in Davis ). Similarly, reacting to the presentation of night-vision goggles as an effective aid in the stalking of victims in the  film The Silence of the Lambs, psychiatrist Park Dietz says, “Hollywood has done much to pave the way for serial killers” (qtd. in Davids ).

On a more academic level, Deborah Cameron, exploring the possible links between pornography and sexually motivated murder, argues that serial killers, in a nonverbal and roughly conceived manner, are extremely conscious of and moti-vated by cultural narrative conventions of violence, since they choose an inherently literary structure (the series) for striking out against real or imagined personal wrongs (). In other words, according to these diverse critics of the sensational media, violent images often provoke and/or guide the violent actions of copy-cats. These copycats, who presumably would have lived essentially blameless lives were it not for the corruptive influence of external forces, are mimetically inspired to ever-more flamboyant acts of brutality and murder by the “viral” contagions of dehumanizing pornography and fictional portrayals of mayhem.

According to this theory, the serial killer who copycats the hegemonic cul-tural narratives of sensational murder available to him consciously or uncon-sciously selects and frames his most personally significant social interaction in terms of the narrative conventions of pornography and/or horror melodrama, as do the inevitable secondary chroniclers of his murders. These chroniclers are the unindicted coconspirators in the media’s perpetuation of the murder cycle.

Within serial murder’s complex and cyclic transformation from fact to fiction back to fact, the demarcation between the facts of a given case and the “true crime”

and fictional narratives that derive from the events blurs. We receive the media images of a Jeffrey Dahmer as if he were a character in a horror film because the framers of his story have made him into one. Thus, the cycle of historical-mur-der-cum-fiction narrative continues, and the self-referentiality that such a cycle represents best suits that particular strain of postmodernism that celebrates the hollowly parodic even as it relocates modernism’s lost God within the simulacratic constructs of humankind. The murdering copycat of fact and fiction, then, stands as a particularly apt symbol of the postmodern age’s supposed aesthetic bank-ruptcy and the collapse of all historical periods into one imagistic stew.

There is, however, a significant problem with the theoretical underpinnings of the copycat theory, which in turn limits the theory’s usefulness as an explana-tion of social deviancy. The copycat theory’s selecexplana-tion-and-deflecexplana-tion strategies, in Burke’s terminology, are flawed at best and disingenuous at worst. For example, Joseph Grixti, on the basis of his exhaustive survey of popular claims about the alleged pernicious effect of violent media images and narratives upon the masses, concludes that those who promote the copycat theory by railing against the media

are typically proceeding on rather simplistic and largely discredited behaviorist and neobehaviorist theories. In effect, such theories claim that human psychol-ogy—an elaborate web of terministic screens—is determined almost exclusively by environmental influences. As a result of this problematic behaviorist founda-tion, Grixti concludes that the copycat theory is too limited to be of much in-tellectual use. Such limitation complicates our reading of those cinematic texts that rely upon the copycat theory to provide convincing character motivation.

Nevertheless, since many filmmakers and media critics uncritically accept and act upon the theory’s postulates as convincing explanations for human behav-ior, it is important to explore further why the copycat theory persists.

Perhaps the theory persists in America in particular because of the widespread cultural bias toward quantification, which complements behaviorist science.

According to its critics, classical behaviorism and its intellectual descendants appropriate the methodology and rhetoric of the physical sciences and thus con-sider only those mechanistic or conditioned aspects of human psychology that can be measured, tested, or quantified. Intangibles such as motivation and con-text are disregarded; or, as Burke would have it, behaviorism as rhetoric deflects attention away from the unquantifiable. Ideologically, behaviorism implies that personal responsibility or free will is an illusion, in spite of a surface rhetorical emphasis on the individual. In such a deterministic conceptual framework, what Grixti calls a kind of “magical thinking” dominates, wherein “The explanatory role once performed by concepts and abstractions like ‘chance,’ ‘fate,’ ‘destiny,’

‘the divine will,’ ‘heavenly bodies,’ and ‘the stars’ has been passed on to a suit-ably mathematized and ‘scientifically’ perceived conditioning environment” ().

For behaviorists, then, the process of social learning means that the individual must be conditioned by an objective norm, which itself is inevitably determined by the social status quo. The values or morality of the norm itself are beyond criticism and taken for granted. Individual deviancy becomes the focus of inves-tigation and “correction,” not the norm itself. Reconditioning strategies tend to focus not on the larger status quo but on a more local and “controllable” social force, which of course leaves intact the cultural values that constitute the norm itself. Grixti claims that those who link deviancy to one primary agent or pre-cipitating cause and deflect attention away from the larger social context in which deviant and agent coexist are, in actuality, “conservative guardians and reinforc-ers of the very structures and interactive processes which they claim to observe and explain dispassionately” (). Thus, a given factual or fictional narrative in which a copycat’s problems are blamed exclusively on one or two precipitating and immediate agents is constructed from a reactionary terministic screen.

In terms of the debate over media portrayals of violence, then, the many crit-ics from both the left and right sides of the political spectrum who so earnestly accuse the media of creating the conditions for social deviancy or copycatting are thinking locally and not globally and tend to be champions (in some cases, unwitting champions) of the status quo. The keenest irony here is that the

me-dia instruments themselves, driven by profit and ratings in the capitalistic cul-ture of the United States, usually promulgate, although timidly because of the need for survival in a ruthless marketplace, the same values that critics accuse them of defaming. The conservative tendencies of the large media companies lead to many delicious paradoxes, such as extremely violent movies blaming extremely violent media for creating criminals (Natural Born Killers, Copycat). The violent and at-times subversive content of the media narratives blinds the offended critics to the fact that, time after time, the narratives also uphold—even venerate—sta-tus-quo American values and conventions. The narratives’ tendency to champion the status quo is often forgotten in light of the transgressive or radical nature of the textual incidents of explicit and graphic violence and violations of sexual taboo. Of course, it can then be argued that the text’s inherent radicalism un-dermines its own conservatism—but the status quo is most definitely invoked in order to be undermined in the first place. In any event, regardless of one’s politics, the copycat theory appeals because it reduces complexity to simplicity.

However, while it is important not to blame violent movies for creating vio-lent people, a simplification often made by politicians campaigning for office via the sound bite, it is equally important to note that identification strategies in-herent in narrative cinema do implicate the viewer by proxy in the happenings on-screen. If those happenings include murder, it is not surprising that some audience members may feel an immediate visceral attraction to the fictional murderers and then a retrospective intellectual self-repulsion toward this attrac-tion. The resulting audience unease may indeed compel unsettled viewers to denounce a violent film as a contributor to violence in America, since it is easier to denounce a film than to address real issues of social injustice, poverty, racism, sexism, et cetera. Viewer unease is further provoked because, deliberately or in-cidentally, the maker of violent films is giving voice to the deepest reactionary fears of his/her audience, a cinematic trend firmly established during the decades of the s and s by films such as Copycat.

Peter Foley and Daryll Lee Cullum are the central serial killers in Copycat. The film they inhabit eschews historical and political complexity in favor of simplic-ity. For example, Foley is brainwashed by the media and Cullum is a religious fanatic. As “copycats” of inherited narratives that catch in their private terministic screens, Foley and Cullum are next-generation copies of other, more renowned killers. For example, Foley renames himself Peter Kurten after an infamous Ger-man serial killer. The film itself takes the forms and elements of other recogniz-able genre films, melts them down and re-coalesces them into a derivative, hy-brid narrative in which the serial killer subgenre’s creative bankruptcy is suddenly touted as an ironic strength. As Jonathan Romany puts it, in his praise of the film,

“everything [in the movie] seems to have been assembled piece by piece from a genre kit” (). The film doesn’t content itself with plundering the storylines of its cinematic predecessors, however. It also recycles the specific ^MOs and “signa-tures” of notorious real-life serial murderers into its fictional narrative. History

matters only insofar that it provides a template or inherited narrative for a copy-cat to slavishly follow. Copycopy-cat as a film superbly illustrates the copy-catching and sifting process of the terministic screen. The title of the film alone tells the viewer to expect endless recycling, or viruslike replicating, of earlier precedents.

Copycat, being a film first, delights in recycling earlier noteworthy films within the same serial killer subgenre or other related genres. The film’s opening se-quence, wherein Dr. Helen Hudson is captured, tormented, and nearly killed by one of the breed of psychopaths she has until now studied only at a safe distance, imitates the famous opening of Alfred Hitchcock’s  psychological thriller Vertigo. In the latter film, Detective Scottie Ferguson, taking part in a San Fran-cisco rooftop chase after a criminal, slides down one angled roof and barely catches himself from falling off. Hanging by his hands from the edge of the building’s roof, he watches helplessly as a fellow policeman, attempting to save Scottie, loses

Copycat, being a film first, delights in recycling earlier noteworthy films within the same serial killer subgenre or other related genres. The film’s opening se-quence, wherein Dr. Helen Hudson is captured, tormented, and nearly killed by one of the breed of psychopaths she has until now studied only at a safe distance, imitates the famous opening of Alfred Hitchcock’s  psychological thriller Vertigo. In the latter film, Detective Scottie Ferguson, taking part in a San Fran-cisco rooftop chase after a criminal, slides down one angled roof and barely catches himself from falling off. Hanging by his hands from the edge of the building’s roof, he watches helplessly as a fellow policeman, attempting to save Scottie, loses