Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 153

November 26, 2020: Book Thanksgivings: Podcasts

[For this year’s Thanksgiving series, I wanted to share a few words of appreciation related to my forthcoming book Of Thee I Sing. I’d love to hear what y’all are thankful for in comments!]

I enjoyed every chance I’ve had to share my thoughts on a podcast, going back to SSN’s No Jargon, Facing History & Ourselves’ series on Democracy & Civic Engagement, and more. But as part of the rollout for Of Thee I Sing this fall, I’ve been able to connect much more fully with some of the most compelling current podcasts, in a variety of genres: public scholarly, as I chatted with Evan Axelbank for his Axelbank Reports History and Today; political, as I fought the good fight with Burt Cohen for his Keeping Democracy Alive; and just plain fun, as I drank with Matt Gabrieleand Varsha Venkat for their Drinking with Historians video podcast. Each of those conversations really pushed, extended, refined, and amplified my thoughts on all things American patriotism, and helped me connect to distinct audiences and fellow AmericanStudiers. I highly recommend both listening to and connecting with such podcasters and podcasts, and I’m very thankful for my chances to do so.

Last Thanksgiving tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What are you thankful for (other than the approaching end of this damn year)?

November 25, 2020: Book Thanksgivings: Keri Leigh Merritt and Twitter

[For this year’s Thanksgiving series, I wanted to share a few words of appreciation related to my forthcoming book Of Thee I Sing. I’d love to hear what y’all are thankful for in comments!]

Getting blurbs for a book is roughly 20% nerve-wracking (especially because reaching out to folks feels very own-horn-tooty) but 80% one of the best parts of the whole process, as it’s a chance both to let other scholars know how much their work means to me and (when it works out) hear some kind words from such awesome folks about my own project. For Of Thee I Sing, I’ve been honored to get blurbs from Teresa Bergman (whose book Exhibiting Patriotism was a very influential one for me as I thought about this topic) and the amazing Keri Leigh Merritt. Keri Leigh is one of our very best public scholarly voices, and exemplifies the range of forms through which such work is now able to be produced—still books and articles to be sure, but also podcasts (on which more tomorrow), documentaries, and, yes, Twitter. It was in that social media space that I first connected with Keri Leigh, so I’m very thankful for public scholarly Twitter, as well as for amazing folks like Keri Leigh to whom I’ve been fortunate enough to connect and whose blurb for Of Thee I Sing means the world to me.

Next Thanksgiving tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What are you thankful for (other than the approaching end of this damn year)?

November 24, 2020: Book Thanksgivings: Joan McClymer and the Women’s Circle Breakfast

[For this year’s Thanksgiving series, I wanted to share a few words of appreciation related to my forthcoming book Of Thee I Sing. I’d love to hear what y’all are thankful for in comments!]

Almost exactly a year ago, I expressed my thanks to the good folks at the Southgate Women’s Circle Breakfast, as it was there that I gave the first talk on what would become Of Thee I Sing; that was my second talk to the group, following one on We the People. I’m always excited and honored to talk about my projects with any audience and community (so reach out if you have ideas for others, please!), and the Women’s Circle Breakfast exemplifies why: a knowledgeable, engaged, interest audience, who bring their own perspectives and probing questions to bear on the topic while helping me feel that what I have to say is meaningful and important. And all of that is due to, and reflects the leading role played by, Joan McClymer, the Southgate resident and Residents’ Council President (and partner of the great historian John McClymer) whose voice and vision not only drive the Women’s Circle but have significantly shaped my own continued thinking over the last few years. For all that, and for many great shared meals (at the Breakfasts and beyond), I’m very thankful for Joan.

Next Thanksgiving tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What are you thankful for (other than the approaching end of this damn year)?

November 23, 2020: Book Thanksgivings: Jon Sisk and Rowman & Littlefield

[For this year’s Thanksgiving series, I wanted to share a few words of appreciation related to my forthcoming book Of Thee I Sing. I’d love to hear what y’all are thankful for in comments!]

Of Thee I Sing will be my third consecutive book with Rowman & Littlefield, and my second straight in the wonderful American Ways series. There’s a lot that I love about American Ways, from the pricing (actually priced for interested individual humans to purchase, a battle I’ve long fought and mostly lost when it comes to scholarly publishing) to the editing (series editor John David Smith is awesome to work with and a great historian in his own right) to the series’ goals (publishing readable public scholarly introductions to key American histories and ideas). But there’s no doubt that what has brought me back to R&L for these three distinct projects across more than 4 years—and what is going to keep me there for my next book as well, for more on which watch this space soon!—is VP & Senior Executive Editor (and one of R&L’s founding figures) Jon Sisk. For his pitch-perfect combination of editing and cheerleading, his support and solidarity, and most of all for helping me find the public scholarly home I had been seeking for a decade, I’m very thankful for Jon.

Next Thanksgiving tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What are you thankful for (other than the approaching end of this damn year)?

November 21-22, 2020: Laura E. Franey’s Guest Post on The Keepers

[On November 17, 1894, infamous serial killer H.H. Holmes was arrested in Boston. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied Holmes and four other murderous histories, leading up to this Guest Post on serial killing and a true crime documentary from one of my favorite scholars!]

[Laura E. Franey is Associate Professor of English at Millsaps College, where she teaches Victorian literature, Communication Studies, writing, and much else. She’s the author of Victorian Travel Writing and Imperial Violence: British Writing on Africa, 1855-1902 (2003) and the editor of the first scholarly edition of the first novel published in the United States by someone of Japanese descent—Yone Noguchi’s The American Diary of a Japanese Girl (originally published in 1902). This post is drawn in part from a chapter of her next book project, which I’m very excited to read!]

On Serial Killing and Netflix’s The Keepers: An Unexplained Absence

Law enforcement officers sometimes wrongly consider a set of individual murders the work of a serial killer. A strong incentive exists for such a misinterpretation: Find the guy (and, yes, serial killers are almost exclusively men) who committed one of the horrible crimes, and you’ve caught the guy who committed all of them. On the other hand, could there be an incentive for someone to downplay or ignore the possibility that a set of murders could be the work of a serial killer? The way femicides (the killing of women, specifically) are treated in The Keepers, a seven-part true-crime series directed by Ryan White and released in May 2017, suggests there may be. Here I’ll explore the way that ideological fervor against patriarchal institutions may have encouraged White to ignore the possibility that a serial killer was responsible for the two murders investigated in the series. 

The Keepers offers an intriguing blend of two storylines that have been popular in documentary storytelling in the last ten or fifteen years. The first storyline is the unsolved-murder investigation (á la Someone Knows Something, a podcast, or Disappeared, a television series). The second storyline is the discovery of a cover-up of sex abuse by Roman Catholic priests (examples include Deliver Us From Evil [dir. Amy Berg, 2006] and Mea Maxima Culpa [dir. Alex Gibney, 2012]). However, The Keepers does not bring together the two types of storylines all that smoothly. Brian Lowry laments that the series “splinters off in several directions,” and New York Times critic Mike Hale saysthat the “shifts back and forth” between the two plots “can be jarring.” This failed intertwining may arise from the fact that the potential link between the two types of crimes explored in the series, the murder of two young women and the continuous sexual assault of high school girls, is tenuous, resting almost exclusively on the statements of one woman, Jean Hargadon Wehner, who came forward (as a “Jane Doe”) in the 1990s to tell police and the Archdiocese of Baltimore that she was now remembering having been raped and sodomized repeatedly at her Catholic all-girls’ high school, Archbishop Keough High School, between 1968 and 1972. She also communicated to them that she was now remembering having been taken by one of the abusive priests to see the dead body of Sister Cathy Cesnik, a former teacher at the school who had disappeared on Nov. 7, 1969, and whose dead body was found on January 3, 1970, thrown on a kind of makeshift dump site. Wehner said the priest, Rev. A. Joseph Maskell, leaned down close to her as she knelt next to the dead Sister Cathy and said “See what happens when you say bad things about people?”

You are likely wondering at this point what serial killers have to do with any of this. Isn’t this clearly a case of motivated killing by someone who wished to keep their own abuse from getting exposed? Well, maybe—or maybe not. The first episode had already informed viewers that Sister Cathy was not the only young woman abducted and killed in the Baltimore area in November 1969. Only five days after the 26-year-old Cathy disappeared, a 20-year-old woman, Joyce Malecki, was also abducted. Her body was found the next day, face-down in a stream out by Fort Meade, with her hands tied behind her back with a knapsack cord. The Keepers makes a somewhat weak attempt to link the two murders, but not through a serial killer, as those who consume a lot of true crime media might expect. Instead, the series links them through what one commentator has called a “serial perpetrator”—the abusive priest, Maskell. Though Malecki never attended Keough High School and did not seem to have known Rev. Maskell personally, White pushes a conspiracy theory that has her death being orchestrated by Maskell. The proof? Maskell’s name was printed with two other priests’ names on the sympathy card that St. Clement Parish sent to Joyce Malecki’s parents after her death.

What makes more sense, especially if we explore the simplest explanations of crime first, would be to see a serial killer behind the deaths of the two women. The phrase “serial killer” is never uttered in the series, however, and the idea of a murderer attacking and killing women he had never met before is dismissed. One of the two amateur investigators featured in the series, Abbie Schaub, a former Keough student who enjoyed Sister Cathy’s English classes, says that random killing seems unlikely. “Back then,” Abbie Schaub says, “random abductions and murders of young women were almost unheard of.” While it is true that the term “serial killer” had not yet been coined when these two murders happened, it is true that kidnappings and murders of young women did happen in the 1960s and 1970s. In fact, each fall for two years after these unnatural deaths saw another young female Baltimorean disappear and wind up dead, with her body not concealed particularly well. In October 1970, the body of sixteen-year-old Pamela Conyers was found in a wooded area, after she was last seen at Harundale Mall. (Both Sister Cathy and Joyce were likely shopping when they were abducted.) In September 1971, the body of a 16-year-old girl, Grace (Gay) Montayne, was found in a vacant lot in South Baltimore. It does not seem unreasonable to think today that a serial killer may have been responsible for all four of these deaths.

But Ryan White’s series never mentions this possibility, because White is, ultimately, less interested in exploring all possible angles on the deaths of the two women than he is in telling a story of corruption and cover-up by a patriarchal institution, the Catholic Church, that in his eyes sacrifices women’s and children’s well-being for power, money, and the continuation of all-male authority. This theme continues his politically-themed work in his previous documentary, The Case Against 8, which chronicled the story of same-sex couples and their lawyers struggling for the right to marriage against the combined power of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and the Catholic Church. White crusades to change systems and to advocate for the individual’s freedom vis-à-vis institutions; he’s not interested in going down the true-crime path of chasing a serial killer who may have killed a few women he randomly met at a shopping mall. Of course, though, Cesnik’s and Malecki’s deaths almost certainly emerged out of misogyny, whether that misogyny was the kind that would allow a Church to cover-up rapes by a priest or the kind that pushed a man to kidnap, assault and murder girls and young women he didn’t know. No matter who killed them, Cathy and Joyce and Gay and Pamela suffered terror, pain, and death because they were women in a society that didn’t care a whole lot about their lives.

[Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other serial killer or true crime shows, histories, or stories you’d highlight?]

November 20, 2020: Serial Killer Studying: Dexter

[On November 17, 1894, infamous serial killer H.H. Holmes was arrested in Boston. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Holmes and four other murderous histories, leading up to a special weekend Guest Post on true crime from one of my favorite scholars!]

On antiheroes, vigilante justice, and serial killers.

Although the character began in 2004 in the first of a series of novels by Jeff Lindsay, when Dexter Morgan was brought to TV life by Michael C. Hall across eight seasons on Showtime he fit very nicely into the dominant 21st century trend of television antiheroes. While Dexter might seem to be the worst of the bunch, given that his defining characteristic was killing people week in and week out, I would argue that he’s more representative of the type than unique; after all, Frank Underwood and Tony Soprano both kill their fair share of innocent people, while Walter White kills numerous fellow criminals in order to further his own criminal enterprise. Indeed, since Dexter only kills the guilty (something that the show makes sure its audience knows with certainty in a way that would be impossible in real life), he’s not unlike another heroic antihero: Jack Bauer, who only tortures and/or kills those whom viewers know are necessary to thwart terrorist plots. Dexter is unquestionably haunted by his actions (given tangible form through his “dark passenger,” the ghost of his adopted father Harry Morgan), but so in one way or another are these other TV antiheroes as well.

Yet at the same time, Dexter’s explicit and primary motivation is to find ways to kill his deserving (as he sees it, and again as the show portrays it) victims without being caught or stopped; if and when those other antiheroes kill, they do so as a means toward other ends (some more noble than others, to be sure), rather than the end in and of itself. That doesn’t necessarily make Dexter worse than them, but it does link him to a different cultural and American type: the vigilante, one pursuing a self-defined vision of justice outside of and opposed to the law (a narrative driven home with particular clarity and irony due to Dexter’s day job as a policeman). As is so often the case with such vigilante characters in popular culture, while the audience is given various forms of distance through which they can critique Dexter’s actions (such as the stories of his fellow police officers investigating his killings), the ultimate success of the show depends on the audience sympathizing enough with him to remain invested in his story—or, to put it another way, if the audience became more sympathetic to his victims than to him the show would quickly cease to work.

So Dexter Morgan is an antihero and a vigilante, two types we’ve seen quite a bit on television and in popular culture more broadly over the last couple decades. But he’s also a serial killer, and to my mind the only serial killer protagonist of a TV show. Contemporary TV is full of serial killers—they’re pursued just about every night of the week by the detectives on numerous procedural and cop shows—which certainly reflects our collective fascination with such characters and narratives. Yet even when those killers are charismatic or compelling (as were Mads Mikkelsen’s Hannibal Lecter on Hannibaland James Purefoy’s Joe Carrollon The Following, for example), the logic of the shows requires them to be the hunted, locating the audience as one of those hunting them. Whereas, as I’ve argued in each paragraph here, the logic of Dexter locates us in an uneasy but clear parallel to Dexter himself, concerned about what might happen to him (legally but also psychologically) but taking part in his ongoing killing spree. Perhaps the show was simply an anomaly—but perhaps it represents a next step from some of the cultural texts and narratives I’ve highlighted throughout this week’s posts.

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other serial killer histories or stories you’d highlight?

November 19, 2020: Serial Killer Studying: Lizzie Borden

[On November 17, 1894, infamous serial killer H.H. Holmes was arrested in Boston. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Holmes and four other murderous histories, leading up to a special weekend Guest Post on true crime from one of my favorite scholars!]

[NB. I know Borden, whatever she did or didn’t do, wasn’t exactly a serial killer—but she definitely became a celebrity murderer, and since this is one of my favorite prior posts I was happy for a chance to re-share it!]

On what we’ll never know about the famous crime, and what it can help us understand nonetheless.

Barring some miraculous recovery of new historical evidence, the simple truth of the matter is that we will never know for sure whether Lizzie Borden killed her stepmother Abby Gray Borden and father Andrew Jackson Borden in their Fall River (Massachusetts) home on the morning of August 4th, 1892. Despite being the first to discover and report their murders, Lizzie was the police’s prime suspect in the crime and was indicted by a grand jury in December 1892; yet after a 15-day trial in New Bedford in June 1893, she was acquitted on all charges. The Commonwealth never charged anyone else with the crime, and so despite a range of subsequent theories Lizzie remained the prime suspect for the rest of her life (which she chose to live out in Fall River, despite significant ostracism from that community). She has been likewise portrayed as the killer in numerous popular culture texts, such as the famous nursery rhyme, a 2014 Lifetime movie starring Christina Ricci as Lizzie, and (apparently) the theatrical film Lizzie starring Chloë Sevigny as Lizzie (and featuring Kristen Stewart as the family’s maid Bridget Sullivan, with whom Sevigny’s Lizzie is having a lesbian affair in a melodramatic version of one of the many theories about the crime).

While its fundamental mystery will likely remain forever uncertain, however, there are some aspects of the Lizzie Borden case that are quite clear. For one thing, the immediate and ongoing public and nationwide fascination with the crime should put to rest any ideas that Americans have become more morbid or driven by sensationalism in recent years. Indeed, one of the first blockbuster stories in the 19th century’s newspaper boom was the 1836 murder of Helen Jewett, a New York City prostitute whose accused killer (19 year old Richard Robinson) was also acquitted but remained a prime suspect. In truth, as I argued in Monday’s post on the Menéndez brothers, it is simply the technology and media that have changed over the years, rather than the morbid fascination; the small number of daily newspapers in 1836 gave way to the tabloid, yellow journalism of Borden’s 1892 era, and then to the Court TV coverage of the Menéndez case a century later (with many stages in between, of course). Each of these cases has particular contexts all its own, but I’m not sure that those contexts matter much for the public fascination—as long as we’ve got a grisly killing and the heated trial of a controversial accused murderer, we can’t seem to read or watch enough about the case. Perhaps that’s something in America’s violent nature, or perhaps it’s just human nature; but Lizzie reminds us of it in any case.

A second, less well known aspect of Lizzie Borden’s case interconnects with that public fascination, and has its own echoes down into our present moment. In the aftermath of her acquittal, Lizzie and her sister Emma became wealthy celebrities; using their inheritance from their father’s and stepmother’s estates, the sisters moved into a large house in Fall River’s elite “Hill” district. Lizzie named the house, which featured live-in maids, a housekeeper, and a coachman, Maplecroft, and the sisters hosted parties there for local elites and celebrities such as the silent film actress Nance O’Neil. All of that was of course entirely within Lizzie and Emma’s rights, but it nonetheless foreshadows the many subsequent American figures who became famous and even wealthy due to crimes (accused or convicted). This too seems an inescapable part or at least direct effect, of the American fascination with true crime: alleged but acquitted famous murderers like Lizzie are unlikely to ever have a normal life again, but quite likely to achieve a new level of prominence as a result of their controversial fame. The nursery rhyme and films might all portray Lizzie as the killer, that is, but they also have reflected (and helped extend) her celebrity status.

Last serial studying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other serial killer histories or stories you’d highlight?

November 18, 2020: Serial Killer Studying: Executioner Songs

[On November 17, 1894, infamous serial killer H.H. Holmes was arrested in Boston. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Holmes and four other murderous histories, leading up to a special weekend Guest Post on true crime from one of my favorite scholars!]

On two striking similarities and one important difference in a pair of pop culture serial killer texts.

Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song(1979) and Bruce Springsteen’s “Nebraska” (1982) both consistently link the story of their real-life serial killer protagonists—Gary Gilmore in Mailer’s novel and Charles Starkweather in Springsteen’s song—to key women in the men’s lives. Although Mailer’s opening section is titled “Gary,” it begins instead with the perspective of Brenda Nicol, a cousin and childhood friend of Gilmore’s who remained linked to him through his final killing spree; parts two and three are titled “Nicole” and “Gary and Nicole,” after the girlfriend (Nicole Barrett) who stayed with Gary through his execution and on whom much of Mailer’s portrait of Gilmore focuses. Similarly, Springsteen’s song uses the 19 year old Starkweather’s relationship with 14 year old Caril Ann Fugate, who accompanied Starkweather while he took part in his own killing spree, as its linchpin, from the song’s opening lines, “I saw her standin’ on her front lawn/just twirlin’ her baton,” through to Starkweather’s culminating desire to have Fugate “sitting right there on my lap” when he is executed. These family and romantic relationships certainly humanize Mailer and Springsteen’s protagonists, but they also seem tied to the men’s crimes in complex ways that echo the links between sex and horror I discussed in yesterday’s post.

Mailer’s and Springsteen’s works also similarly feature a near-complete disappearance of their creators in the course of the texts. That’s perhaps more expected in a song like Springsteen’s, but I don’t just mean that Springsteen doesn’t refer to himself in any overt way; even the voice in which he sings “Nebraska” is strikingly affected and distinct from Bruce’s own (and an entire departure from the voice in which he had sung any of his five prior albums), and since this was the first song on the album, would have taken contemporary listeners entirely by surprise. The absence of Norman Mailer from his book is more striking still, as the book is as the subtitle puts it “A True Life Novel,” and one based (as he writes in a brief “Afterword”) on extensive interviews and conversations between Mailer, Gilmore, and many other individuals. Yet to the best of my recollection Mailer does not appear anywhere in the book’s more than 1000 pages, engaging with his role in producing the text (and even participating in the text’s events in the closing period of Gilmore’s life) only in that brief concluding coda. As a result, Mailer’s mammoth book feels as closely focused on Gilmore and everything within and connected to his life and identity as Springsteen’s intimate song does on Starkweather, even though in both cases the texts are the careful, artistic constructions of two deeply talented creators in their respective genres.

There’s one key formal difference between the two texts, though, and it significantly impacts their portrayals of the two serial killers. As he does with all but one of the songs on Nebraska, Springsteen sings the title track in the first-person, speaking directly as Starkweather (the only historical figure among the album’s first-person speakers); Mailer’s book features a fully omniscient third-person narrator, one who can provide the perspectives of any and all of his historical figures (including Brenda and Nicole among many others) alongside Gary’s. Due in large part to that narrative distinction, Springsteen’s song forces its audience into a direct and unfiltered relationship with Starkweather’s raw voice and cynical worldview, as in its nihilistic concluding lines: “They wanted to know why I did what I did/Well sir I guess there’s just a meanness in this world.” Mailer’s more sweeping narration, on the other hand, situates Gilmore as part of broader communities (family, romantic relationships, neighborhood, prison, region, nation) and offers more of a sociological than a psychological engagement with his identity and perspective. I wouldn’t say Executioner’s Song is optimistic, exactly, but it certainly offers its audience more ways to understand its serial killer subject than does “Nebraska”—while the latter lets us see through that subject’s eyes, whether we want to or not.

Next serial studying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other serial killer histories or stories you’d highlight?

November 17, 2020: Serial Killer Studying: H.H. Holmes

[On November 17, 1894, infamous serial killer H.H. Holmes was arrested in Boston. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Holmes and four other murderous histories, leading up to a special weekend Guest Post on true crime from one of my favorite scholars!]

On two layers to the historic horror beyond the World’s Fair.

I wrote about H.H. Holmes and his connection to the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in this October 2016 post on Erik Larson’s masterful book The Devil in the White City (2003); I said much of what I’d want to say about Holmes in that context there, and would ask you to check that post out if you would and then come on back for two new paragraphs. [I’ll add that my proposed next book, 1893: The Fair and Year that Changed America, will examine many of the other Exposition figures and histories that I address in that post’s final paragraph!]

Welcome back! While Holmes (born Herman Webster Mudgett) will forever be associated with the Exposition, and indeed was very much linked to the fair in his own era as well as through subsequent frames like that of Larson’s book, as with any historical figure and story there are nonetheless additional layers that can help us think about other AmericanStudies contexts. One that I find particularly interesting is Mudgett’s deep roots to the histories and power structures of Anglo American New England: his parents, Levi Horton Mudgett and Theodate Page Price, both traced their ancestry to the earliest English arrivals to their town of Gilmanton, New Hampshire; and young Herman carried that legacy forward in two of the most stereotypical New England WASP ways possible, attending the state’s historic and prestigious Phillips Exeter Academyand going on to attend medical school (from which he just barely graduated—talk about skating by on privilege!) and become a physician. A great deal has been written about how many serial killers seem to be white men, and often privileged white men at that, and H.H. Holmes does nothing to disprove that narrative—indeed, he embodies much of what white male privilege meant in that late 19th century period.

Holmes also features another layer of identity that might seem obvious in a murdering sociopath, but is nonetheless worth stressing: a history of abuse and violence toward the women in his life. Herman Mudgett eloped with and married Clara Lovering when he was just 17, and she moved with him to Ann Arbor when he began studying at the University of Michigan’s Department of Medicine and Surgery; but housemates described him as violent towards Clara, and she left him and moved back to New Hampshire (taking their young son Robert Lovering Mudgett with her). After he changed his name to H.H. Holmes (to escape multiple charges of fraud) and moved to Chicago, many of his murder victimswere also women with whom he was romantically involved: that included his alleged first victim, his mistress Julia Smythe; a young woman who worked for him, Emeline Cigrande; and the actress Minnie Williams with whom he presented himself as husband and wife; none of those were his second and third wives, Myrta Belknap and Georgiana Yoke, who were lucky to escape the same fate yet to my mind undoubtedly faced Holmes’ domestic violence. I’m not saying that serial abusers are the same as serial killers—but I would certainly suggest that the two types are parallel, and their links embody one more violent and telling layer to the story of H.H. Holmes.

Next serial studying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other serial killer histories or stories you’d highlight?

November 16, 2020: Serial Killer Studying: Bundy and Dahmer

[On November 17, 1894, infamous serial killer H.H. Holmes was arrested in Boston. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Holmes and four other murderous histories, leading up to a special weekend Guest Post on true crime from one of my favorite scholars!]

On how two pop culture genres portray monstrous serial killers.

I’m sure the discipline of abnormal psychology would have something to say about this, but to my mind it’s virtually impossible to truly understand the motivation behind decades-long, horrifically brutal serial killing sprees like those undertaken by Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer. I’m not going to get into the most graphic and disturbing details, but suffice to say that these men didn’t just kill dozens of strangers; they committed acts before, during, and after those murders that defy any rational (or irrational) explanation I can imagine. Moreover, both admitted those acts with (it seemed) pride during their eventual trials and (in Bundy’s case) the media interviews that accompanied them. While it’s tempting to say that we shouldn’t even try to understand such monstrous acts and figures, you don’t have to be an abnormal psychologist to recognize the importance of engaging with every kind of human identity and experience, even (perhaps especially) the most unnerving or repellent. And as is so often the case, cultural texts—and specifically here two genres of popular culture—have offered their own interesting and illuminating portrayals of the Bundy and Dahmer stories.

The first genre also happens to be one of the most ridiculed in American pop culture: the made-for-TV movie. As that hyperlinked listicle makes clear, there have certainly been plenty of terrible TV movies, although of course no cultural genre is without its bombs. And I think that the genre does allow for a certain kind of film to be made, one that might not work as a big-screen blockbuster but that offers a fictionalized spin on a real-life story (the model in particular for the sub-genre often known disparagingly as a “Lifetime movie”). Between them the Bundy and Dahmer cases have (by my admittedly unscientific count) produced at least five made-for-TV movies over the last thirty years, some starring well-known actors like Mark Harmon and Billy Campbell (both of whom played Bundy, in 1986’s The Deliberate Stranger and 2003’s The Stranger Beside Merespectively) and others with lesser lights. There are plenty of differences across those films, but to my mind they all resist the horror/slasher tendency that might come with cinema treatments of the stories, choosing instead an almost domestic drama dynamic more appropriate to the small-screen. In so doing, they at least ask us to imagine serial killers as part of our everyday world, rather than extreme or superhuman exceptions to it as is sometimes the case with film killers like Hannibal Lecter.

The second pop culture genre I’m thinking of offers a very different kind of portrayal of serial killers like Bundy and Dahmer. The Law & Order TV franchise has long promised stories “ripped from the headlines,” and has indeed, across all three of its shows, often delivered fictionalized accounts of real cases that explore both their legal and psychological facets. Neither of the episodes I’m focused on here portayed Bundy or Dahmer precisely; but both created similar serial killer criminals who, thanks in part to phenomenal guest actors, opened up such stories in new ways. On Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Fred Savage played a charismatic serial rapist and killer who was smart enough to defend himself in court and convincing enough that another defense attorney fell for his lies until she saw irrefutable evidence of his crimes; the episode linked rape culture to serial killers like Bundy in a way that forces viewers to see Bundy as something more than simply a monstrous aberration. And on Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Neil Patrick Harris played a lonely and troubled serial killer who kept and ate parts of his victims, yet with whom Vincent D’Onofrio’s Detective Bobby Goren came to sympathize (to his colleagues’ frustration and anger); the episode sought to portray and understand the psychology of a monstrous killer like Dahmer better than any other cultural text I’ve encountered. We may never truly get killers like these, but cultural texts can help us get a bit closer.

Next serial studying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other serial killer histories or stories you’d highlight?