Why do Americans idolize serial killers?

If you log on to eBay, you will find a variety of "murderabilia" on sale for anywhere from five dollars (for a lock of Charles Manson's hair) to $10,000 (for one of John Wayne Gacy's clown paintings). If you are broke but still stuck on Gacy, it is possible to pick up a bag of dirt from his infamous crawl space for a mere $10. This might seem ghoulishly commercial, but it is just one manifestation of America's century-long obsession with serial killers, as are the plethora of books, films, and television shows that examine who these people are and why they kill--and how.

"The answers to those questions are deeply colored by the psychosocial needs of both author and audience, and often tell us more about those needs than about the subject in question," surmises David Schmid, associate professor of English at the University at Buffalo (N.Y.) and author of Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture. He feels that our construction and lionization of the serial killer as a cultural figure reflects Americans' unconscious--but deeply held--fears about human nature, power, and sexuality.

Schmid points out that, despite the fact that the U.S. produces 85% of the world's serial killers, Americans consistently represent them as "other" than themselves--as loathsome, monstrous, utterly alien creatures. At the same time, these murderers are treated as icons, celebrity performers, and fetish figures. Entire industries revolve around them; they entertain us in a variety of ways while providing a handsome living for the FBI, true-crime writers, novelists, filmmakers, and television producers.

"We can hardly deny it," Schmid maintains. "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," Schmid indicates, 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 [quite] ordinary, the 'serial killer industry' reassures us that they are not."

Despite denials, Schmid insists that people's fantasies and compulsions represent values embedded in our culture, values that permeate our 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," analyzes Schmid, "is through the popular image of the so-called 'mask of sanity.' It is a device that turns the killer's apparent ordinariness in to the most compelling sign of evil--by depicting it as a facade 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 contends. "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."

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 longstanding presence on the American scene, the serial killer has a familiar and even comforting quality compared with the radical 'otherness' of the terrorist," Schmid explains. "After all, however we appear to despise the idea, serial killers are us."

COPYRIGHT 2006 Society for the Advancement of Education
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning