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10 Fantasies of Power Every age needs its heroes-and for the nineties, it's the Serial Killer. (Television reviewer of Confessions of a Serial Killer. The Daily Mail, 29 January 1993) Beliefs which attribute spiritual power to individuals are never neutral or free of the dominant patterns of social structure. (Douglas 112) My introduction includes a quotation from Dennis Nilsen in which he says the portrayal of Hannibal Lecter as a powerful figure is "pure myth" and that his own offenses arise "from a feeling of inadequacy, not potency." In this chapter I want to explore more fully the ascription of power to the serial killer, which is one way we can distance ourselves from the serial killer and in the process figure ourselves as (innocent) victims. As I hope to have demonstrated in these later chapters, however , our desire to estrange sometimes seems to dissipate, and our behavior can be mistaken for awe-struck reverence. Speculating about the serial killer's motivation, Gregg McCrary of the FBI's Investigative Support Unit says, "It's this God-like rush of power over life and death, it's playing God with these victims, and it's that thrill, and it's that same thing that all of these offenders enjoy. It's that discretion that they have, this control over life and death" (Murder by Number). The idea that serial killers are "playing God" is common in attempts to explain their behavior (a fact which presumably reveals as much about how we perceive God as how we regard the serial killer). Absent in such comparisons is a questioning of the "rush," the "thrill," the "enjoyment" of causing arbitrary destruction. The cultural need for the spectacle of power has been discussed by George Bataille, and Jane Gallop notes that" I a thought of the crowd' is precisely how Bataille describes the function of the sovereign in ancient times when the ancient games would have it that the spectacle of royal privileges compensated the poverty of common life" (author's italics; 143 PART II. DREAMING THE SERIAL KILLER Gallop 27). "A thought of the crowd" can also, I suggest, describe the function of our monsters. Ian Brady calls the part of him which tortured and murdered children the "higher" self (Masters 1993, 198). How far does our own construction of the serial killer go in similarly figuring him as a transcendent, elevated being? The serial killer can appear less as something against which we define ourselves, and more as the embodiment of dominant themes in our cultures, the fulfillment of dreams of omnipotence. Possessor of power over life and death, superintelligent , transcender of barriers between sanity and madness, ultimate loner, sanctifier of violence-he is deserving of eternal fame, of media attention on a massive scale, of groupies. We may question Doreen Lioy's desire to marry Richard Ramirez, the killer and torturer of thirteen people, or think it strange that Sandra London would want to become Mrs. Gainesville Killer. But if power is an aphrodisiac, no wonder our omnipotent serial killers get the girls. What is the function of these superhuman characters whom we can't get enough people (fictional or otherwise) to play? Roy Norris, murderer of at least six women in California, suggests that "the rape wasn't really the important part, it was the dominance" (quoted in Levin and Fox 68). How much effort do we spend estranging the association of rape and murder with power? If the serial killer representation has the characteristics of a dreamed-up reality, whose dream is he? Reading Kenneth Lynn we might suggest that he is as much the dream of those who feel their power slipping away as the dream of the powerful. In "Violence in American Literature and Folklore," Lynn says, "When we consider the humorists of the region between the Alleghenies and the Mississippi River, which in the 1830s and 1840s was known as the American Southwest, we are immediately struck by the theoretical possibility that the literature of violence in America has been written by losers-by citizens who have found their political, social, or cultural position threatened by the upward surge of another, and very different, group of Americans" (Lynn 134). We can make sense of the serial killer myth by providing the context of a changing social scene. We can suggest that, in a culture which glorifies violence and aggression, it is not surprising that a violent white male should be represented as powerful by media...

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