Pierre Rivière Spectacular 06, and: Pierre Rivière Spectacular 10, and: Pierre Rivière Spectacular 08

Pierre Rivière Spectacular 06

Pierre Rivière was known to sit for hours, watching birds and frogs he’d nailed to trees. Often, he’d be laughing. This crucifixion-as-entertainment might remind you of The Passion of the Christ, unless you haven’t seen it, in which case it will really just remind you of that South Park episode. Kenny and Stan travel to Malibu to get their money back from Mel Gibson because this is America and in America, if you’re not entertained, you should get a refund. Mel Gibson is in a mansion. Then he’s in his underwear, begging to be tortured. He’s restrained to a table, now he’s playing a banjo, now pulling a gun from his underpants. When he does cartwheels, his body hovers above the ground. Mel Gibson sings in words that work like gibberish. His head is his real head. It’s not easy to escape a madman’s mansion but those kids do it and catch a bus home but he follows them. He is only wearing underwear still. This is how you might imagine Pierre: cartoonish, tottering, maniacal, and impossible to get away from. At the end of the episode, the people of South Park agree that focusing on the death of Christ is not the best way to be religious.

Pierre Rivière Spectacular 10

Adam Lanza shot his mother while she slept. Point blank range again, and again, and again. At the grammar school, he reloaded half-spent cartridges—video game style. Where do the simulations end. Pushpin skin, thin-braided nerves: He walked out into the fray. Pierre Rivière beheaded cabbages, playing battlefield against the mind’s infinite army. Pierre understood what he’d done the day that he did it. Not immediately, mind you, but within hours. He’d shocked himself into temporary sanity.

Pierre Rivière Spectacular 08

Imagine this scene from The Bad Seed: two ladies drooping, lily-like, in a nineteen-fifties living room. No pillow is out of place. Each woman is devastated. Hortense Daigle because her little boy was killed, the other woman because her little girl murdered him. Mrs. Daigle is liquored up good. She exits her grief long enough to see the killer’s mother’s internal tornado, which has collapsed her features and disheveled her hair. Mrs. Daigle hangs on the other mother, sways to no music, offers her a free beauty treatment. When she leaves through the front door Mrs. Daigle slurs, I know you know something and you’re not telling me. These women’s sorrow unspooling so civilized. The Rivière family fights, on the other hand, were embodied. Once the family found themselves in the front yard; the neighbors gathering around the eighteen-thirties reality show. Scratching and slapping and screaming and dragging. Pierre’s mother knew the power of the public gaze.