In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

5 The Horror in the Mirror Average Joe and the Mechanical Monster To Randy Jones, one of Dahmer's neighbors, Dahmer seemed "like the average Joe" (Newsweek; 5 August 1991: 41). Helping us to disseminate a picture of Dahmer in court, a caption in Anne E. Schwartz's book describes Dahmer as an "average-looking man." To Tracey Edwards, whose escape from Dahmer's apartment led to Dahmer's arrest, Dahmer "seemed like a normal, everyday guy," and presumably in order to justify that characterization, Edwards agrees with Geraldo Rivera's suggestion that he and Dahmer were out to "hustle some chicks" (Geraldo; 12 September 1991). Dahmer "is a very gentle man" according to his attorney, and "that's what makes it so absolutely intriguing and unbelievable to see how a fellow like that you saw in court today could have done all these horrific acts" (Larry King Live; 17February 1992). To make it even more intriguing, as a Washington Post columnist notes, Dahmer is not from one of the "nation's urban areas with more of a reputation for coldbloodedness," but from Wisconsin, "America's heartland" (1 August 1991: C3). As I noted in chapter 3, the idea that "appearances are deceptive" is repeated in article after article: "Concealed amongst all this normality lies dormant evil." Like the surrealists , in the banal we see, and perhaps like to manufacture, something extraordinary. Average Joe often has a story to tell about himself and his friends that calls into question his claim to his name. This celebrated embodiment of middle America is often hiding something. His normality, we say, is an illusion. But when we look at our monsters and wait for the true gargoyle within to burst through that familiar shell, sometimes 93 PART II. DREAMING THE SERIAL KILLER we experience a more horrifying or thrilling possibility: the monster that appears actually is Average Joe; what is unspeakable turns out to be impossible to put into words not because it is so extraordinary but because it is so ordinary. Thus, we have a twist on the story behind Daniel Vigne's The Return of Martin Guerre or Jon Amiel's Sommersby: not an intruder in the guise of familiarity, but familiarity in all its glory. It is a possibility that Hannah Arendt describes in Eichmann in Jerusalem : "[The prosecutor] wanted to try the most abnormal monster the world had ever seen.... [The judges] knew, of course, that it would have been very comforting indeed to believe that Eichmann was a monster. . . . The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal" (Arendt 276). The "trouble" with Eichmann is the trouble with our serial killers , both new and old. "I shall clip the lady's ears off ... wouldn't you?" asks Jack the Ripper in a letter to his fellow man. As Martin Tropp suggests, the writer "speaks directly to his readers, implying by his words and literacy (despite the [possibly intentional] misspellings ) that he is one of them" (113) and that this is why he is so difficult to catch. Halloween director John Carpenter, commenting on the success of The Silence of the Lambs, remarks, "I think we're all frightened of the unknown and also of the repressed people in our society. There's a duality that touches off sparks in all of us" (People Weekly, 1 April 1991: 70). Those sparks are theorized by Jonathan Dollimore thus: "Since, in cultural terms, desiring the normal is inseparable from and conditional upon not desiring the abnormal, repression remains central to identity, individual and cultural" (246). We often figure the serial killer as failing to repress the desire for the abnormal. Joan Smith, for example , figuring identity in hydraulic terms, says, "The otherwise inexplicable actions of a serial killer . . . can ... be understood as a survival mechanism, a means of coping with intolerable stress. The fact that they commit such terrible crimes enables them to function normally in the periods between their crimes" (3). Our desire for normality, our fetishization of Average Joe, inevitably means that abnormality is constructed as something that needs to be repressed, something that inevitably becomes desirable, mysterious, sexy. As it comes into focus, our depiction of the serial killer as "letting off steam" is also a picture of Average Joe who has given in to his deeper desires. Our monster turns out to be not something...

Share